Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[mostly_harmless]

Much appreciated. And it went into MM it seems.

[Sullla]

Turn 51 - 1960BC

The German team was an improvement this turn. They only made us all wait 23 hours of clock time - we got to skip waiting the final 10 hours! Baby steps, baby steps...

There were a lot of score increases this turn, including three other teams researching a tech. Fortunately they were either researching something else or they got very unlucky, because we now possess the might of Shiva and Vishnu:



The religion popped in Mansa's Muse as expected. This is a nice city to have as a holy city, and it opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities for our future. Here on a Huge map, the opportunity to get a shrine up and go bigtime horizontal expansion looks mighty tasty. Now if only we were planning on building something in Mansa's Muse that gave us free Great Prophet points... and if only our civ had some kind of unique building that let us run Priest specialists...





Here is the core of our civ with most of our units still unmoved. I have to keep turning the resources tab off, or else the copper completely blocks all the info for Focal Point, bah. Warrior Xenu in the south has a safe route back to our borders without any barb issues, and so I'm moving him northwest along that ridge of hills as explained before. Off to go check out fish central in the far northwest.

Our barb friend in the northeast is back again. I plan to move our own warrior onto the gold hill this turn, and begin building up the fortify bonus there. I'm not sure if we've hit the point yet when barb units will enter your borders (genuine barbs, not animals which never do). I know there's a grace period when they first appear when they will wander around but not enter your territory. Might as well get up there on the hill and get some cover just in case. We do have a spear getting whipped in MM in 2t, so not terribly scary. I've left the warrior unmoved, let me know if there are any objections.

Our workers are all set to move into forests to begin their Stonehenge chopping operations. This is the last turn to cancel that move before we waste 3 worker turns moving into forests. Speak now or forever hold your peace if you oppose. Seeing as how Stonehenge is still alive and well, and we can build it in 4t according to our current plan, I think we should continue to go for it.

I've heard no real suggestions on what to build in Focal Point now that the granary is done. It's stuck on a tentative axe for now. If we don't get Stonehenge, we'll probably need to do an obelisk there. Suggestions?



Mansa's Muse also grew to size 4 this turn, in addition to getting its own religion. Sadly, we are reduced to working an unimproved grassland forest tile. (We could finish the plains cottage here, but not if we want to go chopping for Stonehenge.) The city already has 5 culture, will pop borders next turn, and then pop them again in 19 more turns. The early culture is very nice indeed. Our capital also hit the 100 culture mark and expanded borders this turn, giving us more visibility and early barb detection. Seeing as how our capital was very vulnerable on the diagonals earlier (all four of them hill tiles able to see into our city), this is very welcome news.

We are running 0% science this turn, seeing as how we used up our treasury on our Polytheism run. That brings up the question of what to research next. With a religion already in hand, I would argue that we have less of a need to drive to Monotheism/Judaism immediately. My suggested path would be:

Fishing (needed for next city anyway and very cheap)
Priesthood (pre-requisite for Writing/Monarchy and also dirt cheap)
Writing (very cheap with 60% pre-requisite discount)

And then our planned Masonry -> Monotheism -> Monarchy route after that. Yes, we're not exactly emphasizing libraries here, but they will be a useful building to dump production into when regrowing from worker/settler whips. We knock out granaries super fast and we are quite possibility getting obelisks for free. Need something to throw production into, and libraries are better than barracks. Yes, military units are another option, but infrastructure is always good. Keep in mind that Writing is very cheap with all three pre-requisites; at 216 beakers and 60% bonus, Writing is only slightly more expensive than Masonry at 20% bonus:

Masonry: 144 beakers, 20% bonus = 120 effective beakers
Writing: 216 beakers, 60% bonus = 135 effective beakers

Seems like it's more worth it to pick Writing up before a religion that we're not even going to be using. (And we're not revolting to Organized Religion until we also have Monarchy/Hereditary Rule civic.) That's my thoughts, in any case. Knock out a bunch of cheap stuff in the upcoming turns, then go for OR/HR.



Here are the start of turn Demographics, looking very good indeed. We are #1 in GNP with no tech selected at 0% research, half again the "Rival Average" and more than double the "Rival Worst". If I select a pre-requisite bonus tech and flip research to 100% it just gets silly - our GNP is 65 if I do that with Writing tech. (Yes, some of this is holy city culture, but that's not a bad thing either.) We are also tops in Food by a pretty decent cushion for this early in the game, as well as tops in Total Pop points with 11. Production still lags behind, but have I mentioned that we are picking up a 1/5 copper mine tile in 2t? Without getting too cocky, this is all looking exceptionally strong so far.

I'm starting to worry that we're going to look way too good in the Demos, and inspire some Pitboss #2 dogpile action from the other teams. Not exactly sure how to avoid this, because we definitely have no plans to stop kicking some serious ass in this game.

Other team score increases:

CivFanatics: 1 pop
German team: 1 pop
CivPlayers, UniversCiv, Spanish Apolyton: new tech each

I don't have any real idea of what they got; global power increase was 8k. One of them could have taken Bronze Working, but that would mean no other power increase anywhere in the world, which seems unlikely. I'll let kjn take his best guess when he wakes up tomorrow. For Spanish Apolyton, this was only their 6th tech of the game, 4th if you ignore the initial starting two. By comparison, we discovered our 9th tech, and Apolyton is the only other team with 8. Our techs are also more expensive in beakers than the ones Apolyton has discovered. Again, you get the idea. We have the most pop, the fastest growth, the best research, and the game's first self-founded religion.

Plenty of room for input from this turn, let me know what you think.

[SevenSpirits]

I don't see any benefit to an Obelisk in FP. An axe on the other hand would be very useful, seeing as we can barely defend ourselves and can't even afford to scout right now.

Fishing next seems perfectly good, maybe saving money for a turn or three since there's no hurry. I'm still inclined towards Masonry/Mono/Monarchy, ignoring Priesthood and Writing, but especially after landing Hinduism I agree we should consider other options.

Regarding Priesthood in particular, let me do the math here. It will cost us 90 base beakers (108/1.2). It will save 20 base beakers on writing and 64 base beakers on Monarchy. Net cost of 6 beakers for the moment which is negligible. So the benefit is basically the arrow to Code of Laws, which is worth 75 beakers at least (compared to using only Currency as a prerequisite), but a bit later in the game. And the drawback is we have one less cheap tech we can use to build up massive overflow to reduce teching risk in the renaissance, plus of course the 6 points of score we'll be up for the interim. OK, I agree that priesthood is worth it if we are getting writing and monarchy soon after. Those CoL beakers will be nice. (It's also possible that everyone else chickens out on the oracle, and having priesthood will incidentally allow us to 1-turn it later with less investment, so I guess that's good.)

[fluffyflyingpig]

We need more map info. Axe in FP.

[kjn]

Tech plan looks good. An axe would be great.

And we have still only met one team, and another one probably knows where we are, so I'm not scared of a dogpile yet. More settlers, more workers, more scouting units.

[NobleHelium]

Not really sure if we need to do Fishing next since we aren't settling the city so soon. Priesthood next may be better if doing it before Fishing would lead us to more tech discounts. Priesthood earlier may also affect other people's Oracle plans (like CFC's), via C&D. I'm not really in the mode to think about those secondary effects, but it's something to think about.

[kjn]

Jesus City is the next planned city. It can borrow the corn for an ultra-fast start, and has the production to get a couple of work boats out quickly.

[NobleHelium]

It is the next planned city, but will it go down before we can tech both Priesthood and Fishing?

[luddite]

It really doesn't seem like there's much opportunity to build libraries in the near future. The defense right now is minimal (two warriors?) and there are barbs running around, so any extra hammers would be much better spent on units than on libraries.

[kjn]

It really doesn't seem like there's much opportunity to build libraries in the near future. The defense right now is minimal (two warriors?) and there are barbs running around, so any extra hammers would be much better spent on units than on libraries.

On the contrary, I think going for a library in AO once we have settled Jesus City and Clams would be excellent. By peeling off the corn to the Jesus City and the deer to MM, AO still has enough food surplus to run two scientists while working all its cottages.

Ie, we use MM and FP to take care of the units. We have three warriors right now, in 3t we will have a spear, and FP is building an axe.