Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[scooter]

A question for those who have a better feel for it - are we still feeling like we can be fielding a sizable group of Knights by T150 in time to invade the German team? I want to send a reply to WPC either tonight or tomorrow. If we're totally confident we can blitz through with Knights, we might be able to tell them to just keep the 5 catapults, that way we owe them nothing. I haven't actually seen a tech path outlined that tells when we would have Guilds, so I wanted to check in with you guys before drafting something with the wrong assumptions.

[novice]

I don't think we can confidently say that. Even if we can build a knight army by then, we might not want to. So we should try to have some bailout clauses in the WPC deal.

At any rate we can build our own cats. Let's just do that and owe them nothing, but promise to try and coordinate an attack.

[Sullla]

CAN we get Guilds researched and knights built by T150 if we want to do so? Absolutely; we're already making roughly 150 beakers/turn at break-even rate just after Turn 100, and about to enter the Medieval era. 50 turns ago we were researching Writing tech and our break-even rate was about 40 beakers/turn. We can do it if we make it our goal.

But do we actually want to do that? I have absolutely no idea. Better to leave things up in the air and work out the details later, just as novice said. We might be in a Liberalism race or need to hit the top of the tree rather than pushing the Guilds line of techs. Hard to say at this point.

[Sullla]

Turn 102 - 325BC

This is going to be relatively short, as there wasn't all that much going on this turn.



Woodsman axe kept moving to the north and west, eventually finding an end to the forests at this patch of desert. Still no borders spotted anywhere. I'll probably rest this unit in place for two turns to get it up to full, and then we can decide where to go from there. If CivPlayers is still being uncommunicative, we can bring the axe back home to guard and harass. If they actually talk to us and sign something, then we'll be good to keep exploring.

There was a barb axe on the indicated tile at the start of the turn. Another reason I'd like to heal up to full before moving.



Good suggestion over in the C&D thread to move our axe southwest and reveal the center tile of the nearby CivPlayers city. Xochicalco is size 2, no religion inside, no buildings present, defended by a single Combat I warrior. You know, I really don't get the whole deal with CivPlayers. If I were running a civ with 7 cities, with my cities defended by warriors, I wouldn't be antagonizing my neighbor which has 12 cities and axes walking around all over my borders. You'd think that they would have written something by now, right?

Well, if they do want to come after us, we should have elephants and catapults on hand to deal with them, plus a heck of a lot more production and population to throw at them. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.



This is the most interesting area at present, the tactical puzzle posed by this barb spear. I've covered our worker chopping the forest with an axe, and moved up the Shock axe to the copper tile. The hope is that the barb spear will move northwest onto our grassland hill mine; we get 97% odds to kill it with the Shock axe on that tile. If it moves northeast onto the forest tile, we can take a roughly 90% shot to kill it, with the other axe ready to clean up if we fail, or we can cover both workers again and try to bait the spear into moving onto the copper flatland tile. The worst result would be the spear moving northeast - northeast, and even then it should still be a fairly minor annoyance. We'll wait and see what the barb does on the interturn, and work from there.



We had a free religion spread into The Covenant this turn, allowing the missionary just produced in Forbidden Fruit to head off towards Starfall / Seven Tribes. (Cross your fingers that we don't fail the dice roll on spreading religion in the later city. Silly Confucianism!) This allowed me to finish chopping the granary in The Covenant a turn earlier than we expected. Exploring work boat found a bananas resource on the east side of the lake, although probably outside of what we can realistically claim. There are CFC and UniversCiv cities very close to that spot.

One other cool thing from this turn. See this?



We've finished our first town of the game. 3/0/6 floodplains tile at the capital. Since it takes 70 turns of continuous working to reach town status, we've been using this tile every turn since T32. This is one of the earliest dates that I've managed to reach a fully developed cottage; give credit to Egypt's awesome starting techs and our early Pottery research. It's too bad that the cottage on the tile to the west was pillaged by a barb earlier, as that was our original floodplains cottage. We could have had our first town even sooner!

Overview / tile micro:

Seven Tribes whipped an axe (starting value 34/35), to overflow into aqueduct next turn, then to be whipped and overflow (with chops) into Hanging Gardens. All cities are still on pace to finish their wonders on top. Horse Feathers swapped to a settler, to be whipped next turn for the ivory location. Overflow will go into Moai Statues. Eastern Dealers has to work the floodplains tile either this turn or next turn to grow to size 3 in the next 2t; it's better to work the floodplains tile this turn on 0% research and then go to the gems tile next turn at 100%.

The plan is to turn on research into Construction next turn; we are about 20 beakers short of being able to tech Construction in 2t, so we'll run 100% / 100% / 10% science and finish it in 3t. After that, one turn of 0% research followed by 2t of 100% research easily finishes Code of Laws tech with large amounts of overflow. Then on to either Civil Service or something military as needs dictate.



Demos continue to show a commanding lead in most areas, and now the geometric Population number is even starting to favor our team. Any time we feel the need, we can start converting this population into military and take the Power lead easily. I am continuing to spend our espionage points against UniversCiv; they must not be microing their EP, as they keep spending 1 EP/turn against us. All four of our points are going against them. We'll have graph visibility in about six more turns if nothing changes there.

Worker and city micro is now following this plan; feel free to read and comment over in the micro thread as everyone has time: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...ring#gid=0

[NobleHelium]

Uh, surely we want to be working the gems and the pig at ED? If we wanted to work a food tile with the second citizen, then we would have hooked up the clams instead of doing some not-very-useful exploring with the work boat. I don't see a particular need to grow in 2t...we will still be size 4 at the start of turn 105, and the extra HG citizen will still be placed on the netted clams.

[novice]

Great job with the micro plan. I've looked at it, but I haven't played through it, so I don't have any suggestions for optimizations atm.
Question: Are our workers at TC taking advantage of the new border pop ETA in farming the rice?

Suggestion for this turn, do this:

as for missionaries ... i suggest sending the one built at Forbidden fruit to the tile NW of Focal Point ... if spreading to Seven Tribes fail it can continue moving towards that, if its a success it can move to Starfall (not losing any turns at the end of the day as of how fast it could get there directly)

As for this:

Uh, surely we want to be working the gems and the pig at ED? If we wanted to work a food tile with the second citizen, then we would have hooked up the clams instead of doing some not-very-useful exploring with the work boat. I don't see a particular need to grow in 2t...we will still be size 4 at the start of turn 105, and the extra HG citizen will still be placed on the netted clams.

You realize past workboat movement is irrelevant for what is the best tile management this turn? From looking at the micro plan it looks like working the gems over the FP will delay growth to size 5 and 6 as well, so I think working the FP this turn is fine.

[NobleHelium]

I'm saying that if we had not explored with the work boat, we'd have the clams netted already. Netted clams are surely superior to the flood plains, no?

Never mind, you're saying this prior decision was a poor one and we should not keep making it. Anyway, I think we will quickly outstrip our tiles in ED, so that extra growth may be of dubious value. Although that doesn't matter if our chief aim is to grow to 6 to whip a settler. Would it be faster to 2-whip the settler at size 4?

I think we'd be better off sending the TH missionary to GM rather than SF. CFC can't complain about us not hooking up the stone if we don't have culture over it yet.

[novice]

I think we'd be better off sending the TH missionary to GM rather than SF. CFC can't complain about us not hooking up the stone if we don't have culture over it yet.

That's true, something to consider. At any rate, let's move the missionary to NW of FP.

The work boat scouting effectively let us reveal some tiles at the cost of 1f2c, so it's not necessarily bad. But yes, my point was that it's water under the bridge now.

[Sullla]

My initial feeling had been that we should connect the clams immediately with the work boat. However, there was a note in the previous micro plan that said we should scout with the work boat for two turns, because we didn't need to connect the clams until T104. Unfortunately this was wrong; there was a small error in the previous plan, which had us working pigs + gems at Eastern Dealers and still growing to size 3. The mistake was assigning +6 food to the pigs/gems combination instead of +5 food; we need 11 food to grow, and thus we'd be left one food short of growth.

Basically, a minor math error in the previous plan said that we didn't need the work boat on the clams, and as a result we have to spend one turn working the floodplains over the gems.

[NobleHelium]

That wasn't really an error, Seven consciously chose to do that because we didn't have any tiles to grow onto. I assumed with the lack of comment on it that we were in agreement with that. But anyway, it doesn't really matter as novice says.