Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[dazedroyalty]

Yeah, wouldn't it be a less ideal play to use a GE on a wonder that gets the doubling modifier? Tho, they have marble and stone so basically they have the doubler on all wonders.

[Bigger]

Yeah, wouldn't it be a less ideal play to use a GE on a wonder that gets the doubling modifier? Tho, they have marble and stone so basically they have the doubler on all wonders.

not all of them. there's no doubler on wall street, for example . or some of the world wonders.

[Sullla]

Turn 141 - 620AD

This is getting late, so the report will have to be short. Or as short as someone as wordy as I am can make it.



We found the first place for a city that's not completely terrible down in the polar ocean. We could put a city on this hill tile, where it grabs crabs, marble, and two freshwater lake tiles. That's +7 food, infinitely better than any of the other spots. The downside is that the silver is third ring, so we would have to whip an early theatre and run some Artists to get the silver. It would probably take a dozen turns to get silver, as opposed to some of those other spots where we could settle on the silver immediately. The difference being that this spot would actually be worth settling, and not be a giant steaming turd. This location is also in a strong position in terms of controlling the sea lanes to the south of CFC and the north of WPC. A fortified city here would make it very difficult to stop us from raiding the southern coast of CFC later, and would provide easy fort/canal access across this particular island to either side.

What do you think? Worth settling here soonish for the silver, marble, and overall strategic position? (Not with the current settler, of course, but maybe soonish.)



Here's the actual south. Our settler is inside French Riviera, heading for the tile two west of the eastern crabs. It looks like the city gets founded T146. Catherine is about to expand borders next turn, and two workers will pasture that sheep for some food. The other worker will chop a plains forest into... something.

I'll request again the ability to use that chop for a theatre and run Artists to bring over irrigation. I think this city sucks bigtime otherwise, but up to the team in the end. Otherwise, we overflow/chop into lighthouse and simply work the coastal tiles at +4 food.



Overview of our western half of the civ. Stables finished in Horse Feathers and Brick By Brick. I set HF to a war chariot because it's the only unit that it can build in 1t right now; next turn, the city grows to size 14 and will be able to 1t war elephants. I'm pretty sure that we can use another 5XP war chariot, and it feels most useful to build a unit this turn rather than 90% of a catapult. Brick will build some elephants for the moment while waiting on Guilds tech.

Gourmet Menu is recovering nicely from its forge whip, and the market in there is about 80% completed with the whip overflow. Most of the happiness issues are gone there with the addition of the forge. Focal Point finishes its own forge next turn, then will go onto some catapult builds. Capital is letting Horse Feathers borrow the corn for this turn to grow to size 14, then it will take back the corn and grow itself to size 14, and then pass the deer tile to Mansa to allow poor Mansa to grow a bit.



Here's the only population abuse for the turn: a fairly standard forge whip in Seven Tribes. Only 2 pop and not 3 pop because we've gotten quite a bit of production into this thing already. I plan to overflow into a missionary here for one of the cities still lacking Hinduism.

We have no cities up for drafting this turn! Yeah, first draft cycle is basically complete now. Six more turns until the first unhappiness penalty wears off. We don't have enough surplus happiness to double draft cities.



Eastern half of our territory. Cutting Edge is waiting on that Hindu missionary from Tree Huggers (or a free spread - it's four tiles from the Shrine, darn it!) before whipping the forge. The overflow will finish the city's barracks, and then we'll grow and go all production. Forbidden Fruit, Simple Life, The Covenant are all just growing and working cottages. Eastern Dealers still needs more discussion:



Here's the city working specialists after finishing National Epic, as was requested last turn. Honestly though - I don't like this setup. The rate of Great Person Point accumulation is not that strong, and the city still has major happiness and cost problems. The city is happy neutral at size 9; I'm having to keep the drafted unit here for military police just to keep it from revolting. And check out that maintenance cost: just shy of 15 gold/turn. Yikes.

What I want to do is grow this size to size 12 and work 7 specialists. Unfortunately we don't have the happiness or even the specialist slots to do that right now. I would much rather we put the specialists on hold for another half-dozen turns to solve these problems first. Like this:



I'd like to ignore the specialists for the moment and run this configuration. Set the city to a forge, triple-whip next turn, and then use the overflow and work some mines to finish a courthouse. We need the forge for happiness purposes, and the maintenance costs without a courthouse are getting ridiculous. Plus, we can actually get good value out of both the Engineer and Spy specialist slots, which are probably more useful than Priests and Artists. I don't think we're in a drastic hurry to produce a Great Person in the next dozen turns, so why rush to work these crummy specialists when we can significantly improve the city first?

I hope I'm not crazy in posting this. I really think that we want a courthouse here ASAP, and we need either a forge or a barracks here to control unhappiness. The forge is obviously much more useful to the city.

Overview:

We're still saving gold for the Guilds run. It might not look like it yet, but our cities are economically recovering pretty nicely from the forge/draft abuse we put them through. That was a bit of a nadir for our economy, and of course it looks even worse on the Demos screen because we were running several Wealth builds previously. If we set our top production cities back to Wealth again, we'd be over 300 gold/turn right now. So the numbers we've been seeing have been a bit deceptive; we didn't suddenly collapse into a huge economic rut. With forges mostly in place now, courthouses and markets will come next and help us out significantly.

Probably 2 more turns of running 0% science after this one (until eot 143), and then 4 turns of max science for Guilds. End of turn 147 looks like our planned finishing date.



GNP still looking not so hot, although we did go back up to 3rd at 100% rate. This is the final turn of the CFC Golden Age, and CivFr is getting closer to the end of theirs as well. Lots of teams burning through cash at max research right now. German team's Golden Age has ended. Notice that no one else is building any military in response to our huge surge in Power. Five turns ago, we were 313k to the Rival Best of 293k; now it's 472k to 325k. Not exactly keeping pace.

Apolyton discovered Machinery tech and CFC discovered Engineering this turn. We'll see if CFC uses their Great Engineer on Notre Dame. We almost half to hope so, since there's not much anyone can do to stop them from just slow-building it with stone. This is another race we're not going to win... Can't do everything in this game, always have to make some sacrifices. Well, we'll see who's laughing when we've devoured a dozen German cities and nearly doubled our territory.

We should have graphs on CivFr in two more turns.

[NobleHelium]

I'm definitely in favor of planting on that crab + marble + third ring silver spot. Much better than any other spot we've found so far in the islands.

[SevenSpirits]

How are you suggesting we get the food to run 7 specs in ED?

[Merovech]

I'm definitely in favor of planting on that crab + marble + third ring silver spot. Much better than any other spot we've found so far in the islands.

Agreed, with the GLH it'll start turning a profit immediately, pay back the settler in a reasonable timeframe, and with two border pops make (almost) every other city better from the silver. It's too bad that we won't be able to run a few artist turns there. Would sending a missionary down there with the settler be feasible? That'd halve the number or turns for the border pops. The marble is nice, too.

[kjn]

How are you suggesting we get the food to run 7 specs in ED?

Eastern Dealers gets +14F at size 6 (3 grass farms, FP farm, pig, clam). However, it does mean giving up working the gems mine, so it's not a trivial trade-off.

[Merovech]

How are you suggesting we get the food to run 7 specs in ED?

We could chop/farm the two grasslands and drop the gems to give seven specialists at size 13. It's probably better to configure for just six or 5 specialists, though.

Edit: This was a cross-post with kjn, btw.

[sooooo]

My strong preference at eastern dealers is to hand-build the forge over 8 turns. Work the 4 mines, the pigs, the fish and the 2 farms and employ 2 scientists. I don't want to whip this city again - just keep growing and building hapiness buildings. Once the hapiness buildings are done (8t market after the forge iirc) then we change the mines to specialists.

[SevenSpirits]

My strong preference at eastern dealers is to hand-build the forge over 8 turns. Work the 4 mines, the pigs, the fish and the 2 farms and employ 2 scientists. I don't want to whip this city again - just keep growing and building hapiness buildings. Once the hapiness buildings are done (8t market after the forge iirc) then we change the mines to specialists.

This seems reasonable to me. At least we won't be working coast tiles!