Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[kjn]

I absolutely love the upcoming city plant from the Germans. Unguarded settler + 8 tiles away from any other cities + no road connection = sheer awesomeness. Keep building those cities, gentlemen. (Do you realize this takes the Germans to 13 cities, which is more than any other team in the game? Heh.) Keep that economy in the Ancient Age. We'll give those cities a good home in two dozen turns.

To be fair, they do have two units fogbusting E and SW of the settler, and we don't have visibility on the are NW of the settler, so I think it's quite likely they have a unit there too.

And we don't know where the city of Wanzleben is yet - it might not be 8 tiles from their other cities, but half that.

But the lack of worker support, that I give you. But I can understand them trying to rush out cities to claim land if I were them, giving the way WE keep expanding.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

But I can understand them trying to rush out cities to claim land if I were them, giving the way WE keep expanding.

I disagree. Expansion has to be balanced with economy. At this point, every city just puts them deeper into a hole. Aren't they running two dozen turns to research Classical era techs right now?

[Sullla]

Turn 125 - 250AD

Hopefully this post will show up in the right place; the clock on the forums seems to be acting up again and time-traveling some of the posts into weird places. Anyway...



There was a message from WPC when I logged into the game asking us to move our missionary into Great Plains and spread religion. Uh, sure guys, we were doing that anyway? Well, mission accomplished in any case. Great Plains has a granary, barracks, totem pole, and library - this means that it has more infrastructure than their capital for some reason. Odd. Looks to be a low-commerce city too, so I'm not sure why this city has a library when other, better cities do not. I probably shouldn't try to expend too much brainpower trying to understand WPC's city management decisions in this game. They haven't been quite Templars-level bad, but certainly not good either.

We got a free religion spread into WPC's Fields of Color as well this turn, meaning that our religion is pretty well established in WPC territory. Here's an overview of their territory that we can see:



There's the six cities that we can see, five of which are running Hinduism. Let's hope that WPC will spread our religion further to the rest of their cities. It's also visible here how badly we've squeezed both of these teams for territory; the entirety of the equatorial jungle region has fallen under our control. WPC and Germans both have their southern borders well north of where the other teams that started in the "northern" hemisphere have them. Their idiot conflict in the early game over the territory north of that central lake could not have gone much better for us.



Here's our scout in Apolyton territory; I took the picture to show how close we are getting to the big sea that we spotted on the other side of the worldwrap. I was originally going to keep pushing east for circumnavigation purposes, but now that that bonus is gone, I think we'll do better by moving north and trying to scout as much of Apolyton territory as possible. If they won't trade us their maps, then fine, we'll just map out their territory manually. At worst, they can ask us to leave. Until then, better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.



And here's a similar picture of the deep south. We thought before that our tundra south didn't connect to CFC's deep south, but now I'm not so certain. A few more turns of exploring should clear up whether or not those two fingers of land connect to one another. Sadly, we have not spotted any more resources down in our own territory. The barb axe appears to be leaving our own axeman in peace for the moment, and I'm content to walk past in safety if possible.



In our own territory, the biggest news was the founding of our newest city, the somewhat misnamed Frozen Jungle. I heard some calls for "Stagnation", but I couldn't in good conscience give a city such an inauspicious name. Workers are in the process of farming the rice (farmed next turn, irrigated the turn after that) and then roading over to Ditchdigger. We will probably add one more farm for +6 food, put down a couple of cottages, and mostly do whipping for production here for the moment. The true purpose of this city is to be a monster State Property workshop camp later on; every one of those jungle tiles can become a 2/3 tile later on, or even 2/4 if we adopt Caste System. There are 13 flatland grassland tiles here, meaning we can easily get roughly 40-50 base production before any modifiers. So while this and Ditchdigger are extreme longterm projects, they will be wonderful cities in about 50 turns.

Don't worry, we're not abandoning the northern rice; a city placed two west of that resource can be founded in the post-German era and will be very strong as well. But we'll never get control of that second rice tile until the Germans are gone, and Frozen Jungle has plenty of food to work with. There's no reason to push an aggressive city further north here right now.

Another city management point: I've queued up a lighthouse in Brick By Brick, due in 3 turns. This is a bit of a judgment call, but I want us to have some way to grow the city rapidly if needed later on. With the lighthouse, we don't have any way to push fast growth (by working a bunch of water tiles) in the wake of a whip or draft. This feels like the best time to get the lighthouse done as well: Golden Age, no strong military units to build, still waiting on forge and stables to become available. The only other option at the moment is a catapult, and the lighthouse is only slightly more expensive at 60 shields vs 50 shields. Feels like the right decision to me, let me know if all of you object.

Further to the south, Heroic Epic is now due in two turns, and this is due in one:



We are guaranteed at least a coinflip for this wonder now. I'm really hoping we land Great Lighthouse, and I think it will be pretty valuable. More so than the other teams think. We have 5 coastal cities at the moment, and our next city will be on the coast in the south by the furs for 6. We can then plant at least 2 more coastal cities in the deep south. Meanwhile, the German team has 5 coastal cities of their own. That's starting to add up to a lot of trade routes there! Furthermore, we're Expansive and will have the opportunity to build cheap harbors (effective cost 40 shields) which synergize very well with Great Lighthouse trade routes. We also will not be teching Corporation for close to 100 more turns. I am waiting to see if we land this wonder before moving forward with the simulation, as it would give us some more commerce to play around with and make the Liberalism race not quite so tight.



Here's the eastern part of our civ, not too much of great interest happening here either. Eastern Dealers is going to pop out its Great Scientist next turn, and that's about it.

Speaking of the Liberalism race, we are teching Philosophy to near-completion this turn, in the same way that we did Paper tech last turn. We previously had 1177 out of 1440 beakers, and we make 158 base / 228 modified beakers this turn. That gets us to 1405/1440 in total at the end of the turn, 97.6% overall. It's as close as well can get without going over, if not quite so nice as Paper tech. Next turn, we'll run 0% research and put the Scientist specialist beakers into Archery tech, then go four turns of 100% to close out the race. Just the Scientists alone nearly finish Archery, due to its extreme cheapness and discounted cost from other teams.

Overview / tile micro:

Note that Focal Point is building Wealth to help us in our Liberalism push. There's very little that it needs to work on there; it would only be pushing out catapults or whatever. We do need some extra gold to land our desired slingshot, and Focal Point + Brick By Brick are the best spots. Brick will be running some Wealth after it finishes its lighthouse. Eastern Dealers is also running 5 Scientists + gems tile in truth, but I'm not creating another image after doing the 6 Scientist graphic before.

I am nearly out of the default colors in Paint to use for our cities.



Demos still putting up the predictable Golden Age stampy stamp numbers. We are well over 300 Food without mass specialist usage. We're also finally about to overtake CivFr on the misleading "Population" number, which they've led for ages due to their size 16 capital. The GNP number is just funny, due to the double pre-requisite bonus and known tech bonus on Philosophy tech. At 100% research, our GNP goes to 845 for the turn. Yikes.

Apolyton ran a turn of 0% science last turn, which is a huge win for us. Any turn that they are not putting beakers into Education right now is a turn that puts us closer to Liberalism. They are rapidly running out of time to win that race; even if they lightbulb Education at the end of this turn, they'd only have 5 turns to get through the 2500 beaker cost of Liberalism itself. Looking more and more difficult for them all the time. We also have confirmation that teams are not gifting Apolyton gold to win a Liberalism race, which was always unlikely, but still, paranoia and all that.

I am trying to keep graphs with UniversCiv while also building EP towards CivFr. We'll have to run another turn or two of spending against Univers for the moment, as they had just enough points for us to lose their graphs this turn. CivFr is spending no points against us, thank goodness. We are actually ahead of them 10 to 6 in EP. They either didn't build courthouses or don't have Code of Laws. We actually think that CivFr researched Metal Casting this turn, so they probably do not have Code of Laws. They would obviously be in Bureaucracy if they had Civil Service (with their size 16 Academy + Great Library capital). In other words, CivFr isn't even in the picture for Liberalism, as predicted earlier. No one other than Apolyton has Paper or Philosophy techs, making them the only competitor.

Well that should be all for now. Hopefully we get this marble deal straightened out with the Germans, and then sign an NAP extension with CivPlayers. Let me know what you think.

[novice]

Maybe it's better to build wealth in BbB now, and build the lighthouse once we're back in OR.

[sooooo]

I'll reiterate that my "vote" is to not build a lighthouse in BbB - I wouldn't want to work the coastal tiles here for a long while and now seems to be the time to build some military before we get access to forges and universities. I'd go for two catapults here before a forge. In terms of being able to work the 2F coastal tiles to draft, then I don't think that a lighthouse helps that much. If we work the coast to grow, then we'd be taking away people on 4-hammer mines, which doesn't seem productive. I think in this city we only draft away the guys on the plains farms.

Even if we decide that horse feathers will make all the catapults we'll ever need, then I'd put BbB on wealth and focal point onto another worker.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I'm ok with the lighthouse build, but if we aren't going to be working the lake immediately, I agree with novice, let's wait for the OR bonus and build wealth now. One other thought, now that we're a coin flip at worst for The Great Lighthouse, we'll at worst get failgold from that, or the trade routes. Either way, we should have more flexibility in our finances for the run to Liberalism.

[kalin]

I agree with soooo on the lighthouse in BbB, that is I'd prefer not to build it. A couple of cats or wealth seems like a better choice imo.

Kalin

[Gold Ergo Sum]

I vote for the lighthouse. It is an easy build and it will easily pay more dividends than one catapult.

[pindicator]

BbB is going to be a military building city, right? And we are planning on a war in 20t? I would skip the lighthouse, and do either military or build wealth

[kjn]

Also, do we have a barracks in BbB yet? Catapults need all the starting XP they can get.

Another thing is that WCs are still decent builds for military. They kill axes and cripples just fine, are a lot cheaper than knights, and we can build them right now. Catapults will be useful for a long time, but they're slow on the offensive, and we envision a fast campaign. Then we will need some unit to provide numbers to our knights, and WCs are perfect for that. Fast, relatively strong, and cheap.