[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[ljubljana]

Turn 5 - Japan



Looking like land's end over here. Even more decent-to-strong city sites in the east, eg 1E of the lake. Wow, what a juiced map.



Hey, it's Geneva again! And just like in PBEM20, it looks like an utterly monstrous Feitoria paradise. I swap both of us to sailing, me to kill them ASAP and you to rush what I'm sure is an equal-and-opposite CS by your island. But obviously, feel free to overrule me on your end if you think the fast campus is more urgent

Geneva has a strong riverside HS spot too for River Goddess, neat and by no means guaranteed...but it's on maize, so we can't start it immediately upon Astro discovery, would need to wait for Pottery, and it might kill Feitoria spots :|. And in the west, we'd have to pave over hills to get riverside HS there, which I'm not thrilled about. Officially in the "undecided" camp re River Goddess vs. GotS. At least GotS is looking pretty nauseating indeed with all this seafood

Still no sign of barbs on either island, surprisingly. We are both starting to defog the first 7-distance tiles from the capitals, so I expect that to change pretty quickly.

[williams482]

GotS is not only really good but also has denial value. If we can get it, we should.

River Goddess seems like an okay consolation prize at this point, although either culture pantheon would probably do okay too.

[ljubljana]

i mean, river goddess could be CRIMINALLY underrated here, couldn't it? like, look at how my pre-game feed the world tests turned out:



amenities nightmare everywhere, and l'm really not seeing much in the way of luxes on our starting islands to offset that. so in this situation, with my whole empire at -1 amenities, RG with 5 or 6 riverside HS would be worth...8 beakers, 5 culture, 11 gold, 11 faith, probably ~1.5 hammers/city, and a 15% growth multiplier PLUS housing! Neither GotS nor a culture pantheon can come even close to matching that, and they're not more front-loaded either since the PBEM22 start will have amenity problems immediately with no pre-plantation luxes and nothing at all at the capital. Not sure if we will be this amenities-constrained in the actual PBEM, but.....looking at our starting islands so far, and knowing that i'll have a ton of extra pop to play around with from FtW, doesn't it kinda seem like it?

idk man. let's do some more exploring and see how many decent riverside HS we can find before committing i guess

[Ginger()]

I always love it when it isn't the usual suspects of pantheons that get attention, that being said, won't Indonesia take GotS?

Those geothermals and overall quality of land are rather unfortunate for the Japan pick, diminishes the relative improvement offered by Meiji

[ljubljana]

I kinda tend to think Indo wants a culture pantheon in generic circumstances, likely God of the Open Sky, to speed them to Mercenaries. But these may not be generic circumstances, GotS is the next suspect for sure, and there's a good chance Chev in particular ignores how underrated it has traditionally been and takes it anyways, imo.

Agreed about the land, and I'm not really sure what we should do about it For now, I'm waiting for more scouting before committing on the "big campus cluster" vs "not killing my hills" question... Luckily Japan would still be ok even with no Meiji from Divine Wind and the cheap HSs...

[ljubljana]

[b]turn 6 - japan]/b]

no screenies today but i played to keep it moving

no barbs either, and everyone's scores and rankings are still unchanged from turn 3, indicating we likely have exactly mirrored starts in the first ring at least.

and no scout openings, not that that's at all surprising lmao

[ljubljana]

ok, one screenshot:



where should my warrior go? in particular, if there is a barb camp 1NW of the pinned tile, what would we expect its appeal to be? i assume not 4 unless the camp is also on woods, since a camp contributes -1 appeal and it should have 4 from 2 lake and 2 coast tiles. although, actually, civwiki is a bit unclear about if the two lake tiles should contribute 2 or 1 to appeal - if the latter, i think even a woods camp is impossible.

anyway i want to move the warrior east along the lake to scout second-ring sites up there and block any scouts that might come down from the north, and am hoping the appeal of this tile justifies doing so. but really idk man :/

[Ginger()]

also, if you're amenities choked, what's the viability of some of the amenity wonders like ToA or Colosseum? The latter might be able to hit every city on the island, although maybe you want to save it for your ally and you take River goddess

[ljubljana]

ToA is pretty strong and would be a solid build that i'd think hard about prioritizing. but... um, we don't have any legal tiles for it, at least as currently defogged. it must be next to a camp specifically, even though it adds extra amenities for pastures and plantations as well

colosseum, hmm. i think it will eventually be really strong, but the shield investment is serious business - 400 for the wonder itself, 150 for an arena, and likely at least 100 for the EC district, plus one of our already very constrained Japanese district slots. in Naval Infrastructure galley units, that is 19 galleys it will pay for itself someday, but my insrincts are that our empire will need to be very large for the time horizon on that to be quick enough.

whereas river goddess provides a comparable amenities boost to the colosseum for a cost of 0 shields :D although perhaps it will cost a few shields on a per-turn basis if we are forced to pave over productive land to get the riverside holy sites we need.

but, ok, i know williams' team ended up building huey teocalli largely for amenities reasons last time, though, which is a similar hammer investment to the colosseum - what did you guys think of that build in retrospect? and, i mean, 6 free monuments is 360 hammers anyways and i'm willing to hand-build those, maybe i'm underrating it above, i'll think about it some more over the next 3 months lmao. excellent idea, one i probably wouldn't have conceived of on my own! :D

edit: and indeed it is true that ToA could effectively pay back really quickly in opportunity cosf if it lets us take GotS instead of River Goddess without smashing into the amenities cap..... maybe that's how i should be looking at this. RG costs no hammers up-front but it DOES cost like, 20 hammers per turn compared to the alternative of GotS and a happy wonder. so going to the happy wonder + GotS combo pays for itself in maybe 750/20 turns compared to RG...... and the real thing we should NOT do is carelessly grow over the amenities threshold without a plan?

[williams482]

but, ok, i know williams' team ended up building huey teocalli largely for amenities reasons last time, though, which is a similar hammer investment to the colosseum - what did you guys think of that build in retrospect? and, i mean, 6 free monuments is 360 hammers anyways and i'm willing to hand-build those, maybe i'm underrating it above, i'll think about it some more over the next 3 months lmao. excellent idea, one i probably wouldn't have conceived of on my own! :D

I probably wouldn't have built Huey if I had been in charge at the time, that was Chevalier's plan. It wasn't a terrible idea though, and a large part of why he did it was that the city couldn't build ships anyway. Unfortunately that also meant that the +3(?) amenities attached to that specific city didn't actually add much value either. 

What is undeniable is that lack of amenities hurts in the mid- to late-game, especially for the civs that manage to get big enough to be real contenders and are suffering major war weariness as a result. If we can get ourselves into that position, bonuses like River Goddess and Colosseum will be really appreciated and we'll be able to add more cities at a profit than other nations. The big question there becomes if we can establish ourselves as a major power without investing those resources into more conventional snowballing bonuses.