[SPOILERS]The Tyrant realizes that once the world burns it gets really boring....

[NobleHelium]

You can connect the stone by forting it and roading it. Or you can quarry it and road it to a fort (or a city).

[spacetyrantxenu]

I knew a fort acted as a city for combat purposes, so I guess the same goes for trade group purposes. Good to know, thanks Noble. Won't come in to play here unless we're willing to wait until we can build a fort, though.

[Bigger]

if you play much single player, the ai is notorious for building forts instead of plantations, quarries, etc. sometimes even when the resource is within a BFC! very annoying.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T60 - That desert island just got more interesting:




Stone and copper in one (so far) pitiful looking city. Yes, that is city #5, coming up soon. We're saving cash again this turn so it doesn't matter yet, but I think we'll want to go Sailing next, build a galley, and run a settler up here ASAP. Settle on the stone, hope there is seafood, and work the copper. And build axes/spears in some hopefully low quantity. GLH is really looking better than mids to me, even though we have stone. Look at all those islands. Spam cities and damn the cost, they should be close to free to settle or at least very inexpensive with ICTRs and an extra trade route. Thoughts?




We need to explore the peninsula with the western chariot, if there is seafood out here that make a good case for city #6 after stone/copper. I put signs in game after taking this screenshot but I think the route should be onto the rice, then work north up the coast.

On the east side of the map I've sent a chariot to explore around the rice tile. It just happens that Azza's scout is there and can easily be killed if he doesn't double move away (which I'm sure he'll do, S/SE/live to see another day since he often plays the turn rolls like he did this one). I don't think we should actually kill his scout, that's very little gain for potentially making an enemy. No doubt he would be displeased and less likely to do business with us in the future.

I swapped to the river grassland tile in ML, so we're on for a 2 pop whip at 29/60 on the granary. HF will indeed have a half full food box next turn so I think we're OK to 2-pop whip the granary there as well. I think ML should overflow to a settler and then swap off to regrow...but what would we swap onto? Another work boat in hopes it is needed in stone city? We can figure that out.

It will take 7T to research Sailing, so I think we should get the settler built by then and whip a galley for the stone. I guess we could research Masonry first, though, and dump unboosted hammers into the pyramids and regrow that way. But that would delay settling Stone city, and therefore probably delay the completion date of the 'mids. Something to ponder.

I completed the road to Tyler. I don't know why you wanted the road on the plains tile instead of the rice, though. I roaded the rice because we'll need to farm it as soon as it is in our culture anyway, plus it is a more direct route to road over to The Boathouse from. It doesn't delay travel to Tyler from HF (once we put a road on the forest NE of the rice) so I thought that the rice was the right tile to road. I swapped Tyler onto the river grass tile so it can begin growing, now that its health crisis is temporarily over. But we need to keep adding happy resources, like roading our deer tile, or Tyler will be sick again. Once it has a granary we'll have more health available but until IW this is going to be a sickly little city.

Demographics:




No time to dig into this, but one of our rivals that we don't have graphs on continues to build military. Hopefully there is a war going on out in the fog and they're both wasting hammers. Our numbers look solid all around, especially since we're saving cash right now (but maybe GNP actually sucks since we're pumping out a lot of culture). I think we've had a decent start so far overall.

I guess the questions to settle now are tech path: Sailing --> Masonry, Masonry --> Sailing, or...do we even want to consider Polytheism --> Priesthood now? I don't think the oracle makes as much sense for us now. I think I'd prefer GLH over mids, though, given what we've seen of the map and our desire to go wide rather than tall. It looks like we're going to have a lot of coastal cities and they'll all be boosted by GLH. We don't have many rivers and lakes, so not as many farmable tiles, and not a ton of food until we can chain irrigate with Civil Service, so 'mids / representation doesn't look to be as strong as it otherwise could be. I think we should tech Sailing and Masonry, get our settler built (possibly at HF), and chop out the Lighthouse as soon as possible. We'll need to decide on a plan soon, though, probably by next turn so we can set the tech path we need.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Quick hit thoughts:

Don't kill Azza's scout. Poor lad has been through enough already.
Overflow Mr. Love for a settler. Dumping these hammers into the Mids this early isn't going to be helpful overall towards completing the wonder. Better to get the city founded earlier and then start dumping everything we can once we have stone.
Sailing before Masonry. This leaves GLH in play, and a LH at Mr. Love gives us an additional 2 food even if we don't land GLH.
Re: road to barb capture - I was going for the route that got the TR in fastest, and going over the open grass saved a couple worker turns. Also, these tiles are (will be) in our culture soon and are a more forward route toward our nearest opponent. Finally, it roads a dyes tile, not that that will matter for an age yet. Mostly, forward road nearest our opponent. If you have worker turns to spare the other way, go for it, but I think we need to prioritize cottages like crazy. The rice was the intended tile to road, yes. I skipped it to save worker turns/get the road completed faster, as the follow up group can knock it out instantly without any waste.

Other stuff:

Wide vs. Tall - We're CHM and built Henge. We're tall, period. We can REX too, but we have plenty of upward growth. If you want to go wide, we just have the luxury of whipping harder. So, food, grow, whip.

GLH would be pretty good for us right about now. Mids would be good too, and I doubt many other teams have located Stone this soon, so we have a perceived advantage there on top of being IND. If you prefer GLH, we can go for that, but we may have more competition for that than Mids, based on the lack of a resource doubler (if you know there isn't one, you're less likely to feel deterred because you don't have it and assume someone else may). Also, I think it more likely that someone would go for an early sailing than early Masonry. Masonry is there if you want Mids, GLH, or Judiasm, and for little else. At least with sailing you get a building and a unit that are both useful immediately, and long distance TRs at Writing. I'll really need to get in the sandbox and play around to get a feel for how soon we can get GLH. It is possible that someone is already far ahead of us on this. Can you go back and do some analysis on starting locations and #tiles in capitals? This is going to be important to know so we can kind of eyeball guestimate how much competition we may have from another team's water capital.

[spacetyrantxenu]

If this was AW I'd for sure whack the scout, but I agree there's no point in doing it here.

I've already roaded the rice tile to complete the trade route to Tyler. If you have a different path in mind to The Boathouse that's fine, I just went as straight down the diagonal as possible for quickest reinforcements from ML.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

if you've already started roading the other path, just do that one. I don't want to waste time and duplicate effort/waste worker turns.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I don't know about going back for it now, but I think only one team had fewer land tiles than us at the start of the game. We know that everyone will have started with (at least? or only) three hills in the BFC, including whoever has less land tiles than us. The team with less land tiles than us probably also got the start balanced by adding multiple seafood, like ours did. So we can assume a strong production and food capacity at their capital, whoever it was. I may be able to go back and see who that was, and if they're an IND team, or if they started with Fishing, but that's probably about it.

Of course, by now the greater competition may well come from anyone's second city. Anyone could have teched Sailing and Masonry by now and could have enough workers to chop chop chop. I think all we can do is whip in a lighthouse for maximum overflow into tGLH and then save any chops for the end to complete it, saving the chops in case someone beats us to it. If we get beat we get beat, we can't catch 'em all.

I think the thing to test would be whether we'll be able to try for 'mids and tGLH. Sounds audacious, right? But when The Boathouse comes out of revolt soon we may find out that we can't afford more cities for a little while anyway, so other than building workers and keeping pace in military power, we may have some spare capacity in a build queue coming up soon. Well, if you can ever have spare capacity...I guess I mean to say that it would be decent time to build wealth if we had Currency, but since we don't we can put hammers into a wonder that we'd really like to have. But that is a bit down the line -- we need to put out a galley and settler first, along with garrison for the new city. Maybe that's far enough down the line that it becomes a situation where we have to choose one or the other and not shoot for both.

Maybe this: we pick one as our priority, that we're going for. As long as the second city (either of ML or HF, whichever one isn't building the primary wonder) isn't interfering with the primary build, we can work on the other wonder there. So, for my money, the primary target would be tGLH, we set ML to working on it, mine all the hills we can, set the chops to come in on the last turn to complete it. At the same time HF can be working on 'mids after we get up Stone/Bronze city and as long as it doesn't steal needed tiles from HF we can work on it at the same time. I'm sure we won't land both, but this has been a strange game so far, you never know. At best it could put us far ahead. At worst, well at least the fail gold is from IND-boosted hammers.

Taking on building the secondary wonder would only come into play if we didn't have an immediate need for more of anything out of a good production city, so we may not even have time to try this. I guess it's time to sim and find out.

[spacetyrantxenu]

RE: workers, all they did this turn was complete the road into Tyler. Nothing is set for next turn, I just put down signs on the map. If you have a preference for the forward road instead of the quicker reinforcements road, that's possible still. I think I just value being able to reinforce from HF sooner more highly than projecting a bit more pressure at the edge of our culture due to mobility.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I don't know about going back for it now, but I think only one team had fewer land tiles than us at the start of the game. We know that everyone will have started with (at least? or only) three hills in the BFC, including whoever has less land tiles than us. The team with less land tiles than us probably also got the start balanced by adding multiple seafood, like ours did. So we can assume a strong production and food capacity at their capital, whoever it was. I may be able to go back and see who that was, and if they're an IND team, or if they started with Fishing, but that's probably about it.

Of course, by now the greater competition may well come from anyone's second city. Anyone could have teched Sailing and Masonry by now and could have enough workers to chop chop chop. I think all we can do is whip in a lighthouse for maximum overflow into tGLH and then save any chops for the end to complete it, saving the chops in case someone beats us to it. If we get beat we get beat, we can't catch 'em all.

I think the thing to test would be whether we'll be able to try for 'mids and tGLH. Sounds audacious, right? But when The Boathouse comes out of revolt soon we may find out that we can't afford more cities for a little while anyway, so other than building workers and keeping pace in military power, we may have some spare capacity in a build queue coming up soon. Well, if you can ever have spare capacity...I guess I mean to say that it would be decent time to build wealth if we had Currency, but since we don't we can put hammers into a wonder that we'd really like to have. But that is a bit down the line -- we need to put out a galley and settler first, along with garrison for the new city. Maybe that's far enough down the line that it becomes a situation where we have to choose one or the other and not shoot for both.

Maybe this: we pick one as our priority, that we're going for. As long as the second city (either of ML or HF, whichever one isn't building the primary wonder) isn't interfering with the primary build, we can work on the other wonder there. So, for my money, the primary target would be tGLH, we set ML to working on it, mine all the hills we can, set the chops to come in on the last turn to complete it. At the same time HF can be working on 'mids after we get up Stone/Bronze city and as long as it doesn't steal needed tiles from HF we can work on it at the same time. I'm sure we won't land both, but this has been a strange game so far, you never know. At best it could put us far ahead. At worst, well at least the fail gold is from IND-boosted hammers.

Taking on building the secondary wonder would only come into play if we didn't have an immediate need for more of anything out of a good production city, so we may not even have time to try this. I guess it's time to sim and find out.

"If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both."

RE: workers, all they did this turn was complete the road into Tyler. Nothing is set for next turn, I just put down signs on the map. If you have a preference for the forward road instead of the quicker reinforcements road, that's possible still. I think I just value being able to reinforce from HF sooner more highly than projecting a bit more pressure at the edge of our culture due to mobility.

We can go with your road, that's fine. I haven't simmed anything, so I don't know what the current situation is or should be at this moment.

--

I'm away from Civ tonight. One of my wife's friends decided that a sunrise wedding at the beach on a workday (when my wife has an Orientation to run, no less, so now I get to fetch her to/from work) would be just the thing, so we're staying overnight a little closer to the beach so as to be up and ready for this bullshit on time. If anything interesting happens, text me, I'll probably need some relief.