Gaspar and NobleHelium - More Arguments About Buildings & Food.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 33.

Big news!



You've got [strike]Mail[/strike] Stone! This changes the calculus considerably. We're going to thoroughly reconsider our options...



Back home, we finished Granaries and are overflowing into Warriors. Hunting finished and we'll probably research Writing next.



Top score! Win by default!

[Gaspar]

Title says it all really. We held the turn all day while we debated various scenarios in which to settle for stone and make an honest run at the Pyramids. We're happy enough with the results of that to go ahead, but I'll try and get a bit more specific a plan in the thread tomorrow so hopefully our faithful lurkers can critique a bit. THIS PLAN IS INCREDIBLY RISKY.

Anyway, as far as T34 itself is concerned, nothing really happened:







I have nothing else to say. Pretend I just insulted Noble and it was funny.

[Gaspar]

Hrm. Its more fun to insult Noble because there's always a 10% chance that Dave isn't taking the poking well. Noble, I don't care in the least if he's taking it well. Update coming shortly vis-a-vis Pyramids plan.

[Gaspar]

Scratch that, quick turn report first.

Results of exploration:





You can see a little water poking out through the desert S-SE of the warrior in the 1st shot. Assuming that's a lake or an inlet and not loads of water. If that's incorrect we have an incredibly defensible spot pre-Astronomy.

Back home, just doing the stuff we said we'd do:



Monument whipped in Cathedral, Settler in process at capital, MP Warrior finishing up at Old Ruins. Here are the demos:

[Gaspar]

So the Pyramids plan. I had hoped to type up a marvelous micro spreadsheet or at least heavily twig through Noble's micro (which is the result of him looking at my initial sloppy micro, laughing, and starting over. This is a common response to me doing this sort of micro.) Anyway, instead I'll just sort of picture through the plan. Here's a shot on T40:



You can see Royal Crypts has been settled and we're pasturing Pigs. It is clearly the weakest of the possible next city spots but its the only one which advances us towards Stone. A lot of this is theory right now - if there is no food in range of Stone in the south, we're going to have to rethink things. Probably to settle an incredibly lousy dotmap.

This is a shot on 46, with Wortham Chapel settled for the stone. Ignore the tiles south of the city, we don't know what's there yet.



Here's a shot on 49 with Pyramids started and many workers in place to chop:



And finally here's a T54 finish shot:



So, what's not to love? Well lots, actually. Let's talk about the positives to this plan:

• OMG H4X PYRAMIDS
  
• We settle a superior dotmap by settling on the stone after settling Royal Crypts for the pigs vs settling a 4th city directly for the stone.
  
• Still some forests left for something later.
  

And then the negatives:

• Expansive China on 5 cities on T54.
  
• Our military consists of 6 warriors and 2 spearmen.
  
• We don't even have so much as 1 Library built to start taking advantage of the Rep Specialists yet.
  
• Stone city could end up being completely worthless, fed by an Oasis and some farms.
  
• The southern cities get pretty neglected in terms of development.
  

Techwise we only add Masonry, Writing and will complete Mathematics at the end of turn 54. So the limp to Currency tech is on in full force. As I stated last night, the situation is very risky. We are basically putting a ton of eggs in this basket and hoping that Commodore doesn't get frisky and that we can leverage the improved happy cap and loads of workers to make up for all the expansion we didn't do. If the map is cramped to the SW, we can lose a ton of territory to other teams. And we're hoping we can limp to Currency and then CoL fast enough that we can salvage an economy from Wealth builds and Caste specialists.

What alternatives do we have?

• Ignore the stone, just go for a good solid expansion.
  
• Settle more aggressively for stone first FUBARing dotmap, then aim to get a better 5th city down once Stone is hooked.
  
• Ignore the Math line and hope to land Monotheism instead, getting both the OR boost to the Pyramids build and religion boosted happy caps sooner.
  
• Many others I'm sure.
  

I'd love to hear opinions from lurkers, so I'll open the floor a bit here. Once we know the geography around stone we can get a bit more specific - the purpose of this microplan was really to see if we could get The Pyramids done fast enough - we had T55 as sort of our drop-dead date (keeping in mind possibility of stone access for others, Yuri's IND trait, and the likelihood that Dave would like them even more than we would.) We can do that, but does it cost too much to get there? The specifics can be refined as we get closer.

[CFCJesterFool]

I think I would settle stone next. This would allow you to get Mids sooner and the workers will be in place to chop out settlers once Mids done.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 36.



Warriors found no food as expected. The water is indeed a lake. We're still arguing about how we're going to go about doing this since there's no food within range.



The core is aworkin'.



OMG, huge CY lead and #2 in GNP! (Two prereqs on Masonry. )

[Gaspar]

Not a lot to say. Beginning our train of lighting the next 15 or so turns on fire to land the pyramids. Its not like the first 50 turns are important or anything, anyway.

First, discovered Commodore's favorite resource - plains cow. (Ask him about this, global lurkers.) And also that our coast down here is probably more of a salt lake than actual coast.



Back home we lit a worker turn on fire with a turn into a useless plains cottage we will absolutely never complete let alone work because Noble would actually spontaneously combust if he just moved a worker 4 spaces and left it at that. We also temporarily grew to unhappiness at Old Ruins. If novice is grading everyone's games on micro quality, we definitely just lost like 8 points.



Demos still looking pretty good considering our slow start.



For the lurkers - played a little game I like to play called "who gets what wonder?" Here's my picks for the betting pool, feel free to add your own:

Stonehenge - Commodore
Oracle - Yuri
GLH - Ichabod
Colossus - Yuri
Pyramids - Us
Great Wall - Commodore
Hanging Gardens - Us

Tiebreaker question, what turn does Stonehenge fall? I'm going with 39.

[novice]

We also temporarily grew to unhappiness at Old Ruins. If novice is grading everyone's games on micro quality, we definitely just lost like 8 points.

Looks like you're switching to a worker, double-whipping, and overflowing to a monument? That's not so bad. The unhappy citizen is worth two foodhammers when building a worker, and you obviously need to be size 4 to double whip. Although it might've been better to start the worker at size three, then grow to unhappy on the monument and immediately whip the worker.

[NobleHelium]

And that's for lower city maintenance, right? Good point, didn't consider that. Maintenance didn't go up though, fortunately.