Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[kjn]

Agree with Sian. The unexplored lands towards CFC can be handled by the galley and our chariot over in CFC land.

[Ceiliazul]

Also agree with Sian. There is much more land on the West side of crab crevice than there is on our explored East side.

[Sullla]

Turn 131 - 400AD

Liberalism is ours! Now the race is on for Taj Mahal.



As posted earlier, we did land Liberalism as we expected. Congrats to everyone who helped on a job well done. We cannot rest on our laurels, however, because the race for Taj Mahal has immediately begun. The surprise of the turn was CFC discovering Nationalism on the same turn that we slingshotted it with Liberalism. We will now be racing them to the free Golden Age. More on this in a minute.



Scouting units revealed two more Apolyton cities this turn; we now have vision on about half of them. Like all of the other Apolyton cities, they have quite a bit of infrastructure, with forges and libraries and courthouses and such. This overview shot gives a pretty good view of Apolyton's territory. They are not really that far away, and we'll need to make sure that we have an extended NAP in place with them before going to war with the Germans. Apolyton does seem to be pretty squeezed on territory, and I suspect that they are more or less out of room for more cities. If they can ever get some more population to go along with their infrastrucutre and teching, they could be dangerous. But their biggest weakness is that they just don't have that much in the way of population.



CivPlayers has founded a city on the northwest coast by the spices. This jungle region is rapidly disappearing as it gets claimed by all of the other powers in the area. I have heard some suggestions about trying to settle at the sugars, and while those resources would be nice, I think that would be stretching ourselves too thin. A city placed over there would be extremely difficult to defend, and we could basically kiss goodbye to any prospect of future relations with CivPlayers. I'm worried enough about having to defend Brick and Ditchdigger if we get into a war over here. Extending our borders even further west right now doesn't seem like a good idea to me. You guys can feel free to chime in with your thoughts, I just think that we're going to have enough on our hands when we go to war with the Germans.



This is what we've managed to explore in the southern reaches of CFC territory recently. Does that land connect down there? Maybe? We should know soon enough. In the event that it does, we can likely use our galley to found a city in a spot of our choosing down there to serve as a border fortress against CFC. They have largely ignored the south.

Note that CFC has Fast Workers chopping tundra forests in the middle of nowhere. This looks like a sure sign to me that they are making a play for Taj Mahal in their capital of Indira. And... guess what? When I highlight the marble near CFC's territory, it no longer says "requires quarry". That means that someone has connected that marble, even if I have not seen the resource in CFC's diplo screen just yet. We have to assume that they will have marble connected and will use it for their forest chops and Taj build.

Now the good news is that they still don't have much of a chance to build this thing quickly. Third and fourth ring chops don't provide that much in the way of production, and CFC's capital is heavily configred for commerce, much like our own. I counted up their tiles and got 17 shields/turn base if they work for maximum production there. CFC does not have a forge in the capital, and even with Bureaucracy, marble, and Organized Religion civic, that only gets them to 46 shields/turn. I think that we should beat them to Taj even assuming that they connect marble this turn or next turn. However, we need to start tracking production in CFC's cities. We need to check all the cities at first until we identify which one is building Taj, then keep close tracks on that one city each turn. I'll see what I can do about this, but if someone wants to help it would certainly be apprecitated.



Elsewhere, here is the deep south with our new city founded, Let It Snow. I have it going work boat -> granary with the benefit of a forest chop, which seemed to be the better order. If someone wants to do a more formal sim on those two builds, be my guest. We are hampered here until the borders pop and open up the crabs + cows tiles, fortunately a missionary will shortly be down here from Seven Tribes. Our war chariot will finally move off to explore that southwest darkness and see if there's anything worth settling in the area. The CivPlayers chariot scampered over to the east somewhere. Amusingly enough, they will have to sign Open Borders with us in order to get that unit back home. We reoffered them but their team did not accept so far.



Here's our core territory. The road through the jungle to Ditchdigger has now been completed, and that does a lot to make our cities in the west safer. Once we have Engineering tech, mounted units will be able to move from Adventure One to Brick in two turns. At some point, it might be worth getting a road around the southern edge of the lake as well, nearly all of which is controlled by our culture.

Anyway, Frozen Jungle overflowed from its granary whip and I stuck it onto a barracks. We are planning to use this as a mass workshop production location, and barracks felt more useful than any of the other options. Feel free to suggest other builds. Horse Feathers can build a 1t catapult this turn, which makes that build fairly easy to choose. In the capital, we overflowed into Taj Mahal:



Thanks to the extended planning done by novice, we get to start with the wonder more than 1/3 completed. Now I'm really glad that everyone insisted on pushing Taj so hard even when it didn't seem like there would be any competition. Good call there.

We are planned to swap to settler next turn and then whip it; the overflow will accelerate our Taj build and have the wonder complete eot 138. We can speed up the wonder a turn further by chopping the deer forest tile and funneling that into Taj. Obviously this costs us 1 production per turn for the rest of the game on that tile, but that's a trivial issue compared to the output of a free Golden Age. I plan to have a worker on that tile chopping in a few turns, and we can decide whether to finish the chop or not when we reach that point. So it looks like we'll be finishing here at the end of turn 137 if we chop that deer resource. That's 6 total turns including this one. For this early in the game, that's a pretty good completion rate. I'll post the current sandbox file later if anyone wants to play around with this and try to shave another turn off. I couldn't find a way to do that without whipping the wonder directly, which we probably want to avoid given the massive penalty.



In the east, Mansa overflows into a university while awaiting Metal Casting and forges. Eastern Dealers whipped its nearly completed library, and will overflow some 70 production into National Epic next turn. That was an excellent suggestion from last turn.

Starfall wants to whip a building of some kind next turn to overflow into Globe while awaiting the chance to whip a forge. I selected a monastery largely for selfish reasons; this is basically a "free" building here, and we can get extra culture to push on that silly CFC city. That said, the monastery doesn't really do all that much for us, and we can just as easily whip a barracks here instead. I was planning to go monastery -> forge -> barracks, but we can go barracks -> forge -> units instead. If this is just me loving the cultural push too much, let me know, and we can go with the barracks instead. We are about 1/4 of the way done with the Globe already from whip overflowing.

Overview:

We overflowed about 50 beakers from Liberalism into Metal Casting. I've set us to 0% research for the turn; we'll be able to go 100% rate next turn and almost (but not quite) finish the tech. We can then finish Metal Casting at 10% or 20% research the following turn, at eot 133. Although we can probably finish Metal Casting at the end of next turn by squeezing out extra beakers, it didn't feel worthwhile to me. End of turn 133 should be fine.

Without the Wealth builds and with our capital not working some of its cottages, our break-even rate is currently about 45% science, at about 260 beakers/turn. This will recover when we stop working all production tiles at the capital, hopefully after landing Taj.



We fall all the way to 5th in GNP at 0% gold for the turn, although a lot of teams are running unsustainable deficits right now. Few teams have much gold, and they'll have to build up their treasuries again. Kjn believes that CFC has been running massive Wealth builds and Representation Scientists in recent turns to reach Nationalism so fast, which would make sense given their lack of recent cities or new infrastructure builds. At 100% science, we are still #1 in GNP right now. Everything else is about the same as before.

There are some important strategic planning discussions to take place; I will be out for a while today, then try to post on that later tonight.

[Fintourist]

Great report as always! Quick comments:

1. I don't think we need to chop that deer-forest, but pre-chopping it and making the decision based on CFC sabotage production data sounds like a good plan.

2. I vote for the barracks build in Starfall. I think the extra culture will be only useful if we can win that damn desert hill. How do the ownership percentages of that tile look currently? Do we have any realistic chance of winning it?

3. I agree with not settling too far west. Let's consume the Germans and if CFC manages to establish themself as the strongest competitor, we might want to start looking more towards east and see if we can harm them. Their spiritual trait allows all kind of annoying "no-state-property-for-you-plays".

[NobleHelium]

I'm fine with a monastery build in SF.

Third ring chops are surprisingly good (24h). That tundra forest is fourth ring though.

[SleepingMoogle]

Agreed about the Deer. Pre-chopping it sounds like a good idea, but I'd rather keep it unless that would threaten us to lose out on the Taj. From what I read, we should be fine at least for now.

Buildings in Starfall I'm less sure about. But as a permanent draft-camp, it will have next to no production capabilities and it doesn't need the happiness bonus from Barracks. We could go wealth until MC is finished and then put the overflow into a Forge?

[NobleHelium]

We obviously need a barracks in the Globe city.

[novice]

I prefer whipping Barracks and then catapults in Starfall because those builds are more useful and because they give more overflow to the Globe Theatre.

In Let it Snow, I would chop a granary, then start the work boat. When the borders expand we can work the cows until the clams have been netted.
EDIT: And if we can time it so that the missionary spreads hindu at the same time as or before the granary chop comes in, that would be even better.

[fluffyflyingpig]

I prefer whipping Barracks and then catapults in Starfall because those builds are more useful and because they give more overflow to the Globe Theatre.

In Let it Snow, I would chop a granary, then start the work boat. When the borders expand we can work the cows until the clams have been netted.
EDIT: And if we can time it so that the missionary spreads hindu at the same time as or before the granary chop comes in, that would be even better.

Agree with novice.

[sooooo]

My comments:

1. How about we triple-whip the market at Gourmet Menu this turn. The sooner we get a market in a 50-commerce city the better. We whip away the coast (who cares), the plains mine and a plains cottage. The plains cottage can be worked by Seven Tribes instead of its plains farm.

2. I much prefer barracks at Starfall over monastery (for the XP). And after that I don't like a forge here at all. It costs 125 hammers which we won't recoup, since the only other building we will finish here is the globe theatre and we won't get close to saving 125 hammers on it. Once globe is in we'll only get 1 hammer per turn that doesn't even get increased by the forge and I doubt we'll whip the city again. I'd rather whip units (maybe another galley) here after barracks.

3. I think it has to make sense to chop a granary first at Let it Snow, then use the plains cow to hand-build the work boat as suggested by novice.

4. Catapult at Horse Feathers looks good to me.

5. Getting metal casting in 2 turns would require some cities to run wealth, so I agree best to get it in 3 turns.

6. Barracks at Frozen Jungle looks good. Let's mine its grass hill to give it another decent tile to work .

7. This is going to sound strange after I advocated mining a desert hill at horse feathers, but how about we swap from a plains mine here to a grass farm at this city, then triple-whip its forge in 4 turns time.