How do you feel about Productive as a trait by itself? I don't like it much, except for the special situations of Charley and Qin, maybe Tokugawa too.
I feel like Pro's early bonus is actually really weak, in general, if you don't have something interesting to funnel lots of hammers into. However, Imp is really good with it because Imp tends to want extra workers and likes to work high-hammer tiles for settlers, and likewise Pro works well with Ind too because extra workers makes it easier to chop wonders and you can't really build some wonders out of whips.
But, for everyone else, I think you're probably better off whipping... which means the trait has very little power until about 180 turns into the game, when you can spam super workshops/watermills everywhere.
You forget that workshops get good or great with Pro at guilds which can be fast if you go after them.And building wealth with PRo always a pleasure.
As alone trait dont know, i seee it more like a suport trait how is philo or cre (for me at least) and i didnt tred with other, but maybe goes with IND you know becasue with ind you want wonders and having stron tile to work could count, but still early game to slow, so i think the only place were Pro is very good is with IMP.In PB20 i whiped 3-4 times i think, and I was never behind in hammers or something, but there were enough tiles to get the bonus.
Not necesary i had a very good strtegy with sharing food between cities and after city got size 4 workked near always tiles with very high production so i didnt whiped at all for a long time.I worked cotages just in 3-4 cities which i grow them as large as could.The other were producing setler , worker with speed i couldn aford them.After curency some of the setler worker cities builde wealth and that way i kept a tech lead for a very long time.And if wasnt from very easy gains which seven had in his part of world i would had remained that way.
HMmm well, sorry about my part on that, I had that double-pasture start and panicked when Haram was so close,it was my first pitboss game and I thought the map would be like PB16, and then just kinda fell apart...
Very quick update; the game pace has been slow because of nonstop delays so there's not much to say.
I took the barb city last turn, getting ourselves a 5xp, shock-capable axe to ward away Haram's vultures:
We have a very big city lead now, with our 12 cities to Haram's 9; five players have 8. We'll be throwing down another city in 2T, to the northern island. We have 12 workers, which is enough for now but not enough to make an HG attempt, I think. I'll need to figure out how to squeeze out 1 or 2 more if we want that.
We'll turn on the jets for math in 3-4 turns. Our capital's library will be done in 3 and we make contact with Fennbandit next turn (our NE exploring workboat found a sliver of white borders this turn), but we know TBS has math too, because of his Mids completion, and our NW exploring workboat has yet to make contact with him.
Updated numbers:
City counts:
12: Us (T81)
9: Haram (T77)
8: TBS (T71), Dreylin (T73), Fennbandit (T79), Borsche (T80), Jowy (T81)
6: Tsargon (T73)
4: Scipio (T63)
Whip Counts:
TBS: 39 pop total; 5 triplepop whips, 8 doublepop whips, 8 singlepop whips
The Blues Brothers: 36 pop total; 11 doublepop whips, 14 singlepop whips
Fennbandit: 18 pop total; 2 triplepop whips, 4 doublepop whip, 4 singlepop whip
Haram: 18 pop total; 3 triplepop whip, 3 doublepop whips, 1 singlepop whip
Dreylin: 11 pop total; 2 doublepop whip, 7 singlepop whip
Jowy: 9 pop total; 2 triplepop whip, 3 singlepop whips
Borsche: 9 pop total; 1 doublepop whip, 7 singlepop whips
Tsargon: 3 pop total; 1 doublepop whip, 1 singlepop whip
Scipio: 0 pop total
Ok, here's an actual update for the first time in while. I'm still having fun with this game, but I haven't had a lot of spare time lately. I'll break this into sections.
First, news of the world:
Haram has completed the Colossus! Not much of a surprise, to be honest. 125 hammers for a permanent, stackable super-wharf is a great wonder for him. That city will start bringing in a shitload of commerce and also give him 3rd ring borders. Haram is feeling very dangerous right now...
I met Fennbandit this turn, to our NE, and offered them OB... every little scrap helps. I've only got TBS remaining to meet.
Finally, I discovered that Jowy's already got a city on Borsche's island, on the Chinook spot to Jowy's NE:
Jowy just finished Currency btw. I wonder what he thought when he saw our gold stockpile?
Tsargon settled 2 cities this turn, after I played, jumping into the rest of the pack with 8. And, I just noticed Dreylin settled 9 and 10 with the turnflip.
Grand Strategic Plan:
Basically, the short story here is to get swole. Really creative strategy, right?
Well, the idea here is that I think it's gonna be a lot easier for us to keep land than it'll be for us to take it, at least for the next couple of eras. First, Imp (and knowing how to use it better than our opponents, I think) means that we can get cities up easily, quickily, and cheaply. If we get boots on the ground first, then "that land" becomes "Mali land" rather than "contested land." In addition, availability of Skirmishers mean that we can defend our long-strung empire very cheaply and effectively. A fully-fortified 0XP skirmisher on a hill gets odds on everything until Knights, at least without cat support. That's at the cost of just 25 hammers! Great UU. I should be prickly enough for a long time that any attack on me will need to be telegraphed, allowing me time to scramble together a counter-force. For example, even if my most dangerous early-classical neighbor, Dreylin of Rome, wanted to use Amphibious Praets to take a hill city guarded by 2 skirmishers, he'd need 4 Praets and 2 galleys, a 260 hammer investment, and if he actually wants to keep it he'll probably need at least 2 more galleys full of crap. I'm good enough about noticing details that I should be able to spot that kind of buildup and reinforce ahead of time if the situation comes to that.
Anyways, we get lots of land early via Imp + whipping hard and ignoring wonders. Now, what to do with it? Because we whip rather than chop, we saved hammers on workers and yet still have plenty of forests to help put in good infrastructure, like libraries, half-priced markets, and forges. It's important to get this stuff up early because we won't be focusing much on hammers later, ideally not whipping our core at all. Instead, we'll work cottages and coast. Cottages spammed in every goddamn nook and cranny! Wharf-powered Fin coast up the whazoo! We'll even cover up the grass mines and farms that we have with cottages soon enough. Our economy might be behind right now, but we'll overtake people with the sheer mass of boosted tiles we can work. Meanwhile, the bulk of our defensive army will come from heavily-whipped filler and frontier cities.
Our tech plan right now is Math -> Currency -> Masonry -> MC -> Not sure. Currency is priority #1 as it should bring in like +40cpt passively and let us start spamming out half-priced markets, which should bring in about another 50gpt at 0% slider. Beautiful. MC is the next priority, for triremes and forges.
Calendar or Construction would both be decent after that, or possibly IW -> Compass. Gotta feel it out I guess. If both the HG and TGW are gone, its probably worthwhile to just skip Masonry for a bit; there's more important things to worry about than an unimproved stone tile. It would be nice to try for both of those wonders, but with the way Haram is going it seems doubtful that they'll last long. The HG would be sick with like 16-18 cities, even if it costs me 3 pop in HW, but TGW would be awesome too, to shoo away fuckign piece of shit ToW barb galleys and to tie in with our defensive strat. TGW gives an additional +100% to GG production for battles fought within our borders, which means that if we shut down some big invasions, e.g. vs Korea in PB22, we will be absolutely swimming in Great Generals. Hopefully that'll be a non-trivial degree of deterrence from our rivals.
We'll pop a GA around T105ish... the timing depends a bit on how soon we can get our forges up and how close our Moai is to completion. The earliest would be about T102 or so, but that's sacrificing some output in SRT, which is where I plan to generate the scientist.
Further expansion via conquest would be a long time away. 20-22 cities or so is plenty until the Ren era, and I'll want to focus on tech more than more land by about T100 anyways. I think I'll need Galleons+Muskets or Caravels+Rifles to conquer significant land from anyone, so in the meantime I think it's better to claim land first and then defend it rather than try to claim someone else's land. Here's what the map layout looks like right now, and I've highlighted the land I'd like to claim peacefully:
The arrows show potential Ren-era invasion routes. Tsargon and especially Scipio are way behind and thus may be ripe for the plucking before then, but right now I feel like it'll be wiser to just keep to myself and then run interference on anybody that tries to take them first. Every player sort-of borders every other player on this map, and so I think it's gonna be difficult to straight-up conquer another player without running into serious issues with at least one of the other seven.
Domestic update:
We're putting a city on our NE island next turn, on the more-defensive Fish/ULTIMATE-TILE-PLAINS-COW spot here:
I coulda had the workboat ready to plant on the turn the city settled, but instead he'll be about 5 turns late due to exploring further to meet Fennbandit. I really wanted to know badly whether TBS was our northeastern neighbor or not, because that would determine whether I needed to rush a super-defensive crumple-zone city 5E of the fish or not. Since we're not next to TBS, we'll try to settle more for maximizing yields.
Flipping down to the south, Chinook will be out of revolt next turn. I've got a worker already here ready to pasture the pigs next turn, and then will probably want to whip a monument in ASAP to secure the region. I'll also be planting our Moai city down here on T86 on one of the two highlighted spots. I'm still not sure which I want... the bottom one is a far superior long-term spot in terms of yield, but needs a monument and is on flatland. OTOH, the upper one gets jump-started quicker because I can insta-net those first ring clams and skip a monument, but would be a pretty fucking weak city without Moai and grows onto Moai tiles slowly. Either way, this city won't do anything for me for a long while but suck up maintenance, but sometimes you've gotta take a hit to invest in the future.
I've fully spawn-busted our island and plan to settle at the Furs/Fish/Rice in 3 turns. I want to hook up those furs ASAP so that our capital can grow up to size 10; this will be another slow city, because I'll need to whip in a monument. But, that's fine. I'm also tentatively planning on grabbing the mirrored Chinook location with hopes of preventing Dreylin and Jowy from backdooring our core. That'll be a tough city to get out there, though.
The big workhorse of the island is JLH. What a great city! Founded just like 10 turns ago, and it's already put out a worker, a skirmisher, and soon another settler and another skirmisher in quick succession. After this next settler we'll grow up to size 5 I think, and bounce between 5 and 3.
Here's an overview of our core:
41 pop, 12 workers, 12 cities, 9 cottages, 3 hamlets. Two of the cottages will flip to hamlets in 2 turns, IIRC.
Our capital is lookin' pretty decent now. The plan is to slow-grow this badboy to size 10, its limit before its market is installed. In the meantime, its donated its wet wheat to our new cottage-helper city of Junior Wells until MW weens off the last of its whip anger and the fur is hooked. The library will finish EOT T83, and we'll turn on science slider T84. I think we might have enough gold to get all the way through to Currency in one sprint... it might be pretty close though.
Numbers and Graphs and Crap:
Demos:
Top power is slightly concerning but I'm not too concerned because nobody yet has anything that can efficiently chew through even hastily-whipped Skirms.
CY still lookin' great; 2nd-place CY is likely Haram:
Haram's MFG is concerning, but I don't think he's pulled that far ahead of us in net hammer output. Looking at my numbers from 19 turns ago, I've whipped 19 population since that point while Haram has whipped 14 population. So, that's +150 hammers for me. Going from raw hammers, it looks like he averages about 15ish? more mfg than us. So, 15*19 - 5*30 = he's ahead 135 hammers, which is about the price of the Colossus. Still, something to keep an eye on, especially as he gets more and more forges online. Heh, right after I say this, Haram played after me and whipped off 5 more pop. So, he's gonna be solidly ahead of us in hammers now even despite the Wonder... we outta invest in some extra skirms ASAP.
Our GNP might look kind of pitiful, but I'm actually very happy with how our economy looks right now. First of all, remember that we've been saving gold so of course our GNP will look super low. Also, we have very little culture output right now. So, it's all good. We'll climb up to the very top of the GNP chart very soon, I think.
City counts:
12: Us (T81)
10: Dreylin (T81)
9: Haram (T77)
8: TBS (T71), Fennbandit (T79), Borsche (T80), Jowy (T81), Tsargon (T82)
5: Scipio (T80)
Whip Counts:
TBS: 39 pop total; 5 triplepop whips, 8 doublepop whips, 8 singlepop whips
The Blues Brothers: 36 pop total; 11 doublepop whips, 14 singlepop whips
Haram: 23 pop total; 4 triplepop whip, 5 doublepop whips, 1 singlepop whip
Fennbandit: 21 pop total; 3 triplepop whips, 4 doublepop whip, 4 singlepop whip
Dreylin: 11 pop total; 2 doublepop whip, 7 singlepop whip
Jowy: 9 pop total; 2 triplepop whip, 3 singlepop whips
Borsche: 9 pop total; 1 doublepop whip, 7 singlepop whips
Tsargon: 3 pop total; 1 doublepop whip, 1 singlepop whip
Scipio: 0 pop total
1.) The proposed Moai situation is unsuitable. First of all, Tsargon invalidated the lower, better spot by settling 1E of the grass cows this turn, which puts the fish in his second ring. I don't think we can push back a Creative civ's borders any time soon. The upper spot is still OK, but a quick WB test showed me that I couldn't do quicker than Granary+LH+Moai in 30 turns, even with 3 chops available. Ugh. Also, the city finishes the Moai at size 2, which is awful. Imagine the GA takes like 5-6 turns off that timeframe, and the city still isn't useful until like T115-T120 or something. The lower spot woulda been so much better. One alternative is the new city that I'm planning to found next turn, near Borsche... that's a lot more vulnerable though, and I essentially lose 2-3 turns on the completion date because I scouted with the workboat, blegh. That one probably also wants a monument, due to having three 2nd ring trees on hand. Well, I guess I could just chop them 2nd ring at a net loss of 30h total, which is the same cost as a monument. Well, I'll have to test it out.
2.) If we don't put Moai up in the southeast, then we don't need to settle that spot now; instead, we could send that settler elsewhere... but where to choose...
3.) A third post-MC tech option is to go Aesthetics -> Literature, and save all the trees around HW for TGL. We have Marble available and IIRC enough left around HW to 1-turn it with a bit of overflow. (edit: indeed, we do) TGL would be amazing for us for sure, and it wouldn't hurt to get up an early NE for once either. HW wouldn't be the best city for an NE though, as it has a poor food surplus and lots of cottages to work. SRT was my originally planned NE, but that couldn't get TGL very quick. An early HE would be nice too, but that's another wonder I don't know where to place. Well, whatever, I haven't even unlocked it yet. SoZ would be another great build along that line, if we could snag it.
Get bigger and more advanced than him than crash into his empre with overwhelming power. That's been the plan from T0; anyone who's read his PB18 thread knows that he's crazy good with tactics, so the one way I think I can beat him is to out produce him. In late-game I'll have a big edge over him because of Fin, I think. I might even still be able to abuse Kremlin cash-rush shenanigans, but we shall see...
That, of course, begs the question that the game comes down to me vs TBS. Haram's looking really, really strong right now, and has late-game Pro to stand against my Fin. And happens to be directly next to me, in what is perhaps the most contentious neighbor position, rather than the furthest possible position, in what might be termed my only non-neighbor. If TBS starts conquering his neighbors easily, I may have to consider conquering a path towards him via Jowy or Borsche.
I found finally found TBS! We'll make contact with him next turn, so I decided to delay our research until then.
I estimated on T84 that we wouldn't be able to complete Math->Currency with our current bpt unless we had a KTB of at least 4 civs on Currency, and that didn't include the extra maintenance on the cities that I'll be founding on T87 and T89. (btw, the T87 one was originally supposed to plant T85 but I made some adjustments for Secret Reasons). Anyways, we only had Jowy with the tech on T84 and Wetbandit this turn, so we'll actually be teching T86. Math will be an easy 2T and Currency should be just barely done in 3 more. So, T91 our economy will look great and by T95 it will look amazing.
We also have this little situation, which is terribly unclear because I'm correspondingly terrible about saving screenshots. Basically, Haram moved up his woody1 warrior to look into my city, so I moved my chariot forward to look into his, and I discovered 2 workers of his finishing a Quarry on the marble. First of all, Interesting. Second of all, I had no intention to threaten him, as I didn't even know these workers were there, so I sent him an official "Real Ass Trade That Should Be Legal According To This Game's Shitty Stupid No-Signalling Rules That Only Exist Because I Guess I Forgot To Write Regular-AI-Diplo In The Recruitment Thread's OP" to show that I have no ill intentions. This is a """"""real"""""" trade because he has no source of clams. Free health for him. If there's complaints about this I note that I could have sent clam for crab. (I have no crab). Whatever. Fuck!
Numbers:
City counts:
13: Us (T83)
11: Dreylin (T85)
9: Haram (T77), TBS (T82), Fennbandit (T83)
8: Borsche (T80), Jowy (T81), Tsargon (T82)
5: Scipio (T80)
Whip Counts:
The Blues Brothers: 41 pop total; 13 doublepop whips, 15 singlepop whips
TBS: 40 pop total; 5 triplepop whips, 8 doublepop whips, 9 singlepop whips
Haram: 24 pop total; 4 triplepop whip, 5 doublepop whips, 2 singlepop whip
Fennbandit: 21 pop total; 3 triplepop whips, 4 doublepop whip, 4 singlepop whip
Dreylin: 15 pop total; 2 doublepop whip, 11 singlepop whip
Jowy: 14 pop total; 3 triplepop whip, 5 singlepop whips
Borsche: 11 pop total; 2 doublepop whip, 7 singlepop whips
Tsargon: 3 pop total; 1 doublepop whip, 1 singlepop whip
Scipio: 0 pop total
So, he's gonna be solidly ahead of us in hammers now even despite the Wonder... we outta invest in some extra skirms ASAP.
