Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[T-hawk]

Adding a hill for Wealth purposes is terrible. That's like working a 0-0-4 desert village (not that they exist, but if they did, they'd be terrible.) If the city is on Wealth, work cottages. I also don't like Wealth in general, but might be acceptable for the moment since universities are such a poor producer.

What we really need are banks, which at the moment would be six times as productive as universities: twice the multiplier, and three times the slider input if at 25%/75% science/gold.

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.

When the city is size 3 with the food box slated to reach half full on that turn. This works out to T164. Whipping away one of the big food tiles is incorrect, and so is whipping before growth, since losing a food tile for a turn is worse than paying the extra 2 food to regrow one size larger.

I like the Forbidden Palace plan.

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.

The spy teleports back to the capital. I think for counterespionage, there is no chance of the spy failing and getting killed. The location matters slightly; the only variable is the mission cost modifiers (distance, religion, trade route, etc) which are dependent on the city.

[Bigger]

spies that complete their mission (assuming they don't die) always teleport back to the capital, regardless of the mission.

edit: I agree we need banks. Also more markets. Also, we need grocers.

[Zargon]

In general, our production cities will have to choose between short term defense (cats), short term economy (wealth) and long term economy (missionaries), with a few spies thrown in. I think figuring the balance of those 3 things is the most important macro question we currently have in front of us, and will inform our builds in all those cities.

Can we tell how many drafts Apolyton has done thus far this turn? I'm a little wary of getting caught with too few cats. Do we have a firm grasp on how many cats we need to fully collateral a large stack of rifles? Pind or Scooter I believe mentioned needing either 1.25 or 1.5 cats per rifle (or possibly per unit, since there would be janissaries and cats mixed in), and if that's a solid estimation rather than a spitball number, I'm afraid of falling short, even with HF on cat duty.

How many missionaries are we currently short for converting all our new land? There's a lot of infrastructure to build, and the OR bonus would be nice to go with the 1.5 gpt.

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I think that our commerce cities should continue to build economy multipliers, and I think most of our production cities should finish their courthouse first if they haven't already before doing any of the options outlined above, since it's long term economy that probably pays itself back (compared to building wealth) before rifling in most locations, plus it gives EP so we hopefully don't have to run the slider t168 to make a t169 counterespionage mission happen on CP and Apolyton.

MM is going to want to swap to a bank once banking is done, so building wealth there might be good since university hammers are going to sit there for a long time.

Starfall probably wants to build wealth.

I like the relative lack of whipping. It seems plausible that at this point in the game, we'll want to use the whipping philosophy of whip when we would otherwise be working bad tiles, rather than whip when we want nice things.

I also like the Forbidden Palace plan.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

At Denial of Nile, do we have another city that can borrow either the corn or the pig? If that is possible, we could swap this turn for the PH mine and whip next turn, unless the PH mine is being used by another city for something important. We could swap off either the corn or pig (they're equal value) and work the PH mine to get to a 1pop whip before the food box is half full. The city will regrow quickly at size 1 with a +6f tile and then grow with a full box thereafter. Size 4 it will be +12f!! Great city.

I think definitely whip here, and maybe do a cycle of 6/3 (instant regrowth to size 4) whips as many times as needed to get the essential infrastructure (forge, courthouse, market) in place ASAP. Once we're done with those, we just grow onto all those awesome cottages.

fake edit: I just read T-Hawk's post. I didn't crunch the numbers, that was an intuitive plan. I'd go with him if we can't profitably share the pig or corn with another city.

[novice]

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.

When the city is size 3 with the food box slated to reach half full on that turn. This works out to T164. Whipping away one of the big food tiles is incorrect

If my mental arithmetic is correct, and if the city is at 4/24 food, whipping the granary this turn, T162, is correct. That leaves the city at 11/24 food EOT164. Growing to size 3 and whipping the granary on T164 leaves the city at 10/24 food. Goes to show the power of the granary.

If we can share the unworked food resource out to another city, even better.

[T-hawk]

work the PH mine to get to a 1pop whip

We're Expansive, so the granary is already and always a 1 pop whip.

If my mental arithmetic is correct, and if the city is at 4/24 food, whipping the granary this turn, T162, is correct. That leaves the city at 11/24 food EOT164. Growing to size 3 and whipping the granary on T164 leaves the city at 10/24 food. Goes to show the power of the granary.

You are correct. The second food resource is good (+4 net), but doubling the first is even better (+6 net). Whip now.

[Sullla]

To answer questions about Apolyton, they have drafted 0 times so far this turn, 2 times last turn, and 2 times the turn before that (the first one they swapped into Nationhood). Not exactly a swarm of units thus far. Of course, they might be waiting for Rifling tech to draft, but my sense of Apolyton is that they will not do the kind of heavy whipping/drafting that would be necessary to cause us real damage. There's a real chance that they won't attack us at all, and simply want to 1) give themselves some safety while 2) not tying their hands with a long NAP deal. This is why I don't think that we need to rush out catapults when our current group + what the Heroic Epic city produces will give us about 20 of them by T170. And of course we can always adjust if we see them going wild with pop whips/drafts.

T-Hawk, we are not adding mines for Wealth builds anywhere. Every city that I picked was either a city where all of the core infrastructure is already done (AO, MM) and universities hold little value while we're trucking along at ~20% break-even science, or cities that are heavy on production and would only be pumping out more military otherwise (FP, CE, BBB). Every commercial city is still prioritizing cottages over production, and all immature/captured cities are working on their courthouses and markets.

No other city can use Denial of Nile's pigs. The corn can be taken by Doppelganger, although this only takes it from a 5/0/0 bananas to a 6/0/1 corn, and does not affect the 2t needed to grow. I will check the city's food box tonight when we stream the turn.

[T-hawk]

Did I misread this sentence? :

in fact the capital is about to grow onto a plains hill mine next turn, which would be +5 gold/turn (16gpt total).

Is that proposing working a plains hill mine while building Wealth, or did I misread that somehow?

[Zargon]

As an aside, I think we handle whipping infrastructure in new north Egypt the same way we're handling whipping infrastructure everywhere else - only once we run out of good tiles to work (obvious exception for granaries). And there's a lot of good tiles to work here.

I noticed something else. Our new cities are getting no foreign trade routes. Perhaps we should calculate how much commerce we're losing for not having a 3rd and 4th island city and accelerate plans for those if the number is high enough. If we're only getting suboptimal trade routes in the 5 coastal ex-German cities, then settling a fast island city to pick up 5 commerce over those 5 cities probably isn't worth it. But if Apolyton cancelling our OB cost us our 2c routes in a lot more coastal cities, then it might be worth it to bump those plans up.

Ok, I feel much better about not doing cats other than HF for the moment. Thanks for looking that up. Though if we're feeling safe from attack, I feel like pumping missionaries until that's all done is a worthy project.

The counterespionage mission is 100%, but they can still get caught in enemy territory. If the plan is to run a counterespionage against both Apolyton and CP, we probably need 4 spies minimum, to have a backup for both of them.

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I thought it was pretty clear that what Sullla meant was that cities proposed for wealth builds aren't trading cottages for mines, though admittedly he didn't write exactly that.

[sunrise089]

I don't think T-Hawk is saying just that we shouldn't work mines over cottages for Wealth builds, but rather that we should never work 0/4/0 tiles when building wealth because the return per pop is too low. We should instead, I guess, whip or draft or build a unit or work a different tile.