Statue of Zeus is much easier to build at Brick By Brick than at any of the other border cities (Eastern Dealers/Starfall). We have heavy production tiles and three forests to chop at Brick By Brick. Eastern Dealers has only one forest available, and its hills are buried under jungle at the moment. Starfall's forests are already assigned to produce a fast work boat and library; after that, it has lots of food but no production. And Starfall is actually more vulnerable than Brick By Brick defensively, thanks to the CFC city. Honestly, it makes by far the most sense to place the wonder in Brick By Brick from a micro perspective.
With regards to the Brick By Brick micro, it's a question of what you want to prioritize. A floodplains farm requires 7 turns of worker labor to produce +1 food. I'm not trying to downplay the importance of that, obviously it's useful to have, but that's also a lot of worker turns. While working on this, I was trying to balance out a fast Statue of Zeus while also connecting the ivory city and hacking at least one tile out of the jungle for it to work. I have us building Statue of Zeus eot 113, and the city definitely needs all three forest chops to do so. I also needed to sink 6 worker turns into roading to ivory (1 to move onto jungle + 2 to road) and then 9 worker turns into clearing jungle and building a grassland farm. There simply aren't enough workers in the area to do everything.
Basically, we can farm the floodplains tile, or we can chop forests for Statue of Zeus, or we can road/improve a tile for the ivory city. We can't do everything with the workers we have in that area. I'll look again at this when I go through the plan next, but I would rather push out the wonder quickly and get that culture running right away, giving us control over the border, compared to farming the floodplains and delaying the wonder by a couple of turns. (I basically view Brick By Brick as a resource dump city; it's more about controlling resources and building military to defend itself than building it up as a major city in its own right.)
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
In the short run, losing the worker to that barb axe actually hurt worse than losing the wonder. We had 8 turns of worker labor slashed right out of the planning, and there was no way to get an immediate replacement. I kept everything important on track, all wonders still on the same due date and stone reconnected the same turn, but inevitably something had to give somewhere. That turned into delayed plains cottages at the capital (more turns of Scientist specialists) and a delayed forest chop at Starfall for its library. Both of them will still be added, just a bit later than otherwise planned.
Short explanation of these ideas:
- Noble was correct that I had Brick By Brick getting whipped the wrong turn; I delayed it by one turn with better results and the exact same finishing date for Statue of Zeus (eot 113). I do not want to delay this any later and risk someone building the wonder in the fog. Bad experiences from this turn. As far as farming the floodplain tile at BBB, I can't scrounge up the worker labor. Sorry. I even counted up the turns of worker labor we needed in that area, and it was 6 for connecting ivory city, 9 for clearing jungle/farming a grassland tile for ivory, 10 for chopping (3/3/4 including moving onto hill), and then 7 for farming floodplains. We had exactly 25 worker turns available... enough to everything except farm the floodplains. Apologies for poor BBB, we'll just have to farm that tile next.
- The suggestion we had not to whip Focal Point and leave it at size 7 was also correct. The tile micro in that area works out just about perfectly. We have to run one turn of Wealth as we tech Meditation, but we can overflow 177 shields into Shwedagon Paya and build it naturally from there at 38 production per turn. It finishes eot 118, which is just about perfect timing for us. I really like the suggestion from T-Hawk for this wonder, as it lets us avoid teching Philosophy for the moment and still run our Golden Age strat.
- Mansa's Great Person is due on T119. Civil Service is due eot 116, and we can run a few turns of 0% science in preparation for teching during Golden Age. We look to be in excellent shape to pop a Golden Age on roughly T120 and go from there.
- Stone reconnected on the same turn as previously, T114, the same turn that we use whip overflow and forest chop to complete Moai Statues in Horse Feathers (eot 114). Trying to reconnect stone faster involves some really wasteful worker stuff and is not worth the effort.
- Because we need Eastern Dealers and Starfall to accumulate population for use during the upcoming Golden Age, I'm suggesting we slot lighthouses in each before libraries. The lighthouses allow them to work lots of 2 food coastal tiles and simply grow like weeds from roughly T113-T120, as well as giving each +1 food/turn on their seafood resources. I believe that we can get each up to roughly size 10 by T120, and that should be enough to get a Great Scientist out of each before the GA runs its course. I will test this further when we get closer to the dates involved.
- Most cities are on infrastructure builds; I assigned virtually no military stuff whatsoever. I don't see much of a point given that we have Great Wall for barb immunity (barring magical teleporting axes) and long NAPs with all neighbors. Why build units that will be outdated by the time we go on the offensive?
- Worker actions and city tile management have been heavily microed. Feel free to make suggestions as needed, but there really is a logic behind what's taking place, and we are working very few unimproved tiles. I have no doubt that others could do just as well or better, but it seems as though the rest of you are all in lots of PBEM or Pitboss games, and the work of doing this fell to me, so you'll have to live with some of my decisions.
You're doing a fantastic job with turn playing, reporting, and simming, Sullla. I know very well how much work it is to do a full sim for a civ of this size.
One thing to consider in your plan is that the SoZ is an available build and untapped source of failgold on T110-T112. IMO, it is well worth putting some hammers into it on those turns; it's like wealth with doubled yield.
We can generate quite a bit of cash by whipping e.g. some workers with maximum overflow into SoZ. Or, if we want to be less aggressive, just substitute some of the lower priority builds for SoZ on those three turns.
The micro looks good. We can build Paya on t116 by swapping to and whipping a worker on t114-115. I would definitely do that, building Paya as soon as possible. We may be able to whip the library on t115 and overflow to finish the wonder on t116, instead of doing the worker, but I'm not sure because I'm not sure if the library hammer count in the sandbox is correct (it was previously off).
(February 25th, 2013, 18:09)zakalwe Wrote: You're doing a fantastic job with turn playing, reporting, and simming, Sullla. I know very well how much work it is to do a full sim for a civ of this size.r
One thing to consider in your plan is that the SoZ is an available build and untapped source of failgold on T110-T112. IMO, it is well worth putting some hammers into it on those turns; it's like wealth with doubled yield.
We can generate quite a bit of cash by whipping e.g. some workers with maximum overflow into SoZ. Or, if we want to be less aggressive, just substitute some of the lower priority builds for SoZ on those three turns.
To elaborate with more specific suggestions:
Gourmet Menu is scheduled to whip a lighthouse on T108, overflowing into a library on T109. If we delay this whip for one turn, we can whip the lighthouse at 22/60 on T109 for maximum overflow into SoZ on T110, generating ~100 failgold. The library is delayed a bit but I think this is a solid trade off.
The Covenant is scheduled to whip a missionary on T111, overflowing into a WC on T112. This could be SoZ instead, for another 56 failgold.
On T111, we could just put a turn of regular production into SoZ somewhere, or we could delay ED's settler whip from T109 to T110, dumping the overflow into SoZ on T111. If we do the latter, we'll net another ~75 failgold.
So all in all, we could be collecting around 230 failgold on those three turns, at relatively little cost to our development.
(February 25th, 2013, 18:09)zakalwe Wrote: You're doing a fantastic job with turn playing, reporting, and simming, Sullla. I know very well how much work it is to do a full sim for a civ of this size.r
One thing to consider in your plan is that the SoZ is an available build and untapped source of failgold on T110-T112. IMO, it is well worth putting some hammers into it on those turns; it's like wealth with doubled yield.
We can generate quite a bit of cash by whipping e.g. some workers with maximum overflow into SoZ. Or, if we want to be less aggressive, just substitute some of the lower priority builds for SoZ on those three turns.
To elaborate with more specific suggestions:
Gourmet Menu is scheduled to whip a lighthouse on T108, overflowing into a library on T109. If we delay this whip for one turn, we can whip the lighthouse at 22/60 on T109 for maximum overflow into SoZ on T110, generating ~100 failgold. The library is delayed a bit but I think this is a solid trade off.
The Covenant is scheduled to whip a missionary on T111, overflowing into a WC on T112. This could be SoZ instead, for another 56 failgold.
On T111, we could just put a turn of regular production into SoZ somewhere, or we could delay ED's settler whip from T109 to T110, dumping the overflow into SoZ on T111. If we do the latter, we'll net another ~75 failgold.
So all in all, we could be collecting around 230 failgold on those three turns, at relatively little cost to our development.
For reference, what is our cost when running 100% research? Little things like this could let us be first to music while not giving up on liberalism. I support zakalwe's plan.
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Edit: I only had to look at the current turn report for my answer. We're running full research and our expense is 134g. This fail gold would net us almost two full turns of research, which is basically all of Aesthetics. I think that is a very good trade off.
Does anyone else have an opinion? If we want to go down the failgold route that I suggested, Gourmet Menu should NOT whip the lighthouse next turn (T108).
We had 8 turns of worker labor slashed right out of the planning, and there was no way to get an immediate replacement. I kept everything important on track, all wonders still on the same due date and stone reconnected the same turn, but inevitably something had to give somewhere. That turned into delayed plains cottages at the capital (more turns of Scientist specialists) and a delayed forest chop at Starfall for its library. Both of them will still be added, just a bit later than otherwise planned. 
