Apart from deciding on roughly where to place our next cities, it might be time to start thinking about city specialisations, ie national wonders. Especially now that we will get stone soon.
The easy cases first: OU (just to annoy m_h!) in AO, and WS in MM. (mh: )
Moai: I'm leaning towards HF. It can build it reasonably quickly and has two high-quality water tiles. NH thought about Alemanni and BbB - both have more water tiles than HF, but BbB is IMO too exposed. In Alemanni it would dominate that sea, which we probably will share with CFC, but there is plenty of other stuff to get there, and it might be exposed to CFC or another team. Its good land tiles are non-shared, too, unlike HF.
NE: If Alemanni was 1W, it'd be a great spot. Now it's enough food but too exposed. NH had the idea of using FF, and I think that's the best option, especially if we can pry away the corn from MM most times.
HE: I think the best option is HF. With Maoi, the iron, and two grass mines it will have great sustained production, and the commerce potential isn't that great. FP can probably work too, but has less food to work with. ST is also an option, but I think it's placed too far away and it's not as production rich as FP or HF. Red dot could probably work as HE too (more food than FP, but less hammers).
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The endless use of acronyms is definitely pretty annoying. I had no idea what people were even talking about with "WS" until I realized it was a reference to Wall Street. Could everyone consider taking the extra 0.5 seconds to type out these words in full please?
re: m_h's suggestion on 15 cities. Is there still some point at which the maintenance is going to jump up appreciably in all cities for the next city founded? I think this calculating when we hit this wall would find us the optimal number of cities to settle.
fake edit: nm - looks like this doesnt really mean much to us and the article i was remembering is pretty dated:
(January 11th, 2013, 15:37)Sullla Wrote: The endless use of acronyms is definitely pretty annoying. I had no idea what people were even talking about with "WS" until I realized it was a reference to Wall Street. Could everyone consider taking the extra 0.5 seconds to type out these words in full please?
Yeah, I normally write Oxford and Wall Street, but I wanted to tease mostly_harmless a bit :-)
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(January 11th, 2013, 15:57)waterbat Wrote: re: m_h's suggestion on 15 cities. Is there still some point at which the maintenance is going to jump up appreciably in all cities for the next city founded? I think this calculating when we hit this wall would find us the optimal number of cities to settle.
fake edit: nm - looks like this doesnt really mean much to us and the article i was remembering is pretty dated:
The "wall" is actually when the maintenance per new city stops increasing. Maintenance per additional city increases quadratically until your old cities hit the 6 gold number-of-cities upkeep cap, then it becomes linear. That's why filler cities are generally worth founding later on in the game.
(January 11th, 2013, 14:30)kjn Wrote: Apart from deciding on roughly where to place our next cities, it might be time to start thinking about city specialisations, ie national wonders. Especially now that we will get stone soon.
The easy cases first: OU (just to annoy m_h!) in AO, and WS in MM. (mh: )
Moai: I'm leaning towards HF. It can build it reasonably quickly and has two high-quality water tiles. NH thought about Alemanni and BbB - both have more water tiles than HF, but BbB is IMO too exposed. In Alemanni it would dominate that sea, which we probably will share with CFC, but there is plenty of other stuff to get there, and it might be exposed to CFC or another team. Its good land tiles are non-shared, too, unlike HF.
NE: If Alemanni was 1W, it'd be a great spot. Now it's enough food but too exposed. NH had the idea of using FF, and I think that's the best option, especially if we can pry away the corn from MM most times.
HE: I think the best option is HF. With Maoi, the iron, and two grass mines it will have great sustained production, and the commerce potential isn't that great. FP can probably work too, but has less food to work with. ST is also an option, but I think it's placed too far away and it's not as production rich as FP or HF. Red dot could probably work as HE too (more food than FP, but less hammers).
Moai: Horse Feathers - 1 less water tile than Brick by Brick and Alemani, but kjn makes a good argument for why these border cities perhaps should not build Moai. Also, the 1 additional coast tile at BbB is (IMO) not worth the extra delay in building the wonder, as well as it being closer to hostile borders and thus less defensible. Finally, there is plenty of tile overlap at HF, so we'll actually need to use the coast tiles there in the not so distant future. Oxford: Airship One (obviously) Heroic Epic: I'm undecided. National Epic: Alemanni? See below.
Obviously I spent some time in world builder and had to grant us a few techs to get this infrastructure: Compass (harbor), MC (forge), Currency (market), and Aesthetics (National Epic), as well as Bureaucracy for chained irrigation, Monarchy for wines/HR, lastly Masonry for stone and Monotheism for OR (just for completeness since that's our path at this point).
One thing I adjusted was the tile N/NE from Alemanni, converting from coast to jungle --> grassland from the most recent sandbox. See one of Sullla's pics in this post and decide if I'm right. +1 food to this city with that adjustment.
Wall Street: Mansa's Muse with the shrine. Globe: Wherever we can support a draft camp. Tight city placement is good, too, since we'll likely hover around size 6. Iron Works: Late-game workshop powerhouse or a captured enemy capital? TBD. West Point: No thanks. National Park: Maybe late game in a far-flung jungle belt that hasn't been chopped with a random food resource? Probably this doesn't happen.
After our further exploration, what do people think about settling our stone city 1SW of the stone instead of on it? Downside is needing worker turns to hook up the stone, delaying getting horses, and slightly harder to defend in the long run (can't move a boat into the city and unload in one turn), but upside is having a floodplain in the first ring which we could farm and a much stronger city site long term.
Don't like that idea of putting Brick by Brick 1SW.
First, it will delay us hooking up horses with 10t (okay, 9t with micro, but still).
Second, the city will be much easier for CivPlayers to attack, and much harder for us to reinforce.
Third, our main city in the area will be the one 1S of the wines, and that placement will be impossible with BbB 1N of the wines. BbB is a pure resource grab city, so then we should make the resource grab as effectively as possible.
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(January 17th, 2013, 14:20)Shoot the Moon Wrote: After our further exploration, what do people think about settling our stone city 1SW of the stone instead of on it? Downside is needing worker turns to hook up the stone, delaying getting horses, and slightly harder to defend in the long run (can't move a boat into the city and unload in one turn), but upside is having a floodplain in the first ring which we could farm and a much stronger city site long term.
My immediate thought is that I don't want to do anything that will delay getting War Chariots into the field. I don't see this location as a commerce site, but rather a hammer city. I'd rather get the horses up sooner by settling on the stone with horses first ring and then build a couple WCs that can reinforce our claim for a secondary city on the river, perhaps on the grassland SW of the wines resource. That city will be a good commerce city, supported by the hammers coming in from Brick by Brick.