Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[NobleHelium]

You can see exactly what is inside the city by examining the units in F5.

[Lord Parkin]

Tell WPC not to attack anything until after we play our turn.

What about their Catapult? Can only help for them to send it in first, right?

[T-hawk]

That's normal with the interface. If all the units can't fit in the vertical rectangle, it'll compress some of them to "Catapult (7)" and such. You can alleviate it a little with Ctrl-I or Alt-I to remove the interface bar and make more room. You can alleviate it more by playing at a higher resolution. You can alleviate it even more by setting up a smaller font in Civ4Theme_Common, though not sure if that will work in a modded MP game.

[NobleHelium]

Someone check F4 and see if there are any important new techs completed?

[kjn]

Some domestic notes for this turn.

Cities:

Adventure One: can be drafted this turn or next turn (after growth)
Focal Point: finish spy, missionary or courthouse next?
Gourmet Menu: can be drafted
Tree Huggers: do not pick up CE cottage yet - finish the market quickly first, I think
Seven Tribes: can be drafted
The Covenant: pick up cottage from SL
Starfall: draft! Maybe put a few hammers into a courthouse
Simple Life: whip market
French Riviera: draft and whip?
Frozen Jungle: draft or whip courthouse this turn? I think courthouse.
Let It Snow: whip courthouse
Mano y Mano: works rice+spices for some reason
Denial of Nile: work pigs+corn for now
Wien (needs name): start courthouse
The Gauntlet: works the cow, didn't we decide on the sheep?
Wittenberge (needs name): start courthouse

Workers:

Three workers 1S of CE: send one to chop FF's forest, two to TH to cottage and clear jungle

Three workers 1SE of PETA: busywork in area, ready to farm rice next turn

Outside Starfall: continue roading towards ED/FF

Outside ED: windmill TC's hills? Clear jungle?

Outside ST: mine or windmill hills? Road towards Brick by Brick?

Outside Catherine: busywork roads?

[sooooo]

kjn: I don't think we should draft adventure one. It's so slow to grow and I want to see it grow onto the next plains mine to power up production into economic buildings (university, Oxford, grocer, bank etc). There are plenty of worse cities to draft, see my post at the top of the page.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Okay.




I've crossed out the units that are at Westheim, and a galley (wow, never even noticed it before. Did it spend the last half dozen turns harassing the WPC coast?






Notable units are a CG3 longbow, that thing could have been incredibly nasty if it was sitting in a real city.




We didn't get the rice in our borders. I expect it'll just take another turn for the borders to recalculate, but a damn shame that we still can't start the farm.

Funny thing is, I noticed that Denial's borders popping would bring the rice into play a couple of livestreams ago, but I wasn't logged in as I had forgotten my password. So I fired up Gchat with Seven to tell him to bring it to your attention (so you'd missionary Denial), but someone with an autistic knowledge of everything about this game bought it up before Seven could pass it on .

Also, I propose we bring Sian, our Woody II axe, over to the CPers border so to force them to cover their units with something more substantial. I'd like to negotiate with a bit of a bite.

[NobleHelium]

Yes, rice will be in borders next turn. We spread religion in there quite a few turns ago. We also noticed the galley before that.

[Ruff_Hi]

You can alleviate it even more by setting up a smaller font in Civ4Theme_Common, though not sure if that will work in a modded MP game.

Changing colors and / or fonts in Civ4Theme_Common works for all of the MP games that I have participated in (pbem, pitboss, IP, etc). Explicitly, it does work for this game.

[Sullla]

Let's look at our domestic empire right now for T161. We'll look at the military side of things tonight when we Livestream the turn. I can combine those posts together later into a huge formal turn report.

Here's the short idea for the turn:

Potential Wealth Builds
Adventure One (university): 11 gold/turn
Mansa's Muse (university): 7 gold/turn
Focal Point (spy): 18 gold/turn
Brick By Brick (spy): 25 gold/turn
Cutting Edge (courthouse): 20 gold/turn

Draft: Starfall, Brick, Cutting Edge
Whip: Simple Life

And then to cover these ideas in more detail in turn. I mentioned before that we should strongly consider running some Wealth builds in our higher production cities to speed along our economy. These are the best locations that I see right now. Cities like Adventure One and Mansa's Muse don't have a great need for their universities at the moment due to our very low break-even tech rate (currently at about 22% science). They can easily run Wealth builds, and in fact the capital is about to grow onto a plains hill mine next turn, which would be +5 gold/turn (16gpt total). Focal Point is finishing a spy, and then I would have it build Wealth after that starting next turn. There's another 18gpt, down to 15gpt after we draft the city. Brick By Brick is the same story, we need a second spy (to run counter-espionage against both CivPlayers and Apolyton) and after that it does one of two things: more catapults or build Wealth. It depends on how safe we feel, you could talk me into either. Cutting Edge finishes its courthouse this turn, I suggest we pop it onto Wealth next turn (20gpt, 16gpt after drafting).

If you add all of those together, it comes out to roughly 80 gold/turn extra. When testing, this took us from our current break-even science rate of about 22% up to a break-even rate of almost 40% science, roughly 37% or so. We were losing 50 gold/turn at 40% science while making 350 beakers/turn. That's far from good at this stage, but it's a hell of an improvement from the pre-Printing Press stage when we were barely making gold at 10% science. Since we can pretty much rely on drafting to fill out the ranks of our military (along with the Heroic Epic city), and there's little need for science multiplier buildings until our break-even rate recovers, I think that we'd do better to have these mature cities generate some Wealth for a while. I don't think we need THAT much more military, given that we're already #1 by a vast margin, at least not unless we see Apolyton going into major buildup mode.

Drafting: Starfall is a no-brainer. Brick By Brick is at the food cap, so it may as well draft off its plains hill mine and grow back again. Cutting Edge has a very same position to Brick, it drafts off a grassland hill mine and regrows in 2t. I didn't see any other city in a great position to draft this turn. Several will be in position to do so next turn, like Frozen Jungle. Focal Point is closest, but it will regrow in 3t regardless of whether we draft this turn or next turn, so may as well draft it next turn and get one extra turn of working the grassland hill mine. I see little reason to draft mature, strong commerce cities when we have such an enormous military already and tons of low-infrastructure cities out in the boonies that can be drafted for the same unit. We can always draft core cities later if we're facing a more serious threat.



Whips: This is the only whip that I see for this turn. We need to free up some pop since we've outgrown the number of improved tiles in the area. (Note the Engineer specialist and the nextdoor Covenant working the bare grassland tile - workers are on their way to add more cottages in this area for the future.) This isn't the best timed whip, but it has to be done. 2 pop for market, overflow into courthouse.

Other miscellaneous domestic stuff:



Three archers and no longbows inside the barb city is good news. The top one only has 15% city defense, so this is a newly popped barb location. I landed the settler and spotted no barb units on the polar island, without landing the mace. We'll go ahead and found this city next turn, and if the expanded borders still reveal no barbs in the area (which would be essentially the whole island), then we'll land the mace next to the barb city instead and start killing the archers. Let's raze this city ASAP before CFC has any clue that it's here.



Look at how gorgeous this city is. Worms Denial of Nile only needs its granary to start growing like a weed and become a commercial powerhouse. Micro question: when is the proper time to whip this granary? Do we whip this granary? Please advise on the optimal way to manage this.

Here's an overview of the German lands, now the northern provinces of Egypt:

We had a suggestion to name the conquered cities after Civ3 Epics, so I went ahead and tried to pick some appropriate names. Still plenty of cities in resistance that we get to rename when they come out, so keep that list in mind. (I like "The X Factor" for Warendorf given its tumultuous role in the diplo game thus far, and "Jack Frost" for something in the ice/tundra. "Mystery Meatloaf" somewhere too, please!) War Paint deserves some special mention:



This city can't wait for Doppelganger to pop its borders next turn and open up the deer/cows resources to the south. War Paint is going to make a tremendous military pump for our team, and best of all, we can cap it perfectly at size 9 to make that happen. The nine tiles that it work get it to exactly 18 food and 24 production: center tile (2/2), deer (5/0), cows (3/3), lake (3/0), grassland farm (3/0), horses (1/4), grassland hill mine (1/3), plains hill mine times three (0/4, 0/4, 0/4) = 18 food / 24 production. That's 30 production with a forge for 3t knights that come out with bonus XP from the settled Great General. Not too shabby. We can even give the matured cottages to the east over to Summer Breeze and farm just the one grassland tile to the southwest (why the Germans were cottaging this city is beyond me... no Civil Service, I guess).

I also think that we should put the Forbidden Palace in this city, and probably go straight courthouse -> FP for a couple of reasons. First, because the location is very good for our core of German cities. Second, the FP is cheap to build (200 production is not a lot at this stage of the game) and War Paint can build the thing very quickly once it starts working all those mines (7 turns even without a forge). Third, because even if we swap over to State Property soon thereafter, the FP will be worth a LOT of saved gold in the meantime; my rough estimate is that it's currently worth between 50-100 gold in saved maintenance costs, and that's a pretty big deal. Finally, there's no guarantee that some asshole team won't use the bullshit civic swap spy missions to knock us out of State Property, in which case we'd better have a good FP location in place. So in other words, we just grow this city while building the current courthouse, get it up to size 8-9, and then knock out the FP as fast as possible. We can build forge/barracks after that.

Side question while we're on this subject: what happens to a spy when you run counterespionage? Do you lose the spy? Does it teleport back to the capital or something? Does the location where you use the mission matter? I know very little about this side of Civ4's gameplay, and we should know what we're doing given the possibility of other teams using espionage against us.

We still have plenty of time on the turn, let's try to hammer out the domestic stuff while we have the chance.