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Whosit · February 8th, 2013, 23:24

Also, we are the first to get a second city. If you check the demographics screen, everyone else has the same land area. Ours increased after we settled. So we're first! Of course, everyone else is surely going to figure out that we are the first to get a second city. What they will do with this knowledge.... I can't say.

And NC teched Bronze Working. Something worth noting is that, for them, Copper is in their capital's 4th ring. They are most likely going to have to devote a city to getting Copper, unless Horses are enough for them (or they tech to Iron Working and Iron is nearby).

Whosit · February 9th, 2013, 14:39

Okay, as a feared, you had There You Go Working the Cottage. I switched it to the unimproved pigs, but this means we're going to have to switch to the Worker at size 2, leaving the Warrior 1 turn from completion. That shouldn't be too bad, and we can pop it out when we need to. Hopefully we won't need it. We might have to do some Warrior shuffling to get things ready for city 3, but we'll worry about that in a few more turns.

I've played the turn. It looked like you were using Dinar to explore around the copper, so I took him south on the hill. Spotted Corn. He should really turn around and go back to the Capital now, though. I'm also laying down some signs.

Actually, would it be a good idea to stop Mysticism with 1 turn left, start Pottery, and finish up Mysticism right before we need it? That might confuse anyone taking an interest in our techs (though if they're watching GNP, they'll notice probably). Would this hide our intent to get Stonehenge, or signal it? We don't have Fishing yet, so they'd have to guess which tech we were working on. I vote to hide, personally.

Demographics interesting. Pop 5 city was whipped to size 3. Believe that's Commodore. Spiritual, so no down time to switch to Slavery. He has planted his second city, too. Based on the Land Area score, I think he has more overlap with his capital (we have more land area than he does).

Also, MH teched Bronze Working.

[Image: PBEM%2048%20T24a.JPG]

Remember: Worker actions and city micro are important right now. Take extra care to check what you are doing. Hopefully the signs will help us both remember what needs to be done.

Whosit · February 9th, 2013, 21:32

Okay, so I took the liberty of playing the turn again. Hope that's okay! Several things of note:

1) We met Commodore's Warrior! He met Daric, and was traveling West.
2) For the time being I have shifted 100% EP to Commodore. Still no indication that NC has met anyone else. We still have a solid grasp on NC's graphs for at least the next few turns, and I figured he'd know we met someone else anyway, unless we kept all our EP on him, which seemed dumb.
3) I believe two other players settled their second cities: MH and NC, making AT the only one still on one city.
3a) They both increased their scores by 5 points, and the average population increased by 500 (2000/4).
6) I swapped tech to Pottery because no one said not to. I made a not to switch back in TWO turns, so Mysticism should complete as our 3rd Worker does, allowing us to immediately begin working on Stonehenge.
7) Daric is probably ~10 tiles from reaching our Western borders, so he's almost made it around the world.

Uh, I think that's it. I put a ton of signs down and around. We're probably going to want to start thinking about post-Henge Worker actions, or even "if Henge fails" Worker actions. Depending on how things go, could throw chops into another Settler, but just an idea.

I just realized that I don't know if not getting overflow into Pottery matters or not. I guess we'll get some overflow after we finish Mysticism, anyway (we'll have 10 overflow, I think). 4 turns to Pottery from scratch, meaning that with the free beaker we're getting the 20% bonus for knowing Agriculture only, so no one else has Pottery yet (not that I'm surprised).

So, if all goes as planned, we are, what, 6 turns from Stonehenge? 7?

I'm following the micro plan to the letter as far as I can tell, but hopefully my other decisions aren't total smoke

Anyway, pictures:

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Whosit · February 10th, 2013, 18:19

So I'd just like to start musing about some unit/tech/strategic stuff.

1st: When will we start building War Chariots? We're going to connect Horses as soon as we can once the Stonehenge project is complete, so we'll have War Chariots available to build soon, but will we sink hammers into them right away? My personal inclination is "no." Perhaps we'll build one, but I figure we should build as many cheap Warriors as we can to garrison our cities. Once our first wave of expansion is winding down, then we should build more Chariots to actually hold and defend our claims.

2nd: Copper: Do we connect? We have Hunting, so connecting it means that we can no longer build those cheap Warriors. I feel we should road up to it and build a mine on the resource, but not actually connect it immediately.

3rd: Horseback Riding. Should we grab this tech at some point to make Stables available? I think we do, but not until we plan to gear up for sustained Chariot production. To me, the biggest appeal of the Stable is that it should let us train Sentry Chariots out of the gate, yes? I'd like us to have a small team of sentries scouting beyond our borders. I don't expect anyone is going to rush us, particularly with the leaders and civs picked, but we'll probably get attacked eventually, and it would be mighty helpful to see it coming.

On an unrelated note, I just realized that scouting Daric is about where our Southwest is. If he heads Northeast, he should run into Commodore's civ, so that's probably our neighbor that way.

City placement: 2S of the Copper? With Civil Service farms, could be a production powerhouse. Even before that, has what looks to be dry corn (5 food) and one riverside farm possible (if we pick that over a cottage). +6 food surplus. Plains hill, copper grass hill, and several other grass hills. At around ~7 pop, could be pulling in 16 hpt easy. Not a place we need to immediately settle, but we should have 2-3 happy resources in the near future, and it would be good to have a production-centric city in the empire. Something to chew on.

Whosit · February 11th, 2013, 11:56

I have the save in hand, but since our time zone means that there's no real hurry to play, I'm going to hold onto it to see if I get any comments before continuing.

One of the signs is wrong, in regards to the Worker pasturing the Pig: He will be ready to move and chop a turn earlier than the sign indicates. If I play the turn, I will correct this.

It looks like we were the first contact for Commodore. I wonder how many others have met. We could continue NE to see his lands, or, if my hunch is correct, scout NW to find someone else. Everyone has a second city now. Most Demographics values are close enough as makes no difference, so I'd say everyone is playing about the same, with roughly the same opening as far as I can tell.

Dazed, hopefully you get a chance to review some of my last posts here, otherwise you might detect a distinct drop off in the quality of our play once the current plan reaches its end. :P

Whosit · February 11th, 2013, 21:37

Save played and sent. Not much to say. Daric sees:

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It's a copy of our south. May be some opportunity to seal things off with a couple cities on our end. We'll see. Not sure which way to scout. Can't proceed far north because that will be blocked. Could go back south to scope out more land. Or Perhaps North to confirm whose borders are up there.

Whosit

Played save. Only questionable decision was where I moved Daric. Commodore's Warrior is shadowing him, and I moved onto flat ground. However, the way I see it: If he really wants to take a 50/50 shot at our Warrior, and also make (what I've confirmed) is one his neighbors very angry... let him? However, the move did reveal something of note:

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My proposed production city is 1N of where Daric currently stands (as it would grab Copper). The addition of Pigs in the 2nd ring makes it all the more appealing to me. When we have the techs and happy cap to support it, I would workshop all the grassland tiles here as well.

So, unless I did something really stupid I wasn't even aware of, Mysticism completed this turn, so we can begin Stonehenge next turn! Also, There You Go grew to size 2, so the Warrior should be put on pause to get Worker 4 started. That extra worker turn is worth the delay on the Warrior, and my sims showed that delaying the Warrior shouldn't cause a problem for spotting for City 3.

I went back to my C&D and realized I missed some stuff. Commodore had Bronze Working around EoT22. He was already in Slavery when we met. (AT is not in Slavery now, but not sure if he has the tech or not.) Some of the point gains, maybe automatic ones, confused me.

Commodore gained a tech this turn that gave no Soldier Points. I do not know exactly which GNP value is his. If I did a little more analysis I could probably take a stab, though. Anyway, it took him about 5 turns to tech this, which means, based on average rival GNP, he probably spent around 110 beakers on. Could be more or less, of course. I have no idea what he teched. Pottery makes sense, but it's cheaper than that. I don't know if he did any tech swapping, because I didn't really see much variance in the tech rate there.

If anyone else can lay eyes on the Google doc, that might help shed some light on things.

Later today, I think I'm going to find the time to plan out some of our next moves post-Stonehenge. My goal is to get Cities 3 and 4 settled, as well as get up to, oh, 7 Workers? I kinda follow that rule of thumb for 2 Workers per City. We'll have plenty of stuff to improve, especially if we do land the Henge. If not.... things get trickier. Horses are key resource to hook up, as are Furs at City 3, but both are 2nd ring resources.

I think favoring cottages over other stuff is also a good idea? Oh, Slavery switch while Settler 3 is in transit. Well, Settler for city 2. I don't know what the N of settlers is, if we count our initial Settler as 1 or 0. Anyway, the basic idea being that we plant cities, and work cottages to pay for more cities. I would like to get my production city up as City 5, though. It can spit out the War Chariots we need to scout and defend our stuff, while the other cities focus on Food and Commerce. Seems reasonable to me.

P.S.: Dazed, I know you're a busy guy, but the last time you posted was 4 days ago, so if you can find the time to drop by and leave a comment, it'd be much appreciated. I want to make sure we're of the same mind on the overall strategic goal before I start making stuff up.

Whosit · February 12th, 2013, 14:00

So I messed around with stuff. This is probably not super readable right now, sorry, but I don't have time to clean it up yet.

I forgot that Stonehenge provides Great Prophet points! That's good for us, I think, for getting a Great Priest for Confucianism. In the sandbox game, though, the AI got to CoL first. I am not sure that the other human players will beeline it, but it's possible.

Anyway, lot of that worker stuff is in my shorthand, and it's pretty much impossible to understand without looking at the map and stuff. But I pretty much avoided making military units wherever I could, and focused on Workers and Settlers and city improvements. In a lot of cases I had workers build roads because I couldn't think of something better, so that's something to think about. By the time City 5 was founded and a few libraries were up, our tech rate looked pretty good! IW in 2 turns or CoL in 3. I didn't record it there, but I tried to juggle tiles between the Capital and City 2 so that some of the maturing cottages were always being worked. The tricky part in some cases was finding the most effective ways of stagnating city growth. In some cases, like for building Libraries or Markets, growing into unhappiness to whip later seems sound to me.

Just some thoughts there....

Whosit · February 12th, 2013, 20:59

Save came around again this evening, so I took a look. We've begun Stonehenge, but I'm getting worried. I believe 4 people got techs (including Commodore, so he might have been doing some tech swapping after all!) but only one was worth Soldier points, and I believe that was AT with BW finally. What this means is that it's possible MH got his hands on Mysticism, too. There's also someone with 12 hpt out there, but I have no idea who. Whatever the case, if MH has Myst and is gunning for Stonehenge, we are in trouble. Unfortunately, it's hard to plan for failure because we don't know when it will come, and we want to stay in the race, regardless. Just means wasted turns and wasted forests.

Also, I realized I could have partially teched fishing instead of pottery for the tech swap (it would have hid our tech better), because we don't really need either immediately. Oh well~ Wonder how the game plan will change if we are going to need to build Obelisks in every city.

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Looks like Com is going to be fielding some metal units soon.

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Scores and a lot of demos numbers are so close (relatively speaking) that it's hard for me to believe anyone is doing much differently than we are. So I am getting pretty pessimistic about landing the Henge. Only good news is that we'll get some gold to power through techs for a few turns. Hopefully.

Whosit · February 12th, 2013, 21:15

I can't help but wonder if the smart thing to do would have been to start a Settler instead of Stonehenge. Or if it would have been smart to hold onto the save to try and see if Dazed would chime in.

Too late now. Whoops. Time to go boldly marching forward into the teeth of failure! I mean, maybe we'll luck out. But considering how close the score and tech stuff has been, and considering everyone has their second city and no one is creative, people getting Mysticism around now makes sense. So, if a change of plans would have been in order, real sorry for playing on rashly!

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