Ride to ruin and the world's ending! (TBS, Becko & Joao)

[Becko]

Turn played. Gaspar got a GSci. Turned science back off -- seems I'd forgotten about this little prerequisite tech called Masonry. Moved a few citizens from hammer tiles to commerce to get gpt up to 28. Had to select builds after the turn rolled, you'll want to change them.[1] Left the turn otherwise unplayed.

The "feel" I got from playing those turns is, the Mongols are doing very well -- if the Zulus are in 1st place, we're 1.5 -- but we're going to need to slow down and grow vertically fairly soon. We're doing well in power, food and MFG; GNP is losing steam. HR/OR and a shrine will be very well timed for us. We need three or four more settlers to seal our closest borders,but there's plenty of room for more cities after that.

[1] Other things you'll want to change: tile assignments, worker actions, troop dispositions. Possibly dedlurkers. :P

[The Black Sword]

Thanks Becko, you just beat me to it. PB18 deserved some attention anyway, I'll take a look around.

Also, I evidently watched the wrong half of Uruguay vs Costa Rica.

[The Black Sword]

Looks good, I think we're ahead of the zulus. Really tempted to try push Gaspar on the military front, we do have a lot of units already in the area.

[The Black Sword]

Alright, looks like it's been 10t at least since we last posted a picture, time for an update.





I turned on 10% research(actually our breakeven ) to finish off Mono. One nice thing about playing last, last turn, nobody saw our GNP spike from completing Masonry at 100%, was up at 170 I think.



It's on to currency next I think. It's about the same cost as this Mono, Monarchy path has been, should we have gone there instead? Well, we got access to OR along with 3 happy points from our current path, so I don't believe it's been too bad. I need to set up a chain reaction of missionary whips now to spread Buddhism throughout our empire. 15gpt shrine, here we come. Need to think about if it's worth putting up a Library or two now, is it worth it anywhere at 10% research? Maybe the capital and the future NE city. I think we'll want to run max specs in our shrine city to generate another GP for our GA, at least the 3 priests.

Current city counts:
Us: 14
Thoth: 12
Oxy: 11
Gaspar: 12
Commodore: 9
dtay: 12

Warning: City by city screenshots, coming up.


Lets cottage the two grasslands here windmill the hills. The gold will be given over to Donovan's Reef.


This place will have the food surplus to support the gold. It'll make an excellent commerce city and have lots of production left too.


5th best city in the world! Coast over farm, yeah, seems ok seeing as we're commerce strapped. I should have that plains hill mine up instead, I'll get on that.


Last turn with the fish before it gives it over to the new island city. Will stagnate on coast and plains cottages at size 8.


Name ... Cost us 6gt, a lot less than I expected. I decided to just send the 1 worker across instead of 2. So, we probably can't chop out a size 1 granary, size 2 will have to do.


Future shrine city, so it makes sense to give it a lot of cottages too. I wasn't really planning on putting a LH here, the clam is mostly staying with The Seachase, but Becko has it halfway done so we might as well finish it. Should probably wait for the OR bonus at least.


We have far too many barracks going round. Just nothing better to put hammers into. Which makes me wonder whether I should have went currency instead for wealth builds. Also makes me think Joao might get *too* many free hammers. I can really see why mack likes Mehmed so much actually. Org would almost double our gpt from the passive benefit alone.


Nicely cottaged capital. That last forest is scheduled for a granary for the northern filler city. Should probably settle that soon so we can get the last cottage down.



Not sure what to do with those grass forests when Math comes in. Destined to be a weak production city.


One of the missionary whips.


Yeah, I should have delayed the settler whip a turn so this overflow would go through the OR bonus. I'm blaming the break from the game. Anyway, I think I want to give this as much food bonuses as possible and aggressively whip missionaries into the moai. Then we'll give away the food tiles and work moai coast as we let the whip anger wear off. I might do some Moai failgolding elsewhere too. 1.25g to 1h isn't a great trade but speeding up Currency by a turn could be worth a lot of gold.



How beautiful. Only problem I found Becko: why does this city need a lighthouse. This could be our HE city but the other spot works as well for that and doesn't have McLintock's river. Let's cottage this up. Maybe it could be a late game Ironworks with US and a Levee. Probable Forbidden Palace location too.


Gets the sheep next turn when McLintock whips the worker.


Should we farm one of the grasslands? Hmm.

Also, Gaspar's canal plant annoys me more than it should. It's well-defended though, with an axe, spear and chariot. We're Joao with the game's top military though, we should be taking land from others, not the other way around! He doesn't even have any worker support, neither the wheat nor the fish is hooked, it's just claiming him land and costing him gold. Well, I've convinced myself that we have other priorities for the moment, but I'm coming back for this city. The Duke will ride through these lands yet!



We like the number eight. I have chariots keeping in each of our 3 neighbours territories watching for buildup and slightly too big garrisons on the borders. I also want to dedicate some axes to scouting the SW. That takes up most of our military. Looking at Oxy's garrisons, I'm probably letting him get away too lightly on the military front. Not sure what to do there. It is interesting that our hammer production outstrips the gold production so much. That seems to be the case for everyone else as well, given the GNP figures. That probably means military actions between everyone are likely in the future.

[The Black Sword]

I takes two turns to revolt civics ...

Does anyone know the threshold here? Because if it's 14 cities and this little island we just settled cost us the extra revolt ... doesn't help my mood.

Man, the same thing happened in PB13, why can I never remember this.

I need to think about the options, might be best just to use the GP for a golden age? Could also just revolt to OR I suppose.

[The Black Sword]

For reference:


100 pop doesn't seem bad for the GA, and I think we just need a bit of a commerce boost to the next key techs and our GNP would stop flatlining. A potential problem is what do we put the GA hammers into? We could go for CoL first and put up courthouses everywhere. We can put 2 or even 3 temples in the capital to generate a prophet next for the shrine.

I'm liking the sound of this, need to find some time during the rest of the day to check it out.

[novice]

Standard world size, normal speed? The 13th city pushes you past the limit.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=342624

[Becko]

Does anyone know the threshold here? Because if it's 14 cities and this little island we just settled cost us the extra revolt ... doesn't help my mood.

The best reference for anarchy turns seems to be written by T-Hawk (who else?): http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=342624.

Quoting the article: "On a normal map, it's every 100 / 8 = 12.5 cities. So your 13th city, 25th, 38th, 50th, and so on each cause extra anarchy." So I guess Westward Ho pushed us over the edge. Never saw that formula before, but I'll tuck it away for future games.

[Edit: Coke to Novice]

Name for city 14... Sands of Iwo Jima? (The) Fighting Seabees?

Yeah, those lighthouse builds were silly, in retrospect. Mea culpa.

GA sounds fun. GP is due in three turns, right? How widely spread is the true Buddhist faith?

[Krill]

Your point on Joao is spot on IMO. Joao is all about managing tech path whilst spamming those cities, which does lead to you needing to get one of Alpha or Currency earlier than most others would (going off turn number anyway). Joao is a leader that changes the game and gives a new slant on some of the more staid decisions.

There are always other things to put hammers into though

[The Black Sword]

Thanks guys, yeah, delaying Westward Ho wouldn't have been a good idea. Maybe I should have delayed Texas Terror though. Ah well, having looked at things in a bit more detail I think the GA option is best, and maybe would have been the right choice anyway. We currently make around 73f, 73h and 26g per turn so two revolt turns would be pretty expensive.

Doing some research on early GAs, throwing it turn 100 is pretty early but 100 pop is actually very good.

India PB13: T138, 85 pop (the date is obviously late since dtay set us back so much, but I felt this was worked out really well for us, so the pop figure is useful)

Pindicooter PB13: T129, ~76 pop (this feels low, they didn't give a city summary so I was counting from screenshots, I may have missed some)

Novice-Seven, PBEM23: T73(quick), 79 pop

They'd have some multipliers up too obviously, but that doesn't sound too bad.

Obviously it's more important to think about opportunity cost in our own game though. What would be my ideal GA? Well, we'd need to get to currency quickly, I'd like CoL to do some GP magic(1100g from a trade mission to Oxy's island would be magical), I'd want to revolt to Bureau too or it'd be expensive later and I'd like to get a boost to some form of first to bonus. I don't think Philo would be necessary for the first GA, since it's pretty expensive.

If we used our first Prophet for a shrine(3t), we could get another GP 16t later, so we're talking a ~12t delay in the golden age. We probably could make CoL in that time, we certainly couldn't reach currency. Going CoL before currency has it's own costs though. It looks to me that a GA will be worth around 105gpt and 70hpt at the start. That is worth a lot and will boost us to some very powerful techs, which unlock things that allow us to properly leverage our hammers. I think that gives us enough beakers to get to Currency and Feudalism and revolt to Vassalage by the end of the GA. On the other hand, without OR a shrine is very weak(maybe 5gpt to start). I think we need to do this to get out of our tech hole rather than our civ languishing for 10t.

It will really hurt our Great People game though, losing both the shrine and Caste for quite a while which open up the specialist slots. I'm going to have to work on some alternatives there.

Name for city 14... Sands of Iwo Jima? (The) Fighting Seabees?

I like the Seabees.

Joao is all about managing tech path whilst spamming those cities, which does lead to you needing to get one of Alpha or Currency earlier than most others would (going off turn number anyway). Joao is a leader that changes the game and gives a new slant on some of the more staid decisions.

Yeah, I feel like I'm playing on a knife-edge with Joao, and maybe we've just slipped off. Hopefully the golden age can get us back on track. I'm still going back and forth over whether it was a mistake to delay currency for so long. The nice thing about wealth-builds is that they always give you the option of recovering the economy but ideally you shouldn't need to use them.