Micromanagement Sims/Planning

[kjn]

Can you post your post-Oracle save? You have the updated terrain and such I believe. I might play around with some continuations on settling next cities. Yeah I know it's premature given that we don't even know if we'll get Oracle or not yet, but still.

Sorry, I don't have it anymore. But the T54 save should be good for all known land up to the last turn.

[luddite]

Should we be making plans to get a library up soon after the oracle? Assuming we want our second great person to be a scientist, we'll need to start running two scientist specs very soon after we finish the prophet.

[novice]

Should we be making plans to get a library up soon after the oracle? Assuming we want our second great person to be a scientist, we'll need to start running two scientist specs very soon after we finish the prophet.

I think the idea is to use the first prophet for a shrine and the second prophet for a golden age.

[pindicator]

I think someone figured we had 6 turns after the Oracle was built to build the library and hire a pair of scientists if we wanted to go that route. But Seven also made a very good case for just letting the 2nd priest come 40 turns after the first and then using that priest to fire off a golden age, swap to caste and pacifism and use a MoM fueled golden age to churn out a number of scientists.

Last few games I've played, I've had:

PBEM 23: First GA on t73, at 79 pop
PBEM 29: First GA on t88, at 105 pop
PBEM 39: First GA on t74 (since players started with a worker though not with anything good for it to do, a better comparison date would be about 5t later, so t79), at 86 pop

Normal speed equivalents would be t110, t132, t119. By comparison, our second prophet if we didn't hire any priests (or, our GS, if we tried to rush it out ASAP to overtake the prophet) would come out t114. That's certainly not inherently problematic.

Sure, there are game-specific factors. This game has higher tech costs, for instance. On the flipside, it's not always war! Diplomacy is fully enabled, which makes everything much gentler. All traits were allowed without penalty, and hey, we are freaking pacal. And, we are (assumed to be) oracling currency, so, there's that. (More generally, we probably have the highest-skill team to ever play a civ game, and we've already executed a great opening so far.)

So I really think that a prophet around t115 could actually be pretty convenient.

Let me do the math. Once we have the following I think we'd be silly not to start our golden age: MoM, Paya, National Epic, Moai Statues, Civil Service. Throwing in IW too, let's see, we need to tech 3420 base beakers. (Yeah, 1200 of that is CS... I wonder if it's worth using the first 5 turns of golden age to grab it.) Suppose that our tech rate completely stagnates after our current micro plan ends, just above 50cpt, for no reason. Well, we will still get all of those techs other than CS over the next 40 turns to t115. And obviously our GNP is not going to stagnate. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that tech-wise we can be ready for a golden age when our 2nd GP arrives.

Now, I won't discount the option of gunning for the scientist in AO, and then once it's popped, working some priests in MM (we could even hire as many as 5, with the shrine), to make up the remaining 100gpp and get our THIRD great person out just a few turns later. So we'd start our golden age with an academy already built. But this seems unnecessary to me. One perk of the golden age will be unlimited scientists producing up to 12gpp each with pacifism and NE, which would make our 35 turns of painful drudgery in AO, to get our academy just a few turns sooner, look incredibly pedestrian.

Edit: Forgot to add 103b for masonry, since we'll hopefully have something to quarry. Doesn't change the outcome, though; that's a 1t tech by t115.

[kjn]

Should we be making plans to get a library up soon after the oracle? Assuming we want our second great person to be a scientist, we'll need to start running two scientist specs very soon after we finish the prophet.

As Novice said. Seven argued convincingly that a Golden Age would be nice around T115.

[luddite]

Ah, I missed that, thanks. OK, I'm board with the 2nd-prophet-into-GA plan. Since our tech rate definitely isn't going to stagnate, we can even take advantage of our obelisk to run priests and get it a bit sooner than T115. So, to get 3420 base beakers means getting 6156 in-game beakers. If we continue increasing our beakers at 3.6% a turn, we'll be there about turn 100.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I'm in favour of Seven's plan as well because that means we won't need to dump 136 points of food into working specialists when they could be used for whip cycles.

[SevenSpirits]

Ah, I missed that, thanks. OK, I'm board with the 2nd-prophet-into-GA plan. Since our tech rate definitely isn't going to stagnate, we can even take advantage of our obelisk to run priests and get it a bit sooner than T115. So, to get 3420 base beakers means getting 6156 in-game beakers. If we continue increasing our beakers at 3.6% a turn, we'll be there about turn 100.

"Base beakers" is beakers we produce - the number in the upper left corner of the screen. I meant it as opposed to the nominal price of the tech, which gets variously divided by 1.2, or 1.4, or what have you, and is therefore meaningless to sum over multiple techs.

So in summary we need to produce 3523 (adding in the masonry beakers from my edit) beakers starting after we finish math, before we will have all those techs we (expect to) want for a golden age.

[luddite]

Ah, I missed that, thanks. OK, I'm board with the 2nd-prophet-into-GA plan. Since our tech rate definitely isn't going to stagnate, we can even take advantage of our obelisk to run priests and get it a bit sooner than T115. So, to get 3420 base beakers means getting 6156 in-game beakers. If we continue increasing our beakers at 3.6% a turn, we'll be there about turn 100.

"Base beakers" is beakers we produce - the number in the upper left corner of the screen. I meant it as opposed to the nominal price of the tech, which gets variously divided by 1.2, or 1.4, or what have you, and is therefore meaningless to sum over multiple techs.

So in summary we need to produce 3523 (adding in the masonry beakers from my edit) beakers starting after we finish math, before we will have all those techs we (expect to) want for a golden age.

Hmm ok. I thought you meant the base cost listed on the C&D spreadsheet. Since we'll be first to research almost all these techs, and they all (I think?) will have exactly 1 prereq, the nominal cost should be just 1.2 times the real cost for everything. I like using nominal costs since it makes it easy to add bulbs.

I'm not sure how you're getting just 3523 though. After math we'll need iron working(360), sailing(180), calendar(630), aesthetics(450), literature(360), CoL(630), Civil Service(1440), masonry(144), monotheism(216), monarchy(540) at minimum. That would be 5094 nominal beakers after getting math, or 4245 adjusted. Maybe add metal casting(810), and philosophy(1440) too, which is 6534 nominal or 5445 adjusted. Right now we have 1368 beakers-after getting writing, math, and currency we'll have 2754. At any rate, we'll definitely get civil service long before turn 115. If we succeed in oracling currency, I'll bet we get civil service around turn 100.

[SevenSpirits]

I'm not sure how you're getting just 3523 though.

(360 + 180 + 630 + 450 + 360 + 1440 + 144) / 1.2 + (144 + 630) / 1.4 = 3523

That's Iron Working, Sailing, Calendar, Aesthetics, Literature, Civil Service, Meditation; Masonry, Code of Laws. That's including Meditation and ignoring Monotheism and Philosophy because I was including a Paya build as I mentioned, and it's ignoring Monarchy because I believe we can afford to defer HR until the 6th turn of golden age. Remember this was about determining the minimum techs required to make popping the golden age a good idea.

Obviously, techs are not the only factor, and if we find ourselves on track to still be at relatively low population by the time we get all that, we can aim a bit later and include more techs. But this is also in part why I'm making a more conservative estimate of GNP growth than you: even with only half the growth rate you are hoping for, we would get all these techs 5 turns after the no-interference GP pop; and I think we should focus on expansion enough that our growth rate is thus lowered.

Btw this is meandering into vague discussion of future plans, so if we want to talk further maybe it should be in the strategic direction thread. I might rather wait to see if we get oracle though.