Micromanagement Sims/Planning

[novice]

Nice. Some suggestions for what to do with the sandbox:

* Sullla suggested simming out alternatives enabled by hinduism spreading to Horse Feathers. I can't remember if I knew about that spread when I did the current plan.
* We also have possible benefits from speeding up Calendar by 1 turn, but I think the ship has sailed on exploring that option. (I don't mind, I preferred holidaying over optimizing, myself. )
* But we also need to look at ways to manage our workers from turn ~88 onwards to prepare for our next city. The working hypothesis seems to be a city near the wet corn southeast of Focal Point, I still think we should consider the jungle city NE of Forbidden Fruit, though.
* So maybe we could sim out both alternatives for the MM settler and see what feels like the better option.

[NobleHelium]

The screenshots indicate that we knew about the spread when the plan was done, yeah.

[kjn]

T83 sandbox.

I've simmed the trade routes by adding hamlets to city centres (currently in HF, ST, and FP) and swines to the cottages by MM and AO - each hamlet under a city will give +2C (we're FIN) and each wine will give +1C. This will need to be adjusted as we add new cities and research Currency.

All units should be in their proper place as well, though the worker names might be mixed up compared to the game.

[kjn]

Playing through the sandbox and documenting stuff, in preparation for either blue or red dot.

Found two small things for improvement:

On T84 we have two workers mining the grass hill 1NE of HF (J together with either A or C). That mine isn't finished during the sim. I propose they part-cottage the tile 2N of AO instead that turn. On T85 they can either pre-chop the silk forest or finish the cottage - the chop will be done at T86 in either case.

On T85 we move one of our workers (probably E) out of our borders. We should move E first. If there are no barbs, we follow the micro plan and move the axe in FF 1NE where it can cover the worker or the city at need.

If there is a barb, F and G road the plains spice tile, so the axe can cover E at once.

ETA: with the new cottage for AO, there is no need for HF to work the coast on T86. AO works the new cottage, HF the shared one. This causes a slight loss of commerce, which we can compensate by having ST work the plains cottage on T86 instead of the wheat; on T87 ST will then work the wheat instead of the plains cottage.

This can be decided on T86 once we know how the beakers line up.

[novice]

On T85 we move one of our workers (probably E) out of our borders. We should move E first. If there are no barbs, we follow the micro plan and move the axe in FF 1NE where it can cover the worker or the city at need.

If there is a barb, F and G road the plains spice tile, so the axe can cover E at once.

Sounds good. E is the worker moving onto a jungle spice to road it? We should move to the easternmost spice, since that resource will be shared with our next jungle city.

On T84 we have two workers mining the grass hill 1NE of HF (J together with either A or C). That mine isn't finished during the sim. I propose they part-cottage the tile 2N of AO instead that turn. On T85 they can either pre-chop the silk forest or finish the cottage - the chop will be done at T86 in either case.

If we don't have time to finish the mine, we won't have time to finish the cottage either, will we? The workers need to hustle back to TH to improve the bananas.

[kjn]

If we don't have time to finish the mine, we won't have time to finish the cottage either, will we? The workers need to hustle back to TH to improve the bananas.

Yes, as I played along I noted that C&J were slightly off on T87 to reach the banana and start improving it that turn.

Your plan has:

T87: 2 plantation-turns
T88: 3 plantation-turns
T89: 3 plantation-turns

Mine would get:

T88: 3 plantation-turns
T89: 3 plantation-turns
T90: 2 plantation-turns

So we will lose out on 2F and maybe delay getting 2 workers to BbB (stone city) with that modification in trade for a cottage-turn. Not worth it. That said, I'd rather pre-cottage 2N of AO than pre-mine 1NE of HF.

[NobleHelium]

Yeah I think we need more cottages near AO. I don't think we need to worry much about short term commerce loss working new cottages over coast - we're already way ahead on commerce from trade routes from when the plan was originally drawn up.

[Sullla]

I mentioned before that I wasn't a huge fan of the planned worker actions around Forbidden Fruit. Since some of those actions start taking place turn next, this is a good time to figure out exactly what we want to do. My basic idea is that we need to shift things around a bit to take into account the location of the nearby barb city. We had no idea that thing was there when we last wrote out some thoughts, and naturally the situation has since changed a bit.

The first thing to keep in mind is our border expansion situation in the area:



The orange border is the upcoming border expansion from Mansa's Muse, which will take place at eot 86 and be available for worker use on T87. Forbidden Fruit's border pop is still nine turns away, taking place at eot 92 / T93. We need to keep this in mind when deciding which tiles to improve. For example, there was a lot of discussion about roading the northeastern grassland spices tile. The problem there is that this tile is unworkable until T93; we can chop down the jungle and road it, but can't improve the tile itself until after the border expansion from Forbidden Fruit. This is one reason why I don't think we should emphasize this tile.

In terms of pure tile yield, what are our highest priorities for this particular area? In order, I would say that they are:

* Improve/connect one of the spices for civ-wide happiness
* Improve pigs tile for post-capture barb city (6/0/1 tile)
* Improve bananas tile for Forbidden Fruit (5/0/1 tile)
* Cottage floodplains tile (3/0/3+ tile)
* Plantation the grassland spices (3/0/4 tiles)
* Cottage other riverside grassland / plains tiles

I value the grassland spice tiles as a third or fourth priority. There are certainly very good tiles in their own right, but the food tiles in this area come first. The amount of worker turns needed to improve tiles is another factor to consider here since we have such a shortage of worker labor. It takes nine turns to improve the jungle/grassland spices (4t chop and 5t plantation) while it only takes 4t for a normal cottage and 5t for a floodplains cottage. This definitely matters.

I also think it's more important to emphasize the tiles immediately south and east of Forbidden Fruit for improvement, as they lead directly to the city's bananas resource (not available for plantation until T93 remember) and the barb city. The tiles to the north only lead to a future city that we may or may not be planting right now. Given that we're going to need workers for the barb city as well as Forbidden Fruit, planting yet another jungle city to the northeast might be a bit too ambitious at present. We'll have to see, still plenty of time to decide.

Anyway, here are my thoughts for the workers:

Turn 84: E, F, G all chop plains spice forest (done)
Turn 85: E road plains spice (1t) / F and G move SW and cottage (2t)
Turn 86: E road (done) / F and G cottage (done)
Turn 87: E plantation on spices (4t) / F and G move NE and plantation on spices (2t)
Turn 88: E move S-SE-NE onto bananas / F and G plantation (done)
Turn 89: E road (1t) / F and G move S-SE and cottage (2t)
Turn 90: E road (done) / F and G move S onto floodplains and cottage (3t)
Turn 91: E move to pigs at captured barb city and pasture / F, G, and worker from Mansa's Muse finish floodplains cottage (done)
Turn 92: F, G move N and finish plains cottage / other worker moves N and roads (1t)
Turn 93: one worker finishes road (done) / other two move onto banana and begin chopping / plantationing

Far from the most elegant writeup I've done, but I hope it will be easy enough to follow. We follow the previous plan by putting down a very badly needed grassland cottage that MM and FF can share while waiting for Calendar. The extra worker here roads the plains spice tile, so that the workers can then head to the south of the city post-Calendar. I think this is much more useful than roading tiles outside of our borders that we can't work or improve. The workers then improve the plains spice for civ-wide happiness. One worker head over to road the bananas en route to improving the pigs at the barb city (I'm assuming we capture the city sometime around T89-T90 after it grows to size 2). The other workers move to cottage the floodplains tile, improving the riverside plains tile while moving to avoid wasting worker turns, and are in position to chop/plantation the bananas as soon as the cultural borders expand.

Although this is far from foolproof, I would argue that it does a good job of improving useful tiles while avoiding wasted worker turns and positioning our workers to be in a position to move over to the captured barb city as well. Feel free to have a go at other suggestions for this region. Here's a link to the previous micro plan, which understandably left things pretty vague after the spices were connected.

On another note, growing Forbidden Fruit to size 4 and then double-whipping a worker feels like a really good idea as well.

[regoarrarr]

I think that looks good Sullla and I agree with your overall tile priorities. The one thing I might change, and I apologize for the vagueness since I'm not sure how many workers we have in the area and where, but woudl be chopping the bananas before the borders pop. I'd value that over putting in turns roading and cottaging the plains tile (or even the FP)

[novice]

My first impression is that this looks good, Sullla. It does beg the question of what to do with the t92 settler. These workers aren't preparing for it. We have one or two other workers completing, IIRC, they're mining around FP in the micro plan, but those are placeholder orders, really.

Maybe we should 2-whip a worker in MM and overflow to another worker, instead of building the t92 settler there? Then whip a settler from FF perhaps when our workers are ready?