Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[SevenSpirits]

The micro plan ran out last turn. We still have most worker actions planned for several turns still, but most city tiles worked are not planned out at this point - Sullla is just playing that himself.

Last time I wrote the plan, no one really checked it that I'm aware of. At least there was close to zero discussion about decisions I made.

Kjn has put lots of work into micro and will probably make a plan if we need it, but there are two problems with this. The big one is that we rely on him for an incredible amount of work already: C&D department, regular sandbox updates, and general high game participation. In C&D in particular he's shown himself to be the best. Second problem is, to be honest, if kjn is making the plans alone, the quality will be noticeably worse than what we've been used to. He is good, but doesn't have enough time and is also inexperienced.

I do not have the time and energy to make all our plans. It takes a lot of hard work, and doing it alone is pretty draining. Also, whenever the sandbox is not updated to the in-game state, or in this case the micro plan is not updated to the in-game state (tiles worked), it would be more effort for me to work on the plan than I am willing to spend given everything else.

I guess we should figure out now if we have sufficient people to run a micro plan still. And if not, we should think about how to proceed. Ultimately this is another increase to Sullla's workload and it will reduce the quality of our play massively. On the other hand, we can afford to take a big hit in quality of micro, and still win this game.

For the coming turns it will be especially valuable to have a micro plan. Why? Well, we have hanging gardens due in a couple of turns. If we plan ahead we can take better advantage of the free pop; and we should also choose configurations that are reasonable in case someone else builds HG on the same turn and wins the coinflip. I've only thought about this for a couple of our cities. More importantly, we want a golden age about 20t from now. Micro leading up to golden age is extremely important, and will determine for example the number of great people we can produce in it.

[kjn]

Very much agree with Seven's outline of the problems we face right now.

Frankly, I can't do any more micro work than I do - keep the sandbox updated, and give some checks and feedback on other people's plans.

One thing that became pretty clear in the plan that NobleHelium and I co-developed, and in Seven's troubles with the current plan, is that I think are approaching a lot of the micro planning backwards - instead of going with a set of goals we set out to create the most efficient plan we can make. That is, the persons doing the micro not only has to decide how to do something but what to do.

But once you have the tile assignments and the worker actions all planned out, it also becomes much harder to discuss the goals.

[novice]

At some point we need to remove ourselves from the stringent micro plan where everything is planned out.

Something that could work:
- Having a general plan for our empire management - e.g. build up defenses against CivPlayers, fire a golden age and produce x number of GPs from city a, b and c.
- Couple that with specific micro plans on a city by city basis, as needed. Not all cities need detailed plans. We can have detailed plans for a subset of cities, and general plans for other cities. E.g. "build units, grow to size 8 and stagnate working mines".
- Workers also can have specific plans tied into city micro plans, or general instructions, e.g. "build cottages for Tree Huggers".

Is this something that could work? We're doing this in the RB demogame Troll team, it works all right, but obviously the turnplayer gets a lot of freedom and responsibility.

[zakalwe]

Yeah, the nice thing about that approach is that you can do micro "on demand" whenever you identify something that needs to be optimized. (E.g., we really need five workers in this area by turn X.) It's also easier for everybody to contribute when things aren't planned out miles in advance, and the turn discussions become more interesting IMO. The turn player can also ask for input where he needs it; the net effect is still significantly less planning work. We just need to maintain a sandbox.

[Fintourist]

I'm hoping that our micro experts will still manage to create us an overall plan for the next couple of turns. However, when we inevitably enter the phase where we don't type every worker movement several turns in advance, I have a small improvement idea for Sullla's excellent turn reports.

Would it be too much work to include a summary like this at the end of every turn report:

Undecided micro related to current turn

• Movement of Worker X near FP
  
• Movement of Worker X near HF
  
• Next build for AO
  

Undecided micro concerning the following turns

• Next build for MM (T1XX)
  
• Next build for GM (T1XX)
  

Currently Sullla raises all the relevant questions in his turn report and it works great, but in the future as everything becomes increasingly complex, maintaining a list like this could help people involved in the micro plan focus their efforts. This list could be then copied into the micromanagement thread while the discussion related to the bigger picture would remain in this thread. What are your thoughts? Would that help? Would this be impractical for you Sullla?

EDIT: Well, City builds maybe count hardly as micro decision, but treat the stuff after bullets simply as an illustration.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

They're stalling us until they prove otherwise.

I'm not sure what to say to UniversCiv. I'd like to give them until tomorrow to respond - we've sent a couple messages in a row and sending yet another contradicting ourselves again looks really sloppy and disorganized. Might as well ride it out and see what they say.

As a good warmup exercise for how to set goals without micro planning every single move, how can we get 3 axes and 3 spears into Brick by Brick in the next 10-15 turns? Consider this contingency planning. I don't like what's going on to our west with CivPlayers.

[Ceiliazul]

As a good warmup exercise for how to set goals without micro planning every single move, how can we get 3 axes and 3 spears into Brick by Brick in the next 10-15 turns?

An excellent idea. Add in a settler for ivory?

[Sullla]

Unfortunately, playing and writing up lengthy reports every 48 hours doesn't leave me enough time to go through and create an elaborate micro plan either. We're in the difficult situation where our team would benefit enormously from continued planning, but it also requires a vast commitment of time and energy to set it all up. I might be able to work on this over the weekend some, but I can't promise anything concrete. The fact that we have 12 cities and 16 workers at the moment makes this a daunting task, especially compared to the early turns where we had a fraction of those numbers. I don't see an easy solution here, sorry. I'll try to do what I can when I have time.



I went ahead and followed the suggestions made by SevenSpirits with regards to the barb spearman. I'm still not entirely convinced that roading on that grassland hill tile was the best option, as the barb spear will surely move northeast onto the hill next turn and chase our worker away, but it's not a huge issue. Bringing over the other axeman, on the other hand, was unquestionably the right move. We do not want to have to take a 90% dice roll and put ourselves in the hands of fortune. This way, we can stall for a turn or two, cover our chopping workers, and then smack the spearman with our Shock axe instead (odds on a hill are much higher, I think about 98%).

I also killed the barb warrior in the southwest with our 9 XP -> 10 XP axeman. We'll be able to build Heroic Epic now as soon as we tech Literature.



Here's the city of Horse Feathers again. There really isn't anything stopping us from producing a settler as soon as we want to do so. I was thinking that we'd get a settler for the ivory out of Tree Huggers instead, however that will take another 4-5 turns. We can definitely get the settler out here faster, although it will somewhat slow down a Moai Statues build. We have axes in place to defend an ivory plant, although we'll need at least one more worker ferried over to the west in order to connect the city. Ivory spot would unquestionably be a financial drain for some time to come. Still, it's probably worthwhile because that resource holds so much importance.

How about we grow to size 8 next turn, then swap to settler and triple-whip it the following turn? Overflow into Moai. That would take Horse Feathers down to size 5, and assuming we land Hanging Gardens, it would regrow up to size 6. The capital will be approaching the happiness cap right around T105, and so we could borrow the corn resource back again to regrow quickly in HF. Without simming it out formally, that's my best gut feeling on how to manage this area. The settler would reach the ivory tile T107, plant city T108. We could get there a turn faster with more roads, but we don't have the worker labor available in the west. Thoughts?

[waterbat]

sounds great on the HF plan. As we aren't in a race for Maoi, but we are in a race for the Ivory, its an easy trade-off.

Thoughts on micro... Wish I could help but im so terrible (inexperienced) with it, that i felt like any effort I put in was completely wasted. The insanely high quality of the work the micro-strategists have done only reinforces this idea.

When we get to war micro, how is that going to work? I imagine it will be tough as well.

[spacetyrantxenu]

New turn is up. Happy Friday!