Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Ceiliazul]

Why not see about getting marble from the Germans? We can loan them workers, and gift them gems for the duration on our NAP in return. I haven't checked, but surely they have masonry by now... right?

We tell WPC that we're improving marble for them later, and besides, it's not a war oriented resource.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

We may want to consider whipping Taj. I remember making the painful decision to make a septuple whip (or something silly like that) in PBEM19 and it turned out it was entirely necessary. While we hate to whip so many high quality tiles at our capital, especially prior to a Golden Age, if we are going to skip an Academy and revolt out of Bureaucracy, really it won't be that painful.

[kjn]

Why not see about getting marble from the Germans? We can loan them workers, and gift them gems for the duration on our NAP in return. I haven't checked, but surely they have masonry by now... right?

We tell WPC that we're improving marble for them later, and besides, it's not a war oriented resource.

Maybe, though it will take them forever to connect, and I'm not sure they have Masonry yet. I think they do, but I'm not sure.

Can't hurt to ask, however.

[Sullla]

You guys are killing me here. I'm just going to state up front that I don't think we should waste time debating any plan that involves us gifting workers/settlers to other teams to connect marble. No team with any brains is going to put forth lots of effort just so that they can gift us marble and let us complete Taj. We are the obvious runaway civ, and no one is going to do much to help us at this point. We should plan on building the wonder without marble.

If you want to take a flyer on a diplo message and try to trade for marble with the Germans or something, be my guest. But enough with the gifting away of workers or settlers.

[kalin]

If we want marble for the Germans, how about something simple like this: "We noticed you have marble. What would you want if you connect it and gift it to us for X turns? If interested, when do you think you could have that available?".

I agree with Sullla and others that we have to assume that we won't have marble for Taj, but asking costs nothing.

Kalin

[novice]

Sullla, you're absolutely right that nobody will go through lots of effort just to help us - that's why we would probably have to pay them. Of course we'd rather not - but if we have a chance to halve our TM cost and it comes down to paying with a 100 hammer settler, that seems worth it.

It's a long shot, so yeah, we should definitely plan for a marbleless TM build.

On that note, AO can make 21hpt out of a GA, by working all its hammer tiles (we need to mine the rest of the hills). If we skip the forge, we can get +75% from Bureaucracy and OR. Add in max overflow from e.g. a spearman (should be easy to set up by 1-whipping it). In fact, AO completes its market on t124, so we should have plenty of time to set up a cascade of overflowing builds. Build a temple, spear and theatre to near-completion, then once we're in slavery we can 1-whip the spear into the theatre, next turn 1-whip the theatre into the temple, and next turn 1-whip the temple into the TM. (This is assuming we get back into slavery soon enough.) So we should be able to overflow 80 hammers from a temple, which are adjusted down to 48 base hammers of overflow. At +75% and 21 hpt, that makes TM a 17-turn build. (400 base hammers required).

Whipping TM itself yields 15 base hammers per pop, so we could e.g. slowbuild the wonder for 12 turns and 7-whip it to completion. In other words, hurrying it is quite expensive. Each whipped pop yields less than a turn of natural production, and you have to whip pop worth at least two turns of production in order to speed up the build at all.

It might be better to use a settler instead of a temple as part of the whip cascade, since we can get more overflow from a settler and can also convert some food to hammers that way. The caveat is that we can't grow while building the settler, but that might not be a problem. Catapult->Monastery->Aqueduct is another option. Catapult->Monastery->Settler would be ideal, if we could make it work.

[Ceiliazul]

I agree with Sullla and others that we have to assume that we won't have marble for Taj, but asking costs nothing.

[novice]

It occurs to me that we can use AO's ongoing market build as the final step of our whip cascade, if we don't have time to set up a catapult->monastery->settler cascade. (So we just go catapult->monastery->market). The cost is of course delaying the market by ~8 turns, which will cost a fair amount of gold and might require a larger HR garrison to keep the city happy. Of course the ultimate combo would be cat->monastery->settler->market. That could give us a 86 base hammer head start on TM.

[Bigger]

novice - instead of setting up a whip cascade, why not whip each item individually, and leave it in the queue until we can build the Taj? then complete each one every other turn, overflowing whip and production into taj?

[scooter]

Without straying too much into a diplo discussion in the turn discussion thread, I'm thinking like this:

1) Turn planners need to assume we will not have marble for the Taj. There's a strong chance we'll just have to do without, and banking on marble is foolish for a lot of reasons.
2) On the diplo front, we'd be crazy not to TRY to procure marble. No smart team is likely to give us marble at any cost. However, we do have some not very smart teams in this game! This is pretty well-documented. If someone is WILLING even at a high cost, we should consider it.


On the marble issue, can I get a confirmation on the status of marble worldwide? My understanding is these are the only 3 sources we know of:

1) CFC's unhooked marble that we are promised a loan on eventually, but not necessarily in time for Taj.
2) The marble between German team and WPC that neither have hooked
3) CivFr's source.

Are there any others that we know of? If so, we can start poking around and see if any dumb team is willing to sell us some.