It's Clobberin' Time! Raging Barbs Highlands Tokugawa on Monarch

[RFS-81]

If I understood RFS-81 correctly, he attacked out and killed the barb warrior, thinking it was the only unit there. But there was a pair of barb units, and the second one then took out our injured archer.

Yes, that's what happened!

I'm glad you got the city back!

[Zalson]

I have some comments but no WiFi.

How much longer to Monarchy?

[Brian Shanahan]

I see the save and have it. I will look tomorrow and either play then or Saturday.

[haphazard1]

Good luck!

Monarchy is still some turns away; I do not recall the exact number, would have to open the save. We have plenty of gold to keep researching at 100% to get the tech, thanks to the hut our scout popped plus a little gold from recapturing Sonic. Odd to get loot gold from retaking our own city but every additional bit of gold helps.

[Zalson]

To some questions:

Can food-production for settlers and builders overflow?

Yes. Food gets converted to hammers with a worker or a settler, so it is available for overflow. Were I playing, I was going to overflow onto another archer. Don't know if that would have helped. Should have mentioned it though!

Our northern warrior pops a goody hut and we find Horseback Riding

At first I was like: what a lame pop! And then I realized: it's 300 free beakers! And then you got pottery too: great job!

The warrior and archer both moved to the pig tile, and then attacked my returning warrior in the forest SE of that tile. Across a river and into a forest. Our warrior killed the archer and then died to the warrior.

Ah, so that's one warrior. It's ineffective to say it now, but I would have used the defenders advantage here: instead of attacking -- bait the attack into a stack of two or more units. Not much you could have done here, though.

Not liking those odds too much, but I don't want the farm to get pillaged. Our first archer dies, our second wins!

Yeah, let's trying not to sacrifice units if we can. 4 turns of worker labor is less valuable than 25h of defense at this point.

I start another worker at SMB. 1.5 per city was good, right?

As a rule of thumb, yes. However, since we had 2 workers and bronze working and a ton of forests, I would have recommended chopping out workers, settlers and archers. Those two forests between Sonic and SuperMarioBros look pretty protected and are good, cottageable land.

And from reading what happened, it looks like we had a lucky attack from one warrior to take down the city. There's not much you can do there -- although slavery would have helped. Of course, you realize this now.

A good, if rough, turnset. Thank you for reporting so well.


haphazard1

I decide that we can make one or the other copper work, and we will need happiness. The road to Monarchy it is.

Any room for Writing in there? Libraries would be useful while we are happy cap constrained.

I place a sign proposing an alternate location: less overlap with Sonic the Hog, on a plains hill for an extra hammer and defense, and next to the copper so it does not require a border pop.

What’s more annoying from a 20/20 hindsight perspective is that my original sonic the hog city would allow us to found first ring copper and share the pigs. That’s a big “oh well.” Nothing we can do about it now and there’s no way I could have known.

Without a closer look, I think the plains hill plant is the best option. We should make sure there’s lots of overlap to compensate for the small potential city size. I think the desert hill plant and the two copper plants suggested are a good way to make up for weaker land — but we should only plant the first ring copper city and then focus on richer sites. Copper is important enough.

With three barbs incoming from the north, the capital puts the overflow into a 1-turn archer build.

With our lack of units, this is the right choice.

Sonic the Hog comes out of revolt finally, and I start it on a barracks. We may want to whip a granary instead at size 4 and overflow into the barracks, but our need for more units makes a barracks attractive.

However, the same issue is present here, I think. We need units, not infra! A monument might be more valuable too for the cultural bonus.

We could pursue the Oracle here if we wanted to -- our workers have been mining the riverside hills so the city has a bit of production. Not sure it is worth chasing the wonder at 20+ turns of production, but it is an option.

We should not spend 20 turns slow building a wonder if we don’t have to. How long to Monarchy? If we can, maybe we chop out oracle and oracle feudalism? Protective, Vassalage Longbows will be pretty difficult to beat.

It’s unfortunate that it’s turn 70 and we only have 2 cities. Can you fix this Brian?

I know that part of our misfortune was that don't really have any chokepoints, where we can effectively fogbust, too. Oh well.

[haphazard1]

The lack of choke points is certainly a problem. The barbs are coming in steadily from several directions, with the main vectors being the mined hill north of the capital, the deer west of the capital, and Sonic's pigs tile. The first is not so bad with the hill and river, but the other two do not have good defensive terrain. Once we can push outward a bit more, hopefully we can find a better spot to defend those sides.

With the early loss of Sonic our growth curve for number of cities is obviously behind where we hoped it would be. But we need to be careful expanding -- when barb spears and axes start appearing life is going to get very tough. We need a copper city and roads to it very soon.

I built the barracks in Sonic because I temporarily had enough defenders, and it is going to be building many units. Plus we got it cheap thanks to our traits. I think it will be well worth it.

Writing should be a priority once we have Monarchy, although I am not sure how soon we will be able to afford libraries. The appearance of barb axes is going to require a LOT of axe builds.

[Brian Shanahan]

I meant to say thid yesterday about the foodhammer equation for settlers and workers. The reason you apply hammers to them in preference to food is because the multiplirts from Exp, Imp or stuff like the forge doesn't get added to the excess food converted into hammers. This early with Japan it doesn't matter too much (as we don't have Exp or Imp). But with forges we definitely need to be as close to 0 food surplus as possible when building settlers and workers.

And of course with slavery whipping settlers or workers and overflowing into other things is generally the best route.

[haphazard1]

A caveat to Brian's comment: hammers are to be preferred to food when building workers and settlers due to the multipliers (once we have some multipliers, that is). But often a strong food tile like the corn or pigs is still preferable to something that provides less total food+hammers yield. But yes, if the total food+hammer yields are equal and you have a food surplus, then switching tiles for more hammers (plains forest for grass forest, for example) is worth doing. Well, it will be once we actually have a multiplier of some kind, such as a forge.

[Fluffball]

Comment from lurker:

I'm not so sure you guys don't have defensive choke points. I'm not sure how familiar you guys are with HLs, but it's pretty common for ridgelines to converge into ONE tile wide chokes at some point (in several games I've seen AI civs that had a single 1-tile wide chokepoint access to their entire civ!) You guys are likely in some sort of walled-off city-state kind of location.

It looks like you can completely shut down barbs from the east and south with about 4 units without getting so far out that they spawn closer to your cities. I know that's not where you said they're coming from, but hopefully Capac can help you with the west a bit.

[Brian Shanahan]

Ok I've looked at the save I see two big issues that I hope to rectify during my set (barbs willing ;p ). Namely we've hella forests around the capital that should be funneled into workers and settlers. With that kind of foliage we should be able to build out the cities and also a number of defensive units. Second issue, granaries.

We have none. Expect them to go up during my set as well. Overflows will be funneled into the granaries and defensive units.


On the copper city I'm definitely planting on the plains hill, the other possibility is to close to Sonic and therefore very weak indeed. I know it'll take longer to connect but it's a much better choice.

On minor issues, we went on a big long walk south west but we know nothing of our east. If I can I'll scout a bit that way.

Play will be tomorrow, how many turns will I take?

My first gaming rig (if you could call it that) was a C64 so expect the game names for my set to be a bit ... different.