TheArchduke makes the transition from CIV V to CIV IV..

[Sareln]

At this point the overarching economic plan should be pretty clear. Do this last round of whips in the old core, and then shift the whipping over to the 3 new cities to produce settlers closer to the target zone while growing the old core vertically as quickly as possible. Once we get up to our happy cap, we fire the GA, swap into Hereditary Rule and Organized Religion and try and hit Bureaucracy before the end of the GA to swap into that for free as well.

[SevenSpirits]

You don't have to have a multiple of 2f/t for a stable setup. For example, you could add on one citizen who works lake, lake, spec every three turns.

3/0/2 is a pretty good tile, so if you can manage to get it up, it will certainly pay for itself. But I mean, if you don't think you can afford the slower setup time, that makes sense.

[Sareln]

You don't have to have a multiple of 2f/t for a stable setup. For example, you could add on one citizen who works lake, lake, spec every three turns.

3/0/2 is a pretty good tile, so if you can manage to get it up, it will certainly pay for itself. But I mean, if you don't think you can afford the slower setup time, that makes sense.

I think I get what you're saying.

It's a good point. I'll get the tile up as a matter of course since I'm already working a fish and a clam in that city -> lighthouse for sure. I suppose it's a question of how quickly I get to target size.

Ugh, so many techs to get and so little time!

Incidentally Seven, I've been told to ask you: what have you learned from playing with Mackoti?

[SevenSpirits]

Incidentally Seven, I've been told to ask you: what have you learned from playing with Mackoti?

It's hard to perfectly define which insight is from playing and chatting with Mackoti specifically, and which is just from playing. But I think he played a role in all these:

* Don't give up.

* MoM and Taj are very strong. Organized is good.

* Commerce multiplying effects (library, bureau, etc) change the calculus of tile value and can make cottages in one city (mostly, your capital) be worth as much as resources in another city, if you aim for it. Which is very valuable.

* Conventional view here is that commerce's value relative to hammers and food is heavily depressed in the early game; this is wrong. Investments in commerce will pay good dividends, too.

* My previous conception of strategic focus was heavily tied to tech beelines, while in growth and production I would optimize locally. I've found that adding some more local optimization to my teching (e.g. getting significantly cheaper techs before deep beeline techs more often) and some strategic focus to my growth and building (e.g. saving forests for specific builds; planning to whip giant armies at once; building a key library quickly) has improved my play.

* The security advantage that comes from running a military-heavy strategy (note: this does not include ill-advised attacks) has real value (in a no talking game). It's not just peace of mind for your paranoia.

* The sheer amount of non-overlapping skill between, for example, Mackoti and me (now somewhat reduced), for players who are considered pretty good on this site, is mind-boggling. Even if you were to assume that between us we know everything about civ (which is obviously far from true), you'd have to admit that with all our deficiencies, we both suck at this game.

[NobleHelium]

What are your deficiencies, Seven?

[Sareln]

New Plan:

Get Civil Service on T100, pop GA and revolt into Hereditary Rule, Bureaucracy, Caste System, and Organized Religion. Tech like crazy to fill in all the critical techs we're missing (HBR, Construction, Metal Casting) and pay Xenon his danegeld (200 GP on T104). At end of GA revolt back into Slavery and hit the whip again.

Yeah, I know I'm putting off critical military techs, but I don't really have a choice. To even have a prayer of catching up, we need to emphasize technology and economic growth, so we can't waste hammers on units to counter the potential threat of Xenon. Instead, I will continue to offer him gold since I think that's better for the both of us - he gets some benefit out of that massive army he built, and I can continue to skip techs that don't grow my econ until I've got my cities and workers out and doing their thing.

[AutomatedTeller]

I think that's a great plan.

This is as opposed to just beelining Guilds and beating up neighbors?

[Sareln]

It's hard to perfectly define which insight is from playing and chatting with Mackoti specifically, and which is just from playing. But I think he played a role in all these:

* Don't give up.

* MoM and Taj are very strong. Organized is good.

* Commerce multiplying effects (library, bureau, etc) change the calculus of tile value and can make cottages in one city (mostly, your capital) be worth as much as resources in another city, if you aim for it. Which is very valuable.

* Conventional view here is that commerce's value relative to hammers and food is heavily depressed in the early game; this is wrong. Investments in commerce will pay good dividends, too.

* My previous conception of strategic focus was heavily tied to tech beelines, while in growth and production I would optimize locally. I've found that adding some more local optimization to my teching (e.g. getting significantly cheaper techs before deep beeline techs more often) and some strategic focus to my growth and building (e.g. saving forests for specific builds; planning to whip giant armies at once; building a key library quickly) has improved my play.

* The security advantage that comes from running a military-heavy strategy (note: this does not include ill-advised attacks) has real value (in a no talking game). It's not just peace of mind for your paranoia.

* The sheer amount of non-overlapping skill between, for example, Mackoti and me (now somewhat reduced), for players who are considered pretty good on this site, is mind-boggling. Even if you were to assume that between us we know everything about civ (which is obviously far from true), you'd have to admit that with all our deficiencies, we both suck at this game.

@Seven, these are interesting.

I know that I definitely underrated the power of MoM, Taj, and chaining golden ages with GPP until later on in my civving career.

ORG is worth something, yes, but how do you quantify it? I know that I build courthouses and cities everywhere but that that's not good play, so ORG would work great for me (making a bad decision I tend to make cost less), but how about for someone who has their building and expansion discipline down pat? Compared to say FIN/EXP/CRE, how would it rate with you at the helm?

I think I see what you're saying about the multipliers. Pretty much all of my analysis so far has been slider independent, so I tend to look at raw commerce/hammer/food output. It doesn't help that the cost of an individual citizen isn't made very clear in the base interface. Do you have a rule of thumb you use for that? I know it varies heavily on map and distance.

What makes a library key? Is it just when that library can get you your early academy or is the keystone that lets you whip out the universities for a fast Oxford?

Local/Global optimization comment makes sense to me. Not sure how I'd effectively evaluate which "cheap" techs do me the most good to go out of my way for the beeline. Here in this game, for instance, it's pretty clear that I needed to get currency and civil service before pushing towards guilds; but it's not clear if getting Construction/Engineering pre-guilds will buy me anything, if I can just keep buying Xenon off.

[Sareln]

I think that's a great plan.

This is as opposed to just beelining Guilds and beating up neighbors?

On this map, I think I need teching power to build something useful out of any possibility of beating up neighbors. There's still a ton of unfilled land out there for us, so we should fill that before going on foreign adventures. Remember that fighting weakens both parties, so if we fight, we should only do so when we think we can be quickly decisive or it'll put us in a position to win.

It's part of the beeline basically. Maybe we could cut Construction (~300), but we still need:

• Metal Casting (~300)
  
• Machinery (~600)
  
• Feudalism (~700)
  
• Guilds (~1000)
  

And really, to make a credible MAD defense to any of our neighbors we need Cats and Engineering to move them around.

[AutomatedTeller]

oh, I think it's a fine plan, but then, I'm a builder at heart.

And I wouldn't cut construction out, at all. Bridges are important and, frankly, catapults are awesome of defense. I would prioritize cats ahead of HBR.