Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Fintourist]

Damn this MoM-thing and that worker loss are disappointing. I've been angry because of this game in the RL as well We have now been twice very close to delivering almost a game-breaking punch to everybody and just missed it by inch.

On the positive side, we have to thank CivFr for making this a game. It will be even nicer to crush the competition after these setbacks!

So what now? Do we have lot of hammers coming in FP that need new target? Do we put them simply into Settlers & Workers? About the long-term: Win Liberalism, deny Taj, grasp some first-to-research bonuses and destroy everybody sounds like a well-thought plan...

[ironstar]

Sucks about MoM, but damn I'm glad we didn't spawn next to the agg/chm madmen...

[Sullla]

Turn 106 - 225BC

This is not a finished turn report, but we have a lot to discuss this turn and it's better to get started now.

Anyway, the big news for the turn was the completion of Mausoleum by CivFr two turns before our own build would have finished. This is a fairly large setback, as we were counting on that wonder for a lot of our later plans. Unfortunately, as one of the two teams in the game with whom we do not have contact, there wasn't a whole lot we could do in terms of predicting what techs they had or what wonders they might be building. Kudos to them on a well-played move. We did also get 304 failgold from our partial build, which will speed us along to some of our immediate tech goals.

We did land the Great Wall as planned, only we popped borders at Focal Point on the exact same turn as the Great Wall completed, which teleported a barb axeman two tiles east... and right next to a chopping worker. The barb axe was still able to move and then killed our worker. This is possibly the single dumbest thing that I've ever seen in Civ4, the completion of Great Wall + border pop on the same turn magically teleporting a barb axe directly next to a chopping worker. I had big plans for that worker! I'm actually angrier about losing the worker right now than losing the wonder, since it forces me to redo several of the worker moves in the area. Grrr...



Here is the culprit axe. It was three tiles south of Focal Point last turn, and was able to kill a worker SW-W of Starfall between turns. Simply unbelievable. We had 99.4% odds with our war chariot, and then we almost lost that battle too! War chariot is sitting at 1.3 health remaining and needs to heal up before it can do any more exploring. That one axeman killed a war chariot (surviving with one hit left), then magically teleported and killed a worker, and then nearly killed a second war chariot at 0.5% odds to delay our scouting of the deep south further. Seriously game, WTF?!?!

Focal Point needs some serious attention now that the wonder plans have gone through. I will work on this tonight when I have some more time. Here is my general thought: we already have workers on the forests at Focal Point in mid-chop. We may as well continue following the previous plan and double-whip that worker (which we need now that the other worker died!) and finish the chops. But instead of going into Mausoleum, we can funnel all that production into Statue of Zeus, getting the full Organized Religion + ivory bonus, and get massive failgold to speed along our teching. While I have not tested this yet, it looks to be fairly easy to get the max gold value from the wonder at Focal Point. So we'd actually complete Statue of Zeus at Brick By Brick as planned (eot 113), and cash in 290 shields for 290 gold at Focal Point for 2.5 turns worth of 100% research. Does that sound like a good general plan to pursue? Focal Point is only going to be building a barracks and military otherwise, and that doesn't seem very useful right now when we have Great Wall for barb defense and NAPs with all neighbors.

Elsewhere on the turn:



Woodsman II axeman keeps exploring in the far west and has found a rather large body of water. We'll keep following the coastline south for as long as we can go and try to find a way past CivPlayers to the west. In the worst case scenario, we can always turn around and try to pass through to the north.



Here are the ivory operations underway at Brick By Brick. The settler moves onto the ivory tile next turn, settles the city T108, road connection done T109. There is a spear on the worker roading to the city and an axe on the settler itself, just to be safe. CFC has a chariot on the tile southwest of the horses. Amusingly, CFC could not declare war and kill our two workers on the plains hill tile even if they wanted to do so. (They can't move out of our territory, delcare war, and move back onto the hill tile no matter where they go.)



Here's a general picture of the eastern half of our territory. Five workers insta-farmed the rice tile to completion as The Covenant popped borders this turn. The only place we are lacking improved tile coverage is at Eastern Dealers, which is growing to size 6 and then triple-whipping a settler for the spot W-W-NW of The Covenant, which will lock down the German border and secure rice + cows. Forbidden Fruit and Tree Huggers both finished missionaries this turn, with the former on its way to Easter Dealers (visible on the floodplains above) and the latter going to Gourmet Menu. Forbidden Fruit has overflowed into another missionary, this one scheduled for WPC under the assumption that they'll take us up on our religious offer.

We didn't get the Great Wall border graphic, which I understand is what always happens in Pitboss games. I think we get it next turn (?) Nevertheless, it did complete in Mansa's Muse:



Kind of weird that the Great Wall only produces 2 culture/turn, no more than a library and less than a theatre. Anyway, we've forced two specialists here and a Great Person of some kind (we don't really care which type) will be due in 13t on T119. We can speed this up by running a third specialist after Mansa grows to size 9, or slow it down by dropping a specialist at the same time; we get the Great Person on T117 or T121 in those cases, if I remember this correctly. This is where we have to get to some high-level strategy discussion about the future.

The previous plan was to build Mausoleum, produce this Great Person out of Mansa using the Great Wall's free Great Person points, and then trigger a 12t Golden Age with it. We would revolt on the first turn of the GA into Bureaucracy, use the first 5t of the GA to research Philosophy tech, and then swap into Caste System/Pacifism as soon as it became possible, 5t into the GA. We'd run that configuration until the last turn of the GA, using it to produce Great People (likely 2 Scientists) and then swap back into Slavery/Organized Religion. But the key idea there was two civic swaps during the Golden Age, something that's only possible with Mausoleum. We will not have that option now.

So I think we can play this two different ways. One way is to drop the whole notion of using Caste/Pacifism and simply use the GA to revolt into Bureaucracy as soon as possible. We could probably still get one Scientist out this way, but two would be a lot harder. Alternately, we can still go with the same plan as before, but we will need to have Philosophy tech for Pacifism on the *FIRST* turn of the Golden Age, so that we can do an immediate swap into Bur/Caste/Pacifism. Then we swap back to Slavery/OR on the last turn of the GA after pushing out several Great People. The downside is that we have to research up to Philosophy tech first, which means we'll have several turns post-Civil Service where we aren't in Bureaucracy, effectively making CS a useless tech for a little while.



Here is the tech tree for illustration. Thanks to the Mausoleum failgold, we will clear Aesthetics at eot 107 (next turn) and Code of Laws eot 108. At that point, the techs we need are as follows:

Civil Service (1440 beakers)
Meditation (144 beakers)
Drama (540 beakers)
Philosophy (1440 beakers)

Tehnically we do not need Drama for Philosophy tech, but it opens up the 40% bonus beaker multiplier, which would make it rather foolish to skip the tech. (We are saving about 180 beakers on Philosophy by researching Drama first, and we do want Drama for theatres/Globe anyway.) How long will it take us to knock out these techs? We were landing Civil Service at eot 117 in my sandbox without the Mausoleum failgold, and with 300 gold along with potentially another 300 gold from Statue of Zeus failgold, we should be able to improve on that. My very rough estimate is that we can probably finish these techs around T122, which is just about when the Great Person comes out of Mansa's Muse (we can even slow it down slightly towards the end). So the plan would roughly be:

* Research these techs making use of failgold. Plan for roughly T122 date to start Golden Age.
* Trigger GA, revolt into Bur/Caste/Pacifism on first turn.
* Starve down cities with mass Scientist specialists during GA (by far the best two targets are Eastern Dealers and Starfall; I think getting 2 Great Scientists would be pretty doable, not sure about 3)
* Use 1 Scientist for Academy in Bureau capital, use 1 Scientist for Education lightbulb to secure Liberalism.
* Revolt back to normal civics on last turn of GA, roughly T130.

The biggest downside is that we'll be sitting on Civil Service without doing anything with it for about a half-dozen turns. Probably still worth it though, right? Generally speaking, is this the big picture strategy we want to pursue?



Demos for this turn. We have been bumped up to #2 in Power rating now, I believe still behind German team. Everything else looks pretty solid as usual. No one that we know has knowledge of Aesthetic techs, as we're only getting standard 20% bonus to our GNP.

Apolyton did use their second Great Scientist (first went for Academy) to lightbulb Philosophy tech and found Taoism. This gives them an awesome research score on our tables, but Apolyton still has only 7 cities and 39 pop; we have 12 cities and 74 pop. Their failure to expand means that they are probably not a huge threat in the long run. CivFr has emerged as the obvious top dog amongst our competitors.

We will have graphs on UniversCiv in a few more turns, and then we'll switch espionage spending over to Spanish Apolyton (who has spent no EP against us). CivPlayers still has a vast advantage over our team, but we have the EP edge on everyone else.

[Old Harry]

CFC has a chariot on the tile southwest of the horses. Amusingly, CFC could not declare war and kill our two workers on the plains hill tile even if they wanted to do so. (They can't move out of our territory, delcare war, and move back onto the hill tile no matter where they go.)

Where would the chariot teleport to if they did declare? I thought it was towards their capital, but that's either quite wet or an awful long way...

Edit: On the golden age plans - would researching Philosophy before CS and starting the golden age earlier (dependent on the great person) be a dumb idea? Will we be waiting on irrigation? duh - forgot which column Bureaucracy is in...

[kalin]

A thought: in the light of the NAP with CP, is it worth considering not founding the ivory city on the ivory, but say 1 tile west? I don't think we want that because of the SoZ plans, but I thought I'd bring this up.

Kalin

[novice]

I like the idea of SoZ for failgold in FP.

Sullla's tech plan sounds decent, too. I'm not sure what's best, but another option is to tech Aesthetics->Code of Laws->Civil Service, fire the golden age, and use Caste System but make do without Pacifism during the golden age. That could let us get to Liberalism sooner, if we think we're at risk of losing that to Apolyton.

If we can get both Civil Service and Philosophy by the time the GP pops from MM we should do that, of course. Having CS laying around is not a waste if we're waiting for the GP anyway, it's not like we would eat a turn of anarchy for Bureau anyway with a golden age just around the corner.

[Bigger]

are we planning on grabbing the great library? seems such a pity not just to grab a cheap literature if we're going to grab aesthetics anyway. not sure how that would delay other plans, though.

[T-hawk]

On chopping for Statue of Zeus failgold... The question is what's the opportunity cost, what else could be built? Focal Point isn't a commerce city, but one option is a courthouse. Say the courthouse saves 4 gpt. It costs 96 base hammers before OR, which could be 216 failgold. So it takes 54 turns to catch up. This sounds like a job for SevenSpirits' analysis of exponential discounts - is 4gpt forever better than 216 gold now? (Ignoring the EP as hard to quantify, but that has value too.)

Or is there any other wonder we'd like to save Focal Point's chops for? Parthenon? Could we fit that in before the Golden Age? Or maybe use Shwedagon Paya for Pacifism instead of researching Philosophy? Just throwing out ideas. Maybe even Chichen Itza for deterrence?

Golden Age for Bureau and temporary Caste/Pacifism together sounds like a solid plan. It's OK if it takes a few turns to set all that up - cities will grow more beforehand to enhance the GA's value and provide better capacity for running specialists.

[Sullla]

Focal Point is only four tiles from our capital. Courthouse there doesn't feel like it would be a very good use of production. I also don't think that Parthenon is in the cards given our lack of marble. (We are also likely planning a Communism/State Property rush at some point in the future, which means that we'd be obsoleting Parthenon fairly early.)

Shwedagon Paya could be very viable though, given our gold resource. (Of course everyone else has gold too! But if we missed out, it would be the same thing as Statue of Zeus failgold, so whatever.) The argument against Paya would be that we have to research Philosophy tech anyway for Liberalism, making it rather pointless. The argument in favor of Paya would be that we would never have to research Theology tech at any point at all (it's not required for anything longterm except Divine Right) and could still have access to Theocracy civic for later.

We would have to slot in Meditation as a tech to build Paya, but that's easily doable. It's an idea worth considering at the very least.

[Merovech]

Would building the S. Paya allow us to GA and revolt to Bureaucracy as soon as we research Civil Service, or would we not build the Paya quickly enough? That + being able to avoid Theology could be nice.