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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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Strategic directions - long-term planning
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Some thoughts on our goals for the next 100 or so turns.
Religion We will need a religion for happiness purposes and use of the religion civics. I think we should plan on bulbing Confucianism with a Great Prophet: Code of Laws gives an excellent civic and a useful building in the courthouse. The tech path to CoL is also good, with Writing and Priesthood as requirements - all cheap and reasonably useful techs. Judaism also gives an excellent civic, but there we probably will have to reach it using raw research and contend with all the other teams. The other religious techs all give less benefits, or come later. We have an excellent edge in getting Code of Laws since we can effectively double-research it: build an Obelisk, run 2 priests for 17 turns, while we research Polytheism (or Meditation), Priesthood, and Writing. The only way to get an early Great Prophet for the other teams is to build Stonehenge, or someone might go for an Oracle build. But we can generate a Great Prophet before getting Priesthood, while the Oracle has to be started after Priesthood. I see two teams as the main contenders for CoL: CivPlayers and Univers. Of these, I view CivPlayers as the most dangerous contender. Total cost of getting Confucianism: 90 - Mysticism 144 - Meditation 108 - Priesthood 216 - Writing And then the Obelisk and 34 citizen-turns to get the Great Prophet to bulb Code of Laws. (We want Pottery and AH no matter what, so they aren't included above. Or we can go via Polytheism instead of Meditation.) This also has the benefit of reaching 37 beakers per turn without it showing up on any graphs! Wonders The Oracle is nice with the high tech costs, but I view it more as a target of opportunity: if it's still there when we research Priesthood and we can chop it quickly, then go for it. The Mausoleum of Maussollos is of course very nice, and we have bananas and silk, so Calendar is immediately useful. It's also one of the wonders that gets better the more land you have. Stonehenge will probably fall quickly, with five teams with Mysticism, and two of them starting with Mining. Colossus is nice and cheap if we can get Metal Casting early, otherwise I see little need for it. The GLH is less useful since the map is land-heavy. I'm not sure the other teams value it as much as we do. I think we are first in the play order, though, so we would draw more benefit of it than the other teams. The Pyramids would be wonderful, but I think at least one civ will go for it too early. Contact and early diplomacy We are one of two teams with a movement-oriented early UU (the Spanish is the other one), on a very large map with barbs on. I think we should take advantage of that and push WCs hard. By getting them out and scouting we gain map knowledge, experienced units (early Heroic Epic, sentry and medic units), and contact with the other teams. CFC started a diplo campaign even before the game started to contain us. However, that campaign is very curtailed now that the game has started but contacts hasn't been made. By scouting hard and getting in touch with the other teams before CFC does, we can reclaim the lost ground there and make up for it. I think we should work hard to befriend three other teams as well early, if we can make contact: the Spanish, the Germans, and CivPlayers. All three are likely to develop good map knowledge, have good to decent players, and we can use our language skills to make an excellent first impression. BW or AH first BW might give more bang than AH in new worker actions and civics, but I think I'd prefer going AH before BW anyway. We can research AH (T30) much quicker than BW (T37-39) and can thus easily claim horses without delaying our second city. Of course, with the possibility of getting a gold city as our second one, we might want to get that up first. Since we're planning on REXing heavily, WCs also serves as the perfect escorts of settlers and workers.
I think I mostly agree. A religion will be useful, and most of the early wonders are either not useful to us or will be taken too early by the other teams.
Unfortunately bulbing CoL is not easy, because polytheism, masonry, monotheism, and theology all come first on the prophet bulb list. But with Pacal, I think if we just develop normally we can probably get CoL first anyway. Alternatively we could aim for literature and the great library. kjn Wrote:The GLH ... I think we are first in the play order, This, I don't get? Turn order is not important in simultaneous pitboss turns when it comes to decide who gets the wonder? Or are you referring to something else? mh
"You have been struck down!" - Tales of Dwarf Fortress
--- "moby_harmless seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!" mostly_harmless Wrote:This, I don't get? Turn order is not important in simultaneous pitboss turns when it comes to decide who gets the wonder? Or are you referring to something else? Turn order has a really weird effect on trade routes. Someone else can explain it better than I, but my understanding is even in simultaneous the person first in the turn order gets better trade routes than those later in the turn order.
Glad to see this thread popping up. Much of this is pure speculation, but now's a good time to be thinking about these issues.
I really like the idea to push out a couple of war chariots for scouting and barb hunting purposes. Contacts are extremely important in a full diplo game like this one. The teams that say little and wind up isolated are the ones who are going to get left out of the loop later on when wars start popping up. It shouldn't be too hard to get a war chariot to 10XP with barbs on the map, and we all know the vital importance of Heroic Epic. Teams that don't get a qualifying unit or don't build it will be at a huge disadvantage. I'm not a big fan of the plan to rush a Great Prophet for a religion lightbulb. First and foremost, I tend to prefer the early Academy anyway using a Great Scientist as the first Great Person. You could certainly talk me out of this and get our team to focus on Prophet -> Scientist for the first two, but in that case I want to be using the first Prophet on a shrine, not a lightbulb. This map has high maintenance costs, and teams will be severely tech-limited in the early game as a result. I think we shouldn't have too much difficulty founding either Judaism or Confucianism the normal way, which would open up a Prophet for shrine use. If we don't land our own religion, it's not the end of the world. Yes, it would be really nice on this map, but it's not mandatory. We'll always be able to make a play for Christianity or Taoism or Islam later as needed. (Looks like we can't use the Prophet lightbulb on Code of Laws anyway, so this is kind of a moot point.) I would ignore early game wonders with the one exception of Great Lighthouse. That one, I think we can make a serious play for. Put city #3 on the coast by the fish and use some workers to chop it out. We already know that all capitals are landlocked from C&D (not complete confirmation I guess, but extremely close to it) so no one will be rushing the wonder out of the gate. It shouldn't be too hard to get enemy teams to sign Open Borders with us, and Great Lighthouse is stupidly powerful even in an Always War context, which this is not. There's a reason why we keep banning it in recent PBEMs. The upside of this idea is that if we don't see much water by the time we're ready to plant our third city, we can always scrap the idea. But I would think very hard about chasing Great Lighthouse. It's a gamebreaking wonder, much like Mausoleum (which we also want and should have a good chance to get). I still would like to see more of the map before we decide between Animal Husbandry and Mining/Bronze Working (we have until Pottery research finishes to decide). We need both of them very badly, and it will come down to how soon we feel we need to rush Slavery. Seeing horses before planting city #2 might be even more important, however... |
