Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[sooooo]

Wow, 23 hours to go and it's just us and the germans left to finish turn!

Looks good, cities to draft are fine by me. Though we could whip The Covenant instead of Simple Life. This gets the whip in before we whip the city down to size 5, so would delay the city's whip for a couple of turns.

After logging in I noticed that after all the whipping and drafting we have done or are set to do, we're well set for tile improvements in our core cities. This may be a good time to prioritise some of the other things with our workforce:

Transfer a worker or two to the new southern cities to help our with roading, chopping and improvements.
Hook up the iron with a road before we get guilds.
It look suspicious that we've roaded the jungle tile next to the german city - can we go there and start a watermill (and not cancel the action at end of turn) to make us look less suspicious?
Road the deer and the tile 2S of Adventure One to improve the road network.

[scooter]

I don't really think the power graph shooting up is a negative thing. I like it a lot, actually. Nobody really knows where our army is going, and we might be able to use it as leverage for a NAP extension or two before the German war kicks off.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Yeah it makes people want to placate us. We offer a NAP, they go "yes please", we go in return please keep this a secret

[kjn]

Yes. Connecting the iron should be a priority right now. I think we should also look at getting a road over towards WPC and Fields of Color, so we have a secure trade route there, and can shuffle units between us quickly at need.

[Sullla]

Turn 139 - 580AD

More quick turns, the last turn rolled by in just over 24 hours. I'm not sure if this is good or bad for us; at the very least, it's less time for teams to exchange messages and talk about how worrying the big, bad Egyptian team looks. We were last to play on the previous turn (with 22 hours on the clock!) so I went ahead and drafted the suggested cities and whipped the settler in production. On to this turn.



This happened right as the turn was rolling. CFC popped a Great Engineer in their Pyramids city; no idea if this was a lucky dice roll or a planned forge Engineer + Pyramids strategy. In either case, they have their pick of a free wonder of some kind. The good news is that there's nothing much out there to rush at the moment. Notre Dame is the most useful one coming up, but they are a long way from Engineering at the moment. Perhaps CFC will sit on this Great Engineer and try to save it for something like Statue of Liberty later (?) That would be a strong option. I guess we'll see what they choose to do with it.



Here's a little bit more detail on the southern islands. I guess there's an iron there, for what it's worth. We'll probably want one city down here for silver, and that's about it. The only way to make these spots viable would be free corporation food from Sid's Sushi, which will hopefully never factor into this game.



We did finally spot the borders of CivPlayers in the west, while continuing to dodge even more barbarian axes. This is one of the most desolate regions I've ever seen, almost nothing but bare tundra everywhere. Not much can be done here even with Biology farms and State Property. We'll snoop around a bit more on the border, and then return home to try and have this Sentry unit take part in the upcoming war effort.



Quick management question at Let It Snow: do we cottage the grassland tiles and run this as a commerce city, or save them for workshops later and make this a production city? I'm thinking it leans towards commerce, given the lack of hill tiles and the fur resource (5 commerce tile). I thought that I'd let people weigh in with their opinions before making any final decisions. The borders just expanded this turn, and the cows will be pastured next turn. (Working the crabs resource over the unpastured cows does not delay the work boat, which finishes the same turn regardless.)



Here's the center of our territory. I've been moving drafted maces in the general direction of Tree Huggers, which should be a useful place for them to hang out for the moment. German team should not have seen any of the maces thus far. We are tiptoeing the happiness line pretty closely in a lot of these cities, even with all of our happiness resources. That will get better with time; the main thing that we need are forges (+2 happiness) and barracks (also +2 happiness). Drafting without having barracks in place always means a rather nasty hit. Anyway, forges are going up across our territory and barracks will be next in the cities that don't have them. We do not have enough happiness to double draft these cities. That would put them into unhappiness - only in an emergency. Notre Dame would be a godsend, hopefully we can land that one.

The cities to draft this turn are fairly straightforward: our original core of Adventure One, Mansa's Muse, and Focal Point. The capital and Focal Point can both immediately regrow after drafting, which is why I saved them until this turn. Mansa cannot regrow, and indeed will give up a grassland farm and sit at zero food after drafting. Mansa is paying the price for us whipping the capital so many times before; the capital needs to regrow back to size 14 to work all of its cottages, and that means no deer tile for Mansa. We'll give the deer tile back once Adventure One reaches its happiness cap, and then get some food going inside Mansa.

The Covenant is only size 5, we'll draft it next turn when it regrows. Ditchdigger, French Riviera, and Frozen Jungle are all also sub-6, and will get drafted when they hit those targets.



Since there's not much else to discuss, here's the tech overview for the current turn. The main news here was CivFr discovering Machinery this turn, shortly after our own discovery. They are almost out of gold, but appear to be running break-even science most of the time. Still in their Golden Age as well, about halfway through. As far as I can tell, none of the other major competitors discovered techs this turn. The pace continues to be quite stagnant there. Apolyton ran 100% rate but didn't finish anything. So did UniversCiv, and although we can't see their techs, it doesn't look like they finished anything either from score tracking. CFC ran break-even science without getting anything. CivPlayers and German team amassed gold. I ignore what WPC and Spanish are doing because they are essentially irrelevant at this point.

No one has Feudalism tech, still, despite being 140 turns into the game. The German team hasn't revolted into Hereditary Rule civic, which means that they probably do not have Monarchy tech either. It's looking less and less likely that they'll have longbows or maces on Turn 150, which will make things a heck of a lot easier for us.

Overview:

As I said, we are drafting AO, MM, and FP this turn. The only other pop change is the 4 pop whip planned for Starfall, which will finish the forge and overflow about 45 shields into Globe Theatre. Then we'll start double whipping catapults for the upcoming war effort.

I set research to 0% on Feudalism, and we overflowed about 350 beakers into the tech. We could research it in 3t of break-even science, but of course the min/max binary strategy seems to be working quite well for us. If we want, we can save gold for a few turns here until we can go 100% research and push straight through both Feudalism and Guilds. There's really no reason not to do so, as there's nothing at Feudalism that we particularly care about. Why drop the price of Feudalism for other teams before we have to? I'm think that we should probably do this unless someone can make a good case for not doing so.

Since we had some comments on this before, I am quietly putting roads down along the German border in preparation for our future war, while also adding tile improvements on the same tiles to make them look less suspicious. There will be roads on all the crucial border tiles before our battles begin. There's also a worker about to connect our iron resource as well, to be available when we start to train knights.



We're largely treading water in the Demos, but that in and of itself is exactly what we want. In the last two turns, we whipped or drafted about 18 population across our territory, and we've only seen a minor drop in Food and GNP. We've been timing our population abuse to coincide with regrowth in most cases, and I think we've done a solid job of minimizing the damage to our Demos. The tradeoff has been our huge increase in military power, which will be up 150k in three turns after we finish drafting on the current turn. That's not to mention three cities about to go all military, and our Heroic Epic city which will start one-turning out units for the forseeable future. CFC and German team are also getting close to the end of their Golden Age, I think it's 2 more turns after this one for both of them. CivFr's Mausoleum ensures that they still have quite a ways to go for theirs.

UniversCiv has now spent enough EP against us that it's become clear we're never getting their bar graphs back again. Not until much much later in the game, anyway. They have 170 EP and climbing against us. That's a losing race, so I shifted our spending over to CivFr. Hopefully we can get their graphs at the very least. Our complete lack of courthouses has left us behind in this area, but given our need for forges and barracks at the moment, I still don't see us building them any time soon. It's fairly impressive how competitive we've been on tech despite making no effort to build courthouses at all, on a map where they are fairly strong builds (Emperor, Toroidal). When we finally do hit Communism/State Property, our empire is going to be frighteningly powerful.

I don't think there's too much to discuss on this current turn, but fire away with your thoughts and suggestions. I'll finish playing the turn this evening.

[novice]

The Statue of Liberty is not a good Great Engineer target since it's too expensive to rush with one engineer, and it doesn't save that many base hammers since the wonder has a multiplier resource. I think it's more likely that CFC use it to pick up Notre Dame.

I guess we're going Feudalism-Guilds-Engineering? Making an attempt at Notre Dame is probably still worthwhile since the stone resource will at least give us a good hammer-to-failgold conversion rate.

Like someone (Sian?) mentioned, I think a city on CivPlayers' wounded chariot's current location is worthwhile. Two deers and a couple of grassland tiles is sufficient for a small drafting city. I don't know when our next settlers are planned - this site is somewhat contested but it probably makes sense to prioritise the city south of Catherine first.

[kjn]

I think the GE is a lucky break for CFC - Terasvin didn't have a forge last I checked. It does mean they have a lock on Notre Dame if they want it though. They only need Machinery before they can research Engineering, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're researching Machinery right now.

A possible sign that most teams are running out of worthwhile land to settle was that no new land were claimed on T138 (if some team claimed tiles, then they took them from another team). The last time that happened was on T111.

Apolyton received a monster score increase of 30 this turn. Not sure what's up with that. They don't have Literature yet and they already have Moai. Must have grown a lot of pop and received some land score. Will have to check when the game is back up.

As for a staging tile, I think the plains tile 2SE of Cutting Edge makes for a good spot. It's out of visibility for all teams, and it's located so it's hard to tell if the stack will go against the Germans, WPC, or CFC.

[NobleHelium]

Looks like the best city location on the islands visible at the moment is on the western bigger one. There is a two-tile lake there and we can get up to +4 food with a lighthouse and just work coast.

[sooooo]

I'd go cottages at Let It Snow for the reasons you mentioned. Shame about the CFC engineer - pretty sure that means no Notre Dame for us. But as you say, we should probably go for it for the failgold.

[kjn]

I'm not against making Let It Snow into a commerce spot, but we will need at least one city geared towards production on our southern shores in the short and medium term. We don't know if the Germans has had any real naval focus, and they could hurt Starfall pretty badly.

Once we've taken the German lands, the need for a naval base in the south becomes less (Wien would make for a good naval base).