Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Happy unlucky '13 to you all too! Let's hope it's everyone else that rolls losses at 95% odds!

[mostly_harmless]

Not knowing how hard Sullla is partying, here the interesting bits from the turn for the Europeans that are sober:

The barb city is on a hill and has 3 warriors inside. It is not size 2 yet, and we do not see what tile it is working. Any experience about barb city growth? Will it build a worker first? in any case, I think a single axe might be not enough to attack three warriors on a hill.

Up at Worms there is plenty of barb action. Our Axe at Gem City is ready to strike the barb SE of the Spear. However, the barb gets 75% defensive bonus!

We revealed the capital of CFC, Indira. This will help kjn's C&D work a little by constraining the global pop distribution.
Indira has the palace, a granary and a library. The two mines visible are both worked at the moment. Indira sits on a hill, which makes E-E the next logical move for the scout, I suggest, to reveal the whole BFC.

Happy New Year 2013 everyone! Lets aim for airships at the end of this year! :P

mh

[SevenSpirits]

Pretty pictures.

I would expect the barb city to build more military units first (i.e. grow), but I don't think anything's certain. It's probably working the riverside grassland to its SW. We can see almost all its tiles next turn by moving onto the grass hill - that will give us more information.

Barb warrior defending a city on a hill at full fortification gets 2.5 strength vs an axeman: 2 * (75% - 50%). This happens to be exactly enough for a full health, no promo axe to get 99.1% odds and 2xp if it wins, which is pretty much ideal. I don't know the state of our axe though, in HP or promos.

Similarly the barb warrior chasing our spear has 75% defense. Again, that's as good as it gets if the nearby axe is in normal condition.

[NobleHelium]

The barb warrior getting a 75% defense bonus is fine, since it ends up being a 5:2.5 ratio attack which is just bad enough odds (99.1%) to give us 2 exp. So we should attack the warrior and then retreat the spear to the tile en route to the banana to heal up. We can heal the axe in place if necessary before sending him out into the wilderness.

I think we should attack the barb city from the hill outside it and heal up in between combats. I'm pretty sure the barb city is working a 2f or 3f tile right now while spamming warriors, so it'll probably grow by the time we get through the defenses. We can send another axe over here but I see no reason not to get started now. I doubt anyone will send a unit in time to steal the city given that WPC is engaged in a war and CFC is taking forever to actually settle a city at the stone.

There's a road on the tile NE of Indira (you can tell by how the road exits the city). So we should probably move NE-SE next turn and then plan to follow the road out of the city.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Plus, if CFC are settling a safe city, they'd probably do it with a warrior escort instead of an axe.

So get an axe over there are snipe that city! Strategic value: it's coastal, if that sea is 20 tiles, then it's an angle to place pressure on CFC during the late game.

[Sullla]

Turn 83 - 800BC

I'll remember this as the New Years turn. We waited for four whole days for the turn to roll around. I was heading out for the evening at 9:30pm... and the German team ended turn at 9:25pm. Heh. I moved our scouting units and took some quick pictures, then finished things up today.



Here was the situation in the northwest at the start of the turn. The barb warrior moved as expected onto the jungle hill to cut off the retreat path of our spear. Meanwhile, the Germans killed their barb warrior with an axe up at Worms, and yet another barb warrior appeared next to their borders. I waited to take any action until our team could weigh in, and the consensus was to kill our barb warrior with the axe in Tree Huggers. We had 99.1% odds and won with minimal damage:



As predicted, this gave us two XP and a free promotion. I'm thinking that Woodsman would likely be best, given all the jungle we're going to be passing through. I moved the spear onto the axe for protection, and the plan is to move over to the banana tile and heal there. Hopefully we'll get some peace up here after the latest wave of barbarians get cleared out.



In the east, our settler founded our eighth city of Forbidden Fruit on the desert hill. It grabbed the wet corn from Mansa's Muse as planned to grow quickly to size 2. Our scouting axe revealed the barb city of Alemanni, on a grassland hill with three barb warriors inside. Barb cities only spawn on the suggested "blue circle" tiles, which means that there is at least one food bonus at this city that we're not seeing yet. Our axe will be able to move SE-NE and reveal all of the tiles nearby so that we have full information on the city.

I agree that we definitely should start killing our way through these barb warriors while waiting for the city to hit size 2. Barb cities don't build workers at size 1, making it just a matter of time. No idea how long this city has been here, and the time to grow will depend on what resources it happens to be working. We will know more next turn after moving.



Moving up the scout revealed the CivFanatics capital of Indira, right where we thought it would be. The city has granary and library inside and is working both mine tiles pictured. There's quite a bit of production in the box, and I suspect the city is building either a settler or worker at present. For some reason, CFC has not settled a city to work their grassland pigs resource four tiles away from the capital, which is a bit of an odd choice. They settled in place on T0, making this their exact starting tile. I plan to move the scout South-Southeast next turn onto the plains hill, which should reveal a large number of tiles and still allow us to move into the capital on the following turn if desired. We definitely want to defog a trade route to CFC so that we can make us of their trade routes when we discover Currency tech. The WPC/German cities won't be enough by themselves to get us 2 trade routes in each city.

We also spotted the barb warrior incoming to CFC at the start of the turn, whose location I marked with a sign. If someone chats with CFC in the next few days, we may as well let them know that a barb warrior is on the way to their northwest border.



There's nothing much going on in the southwest. Axeman Lew could heal to full health by standing in place, so he did. Axeman Wyn moved up a tile and will go another tile northwest next turn. That will reveal at least four more tiles as he continues heading in the general direction of the stone location.

Here is our overview/tile micro picture for the turn:

We grew three pop points this turn: Mansa's Muse, Focal Point, and Gourmet Menu. Horse Feathers also finished its lighthouse between turns and picked up the newly christened 3/0/3 lake tile. We may want to alter our planning at Horse Feathers slightly to take advantage of one extra happiness there due to the free religion spread a couple turns back. The plan has the city stopping growth at size 5, but we can instead take it up to size 6, and the city has a crazy +10 food/turn rate at the moment. Given all the free time we have sitting around between turns, this may be worth investigating.

Elsewhere, Gourmet Menu has one turn of working an unimproved floodplains tile before the cottage completes next turn. Focal Point runs one turn of +4 food instead of +5 food to decrease the starvation penalty in Mansa's Muse. It will still grow at eot 85. Forbidden Fruit takes over the corn tile for a little while to get it started, and three workers will chop the spices forest into a completed granary next turn. This city will start much faster than Gourmet Menu/Tree Huggers thanks to the borrowed corn. As for Mansa's Muse:



We're a bit low on workable tiles in this region currently, so we'll use this turn to run two Priests and complete our Great Prophet. Not only will this create our shrine next turn, but it will also cause the city to hit 500 culture faster and pop the borders for Forbidden Fruit. Borders pop eot 86 with the Hindu Shrine in place. With luck, we'll also get a faster rate of religious spread with the shrine up and running (a shrine doubles the rate of passive spread for religions in Civ4). We are beelining for Calendar tech and then Currency right now; some method of manually spreading religion in the form of Monotheism/Organized Religion will likely be our next tech goal after that.

Speaking of technology, we turned the research rate on in full this turn, timed along with the completion of a library in the capital. We are producing 122 base beakers / 147 beakers after modifiers, good for Calendar in four turns at eot 86. While it's a bit hard to say how that compares to the other teams in this game (at least the real competitors we haven't met yet, obviously we're crushing the weak nearby teams) I would guess that we are either leading in research or close to it. By way of comparison, the Pitboss #2 India team that everyone was so freaked out about was making 97 beakers/turn on this same date at 100% science. We're significantly ahead of that pace in this game.



Here are the Demographics after playing turn (and after the CivPlayers whip). We are lapping the field in Food (despite working two Priest specialists) and have seized the top GNP mark as well. The Rival Best of 121 in GNP is the highest number we have seen so far in this game, and we are beating it comfortably with no bonus from other civs knowing Calendar tech and standard 20% pre-requisite bonus. (We may need to start sandbagging our GNP by running break-even rates after we discover Currency in about 10 turns. Otherwise we're going to stand out too much.) Yes, some of this does represent culture, but our numbers are still impressive.

Along with the top score in Food and GNP, we have now also ascended to the #2 spot in Production as well. We aren't even trying to emphasize production, we just happen to have a lot of population working a lot of improved tiles. We are also still first in Land Area (beating the Creative team), second in Power behind only the warring German team, and second in "Population" as calculated by the in-game geometric tally. In terms of the more accurate Total Pop statistic, the game stands as follows:

Total Pop
Realms Beyond: 29 pop, 8 cities
UniversCiv: 28 pop, 7 cities
CivFr: 27 pop, 6 cities
CivFanatics: 25 pop, 7 cities
CivPlayers: 22 pop, 6 cities
Apolyton: 20 pop, 5 cities
Spanish Apolyton: 16 pop, 4 cities
We Play Civ: 16 pop, 4 cities
Germans: 14 pop, 5 cities

Did I mention that we also grow two more pop points and build the Hindu Shrine next turn? While we don't want to get too cocky, our situation at the moment is extremely strong. Apolyton is the only team truly competitive with us in technology, and their working of Scientist specialists has stunted their growth significantly.

Finally, note that another team did gain access to trade routes this turn (check the Rival Best in Exports/Imports). Someone either discovered Sailing tech or completed a road to another team with whom they had Open Borders. We can narrow down the culprits: because their score is 10, it's likely a team with 5 cities pulling 2 commerce trade routes in each one. Apolyton is therefore the most likely candidate, but it's far from guaranteed. I'm not an expert on how that Demographic number is calculated. Sadly we are no longer unique in this category.

I really enjoy these turns, I just wish they would come along more often than once every four days.

[NobleHelium]

I think we should send the axe currently 2SW of FF to help with the barb city the turn after next. We can have the axe currently in FP play zone defense on the tile between FP and FF. I just checked, FP will not have any unhappy citizens even without a garrison. Then when TH finishes its newest axe we can send it over to FF and move the zone defense axe back into FP.

[kjn]

W1 on the axe in the northwest sounds good. Having a few W2 (and G2) units around is very handy.

I agree with NobleHelium that it's probably better to move the scout NE-SE next turn, onto Indira. I only see the one road leading out from the city, towards the northeast, so I think every one of their cities are in that direction. If we can use their road network we can triple our rate of exploration and be safer too.

I can't see any hills northwest of Wyn until he starts to approach the stone city (possible name: Brick by Brick), except for the one 2W1S - a city there would fit nicely with our possible filler city 1SE of Wyn. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

[Sullla]

Given the amount of barb activity we've seen in this game, I'm not really comfortable with assigning one axe to defend two different cities (and their workers) located four tiles apart. The Tree Huggers axe is still 5t from completion and then would need another 3t to walk into the area. This feels like an unnecessarily risky idea to me - I've seen way too many games suffer setbacks from trying to get too cute with unit movements. I would really rather not do this.

[NobleHelium]

By the time we actually move the axe a substantial distance (>= 3 tiles) from FF, the axe in TH will have finished. We can always recall the axe at any time before that point without any risk.