Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Shoot the Moon]

How light have the other teams been on military though compaired to normal RB games?

I'd say they've been both light on both military and expansion by RB standards. It's also a bit hard to compare to recent RB games as we've moved toward CTON/AW recently where you necessarily build a bit more military (even if to simply prevent our neighbor swiping a border city) than you do in a game where you NAP up with every single other civ in the game.

[novice]

I guess one question for the next few turns is how many whips to put into the TM. Do we whip the market on t130? I think we'll get the TM either way so it's a question of whether the earlier GA is worth a lost pop point in AO.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I'd vote to do anything necessary to guarantee we can't lose the TM. The pop point will grow back, and I can't imagine one pop lost in AO is going to make a huge difference in the long run. I don't think we're going to lose the TM either, but I'm willing to spend an extra whip to make the chance of failure even lower because the benefit of winning the race is so great.

[Yell0w]

I guess one question for the next few turns is how many whips to put into the TM. Do we whip the market on t130? I think we'll get the TM either way so it's a question of whether the earlier GA is worth a lost pop point in AO.

If I understand everything right the winning play "we" are about to do is 1 turn lib with an almost guaranteed free tech. Then we build TM and kinda won the game.

I agree with spacetyrantxenu.

[Dp101]

We should do anything necessary to land the taj, even do another starvedown for a GE if we have to.

[kjn]

We should do anything necessary to land the taj, even do another starvedown for a GE if we have to.

We can't do a GE starvedown - we don't have MC yet, even less a forge somewhere. And even with a forge and engineer in ST, that's only 5 GPP per turn.

[Sullla]

Turn 128 - 325AD

Well, the Golden Age is finally over. But we're still in very good shape.



First of all, I had this marble offer from the German team when I logged in. Very nice. This should clear our major obstacle to the Taj Mahal. Since this was just under discussion in the thread, I'll chime in with my thoughts on the building of the wonder. I think that we should whip the temple and settler as planned, but refrain from the market whip on T130. I don't think that it will be necessary, and I would prefer to save the extra pop point. That's 10 additional turns of working a grassland town in our capital, not at all trivial from a commerce perspective, and then we have one fewer pop point to grow back afterwards as well.

For comparison purposes, the wonder finishes eot 138 if we whip that market, and finishes eot 140 if we don't. My personal feeling is that either date should be extreme safe for a Taj Mahal build; we are on Turn 128 right now, and no one has researched a single Renaissance tech as yet. Apolyton would have to research all of Nationalism tech (3200 beakers) and then build the wonder, without marble, all before the end of T140. That seems incredibly unlikely to me. CivFr has an even more unlikely situation, needing Philosophy and Nationalism techs, in addition to picking up Civil Service at some point and burning a turn of anarchy revolting into Bureaucracy. I mean, sure it's possible, but there is a point at which we start to veer off into paranoia. Barring a Great Engineer popping up somewhere, I'm struggling to see how someone is going to out-build us to this 700 shield wonder when we have the tech much earlier than everyone else and have marble to help build it.

Ultimately up to the team, of course, and we don't have to make a decision for another two turns.



We uncovered a little bit more of Apolyton territory with our scout. More importantly, there is an Apolyton settler (unguarded!) on the tile southwest of the UniversCiv warrior. They're probably heading for one of the desert hill tiles next to the corn. Definitely looks like Apolyton and CivFr are snapping up the final uncontested land along their borders. Maybe thing will get more interesting after that takes place, although their teams seem to be pretty solid allies right now.



We've found the borders of the last remaining German city up to the north. Our Woodsman II axe will check it out next turn. The Germans also gifted us a worker this turn, which we have promised to go and chop the jungle on their gems resource. I thought that they would chop the plains forest tile first, but nope, another worker is coming over to do that. What a sad city pre-borders pop. I'll go send this worker to their gems tile next turn, and if there's a barb sitting outside the German borders to kill the worker... well gee, what a sad event that would be.

Under the interface, Ditchdigger whipped its theatre and will start pushing on the German idiot city. We'll be able to run two Artist specialists in a few turns and pop the 100 culture borders, ensuring our control of the tile southeast of the German city. Their location is completely indefensible against attack.



Fortunately the barb axeman in the south moved away from our borders. Heroic axeman Lew should be able to move next to the thing and induce a suicide attack. Seven Tribes was double whipped for its settler this turn, and we should found the furs/crabs city on T131 if all goes according to plan. That CivPlayers chariot is a bit irritating, hopefully it will keep moving out of the way. I could not cover the two workers on the horses tile with a unit, we'll just have to trust their word on our current NAP. I've brought down a war chariot from the north, currently inside Gourmet Menu, which can help cover workers/settler as needed when they leave our borders.



Here's the core of our territory coming out of the Golden Age. Horse Feathers will go ahead and keep building catapults until we discover Metal Casting. You can never build enough cats in Civ4. I also have the city on a high growth configuration at +6 food/turn; since we don't have any unit all that pressing to build, we may as well take advantage of this time to try and reach a higher size. I think the city caps out at about size 14, where it produces 27 base / 61 total (Heroic Epic + forge) production. 1t elephants and 1.5t knights? Yes please.

Mansa's Muse and Forbidden Fruit have overflowed into Hindu missionaries. These builds can be changed if desired, but I felt that they were a nice placeholder while we are waiting on forges. Our three newest cities all lack religion right now, and we'll be planting two more cities in the near future. Missionaries will not be a waste. Mansa is currently up to +26 gold/turn from the shrine (!!!), the result of another free spread of religion somewhere out in the fog. Just crazy how valuable that shrine has been, and we still get to add grocer/bank/Wall Street later on. We remain the only team in the game with a shrine.



Further east, Simple Life double whipped its worker, and the overflow will finish its library next turn. Eastern Dealers is growing like a weed now that it doesn't have to run those specialists. Workers will have all of the grassland hill mines up shortly, and then we can get started on National Epic, with a forge whip in there at some point. As for Starfall:



We put the first turn of whip overflow into Globe Theatre as planned. Everything that you see there is from overflow; we only get 1 production naturally this turn. Next turn we'll swap back to galley and double-whip that, again overflowing into Globe, and keep doing that until it finishes. The massive food surplus and lack of caring about happiness penalties effectively lets us break the game here and abuse Civ4's mechanics. Note also the two Scientist specialists: almost done with that Great Person. He'll arrive right on time on T130.

Overview / tile micro:

[IMG]

I tested our break-even research rate outside of Golden Age mode, and it turns out to be roughly 300 base / 360 modified beakers per turn. That's a very solid place to be at this stage of the game, and we can claim medieval techs at a nice rate of 3-5 turns each. We caught an amusing break when CivFanatics used their Great Scientist to research Philosophy tech one turn before we finished our own research. Thanks, guys! In truth though the effect is minimal, because we've already knocked out 99% of the beakers, but I did find it amusing. At least they didn't get any known tech bonus from us. Onward to Paper and then Education/Liberalism.

Apolyton finally looks to have turned on their research, but it's probably too late now. Three more turns to go including this current turn (eot 130).



Demos are still pleasantly strong out of Golden Age mode. The GNP is hard to read, since Philosophy gets so many pre-requisites, but we are still first there for the moment. I was delighted to find that we still had a lead in Production as well outside of Golden Age, and by quite a good margin. We will overtake the top spot in Soldiers next turn in all likelihood; we were first before I whipped away some of our population this turn. We are second in the game's geometric Population stat only because CivFr has their crazy size 17 (!) capital.

Nothing of note in terms of espionage points. Still keeping graphs with UniversCiv and slowly getting some EP with CivFr. Fire away with your thoughts and comments.

[kjn]

Thanks for the report! Is it possible to get a unit to check out the land to the south and west of Seven Tribes too relatively soon? We will need some more garrison units for our latest cities too, so some more units (archers or, chariots) could probably come in handy.

Ie, can we afford to put either Brick or Focal Point into building units during our Liberalism run? We do have that WPC archer, but we're still at barely more than one unit per city, I think.

[SevenSpirits]

A major consideration for whether to accelerate Taj or not is our upcoming war with Inca. If we finish Taj t140, we will be in golden age through t148, which doesn't leave us much time post-golden age to whip out units. Where are we expecting to be techwise at that point? How many units can we get by just drafting and slow-building them?

I suspect the earlier golden age will be better, if for no other reason than so we can freely turn our population into units sooner without sacrificing golden age yields.

[NobleHelium]

I'm highly in favor of the earlier Taj build.