Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Sullla]

Turn 56 - 1760BC

The biggest news for this turn was meeting a German quechua on our borders, and the founding of Buddhism this turn (more precisely end of T55) by CivPlayers. However, there were a couple of other things on our end of the turn as well.



Our spearman found another spice up in the northeast. This is going to make for a very nice city down the road, after we have Iron Working and Calendar techs. The bananas are worth 5 food, and then every one of those spices are on the river, granting us the Financial bonus. The grassland spices become 3/0/4 tiles, quite nice indeed! This is a good candidate for roughly the seventh or eighth city.

This was the turn for us to trple-whip the capital:



Sad to see that population sent off to the great pyramid in the sky... Nevertheless, it will grow back pretty quickly, and we'll have enough overflow production to 1t the (Expansive) granary. It's kind of funny that despite all these other teams working heavy amounts of mines, we're doing a very good job of keeping pace on city expansion. We look to be team #5 to get our fourth city, right in the middle, and with much better commerce and more improved tiles than our fast-expanding rivals. New city will be settled on T58 at the fish/corn spot.



Here's an overview of our cities. I've gone ahead and color-coded the map to indicate which cities are working which tiles. Adventure One takes its three best tiles, the corn and the two floodplains cottages. Mansa's Muse has the deer, its own corn, the gold tile, and the newly finished plains cottage. Focal Point has the pigs and copper, then borrows the unworked grassland cottage from the capital for its third pop point. In other words, despite the triple whip, we are working all but two of the cottages at the capital this turn. This is one of the reasons why close settlement can often work so well, as it allows for the swapping of tiles around between cities. SevenSpirits has us doing a lot more of this in the upcoming turns; I may keep indicating what tiles are being worked by which city for fun. There's a lot of micro juggling on each turn!



Here are the Demos after our triple whip. They're actually really, really good still. I was somewhat surprised. I guess it's a testament to working 10 improved tiles with our 10 pop points. We are still tied for GNP lead after our whip and while running 0% gold, heh. Much of that is culture, of course, but still. I'm very happy with how the numbers look. New city and whip regrowth due over the new few turns.

I did set our espionage points to the max on the new German team (all 4 EP/turn). That should be all for the moment. Let's see if they write back to us.

[Sullla]

Oh, and on the nomenclature thing, "End of Turn X" works for me. I'll try to use that in the turn reports.

[SevenSpirits]

Also, any confusion with Seven is probably because he's a PBEM player at heart and those games have distinct during-turn and end-of-turn phases

It's not just PBEMs. Like Novice said, things do take effect immediately, even though in many cases you can't start using them until next turn. They got 5 culture from buddhism along with all the other culture they generated on t55. Once we get their graphs, we will see a culture bump on t55, not t56!

More practically, for planning micro, I find it more intuitive and useful to associate rewards with the final turn of investment rather than the first turn of use. For example, say I build a 1t worker on each of t54, 55, and 56. It makes more sense to me to think of it as
Invest 60h -> Receive worker
Invest 60h -> Receive worker
Invest 60h -> Receive worker

Than as e.g.
Receive warrior -> Invest 60h
Receive worker -> Invest 60h
Receive worker -> Invest 60h
Receive worker -> Invest 20h

More broadly speaking, the entire pattern of civ is, you invest into a thing, and then when you pass a certain threshold of investment you get your reward. The goal of careful micro, then, is to reach those thresholds efficiently, and minimize the amount of time that resources are tied up in investments that haven't paid out yet. So I think with good play there needs to be a strong association between the actions you take in a turn (like choosing which tiles to work) and the resulting thresholds that you pass, and so I find this way of thinking more pertinent than associating the birth of a thing with the first full turn during which you can use it.

The other reason I think it's a better choice of reference point is because like Novice said, some things do take effect immediately. If I finish music this turn, it's DONE, I've claimed the prize right now and you can't tie me by bulbing it next turn. The fact that my artist can't perform any actions until the same time yours could have performed actions had you claimed it via bulb, is less important. If I am due to finish Taj in my capital this turn, I had better check my tile configurations in all my other cities, because the tiles I am choosing right now, before I apparently have Taj, WILL be affected by the golden age production and gpp bonuses. (And of course, in a sequential turns game, units you produce will pop out before the next player gets to move!)

I did try to specify "end of turn" in the micro plan as I know some people find it confusing.

[scooter]

I've always found the clearest way is to use TX for something that happens during the turn and EoTX for something that occurs at the end of a turn. So like this:

T55: Worker chops forest. This happened during the turn.
EoT55: Item completes in city due to forest chop. This happened at End of Turn.

[NobleHelium]

I'm highly in favor of you color-coding the tiles being worked over the course of the Oracle run, Sulla. One because it looks cool, two it lets us visualize the micro that's going on, and three just in case you make a mistake, Seven should be able to catch it.

[kjn]

Having played through Seven's micro plan, I think we should hold our spear relatively close by for now. We don't have any free units - everything else is needed as MP or as settler escorts. Especially with the German team close by for a while I think having a copper unit available will be quite valuable.

[Sullla]

Turn 57 - 1720BC

The guy who plays the turns for the German team must play them in the early morning his time, because he's always finishing his turns around midnight here on the east coast of North America. I always seem to be playing these turns right before I go to sleep, and of course I can't resist the temptation to check things out even when it's late at night. Anyway, on with this turn.



The spear in the northeast found absolutely nothing up there except more jungle tiles (no resources spotted). That river does continue further up into the north; in the distant future when all the jungle is chopped down, it's going to make for some amazing terrain. The warrior in the northwest found nothing over there either. I'm thinking to go one more tile northwest next turn (since it will reveal four tiles) and then head over to garrison our new city by the fish.

The German team moved their quechua away from our borders on their turn. I genuinely don't think we have anything to fear from them. They are obviously in the area to scout, not fight.

One of our workers finished a road two tiles northwest of the capital, two of them chopped, and the last one cottaged the grassland river tile NW of Focal Point. (I canceled all worker orders after taking the screenshot, of course. Looks better in the image when they're doing something rather than standing in place.) The settler has moved into position to settle fish city next turn.



Adventure One picks up the corn and deer this turn as it regrows from its triple-whipped settler, good for +11 food/turn. The overflow also allows us to 1t the cheap Expansive granary, as planned. This will be slightly painful to regrow from, since we didn't have a granary in place ahead of time. Nevertheless, we regrow to size 4 in three turns, then the granary is in place, and the capital's recovery is very quick after that. We probably won't ever have to whip a city again without a granary being in place ahead of time. (As long as there's a forest anywhere nearby for a convenient chop.)

This is pretty much the low point for our Demos numbers. We are only working nine tiles this turn, all improved of course, but three riverside cottages go unworked. Because Adventure One needs to borrow the deer for one tile, Mansa's Muse is forced to work a Priest specialist for one turn. All the tiles are indicated in the picture above.



Aside from our outstanding GNP, we're fairly average this turn. Not too much to say about that. It will all look much better in a couple of turns with the new city, Adventure One's regrowth, and more pop in Focal Point. We still lead CivFanatics on the bar graphs in every single category. I'm honestly not sure what their leadership is doing - they have been down near the bottom of the scoreboard for most of the game so far. They've had less Food, GNP, and Power for literally the entire game, only having a very slight lead in Production (which is stupid anyway, since we all know working lots of mines in Civ4 is generally a bad idea). CFC isn't even in Slavery civic! They have Bronze Working tech and it's a free revolt, so I have no idea what's going on there. Hard to believe that they wouldn't have wanted a worker double-whip at some point in the first 57 turns... right? Weird.

Kjn will have to sort through the score changes for this turn, as there were a good number of them. The Demos from the very start of the turn are right above.

[NobleHelium]

I think there's like a 90% chance that our horse is in the south at this point. There's no way the horse is in the jungle up north. The other 10% possibility is that they're offshore to the west, but I think that's highly unlikely. Keep in mind that we started 1S of AO's position as well.

[mostly_harmless]

Settling 1N of the current position would net us more grassland tiles. And will give us one more forest to chop. Last chance to discuss. If we settle in place, Moai has to go there, I think.

Mh

[Bigger]

we'd only be gaining 4, but also losing 3 (2 that the capital can also use, granted, but it will be quite awhile before the capital is working those 2 tiles, if ever). We would also lose the possibility of a lighthouse-able lake tile (the capital is never going to work that lake). And that may end up being our best moai site anyway.