Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Shoot the Moon]

Random thought, but one that might worth be keeping in the back of our collective head: when should we start trying to get a GS for an academy in our capital? According to the current micro plan, within 7t the capital will already be at size 9 and on top of that we will be a mere two techs away from bureau (CoL which we have a double discount on and CS). Might be worth something to keep in mind as a medium-term goal.

[NobleHelium]

The general plan is to pop a golden age after MoM, either with our next natural GP or the Music artist and generate multiple GPs with it, including one for an academy.

[kjn]

I think the basic idea was to use our second prophet for a golden age, and use that to eg generate a GS. But we might want to change that plan. I think it was Seven and Sullla who did the basic outline of it.

Unless we want to speed things up, MM will pop its second great prophet on T151, but every turn we run a priest in MM will move the prophet 1t closer.

[kjn]

I think we should register RealmsBewonb.net

[SevenSpirits]

I think the basic idea was to use our second prophet for a golden age, and use that to eg generate a GS. But we might want to change that plan. I think it was Seven and Sullla who did the basic outline of it.

Unless we want to speed things up, MM will pop its second great prophet on T151, but every turn we run a priest in MM will move the prophet 1t closer.

The basic point is we will want a golden age by the time the 2 library scientists would produce our second great person (at this point, by quite a few turns I think, since the discussion was a while ago). The golden age would of course allow us to get a scientist for a comparatively trivial amount of effort, due to the inherent GPP bonus plus caste system. So there's no point in starting on our academy GP now - it would cost us a lot and not speed up the academy.

It is worth thinking about whether we need the next GP from MM in order to start the golden age, or if we can get the music artist in a reasonable timeframe. If the former, we should figure out how much effort to put into speeding it up.

[Sullla]

These are good questions. Let me try to address that with some of my long term thoughts.

Here's where I see our upcoming tech path:

Calendar (630 beakers)
Currency (720 beakers)

We know that these are our current and next techs. Next:

Masonry (144 beakers)
Monotheism (216 beakers)
Monarchy (540 beakers)

These are the obvious techs to pursue after that. We want the double civics pairing of Organized Religion and Hereditary Rule, as well as the ability to connect the wines resource for another +1 happiness. Depending on how long it takes for us to get our next Great Person, we may very well choose not to revolt to these civics until we can fire off our Golden Age and swap for free. There's a good chance that with silks + spices + wines + religion (along with gold and silver), we'll be able to ride things out on happiness until we can triple revolt into OR/HR/Bur all at once in a Golden Age.

Afterwards, it gets more theoretical, but these are some preliminary thoughts:

* Metal Casting (810 beakers): Forges grant the +25% production bonus and are worth +2 happiness with our gold/silver resources. Forges/OR would also help with chopping out any future wonders. I think this should be the next tech goal.

* Code of Laws (630 beakers): Needed for Civil Service, opens up courthouses, and we'll need the tech anyway if we want to swap into Caste System temporarily to pop out a Great Scientist during our Golden Age.

* Civil Service (1440 beakers): Obvious economy + military tech.

This tech path is almost entirely economy based. The two major things that it skips are Construction (assuming we will continue to avoid wars) and the Aesthetics line of techs. I don't value Great Library much on this map and I don't think we should pursue it. Let some other team build the wonder. On a Huge map, a wonder that adds two Scientists in one city is a bit of a noob trap anyway. Wonders with empire-wide effects (Mausoleum, Notre Dame, etc.) are significantly increased in power under these settings. We should do anything possible to land Statue of Liberty later for exactly that reason, as it will be stupidly overpowered when we have 30+ cities. Anyway, give up the Aesthetics/Literature line for now and concentrate on other things.

That would mean that we need to generate our own Great Person for a Golden Age and not take the one from Music (or at least not beeline there early on). Fortunately, I don't think this will pose a major problem. We get 3 Great Person points/turn in Mansa's Muse every turn from Stonehenge and Shrine. In order to research all of the techs I've listed above, I would guess it would take us about 25-30 turns. Let's say we land Civil Service around T110. Mansa would have about 80 GPP in the box at that time, needing about 120 more points to pop out something for a Golden Age and our triple civics swap. We need about 40 specialist turns in that span to produce some kind of Great Person. That's a little on the high end, but should be eminently doable since we can run up to 4 specialists at once in there (2 scientists and 2 priests). I don't think it would be impossible by any means.

Summary: I would rather research other techs than go for Music's Great Artist (at least here in theorycrafting land). We should have a rough goal of trying to build Mausoleum and produce some kind of Great Person by T110-115. Then use the following 12t Golden Age to get ourselves a Great Scientist for the capital and revolt into OR, HR, and Bur civics. That's an overview of where I see us going in the big picture view.

[Merovech]

I'm always a fan of the Code-of-Laws->Civil Service section of the tech tree.

I also think our civ has started to reach the point where Metal Casting is desirable, ie, the point where the benefit of forges outweighs delay that building them requires-normally once expansion to every "very good" city site near the capital has occurred or when expansion is stretched due to costs. I wouldn't say we're running into the latter problem very much, but we have expanded to most of the immediate-payback city locations near our start.

I like the Great Library, but without Philosophical or the Pyramids, it loses some of its luster-a great build if it's still around in a thousand years, but not better than courthouses and forges and Caste System and Bureaucracy.

The Music Great Artist is quite a boost, in my opinion, getting us a Golden Age faster and allowing us to hopefully get an Academy up much earlier (depends on if a GS or a GP is produced, I suppose-a GP would be much less useful since we already have the shrine). Music is quite a lot of beakers just for the Great Artist; however. Like with the Great Library (expect a little higher priority, in my mind), I think we go for it if it's still there after we place down a round of courthouses and forges.

In other words...I pretty much agree completely.

[NobleHelium]

I don't see how we're going to ride it to a Golden Age without swapping into HR/OR. For one thing, our ability to reasonably build MoM is in doubt without it.

I think GLib is still a great wonder on a larger map, because GLib's primary effect is the GPP and not the output of the scientists. And I would definitely prefer to grab Music than to work those specialist turns in MM. If we had landed Oracle things would be a lot easier, but unfortunately we didn't.

[Merovech]

I don't see how we're going to ride it to a Golden Age without swapping into HR/OR. For one thing, our ability to reasonably build MoM is in doubt without it.

How bad is a single turn of anarchy at this point? I seem to consider them less painful than a lot of other people here (but that is perhaps because, in some way, I am still used to golden ages not giving anarchy-free switches).

[NobleHelium]

It's not bad at all. This is normal speed. novice put out some numbers only recently.