Unfinished business - SG for improving at Civ 4 (sic)

[shallow_thought]

Sugar as well as three dyes at the barb jungle city? Mmmm, tasty. Sugar is more food as well as happiness, which is always nice to have. And if you have more than one source, you can always trade the extra for something.

I like the continuing expansion push, but make sure you also build/have enough units to escort the new settlers and garrison the new cities. Barb archers are now a known threat, and spears or axes could start appearing soon. Don't stretch your defenses too thin. Zalson's planning notes about roading to the new city locations is good -- a solid road net will help with defense if needed. Plus movement and trade routes, of course, so that is a win all around.

Also, be thinking about costs. As the new cities are founded your maintenance expenses will increase, maybe more than you are used to since this is Emperor. Your Organized trait will help a bit, but your research rate is likely to slow. Keep that in mind as you plan for finishing key techs like Currency, CoL, IW, etc. Getting some more commerce going (improved resources or cottages) or libraries and maybe a scientist or two (non-slider beakers can really help when your tech rate crunches) are possibilities if tech starts stagnating.

Under the circumstances, I'm hesitant to make too many comments, but looking around the save, there's a few things I'd like to note (psychologically, I see tend to see problems rather than opportunities, I'm afraid ).

1) Check the worker up near CP - I'm not sure that a plains riverside farm is a priority over roads or chops (although we'll want one on this tile eventually)
2) Our tech rate scares me. I don't think we can afford two new cities. I think we're about 20t out from currency, and probably as much again from CoL (OK, we'll plan to build more shiny mines and some libraries, but I don't think we can afford the second until CoL is due).
3) That's a pain, because we really want to whip in BS and let YM grow. BS isn't working gold and is at the happy cap; we want to get YM growing to get some value from the granary (payoff may be down the line, but at least food in the box now is worth something).

I'd consider a reversal of some of our planning - aim for one settler, chopped and whipped out of BS (once the foodbox is full, as Zalson says). Library and growth at YM (chop into the library? it's an efficient use of forests because we're CRE, right? Maybe even same at CP?). Hope we can get another settler out out of YM soon enough that we don't lose hammers. Settler has to go purple for sheep/gold/silver.

I'd roll the dice and pray we don't need copper any time soon. Do the barbs actually build spearmen (outside of events)? I'm straining my memory, but can only remember getting archers and axes in recent games. If so, chariots may be enough.

I do like the fact that we have workers read to finish key chops.

I could be wrong about all of this - I've just officially lost the emperor "shadow" game I was playing off the Huayna Capac start, so may be in a negative mood .

So for in-game as well as the (much more important) RL reasons, there's no rush on these turns.

[haphazard1]

Rapid expansion can crash your economy surprisingly easily on emperor difficulty. I've done it more times than I care to admit. There are multiple options you can take, though.

- Slow/delay your expansion until your economy is stronger and/or key techs have come in. This delays growth of the empire and may risk losing desired sites to the AI, but keeps your research running faster.
- Expand but focus hard on commerce (gold/silver/dyes resources, building cottages, etc.) to try to offset the additional cost. This usually means trading food/hammers for commerce throughout the empire.
- Expand and accept a reduction in the science slider for a while, until you can consolidate and rebuild your economy. Libraries and scientist specialists can provide some research despite a lower slider, but again this means giving up food/hammer tile yields that would otherwise be worked. Crashing the economy has costs, but gaining control of a lot of land may be worth it in the long run. Of course, it could also lead to disaster.

A lot depends on your planned tech path. Do you focus on econnomic techs to sustain more expansion, at the trade off of military/culture/religion techs? Maybe you go for a certain set of techs (CoL, for example, or IW, or Alpha) you want quickly, and then expand? Maybe you just limit your expansion, try to get a strong tech lead, and then expand later via conquest?

Any of these approaches can work. It is primarily a question of how you want to play the situation, how aggressive you want to be about taking risks, how you think the AIs are going to develop and act, etc.

Zalson, best of luck to you and your wife! Hope she gets through the flu without any (further) complications.

[Zalson]

We went home shortly after I wrote my post. So, thank you all for the well wishes. Wife and unborn baby and daughter are all okay. I'm okay too. I've got the save and have the feedback needed to at least start now.

I am not too concerned about expansion at this point. We're pushing 38 beakers with 3 cities at 100% science at -8 gpt. That means we're running about a 72% science rate (costs/beakers). That means we need to keep expanding. I do agree that adding libraries is a good hammer dump: adding those beakers means we'll get to 50 beakers sooner rather than later. I'll see about adding cottages.

shallow_thought: you should post about your shadow game! the feedback can sting at times but it will only help you get better!

I'll take a look at our situation when I get the game loaded. That said, I'm going to avoid my error last time and at least play a little of another game to warm up before I get started.

[RefSteel]

Glad to hear everyone's okay, Zalson!

Also wanted to suggest a city name for purple or orange dot (i.e. somewhere in the southern tundra) for one of my very favorite types of ghosts, in spite of the generic name: "The Third" (who walks always beside you) as named in T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, in reference to Ernest Shackleton's (and his crew's) experience of sensing an extra traveler in their company during a harrowing trip to the Antarctic.

[haphazard1]

Glad to hear the positive news, Zalson!

A couple random thoughts (if you don't mind me offering yet more "input" of dubious value on a game I am not directly involved in; maybe I should just be quiet now. ):

- Poor Isabella. Last place, least expansion so far, and most likely putting what beakers she is generating into chasing a religion of her own rather than economic or military techs. She is likely to end up as everyone's favorite target, especially if she eventually founds her own religion and alienates everyone. I foresee Monty attacking her, unless she somehow gets shut out of her own religion and adopts his Buddhism.
- Charlemagne is off to a solid start, but is so far unaligned religiously. Which religion he ends up adopting could be critical, allying him with warmonger Monty or tech pushing Mansa. Or maybe he founds his own religion and you get a three-way religious split? Or even four-way if you reach CoL and found your own?

The diplomatic situation for this game should be interesting to watch develop.

[Zalson]

Here's the report and save. Screenshots come tomorrow.
--
T70
First things first, I go in and cancel all worker actions. That’s mostly so I know what every worker is doing. (noting down how many worker turns they have left). Thanks for the notes, too.

Then I go and reconfigure our cities for max growth. YM grows in 4. BS grows in 3 or 4 turns. Forget which option I chose.



Unit list. All our workers are spread out. That’s not a bad thing but noting it here for my own knowledge.

We’re 16 turns out from currency at the current rate and will have libraries soon. So that means drop the cashflow to zero. That gets us 30 gold per turn. I’ll save until I can get 1 library done.

Copperopolis needs to wait for iron working. Otherwise, it has 0 food. Iron working can come after currency. Who knows, we might have iron nearby. I’ll try to plant purple and get us in place to plant an orange.

I move our ample warriors and our chariot around. We’re not really under barb threat.

So I’m going to follow the plan from my written turnset above (post 115).

Overall, we’re in really really good shape. Good job, Brian and shallow_thought!

T71
Meet Celtia. And my, aren’t they close. It wasn’t even Spain; it was Celtia! completely forgot to check their city list or get OB. (EDIT: That does mean we can get an overland OB to Celtia. Woot).



Monty asks us for OB and I say ok.



Well, I guess you can move diagonally Mr Barb Archer.



Adze chops the granary at CP. Good play right there guys! Granary completes and we’re at 50% full!

We need to finish that farm up there because it’ll irrigate the wheat, eventually. next move will be to chop the labeled grassland farm into a library. I mismanaged this a bit (in retrospect); should have finished the grass farm first with the chop. It wasn't a big deal but we could have probably grown a turn sooner.

T72
Granny Weatherwax, our new chariot, runs over to protect the gold mine at Yaqob Marley.



there is a very nice barb city down there somewhere (probably the one messing with orange dot). There’s another archer on the way from that city (you can just see his right arm).

I’m not too concerned. We have several units in the area.

FAILED SCREENSHOT

BS is maxed out next turn and I turned on avoid growth. This'll allow us to accumulate food in excess of the happy cap which will allow us to grow WHILE building a settler. 

T73
Barb archer moves to the gold hill. That is annoying. However, we’ve got 2 warriors and 2 chariots. We should be able to keep that gold unpillaged.

Here goes nothing:



Copenhagen withdraws!

Don’t fail us, Granny!



Victory!



As they say, it was a risk, but risk is everything.

Chop into the library at Yaqob and into the settler at Bean a Sidhe. 2x whip next turn and then: on to purple dot!

T74

Granny promotes to combat 1 to greet this dude. Do some unit shuffle to ensure that I don't Granny kilt.



Yaqob overflows onto a settler. Once overflow is done, I’ll let it grow to size 6, on chariots. Crank science to 100% Currency is due in 11 turns at -9 gpt.



Now that’s what I call micro: 2x whip into the settler for 30 overflow into the library — which I’ll chop into next turn. Avoid growth is a magical thing.

T75
Charlemagne asks for OB. I say, why not.

Barb archer sees our C1 chariot on a hill, backed up by a warrior and decides to eat Mansa’s scout. 95% odds sounds about right. Granny knocks another one down.

Chops complete Libraries in Bean a Sidhe and Christmas Past. Start a chariot at Yaqob Marley.

Put 100% espionage on Boudica.

Purple dot settler moves toward ... purple dot.

T76
Bean a Sidhe and Christmas Past roll into chariots.

Aksum founded on purple dot. Then I remember the naming convention and, lo, Christmas Present (well, Christmas Pres.) comes into being. I very lamely moved our workers and wasted a turn. Well, 2 worker turns.



T77
Did the math this turn: we’re going to be 1 gold short via Christmas Pres. maintenance costs. We can probably solve this by, well, doing something like this. 


Well that didn’t work as dramatically as I had hoped (only 53 base beakers). But we can probably squeeze the last couple beakers out. We just need 18 more beakers over the next 6 turns. That’s one extra scientist - which we can get from Bean a Sidhe.



Decide against the 2x whip at Yaqob. We don’t need orange dot just yet. Not before currency, at least.

got 4 workers at Christmas Pres. and 2 and Christmas Past. Yay for correct worker use.

T78
Chariot (Nanny Ogg. yes, I am reading Pratchett’s witches books) out of Bean a Sidhe and start another. don’t want to build a worker while we’re starving for currency.

Bean a Sidhe and Yaqob Marley now have Hinduism. Not going to switch just yet: Currency is more valuable and both cities that could grow are starving/stagnating.

T79
Chariot out of Christmas Past (Magrat) goes to investigate the barb city. Granny, now healed, heads south to harass barbarians.

T80


Now that is a pretty nice city. Well, by our food standards.

Bean a Sidhe has ensured we’ll complete Currency by T83 so I set it to stagnate again. After currency, I think we gotta go fishing for orange dot. Then, we should go iron working and currency for the northern jungle. I started a worker but feel free to switch off it. We’re at 22/28 food, so should be able to regrow the lost food in one turn (and grow at the same time). We do need to make sure currency finishes though.

I finished the cottage north of the city for lack of something better to do. Not sure what else these workers could have done?


Yaqob Marley finishes a settler next turn — not sure what we want next. I think, once we get currency, we switch to hinduism and add another cottage somewhere? In the meantime, a 4t worker?


Christmas Past can grow until it gets to size 5 and then just stagnate. Let’s use it for slow building workers?


Xmas present pops borders next turn. I changed the name to make it a bit easier to abbreviate. Workers are roading toward the silver for the extra happy/mining the gold. The road is so that we can get the happy cap to 8. The Mine is because we should waste as little time as possible getting that gold up and running.

Graphs:

Libraries are pretty good, it would appear. So’s gold.

Demos:

We’re not even last in soldiers!

[taotao]

Glad to hear everyone's okay Zalson.


I haven't loaded up the save, but a few stray comments:

- It sounds as if your economy still is in decent shape. 70+% break even is actually too high if anything at this point. Don't be afraid to reach 30-40% break even before Currency. If it dips to 10-20% then you might have to watch out, but purple and orange dot both have the potential to work precious metals and you're beelining the best economic tech of currency so you should be fine.

(That said, you might want to consider how to get more value from currency. Settling an island for ICTRs seems like a pipe dream at this point, but what do you need for routes with say Mansa? I'm guessing building a road the whole way is way too worker intensive, but what if you tech Sailing (sometime after currency) and send out a chariot defogging the coast, could that do it?)

On the matter of libraries: They are good buildings to dump hammers into while slow growing, but I don't consider them worth rushing. Let's say you have a city producing 10 commerce/turn, soon your breakeven will be something like 40% and then the library is worth 1beaker/turn. It's something, but not a lot. If you really go into crash mode, then scientists do help out, but let's not go there in the first place shall we?


- Barb city of Khazak: I don't like it. If I had planted a city there I would've probably put it one the river, if not I would've liked to get the cow in the bfc. Any new city you're to put down for cows now is bound to cause border tension without being a great producer of its own. Border tension? Yeah, second point of mine is that I'm fairly sure Mansa (or Izzy) will conquer it before we have the means to do so. In other words: too expensive for us to clear in lieu of what it offers, but also pushing rivals further towards us than they otherwise would've; lose-lose proposition.


- If my memory serves then barbs can build spears, but archers and axes are a lot more common. If this was me in SP I'd probably settle Copperopolis as the third city from now (after purple and orange) and just hope to get by without axes until then. (In MP I might consider settling copper earlier to have access to spears).


- Tech: Currency first is good. Working towards CoL is good. If you want confucianism then I'm not sure you can afford any stops in between. However, on higher difficulty levels I often consider it better to butter up against one of you're neighbours by accepting their state religion. Fishing and IW (and sailing IF that gives foreign trade routes) are also things you'd really like sooner rather than later.


Edit: It seems Zalson played/reported while I was typing/working.
Good set of turns by the sound of it. Not sure if there's even been too much focus on Currency, but it'll be good to have no doubt. Looking forward to screenshots and future developments.

Oh and an automated message from RB-bot:
Build more workers!

[shallow_thought]

We went home shortly after I wrote my post. So, thank you all for the well wishes. Wife and unborn baby and daughter are all okay. I'm okay too. I've got the save and have the feedback needed to at least start now.

I am not too concerned about expansion at this point. We're pushing 38 beakers with 3 cities at 100% science at -8 gpt. That means we're running about a 72% science rate (costs/beakers). That means we need to keep expanding. I do agree that adding libraries is a good hammer dump: adding those beakers means we'll get to 50 beakers sooner rather than later. I'll see about adding cottages.

shallow_thought: you should post about your shadow game! the feedback can sting at times but it will only help you get better!

I'll take a look at our situation when I get the game loaded. That said, I'm going to avoid my error last time and at least play a little of another game to warm up before I get started.

Great to hear things went OK in RL.

I'll try to put together some sort of write up my shadow game and probably post it in the thread I started about this game over in General discussion. Highlights are that I actually lost three times (the first two I went back ~10t and tried something different). The first loss was due to over-expansion; at the point I gave up I actually had negative gold at 0% science.  This may have been affecting my thinking about this game! In the shadow, I delayed currency until after IW and had started to found marginal tundra cities; we've done neither here, so should be in a better position.

Turns look good; I guess I'll be back to building workers for my turn set! Will look through the post in more detail later.

Quick note - we need fishing before Orange dot, IW before copperopolis. If we want to expand, Ithink we need to either hit one of those techs next, or identify a good alternative dot.

[haphazard1]

From the report, your empire is progressing nicely.

The economy is doing well, and should be able to support more cities as long as you keep developing your commerce resources like the metals. taotao is correct: don't be afriad to push your slider down to 30-40% for a while. Crashing to negative gold at 0%...that tends not to end well. But as long as you have good land to expand into, the new cities can pay off quickly enough to keep you afloat economically.

Barb spears do appear, and not just from events. As noted by taotao, they are a lot less common than archers and axes. But they do appear, and often enough to make relying solely on chariots a bit risky. So getting a settler for Copperopolis at some point fairly soon is likely to be worth doing, but is not a top-most priority. Unless the site is at risk of being poached by an AI? Note sure quite what the geography is for your neigbors at this point, with Boudica joining the party. (Does she have a religion yet?) If you are fortunate there may be some iron around, maybe even at an existing city, but it sounds like IW is still a ways off.

Speaking of tech, remember that Sailing is a prereq for Calendar. So it has some additional value beyond lighthouses and maybe trade routes to Mansa, since you know you have lots of Calendar resources nearby. Again not a top-most priority, but one more thing to keep in mind.

Has Judaism been founded? Not sure if you were aiming for your own religion with CoL or just the cheap Organized courthouses. If Judaism is not yet founded you should still have some time before Confucianism is reached by someone, but taotao is likely correct that you might not have time for tech detours before heading for it if you want the holy city.

Also, how many AIs total are in the game? Maybe it was mentioned at the start and I missed it.

[Brian Shanahan]

We went home shortly after I wrote my post. So, thank you all for the well wishes. Wife and unborn baby and daughter are all okay. I'm okay too. I've got the save and have the feedback needed to at least start now.

I am not too concerned about expansion at this point. We're pushing 38 beakers with 3 cities at 100% science at -8 gpt. That means we're running about a 72% science rate (costs/beakers). That means we need to keep expanding. I do agree that adding libraries is a good hammer dump: adding those beakers means we'll get to 50 beakers sooner rather than later. I'll see about adding cottages.

shallow_thought: you should post about your shadow game! the feedback can sting at times but it will only help you get better!

I'll take a look at our situation when I get the game loaded. That said, I'm going to avoid my error last time and at least play a little of another game to warm up before I get started.

Forgot to mention this in the turn report, and I went to the trouble of calculating BE science too. What worries me more than breakeven is the low 100% rate we're at on this map. Due to the fact that we've no real cottage sites until IW and capturing Khazak (if we're not beaten to there), I actually think at least a couple of libraries are neccessary soon. We need something to keep pulling us up the science ladder and at the moment libraries with hired scientists are it.

On the plains farms, the one south of Christmas could have been skipped, the one east is for irrigation purposes at Civil Service.