Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Sullla]

It was a mistake, I can link directly to the micro plan:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...kdWc#gid=1

Eastern Dealers, T102 and T103. As written, we work pigs + gems on both turns, gain 6 food each turn, and grow to size 3 at eot 103. When I went to play the turns out in-game, this proved to be impossible, since pigs + gems only produces +5 food surplus, and only then did I realize that we should have connected the clams right away. Seven has done a fabulous job here, I'm not criticizing him in any way about the management at this city. What I am asking is for you guys to give me the benefit of the doubt on this issue; this is one case where the mistake was in the plan itself, not in my execution of it.

Now on the issue of sending our missionary to Gourmet Menu instead of Starfall: I don't agree with this. Sending the missionary to Gourmet Menu, it will arrive on T105 instead of the T108 as currently planned. Those three turns will allow us to produce 2, 2, and 1 more production via Organized Religion, for 5 extra production in total, as I have it currently written. In turn, this causes Starfall to expand borders several turns later by not having religion in the city; I have a forest chop completing a work boat on the turn that religion pops the city's borders in the current plan. Starfall only has three good tiles: the corn, the fish, and the oasis; maybe the stone counts as a fourth good tile, but it's not really all that great. The fish is located in the second ring, and all of the choppable forests are in that second ring as well. I value getting the borders popped sooner, and that fish connected faster, more than getting slightly more OR production in Gourmet Menu. Faster border pop also lets us connect that second stone resource faster, which could be useful for our deals with CFC.

More importantly, however, is that the whole micro plan was written under the assumption of that missionary going to Starfall. It might even be better to send the missionary to Gourmet Menu instead; I'm honestly not sure. But everything has been written with the Starfall plan in mind. Is it worthwhile to go through and spend a couple of hours rewriting our plan for a very minimal gain in optimization? Perhaps, but I won't be the one to do it. We all talked about how important it was to have some kind of micro plan in place, and no one was willing to do the actual grunt work of putting it together. I did - I spent five hours putting it together yesterday. I'm not perfect, and I have no doubt things could be further optimized off of what I came up with. However, if no one is willing to put in that time and effort, then yes, you ARE going to have to live with some of my choices, because the city builds and worker actions are all contingent on one another. That's why we plan in the first place, so that we can coordinate things down the road and have a larger strategy.

Long story short, the potential gains from spreading religion in Gourmet Menu over Starfall are not worth the effort of redoing the worker and city planning. If you feel differently, here's the spreadsheet. Have at it.

[novice]

I think your plan is better anyway, Sullla, since the earlier border pop at Starfall gets us the fish sooner, as you point out. As a bonus we can tell CFC we're doing our best to get the stone online.

[SevenSpirits]

Plan was definitely wrong. I had gems giving 2f but they are hills gems. If someone else had looked at the plan maybe they could catch this and we could hook clams 1t sooner.

It was certainly my intention to grow before the HG free pop. It would be silly not to do that.


If your micro plan uses the culture in Starfall, by all means let's send the missionary there.

[kjn]

Some more notes:

I think we should send our W2 axe further to the southwest, to continue scouting. Note the little patch of forest that we can use between the mountains and the sea...



While Sian would be very helpful if CivPlayers goes belligerent, I think contact with Apolyton and CivFr to be more important. Especially since we already have a potential trade connection with CivFr (more trade routes), and our scout is stuck for the time being.

Speaking of CivPlayers, they have finished a barracks in Tlaxcala. Even if they don't have Construction, it sure is a lot of military preparedness stuff going on with them...



The Spanish culture to the east of KwaDukuza. Note that it's probably their capital culture we see there, since it's third-ring culture, there is an unimproved deer in the NW culture corner, and the Spanish still depend on monuments to pop borders.

[Sullla]

Turn 103 - 300BC

We succeed on all our dice rolls, and neighboring civs make some highly questionable city choices along our borders.



German team played a double turn, being the last ones to act on T102 and then immediately playing and ending at the start of T103. They planted a new city at the very end of the last turn, and here's the location. (We knew they were about to settle somewhere from production tracking; they slow built the settler over the course of 10 turns in Wismar, finished it T100, and settled T102.) I was worried that they were going to settle by the rice tile in our jungle, wrecking our dotmap. Instead they settled... this location. Okey dokey...

Wasserburg has no resources whatsoever, just a floodplains tile and a whole bunch of river tiles. This is pretty darn weak as far as location goes. To make matters worse, our city of Tree Huggers just expanded borders for 100 culture this turn, which means that the row of tiles south of Wasserburg will all flip to our control next turn. They'll chop a forest for a fast terrace, and will eventually get those tiles back, but they'll never control more than their first ring along the border. We have too much culture built up already. For this reason, the city should be extremely easy to attack and capture later when we go on the offensive, even if it is on a hill. Best of all, it does not interfere with any of our future cities in this region. The next city to be founded will be the green spot over in the east; micro plan has us founding it on T110 if I remember correctly. That's an infinitely better city than Wasserburg, it will lock down the northern border for good, and we'll be able to plant sooooo's blue dot city later in complete safety. We also want to add the white spot in the west (two west of the rice) when we have a chance later.

The German team has to have crashed their economy in dreadful manner by now. They have 8 cities with virtually no population or infrastructure handy. Their GNP has to be awful right now. Remember that they have researched the least beakers in the entire game thus far... not exactly the time to be planting resourceless, culturally crushed cities!



Here's the northwest. I'm healing the Woodsman II axe off screen further to the north, still waiting to see if CivPlayers ever responds in any way. There's a barb warrior on the ivory this turn, not much of a threat for our C1 axe in the area. Horse Feathers has triple-whipped its settler (overflow into Moai while we have stone), and a settler and worker will be hopping into the galley next turn, unloading on T105, city founded on ivory T108. Roads will have to come in behind the city this time, I'm afraid; not enough workers on hand to pre-road through that jungle. We can have the ivory and city connected by road the following turn on T109.



We won the first big dice roll of the turn at Seven Tribes, where our missionary successfully spread Hinduism. Odds were right around 90% with one foreign religion in the city. Whew! This kept the Hanging Gardens plan perfectly on track. We overflowed from last turn's axeman whip into an aqueduct, then triple-whipped that aqueduct and chopped a forest into the city. This results in the aqueduct getting 199/100 production this turn; we overflow 99 production, add two forest chops next turn for another 60 production, and that becomes 99 + 60 = 159 shields x 2 (stone) = 318 production. One turn Hanging Gardens. Credit SevenSpirits again with the fancy micro, it's looking pretty good at this point on the wonder.

This does mean that we now have a spare axe to play around with from last turn's whip. Where do you want to send him? My thought is to either send another axe over to Brick By Brick, or send an axe down to the south to scout. Which would everyone prefer? We'll have an axe + spear in Seven Tribes once all the overflow goes through, and Seven Tribes will very quickly expand out to 100 culture borders if the wonder completes, so I think the city will be relatively safe from attack. (We'll at least have warning if CivPlayers tries to do something.)

At Focal Point, the barb spear suicided into our axe in the forest. Huh. So much for all that tactical planning! I think we'll take it though. Both axes are healing in place this turn, the war chariot at Starfall is available to move out. I plan to send one of those axes over to Starfall for military police, and then send out the war chariot scouting, either in the south or to get a glimpse of the new CFC cities.

The workers at Focal Point chopped three forests this turn:



133 production after the Organized Religion modifier went through. The civic was worth 26 shields here this turn from the chops and natural production. Just four more turns and two forests left to go. (Pretty obvious which two forests we're chopping in this picture, right?)



Here's the bizarre movement from CFC's settler over in the southeast. We're discussing this over in the diplo thread, so please take your discussion on this subject over there. The hope is that we can convince them to found a city somewhere less aggressive, ideally on the tile southeast of the rice. I have no idea why they would want such a terrible spot in the desert like this, and it would almost inevitably drive conflict between our teams. Let's hope that saner minds will prevail here. This one makes the German team look downright brilliant by comparison.

Overview and tile micro:

We didn't grow much in the way of population this turn, which makes this picture look a lot like the one from last turn. Most of the tile micro involved reassigning stuff after our two triple whips at Horse Feathers and Seven Tribes. Mansa and Forbidden Fruit have juggled tiles slightly so that both will grow next turn and Mansa stays on pace to finish Great Wall in 3t. We also swapped the floodplains tile for the gems at Eastern Dealers now that research is back on.

In contrast to this turn, we grow 6 pop this turn, and then we'd grow another 12 pop the following turn if Hanging Gardens goes through. In the sandbox, suddenly every city was fighting desperately for improved tiles! Well, it's managed fairly well after we did some trial and error, only a few cases of having to work unimproved stuff. And we still need to land the wonder first, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Research is turned on and directed into Construction tech, useful both for bridge-building (surprisingly helpful in planning worker actions over in the east with all those rivers) and also for military purposes. We come extremely close to finishing the tech in 2t, coming up just short, but can lend the tech in three turns of 100% / 100% / 10% research. Code of Laws follows up very quickly from there. We'll have both techs at eot 108 and can re-evaluate tech path then.

Demos before and after our whips:





Losing six population always stinks, although we will grow most of it back really, really quickly. Note how the GNP plunges enormously; that's not due to the whipping, that's due to swapping our tech from Code of Laws to construction. We get 40% pre-requisite bonus on Code of Laws, plus another 3% bonus from CivPlayers knowing the tech, compared to only 20% bonus for Construction. That's nearly all of the difference in GNP. We only dropped from 257 base beakers to 242 beakers in the actual whip. (Where did it all come from? The six whipped pop were all located in the southwest. We dropped a plains hill mine, a grassland cottage, and four coastal tiles. Discounting the plains hill mine, that's 5 tiles with 3 commerce each = 15 less commerce. 257 beakers to 242 beakers.)

Pretty quiet turn in all. Main task is trying to talk some sense in CFC before they plant an idiotic city along our southeast border.

[NobleHelium]

We'll get more than 318h into HG - remember that we get OR on the wonder too.

[Ceiliazul]

I'd like the spare axe to head toward BbB and/or the ivory city.

[pindicator]

We'll get more than 318h into HG - remember that we get OR on the wonder too.

You're also going to lose it on the 99h overflow. 99h / 1.25 gives you 79h overflow. Add the 60h from the turn, multiply by 2.25 and you'll end with 312h

[Bigger]

I'd like the spare axe to head toward BbB and/or the ivory city.

agreed

[Sian]

don't know if its just me, but i'd send the axe to BbB, and then reshuffle our eastern borders freeing up the WC in Starfall to scout southwards