Gaspar, Lewwyn, et al go full Sartre

[Krill]

Er...yes...?

[pindicator]

Right, too much Sherlock Holmes for me lately.
(But season 3 is on Netflix!)

[Gaspar]

You know, I'm reminded of what the VP at my old job would say in regards to the competition: Be excellent in one thing and competitive in the others. He was talking competing for market share and not Civ MP, sadly, but I think there's a lot that carries over.

The trick of course is to figure out what the thing you want to be excellent at is...

Yeah, absolutely this. Lewwyn flat out disagrees with me but trying to keep up with Joao/Stonehenge in expansion was the final coffin nail. We probably weren't winning anyway, for reasons mentioned in previous posts, of course.

Don't get me wrong, we'll dig out of the hole. But we'll be too far behind by then.

I think a combination of bad luck and some map issues put us on the backfoot and then some mediocre decison-making (IW > Math > Calendar plan which favors vertical growth combined with a horizontal growth strategy) is what put us in this position. Ultimately, the very definition of trying to do too much.

Anyway, hopefully my last post got this across but I'm just intending to focus on solving the puzzle of our position from here on out and largely ignoring the opponents. That seems like fun to me, at least.

[Old Harry]

Killing people?

Well, I was thinking more along the lines of the different ways there are of killing people.


...are we still talking about Civ?

Er...yes...?

Who believes this?

[Gaspar]

Quick report for t92...

Commodore got a bad roll on his attempt at a Pyramids engineer:




We discovered a Barbarian city in the SW. We need to get there and raze it quickly because it would be bad for someone else to get it and also whatever gold we get from it would be highly welcome. We have a chariot heading there quickly and a pair of axes heading there slowly.




This fellow has been the source of much debate between Lewwyn and I lately. That academy sure looked a lot more attractive before we tanked our economy. I think I favor icing him for a GA, Lewwyn favors building the academy.




Here's a shot at TBS's core, since I don't believe I've shown it previously:

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Thoughts from an absentee ded-lurker:

Is the bulb option Alphabet? That might be the best use right now, as unpalatable as that may seem. You have plenty of soldiers for now, or at least it seems being #2, so you can perhaps spend some production elsewhere. Expansion should be out as an option because you can't afford it, meaning you're running a low, low, loooowwww slider, minimizing the benefit of the academy (edit: or any other infrastructure like libraries that are useless ATM), and you are far too early for a golden age. Bulb Alphabet and build research with your excess (ha) hammer capacity.

Aside from that, I'd strongly consider cancelling research into Calendar and going instead for Currency to build wealth. It looks like you desperately need to pump some life into your economy in the short term. The growth allowed by Calendar is the better long term strategy, but you need commerce much sooner than that. +10g at 0% is just going to take forever. What is your realistic research time for Calendar? How much room do you have in the empire below the happy cap? How many cottages can you grow onto? Even in the short term, throwing hammers into building Research may be better than working new/immature cottages to get you out of this hole. Long term, of course not, but if this is your research capacity for the next 25-30t, you'll be dead before the long term gets here.

Good luck.

[Gaspar]

I hadn't actually considered building Research - that might actually be a decent option - particularly since the two next techs will do the most to stabilize the economy.

The horizon for improving the economy is a little better than it looks right now - we're growing onto cottages and lakes so we'll get some commerce going sooner rather than later. I'd say we're roughly 15t from Calendar, though if we did bulb Alphabet and work on building Research, we could probably cut that in half just by putting Cockaigne on Research. Additionally, we're two turns from activating TR with TBS, which will be a big boost as well. We did actually swap to Currency for a turn before giving it more thought - the boost from growing larger onto more cottages and lakes will pay off quicker since we can tech it quicker.

Not sure how Lewwyn feels but I think I've talked myself into bulbing Alphabet. The economic benefits of the next 3 techs are so large that managing to get them on board faster is just so much better than the other options. Once we get Currency we can bang out another GSci in Eden and use that to build an Academy which would coincide right around the same time as we got Bureaucracy.

[NobleHelium]

What do you mean you haven't considered building Research? That was one of my joke suggestions when I foresaw your crashed economy thirty turns ago.

[Gaspar]

What do you mean you haven't considered building Research? That was one of my joke suggestions when I foresaw your crashed economy thirty turns ago.

As it turns out, I generally tune out your hurtful words. BibleThump

[spacetyrantxenu]

Commodore and I went down the bulbing Alphabet path in PB7 (or would have if that game had actually happened), it worked reasonably well in pushing a horrible tech rate to a merely terrible one. It didn't do a damn thing about our neighbors though, it was still MackSeven at the end of the day. But you chaps don't have that problem, your tiger has different stripes. Maybe it'll work out better for you!