Holy Warriors - Civilization 5 (BNW) Succession Game

[timmy827]

Domestic route does count against the total. (Thought experiment: wide liberty build, with n*(n-1) trade routes all sending food...)
When I opened the save last night the caravan was greyed out in Faith.
So if we do send a TR to monaco, it should be from the capital, the main benefit is the quest/influence but the cap would get a little more GPT as well. I think.

When do we want writing? (obviously after calendar but after that...) I don't think anyone has specifically discussed, but assume we are more interested in getting the next two cities up than going for any early national college builds. Confirmed?

[yuris125]

Yes I build NC on 4 cities most of the time, and with so few good ctity spots, land grabbing is more important than ever. So expansion before libraries and NC

[T-hawk]

I'd actually think about doing NC on the first 2 cities here. We're not in competition for the next two city spots. Get the rest of the infrastructure ready for those two cities (workers, roads, Tradition finisher) and drop in the settlers as the last piece once the NC completes. Also religion - if we delay the cities until religion is founded, they will be smaller while receiving pressure and convert more quickly.

I'm not sure if this will work well, but throwing it out there for discussion. The ideal timing would be to build one settler in Devotion and buy the other just a few turns before Faith completes the NC.

[Ichabod]

Is there a reason for delaying religion? With Holy Warriors + Pilgrimage, there's almost no benefit from having religion in our 3rd and 4th city (the only thing I can think of is being able to buy units in those cities, which are backline). But we lose some turns of pressure into foreign cities by delaying religion, which will delay the Pilgrimage bonus. So, even if we delay cities 3 and 4 for other things, I don't see a reason to delay founding our religion.

We also lose the UA faith bonus by delaying cities 3 and 4, which delays religion + units. I'm not sure what's the biggest bottleneck for our next objectives, science or faith, but it's worth debating about. It seems we'll really need to attack someone to expand past 4 cities, so we can't delay faith generation by that much. On the other hand, we are trading this faith for a lot of hammers (the 2 libraries we won't need to build + cheaper NC) and the faster Tradition finisher, which is really big. I'd say go for a 2 cities NC, but I don't have enough experience to know what's best.

*By the way, does Aristocracy bonus work for National Wonders? If so, let's try grabbing it before starting the NC. There's not much loss by delaying Monarcy a bit, so might as well choose it as the 5th SP.

If we decide to get NC before expanding, we should try to time the next city to be founded at least before the food TR to Devotion expires. This way, if we send our next TR to Monaco, we'll still have a TR to speed the 3rd city growth (otherwise, we'll have to send it somewhere else or just keep the Caravan parked in a city waiting for city number 3, which doesn't seem so good). Minor thing, perhaps it's not feasible to do it, but worth keeping an eye into (you can see the number of turns left on a TR in the TR screen).

[T-hawk]

I wasn't talking about delaying religion. I mean delaying the cities picks up an advantage from religion, since they convert sooner if pressure is there from size 1 rather than if they grow first. Even if there aren't any city benefits from the religion, they do start exerting pressure sooner, onto Ragusa and Monaco.

I beileve both Aristocracy and marble work for national wonders including the NC. NC at 2 cities does save quite a lot of hammers. I'm starting to think it saves more than the next two cities would produce by starting sooner. Devotion would go library next, with Faith starting its library later and timed to complete at the same time. Then Devotion does a settler, maybe two, while Faith builds the NC. We also regain a few turns by having roads to the new sites built in the meantime.

[timmy827]

Does pilgrimage work on city states BTW?

I think I'm in favor of founding the two cities, believe that if we were going to do a good 2city NC start we should have skipped archery/wheel for writing. (no criticism, none of us were thinking that far ahead). Also assuming we move red dot (post 75) 1W to the lakeshore, both cities 3/4 have some 2nd ring resources that might be swiped by city states...I don't have a lot of experience with how fast CS borders grow but would prefer not to risk it. Also we may have the chance to ally Ragusa, so having a 3rd city out for the +1 food would be nice.

@Thawk - there is merit to having the tradition finisher before or right after founding 3/4. But prebuilding the roads is a terrible idea, you pay maintenance earlier and the city connection trade is 1g/pop, so it doesn't balance until the new city grows to 3 or 4...exact opposite of civ4 but thems the math.


I'm curious to run the numbers on options for next caravan (food to new city vs. TR to monaco moving Trad finisher forward) but that decision is 10t away so will do it after Yuris plays

One other reason for trying to ally Monaco - yes the policy costs always escalate, but might move a couple policies forward before founding cities pushes costs up.
(Although with legalism, founding cities 3/4 increases the culture generation to match as well, hmmm...probably balances as long as you don't found a city when you are at 160/190 culture for the next policy and such)

EDIT from Thawks: Devotion can't go library next unless we put Writing before Calendar. Which may make perfect sense if the horses get picked. Almost in favor of playing just 1t to see which way it goes.

[T-hawk]

I'm guessing Pilgrimage works on CS. I think I remember Ceremonial Burial counting CS.

I'm talking about the roads just to speed the settlers. Founding the cities 3-5 turns sooner makes up for the few extra turns of road maintenance.

4 cities means we won't get NC for quite a while as they all have to go library first. I'm not sure how important NC is compared to hard expansion.

Forgot we don't have Writing and need it for libraries, but we could have it by the time Devotion finishes its current granary.

[yuris125]

Got it and looking at the save now

Wheel is coming in next turn. After that we need 6 turns on Calendar and 6 on Writing. I'm concerned about not expanding while researching those techs and getting Libraries up. Or are you thinking about going Writing before Calendar and ignoring Cotton for the moment? This is probably the main question for my turnset: do I build infra or Settlers? I see the arguments for not expanding, and this being Civ5, we can stay on 2 cities all game (until we start the military campaign). But the longer we wait on expansion, the less time the cities will have to compensate for the tech cost increase

Faith is at 144 and +2/turn. That means religion in 28 turns at ghe current speed. Maybe we want to speed it up by building Shrines? It's inefficient before we open Piety, but waiting for Piety may be too long

[timmy827]

How long will it take to build NC?
Assume we do wheel->writing->calendar. That's 13 turns at current rates. Cap (13h/turn now) takes 6 for its library, so it is done same time (t63). Devotion will be size 3 then, cap is growing slowly and probably still size 5, so lets say we are at 13 BPT then, so ~16 more turns to research Philo (longer than Devotion's lib build). So we start NC ~T79, probably about 17h/turn (cap will grow about then, so 15 base hammers + 2 from the policy), so done around T90. I don't see much way to speed that up, we have some gold and good income but buying devotion's library is not the long pole and will only speed research a tad. (I'm assuming we farm the hills at cap not mine, so it could be built a bit faster with hill mines, but not change much.)
That seems like a long time to not build those cities in the south. Remember they also make the capital better by getting those deer/wheat that are too far to buy over the ocean.

Note this also assumes no sailing for TR anytime soon, or BW to see iron. The payoff of NC is big - would be +10.5 BPT when cap at size 6, 12 at size 8 - but Philo itelf is a pretty big investment techwise if you don't shoot it with Great Library. If we build the NC at 4 cities, we can delay Philo until about the time when we want to build temples (after the Piety opener).

[Ichabod]

If we want to speed up religion, better to build more cities for the UA than building shrines, in my opinion.

Do we really need to improve the Cotton before NC? Perhaps skip Calendar to speed NC up. We lose the gpt from the resource trade, I guess, but getting the NC 6t earlier might top that (considering it also speeds up our next settlements).

If we delay NC, perhaps it's just better to go to Civil Service, before Philosophy. Not sure, though, since only Faith and Devotion would get benefits from it (no irrigation near the 3rd and 4th cities).