Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Bigger]

ok thats a good point, im not plugged into the specifics of the micro. also whipping off cottages to be picked up by a neighbor city, as someone suggested, is not really ideal while we are in Bureaucracy.

[novice]

About 1-pop whippings: According to my very quick and rough math, one optimized whip overflow will improve our Taj Mahal ETA by about 1.4 turns. I agree with Sullla that whipping away cottages from AO is not desirable, but I'm pretty sure that 2 or 3 one-pop whips will hit the sweetspot. 16t Taj with two whips seems doable, maybe even a 14t Taj with 3 whips, but I bet we end up couple of hammers short there.

That 1.4 turns is an ideal number though. It depends on getting a build to within 1 hammer of completion, and still being able to put 51 base hammers (1-pop whip + 21 natural hammers) into it without hitting the overflow cap.

I'm looking at the sandbox now to see what can realistically be achieved.

[kjn]

To all plans that involve a new city: keep in mind that we have like 9-10 turns until we'd start building Taj. Building a settler (without slavery) and moving it in position is unlikely in our time frame...

Focal Point can knock out a settler in 4t (if we delay the theatre), or we can take the settler that's 1W of Simple Life right now.

If we grab the existing settler, then it can be on the marble on T127, and can found the city T128. If we simply build a settler in FP, then it's ready T125, reaches the marble T130, and can found the city T131. (All times modulo how extensive the CFC road network is northwest of Raj).

Even if we do not plant the city in time for when we are about to start Taj Mahal, it makes it much more worthwhile to do whip overflows, since those can be prepared before we start Taj, and then the hammers saved until we can get the marble. It also should allow us to knock out the NE in Eastern Dealers much quicker too - that's another 100 saved hammers.

Heck, 10t could be enough to deny CivFr the Parthenon, if they don't hurry with it, or allow us to put in the Hermitage in a border city.

[T-hawk]

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?

The cascade lets you overflow more turns of non-whip natural production. Suppose the city can produce 21 hpt. Set up the spearman at 34/35, theater at 49/50, temple at 79/80. Build the spearman three turns before Nationalism for 20 overflow. Build the theater on turn N-2 for 40 overflow. Build the temple on turn N-1 for 60 overflow. Apply that 60 overflow to the Taj on turn N. So you get three turns ahead as compared to naively getting the tech then starting the wonder.

Whips can be added to that idea, although there's no real difference between whipping for overflow before Nationalism or after, the whip adds as many hammers on the 34/35 spearman either way. But there is a difference regarding natural production; the cascade timeshifts production from before Nationalism (when it shouldn't be allowed to go into Taj) to after.

[novice]

Honestly, I've looked at the math on this, and Adventure One can simply build Taj Mahal in 19 turns by setting up full production overflow on something on the first turn. Like novice said, the base rate is 21 production per turn, which gets modified by 50% from Bureaucracy and 25% from Organized Religion for 36 production/turn. If we get a barracks or something to 49/50 production and overflow the full 35 shields, it looks like this:

(35 + 36 first turn = 71) + (36 * 18 = 648) = 719 production

So all of the suggested whipping does is reduce the ETA from 19 turns down to 18 turns. It also means that our capital will be whipping off of some extremely strong grassland cottage tiles that we probably want to be working anyway. I'm also not even sure that we can run 21 base production/turn if we are doing 4 different one-pop whips in the next couple of turns. At size 14, the capital doesn't exactly grow population quickly.

Long story short: this feels like a classic RB case of overcomplicating stuff. There's really no need to do all these elaborate 1t overflow chains. I mean, would we really want to delay a market for 8 turns and whip the capital multiple times to cut the wonder's finish date from 19t down to 18t? Yes, insert standard argument about how one turn can sometimes make the difference, I know. But let's not cut off our noses to spite our face either. We should have Alphabet tech long before we get close to finishing Taj, we should be able to see what techs everyone else has, and we'll have the option to whip the wonder to completion and/or chop the grassland deer forest for a bonus shot of production. I honestly don't think anyone else beats us to Taj without a Great Engineer if we go for the eot 130 Liberalism plan, just because no one else will be able to reach Nationalism tech that fast.

OK, I tried things out and I sort of agree with the bolded line.

Still, I was able to cut the Taj Mahal down to a 16-turn build, started on t131 and completed eot146. We gain 75 base hammers from 2 whip overflows, which along with 16 turns of 21 base hammer production yields 411 base hammers, or 719 adjusted hammers (so we have a bit of leeway).

We only really have two builds that are suited for max overflow: Settlers and temples (and more expensive buildings). Theatres, barracks and monasteries are too cheap. So we can build a settler to near completion while we're in pacifism, then build a temple to near completion once we're back in OR and Slavery (revolt back t127 IIRC). On t130 we can do the double bulb Edu + 1-turn Lib trick, and 1-pop whip the temple to 159/160 hammers. This gives 45 base hammers overflow into Taj Mahal on turn 131:



We can then grow another size on the Taj Mahal build (or micro it better to be one size larger already), and then 1-whip the settler for another 30 base hammers gain. (The settler is at 99/100 in the screenshot above.) Notice how we need to be size 13 to be in our max hammer configuration.

Maybe delaying the market and 1-whipping that is actually a better option than building that settler, though. Or maybe it's a worthwhile addition.

[novice]

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?

The cascade lets you overflow more turns of non-whip natural production. Suppose the city can produce 21 hpt. Set up the spearman at 34/35, theater at 49/50, temple at 79/80. Build the spearman three turns before Nationalism for 20 overflow. Build the theater on turn N-2 for 40 overflow. Build the temple on turn N-1 for 60 overflow. Apply that 60 overflow to the Taj on turn N. So you get three turns ahead as compared to naively getting the tech then starting the wonder.

Whips can be added to that idea, although there's no real difference between whipping for overflow before Nationalism or after, the whip adds as many hammers on the 34/35 spearman either way. But there is a difference regarding natural production; the cascade timeshifts production from before Nationalism (when it shouldn't be allowed to go into Taj) to after.

Nicely explained. The problem is that you need to have the items in the cascade prebuilt to near completion, otherwise the cost of completing them eats up the timeshifted hammers. In our case we only have time to prebuild two items, a settler and a temple. We could use the nearly complete market as a third item though. So we should probably sim a 3-turn cascade from temple to settler to market, to see how that works out. I don't have time tonight though.

[Fintourist]

Thanks novice for your work! How many hammers had you in excess when you completed the Taj?? I think our goal should be to complete the wonder in 16 turns with the minimum cost for the growth of our capital. Maybe we can afford to whip another item than the settler, which is less optimal from overflow perspective, but does not stop the growth. Or could we still get the wonder in 16 turns by finishing e.g. a spear (or that market) without a whip but with otherwise optimized overflow one turn before we start building the Taj and later whip the temple as suggested?

Sorry everybody for so many questions and speculation, but if this is not the right target for detailed micro plans, I don't know what would be (apart from microing the whole civ as done by Sullla of course ). Squeezing those 3 turns from the ETA can make the difference.

[Sullla]

I'm not at all sure we can hit that eot 130 Liberalism date once we start doing all these whips in the capital. It's very tight from my sandbox work when we're working standard tiles and finishing the market in the capital. I'm still not convinced that this is worthwhile. Anyway, feel free to play around with things, but remember that you can't just Worldbuilder in the techs we need. Whipping off a bunch of tiles as in the screenshot posted above is going to make it very tough to land Liberalism.

And seriously, just stop with these crazy settler plans with regards to marble. You guys are giving me a headache. This isn't Single Player, and we're not moving a settler 20 tiles away from our borders to plant on marble in an impossible place to defend. It's not happening. Move on to some other topic.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

I would work on this, but honestly, you guys have moved beyond my pay grade with this level of micro.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I agree, given how close we've come on both the Oracle and MoM. I fear that lacking marble we may find ourselves in the same predicament as with MoM; a huge head start from tech only to be undermined by the lack of the doubling resource. If there is ANY way we can obtain marble diplomatically, it should be entertained. If there is ANY way outside of diplomacy short of declaring an untimely war, it should likewise be entertained. Landing the Taj is exactly what our best opponent, CivFr, needs and has likely targeted to try to reel us in. This is the knockout blow for us and a lifeboat for them.

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Edit: Why should we not consider a harebrained scheme to plant a 65h settler on a chunk of marble that would save us half the cost of a 700h build? Who cares if we lose the city? It is an investment on a critical build that is a net hammer profit. I think everyone in this forum is aware that this is not single player. That kind of talk is discouraging and non-productive. If the idea is bad, it will be shouted down. Diplomatic impact should and would be considered, but that has not happened at all. Don't stifle the conversation just because you think it is a bad idea. Something reckless like this is exactly what could have won us the MoM when we had so many forests to chop at Focal Point, had we but known settling for marble was a possibility, no matter how remote. Given complete information, whether we would have done it or not is a matter of debate (diplomatic concerns, etc), but that ship has sailed.