RBP3 [SPOILERS] - Friendly Kittens (Ragnar of Maya)

[Maniac Marshall]

OK, the sandbox is screwed up somewhere. The capital has 1 less food than I thought it would, which means that it can NOT grow in 2 turns, which means that we might as well work a hill, since it's 3 turns to grow working, farm or hill or E Cottage, so meh. I'll try to figure out how I screwed this up and fix the sandbox, but I'm not sure I can.

Anyhow, the micro plan is no longer valid.

I'm having trouble keeping up with everything now. Any help I can get checking for my stupidities would be appreciated.

[RefSteel]

It's already worked off 1 anger, and we've had a new happy maker (dyes) hooked up since it started the worker.

Cool. I meant it should pause production of the worker in the immediate future, in favor of growth, but it looks like we agree on that anyway.

Actually, forges are better winse we have gold, silver, and gems. Thats 3 happyness AND hammers =)

Absolutely (in spite of the greater hammer cost). When I wrote that line, I didn't realize Temminck didn't have its forge yet (which I should have - and did by later in my post).

I felt that this was one of those circumstances. The worker was started right before the city was going to grow into unhappyness, and it's still got 1 extra anger for 7 more turns.

Sure - sounds fine to me. Working the Plains Hill Mine for the reasons mentioned was fine too; I was discussing strategy going forward, not criticizing what you'd already done. Our entire civ is basically one giant special circumstance, so I'm not surprised we're sometimes making what seem like odd moves.

Some other teams, England in particular, have commented to me several times that you shouldn't even try to be friends with everyone.

I disagree with England here - partly because I think "be friends with as many teams as possible for as long as possible" is an acceptable alternate goal (one I like better than "achieve an in-game victory condition before anybody else," personally) - but partly for reasons like the ones you state. The main problem with trying to be friends with everyone is that it takes a huge amount of work and can often fail and/or blow up in your face. ("My enemy's friend is my enemy!!!!!") But I love the idea of trying, for what it's worth. (I would have a different list of our real/best/true friends than you do, by the way. This might be because I'm not up to speed on the diplo though. At all. Nor even close.)

Any help I can get checking for my stupidities would be appreciated.

Quit calling 'em stupidities, 'kay? You're doing a terrific job, and we've all made mistakes at different times in the game. I'll hopefully get a chance to have a good in-depth look in-game sometime next week, but unfortunately probably not before then. If you send me an up-to-date-ish sandbox, I might even have a chance to play around with it a little, although ... well, we'll see.

By the way, answering a question from long ago, there *are* ways to give yourself gold in WB, though the ones I can think of are pretty klugey. I'm no expert, but I'd imagine you can get in the right ballpark by WBing in tile improvements in neutral territory with your units on top of them - then pillage the improvements and disband the units before hitting end turn. (I *told* you the methods were klugey.)

[Maniac Marshall]

Well, since we talked about most of the relevant stuff in chat this afternoon, I only need to ask this: Next builds for Kilrah and Feng Shui? I set them both to Forges for now, but maybe we want to build a 5 turn barracks in Kilrah first?

Got CS and Lit. Revolted to Buro/OR. Of course, we still haven't revolted to Hinduism, but there's no super rush on that. At least we can now spread it w/o a monastery. Two of the 3 cities with enough hammers to matter are building units right now anyhow.

At the rate the tech pace is going, and with us lacking ANY foreign trade, we might actually hope someone gets banking shortly so we can revolt to mercant

[Maniac Marshall]

Oh, just one more thing...

Where do we want the HE? At PR, or at Kilrah? We could chop it up rather quickly at Kilrah if we want it there. I think in the long term that's the better hammers city, but I'd have to check when I get home...

Also, I want to show you something rather neat that the workers managed to do this turn that was started about 30 pages ago later.

[Maniac Marshall]

Here's a picture from many moons ago:

Turn 35: (In progress) Chmeee (worker) moves 1S to a river plains and farms. Cancel orders if you want just because it's a good habit to be in (and there's a tiny, almost non existent chance we'll actually want to get him moving early if another team's warrior shows up someplace in the southwest. Yes, I know he's nowhere near the southwest. It's complicated.) Anyway, it's way more important to cancel his orders NEXT TURN.

Turn 36: Assuming no contact, Chmeee farms and CANCELS ORDERS! It's way more important that we remember to cancel orders than that we remember to farm! The farm is just busywork (and margin for error) while we wait for Bronze to come in; we might never finish the farm.

Not seen in any microplan posted, as I changed my mind after posting: On turn 88, Dutchess put another busywork turn into the same farm while waiting for Berlioz to finish a road in the forest near Kilrah.

Last turn, Dutchess and Berlioz finished chopping that forest to complete the grainery in Kilrah. This turn, the pair took a moment out of their busy "stand up Kilrah" agenda to finish that lame old plains farm. A farm we said we may never finish... a farm we probably will use before long, but maybe not. Maybe we never will. So, ho-hum whats the big deal then?

Well, the big deal is not that tile at all, but rather the tile next to it... the corn tile. This turn, we got Civil Service and revolted. Civil Service does several interesting things, one of which is it allows for a line of irrigation, so:



Yeah, we may never use that plains farm, but, by completing it, the workers managed to irrigate the rice the very turn we got Civil Service. That was really your plan all along wasn't it Ref?

[RefSteel]

Ooooh ... pretty!

I hate to spoil it, but in the interest of learning/accuracy/analness/whatever:

That was really your plan all along wasn't it Ref?

Nnnno... not all along; only at the very beginning. By the time I wrote that post you quoted, I had realized the city would spread irrigation, and that the corn would therefore be up to 6f once CS came in without bothering to finish the farm. (And I should have mentioned that then, and again more recently. Sorry.)

By the way, chain irrigation makes Savannah a decently viable city, if I remember correctly.

In planning buildings for our cities, note that with the AP built, Hindu buildings will generate hammers. (I think it's 2 apiece, and I think it's even without it being our state religion, but I'll have to check.) There's an argument to be made for starting a missionary at Kilrah right away, intending to put any overflow that might be therefore generated into a building after we revolt to Hindu. This also allows us to delay deciding on the specific building, assuming we do want that missionary (and Hindu for our state religion) soon. (I think we do, but I don't know the microplan).

I think forge is fine at Feng Shui.

I'll have to look more closely at Kilrah and Pride Rock, but (believe it or not) I suspect PR will prove the stronger HE city.

I believe blue dot, properly roaded, will give us trade routes with India (once we clear a little more fog). Once we found yellow dot, it shouldn't take too long to get a road connection with Mali. There's a spot Carthage can found to their south that will give us river trade with them. Etc. We'll have trade routes; it just takes time.

All right, back to work for me!

[Maniac Marshall]

Well, I crunched the tiles annnnd... assuming we irrigate everything that's flat (other than the one tile that is already cottaged), and assuming that temminck is going to use "shared cottage and the 2 grasslands in it's inner ring... the two cities would both produce +7 food and 22 base hammers when working every last tile. =P So, I'm going to assume we want to build HE in PR then since it's more mature? Or do we want to build it in Kilrah, where we can chop it out?

Do keep in mind, however, that PR needs to work all those plains to pull that off, whereas Kilrah can do it in a much more compact (ie less pop) manner.

[RefSteel]

In that case, I'd say definitely put the HE in Kilrah. I'd like to see all the grassland within reach of Temminck (and eventually even PR's fp farm) cottaged and assigned to our Insane Commerce City. (This is the reason Maniac didn't like all the overlap between PR and Temminck; they can't BOTH use those two shared FPs or the three shared river grasslands).

[Maniac Marshall]

Zactly on the overlap. Plus, Temminck is overlapped with FS and with our original Blue Dot too. However, given the health situation on this map, overlap is less bad than on maps with seafood resources for sure.

Not sure on that FP farm. If that happens, it will be long term. We're just skating along on food as it is right now.

[RefSteel]

However, given the health situation on this map, overlap is less bad than on maps with seafood resources for sure.

Not sure on that FP farm. If that happens, it will be long term. We're just skating along on food as it is right now.

Absolutely right, of course, on all counts. Note that what I said about Temminck taking all those tiles is assuming infinite health. Given all Temminck's FPs (and jungle; we're going to need to clear that before long) and the absence of seafood map-wide, it may end up being best for Temminck to cede many of the northern tiles to Pride Rock, and possibly the eastern ones to Feng Shui, even long-term. I considered overlap with the original blue dot irrelevant because original blue dot was never going to get founded (if we hadn't found valuable terrain in the south, blue dot would have been all but worthless even if it had zero overlap) but you're absolutely right about PR and FS. I still think the overlap is worth what we gained (and are still gaining) in the sheer quality of the cities at their present locations, but if one or two of them had been moved, one or two of them could have been even better (at the expense of the other[s]).