[Spoiler] Suboptimal's Next Attempt at Lurker Frustration

[Alhambram]

Kaiser surely got one or more cultural city states, otherwise he wouldn't completed 3 civis already now.

Regarding craftsmanship eureka, if a barb unit pillages one of three improvements before builder use its last charge for 3rd improvement, eureka for craftsmanship won't trigger.
Which means as long there is barb warrior or scout alive, you need to guard horse tile with warrior or kill barb warrior and chase scout away to follow towards camp where it did spawn.

Hopefully there is some good city spot with freshwater west of silk resources which we can settle.

[suboptimal]

I should be able to kill both remaining visible barbarians with the warriors I have. London is going to go Monument -> Warrior -> Slinger after the builder completes. One warrior will go west to defog, the other will go take care of the camp and the slinger will sit tight for defense. I don't know in what order, though, as I'm not sure if scouting or killing the camp is the priority in that direction. At Birmingham the slinger is going to head north to try to locate the camp and perhaps kill the spearman and clear the camp. At a minimum I'll get to see the coast up at 'A' by doing so.

I realized after my turn yesterday that I've got in my plans. I can't put down a quarry at London because I don't have Mining completed. I'm going to pasture the horses at London then go put down a cow pasture and the elephant camp at Birmingham.

I'm debating where to put a Campus at Birmingham. The district plan there is to have a Campus, an Encampment with the Industrial Zone up on the river (along with a later Dam and Aqueduct). I'm thinking to put the Campus and Encampment to the south, with the Campus going W of the elephants and the Encampment SW of them. That forms a potential district triangle with a marsh Campus from 'F'.

[suboptimal]

Turn 24

Got a couple of notifications at the start of the turn. First, my warrior at Birmingham was attacked by the barbarian, as expected. Second, the slinger has a promotion available. Third, there was a flood on the River Trent:




The rice picked up a and the floodplain to the SE gained a . Shame the southern floodplain didn’t get the - that site could use all the help it could get. Good thing my warrior wasn’t standing there last turn. . That’s roughly one disaster every 3 1/3 turns since Turn 15 (T15, T18, T24). Wonder what’ll happen in the T27-T30 window… I clear out the notifications and get on with the turn.

The warrior that was attacked stays put and fortifies in place. I’ll eat the next attack and then clean up any leftovers. The other warrior moves through the recently flooded lands and will meet the builder on the jungle hill next turn. The slinger vacates Birmingham and moves across the river into the forest. I’ll be up to the area near Location ‘A’ in three more turns. The city itself has a new citizen and it starts working the elephants. That brings the monument down to 13 turns for now, but I’ll shave another couple turns off the build time once the city grows again in eight turns.

Internationally CMF has joined the ranks of those with 1 domestic tourist. Kaiser has his fourth tech completed. I’ll only be completing my third in 6 turns.

[suboptimal]

Right, so I posted this out in the main thread but there is one thing I'd like to discuss/theorize about, namely this:

Work Ethic – Follower: Holy Site district’s Faith adjacency bonus provides production as well. (Before just +1% Production for each follower up to 15%)

Ichabod should be drooling over this one so much he shorts out his keyboard.

If I were playing Brazil I would have gone for a religious start with the Sacred Path pantheon since Brazil's start bias and +1 jungle adjacency makes it easy to find stupidly large adjacency bonuses. For example, the plains tile NW of London would be +8 adjacency for Brazil + Sacred Path, as would the stone east of Birmingham. +6 sites are a dime a dozen in my start area. Beeline Theology, slot Scripture (+100% adjacency) and you're looking at a Holy Site with +12 to +20 adjacency bonus. Given how policy-doubled adjacencies are handled by dedications and governors (the policy increases those benefits) it means that it's possible to get a Holy Site with, say, +16+16 in the early Classical Age.

I hope I'm not next to Brazil and hope that Ichabod wasn't thinking about playing a religious Brazil. If he is and takes Work Ethic his neighbors will have a slog on their hands.

[Alhambram]

Right, so I posted this out in the main thread but there is one thing I'd like to discuss/theorize about, namely this:

   Work Ethic – Follower: Holy Site district’s Faith adjacency bonus provides production as well. (Before just +1% Production for each follower up to 15%)

Ichabod should be drooling over this one so much he shorts out his keyboard.

If I were playing Brazil I would have gone for a religious start with the Sacred Path pantheon since Brazil's start bias and +1 jungle adjacency makes it easy to find stupidly large adjacency bonuses.  For example, the plains tile NW of London would be +8 adjacency for Brazil + Sacred Path, as would the stone east of Birmingham. +6 sites are a dime a dozen in my start area.  Beeline Theology, slot Scripture (+100% adjacency) and you're looking at a Holy Site with +12 to +20 adjacency bonus.  Given how policy-doubled adjacencies are handled by dedications and governors (the policy increases those benefits) it means that it's possible to get a Holy Site with, say, +16+16 in the early Classical Age.  

I hope I'm not next to Brazil and hope that Ichabod wasn't thinking about playing a religious Brazil.  If he is and takes Work Ethic his neighbors will have a slog on their hands.

If Ichabod happens to get Hildebrand too, one of holy sites is going give adjaceny too and oh he can also build Chichen Itza in that city filled with jungle and also lumbermill all of those jungles, just great....

Regarding writing, do you intend to complete it soon or swap it next turn with mining. Do we need to build campuses now or wait with campuses till after two more settlers?
Also Foreign Trade, finish it asap or hope to find other continent and for now research craftsmanship. We don't need civic swap that badly, Urban Planning and Discipline are still best cards now.
At other side when London grows after 8 turns, euerka for Early Empire is activated and short route towards 50% discount for settlers if we just finish Foreign Trade without eureka now.


Maybe swap tiles at Birmingham: no cattle but elelphant and one of jungle hill tile for production. When Birmingham hit size 3, it is going have unhappiness due too low amenties.
We firstly needs hook up ivory before growing Birmingham to size 3 and London to size 5. With more production, monument in Birmingham should be finished faster too.

[suboptimal]

Regarding writing, do you intend to complete it soon or swap it next turn with mining. Do we need to build campuses now or wait with campuses till after two more settlers?
Also Foreign Trade, finish it asap or hope to find other continent and for now research craftsmanship. We don't need civic swap that badly, Urban Planning and Discipline are still best cards now.
At other side when London grows after 8 turns, euerka for Early Empire is activated and short route towards 50% discount for settlers if we just finish Foreign Trade without eureka now.


Maybe swap tiles at Birmingham: no cattle but elelphant and one of jungle hill tile for production. When Birmingham hit size 3, it is going have unhappiness due too low amenties.
We firstly needs hook up ivory before growing Birmingham to size 3 and London to size 5. With more production, monument in Birmingham should be finished faster too.

My current plan is to finish Writing (5 turns) without the boost, put down the Campus now (locking in its cost at 68) and then building it for the State Workforce inspiration.  I'd look to immediately place but not build out a second Campus at Birmingham. With Foreign Trade I'm also taking the hit and finishing that without the boost. My plan is to do what you indicated - get Early Empire completed on the short route for Colonization and spit out two settlers while working on the top half of the civics tree. 

London's current build order is Monument (T30) -> Warrior (T33) -> Slinger (36) -> Campus (T41) -> Settler (140, T47) -> builder (T50)

The way it seems things work out is that Early Empire completes the same turn the Campus completes and the settler completes the same time as Craftsmanship.  That'll let me slot Ilkum for two builders out of London (one to follow the settler, a second for improvements) and one out of Birmingham (to follow that settler).  The second builder at London will magnuschop one of the forests into the Ancestral Hall, quarry the stone for the eureka and then either head to 'E' for a wine plantation or put a second magnuschop into the Ancestral Hall.   Don't like this idea. Going to use Magnus at Coastal Location for the crab harvest and a jungle chop to get the RND done quicker)

Regarding working the jungle first at Birmingham I did run the numbers on that when I settled the city.  It's 2T faster to the monument but a turn slower to the settler and effectively trades 2 (jungle) for 2 (cows). It should also be noted that Birmingham will be putting into the settler for 9 turns before Colonization is slotted.  If I waited for Early Empire to complete there'd be 63 at Birmingham for other stuff first (units?  granary? most of a Campus?) but the settler wouldn't complete until T54 and settle 'A' until T58.  By building the settler "inefficiently", A gets settled on T48 and grows to 3 population and is 1 turn short of completing a granary (and 2 turns short of a chopped RND) as of T58 even with the growth penalty at 2 population.  

My plan for 'A' is to purchase the 61 volcano tile, work that first to have the city grow in three turns and then work the hill elephants while building a granary.  The builder from Birmingham would come up, improve the hill elephants, improve one coastal resource (if there is one) and chop the forest into the RND the turn after the Granary completes. Edited to add: The coastal location will buy the jungle hill to the east and the builder will improve & harvest the crabs then magnuschop a jungle for a quick population boost and to speed completion of the RND. Coastal will build a galley before the RND and both 'A' and Coastal will build two galleys after the RND completes.

[suboptimal]

Turn 25

I learned a few interesting things about barbarian AI behavior over the past couple of days. User Victoria had put up a thread on CivFanatics as she’s in the process of finalizing a guide on the barbarians. That led another user to link to a reddit thread which had lots of interesting tidbits. Two of them are that:

- a barbarian camp will spawn 7 tiles (as the crow flies) from a non-city-state city (ie player or major Civ AI) and the camp is associated with that city and out of line of sight from all units.
- a barbarian recon unit only alerts (red exclamation point) when it moves adjacent to the borders of the city its camp is associated with.

If this is indeed true (which the CivFanatics seem to think) then there are three things to know about my current situation as it relates to the barbarians:

- the southwestern camp is not associated with London (it’s only six tiles away)
- the scout from the west is from a camp that’s not associated with London (it didn’t alert on my borders)
- the camp in the northeast is just in the fog north of Kilimanjaro (which we sort of already know).

The first two should mean that I’ve likely got an opponent 5-7 tiles (south)west of what I’ve presently got revealed. If that’s the case then they’ve also scouted away from me.

Then there is also the info about how the boldness mechanic works, which may or may not be known around these parts (I didn’t know the ins and outs myself). However, Victoria seems to think the reddit post isn’t completely right about the boldness mechanic. However, I don’t plan on letting the current set of barbarians be a test case for that. One dead, two to go.

With that diversion out of the way, on to the actual turn…

No notifications. The barbarian in the east didn’t attack, the warrior at London hasn’t moved and now there’s a scout that’s come up from the southwest (it’s on the sheep tile south of London). The builder is complete and I start a monument. The builder and warrior meet on the jungle hill and we’ll see what that barbarian does next turn. The movement reveals the original, alerted redlined scout on the bananas east of Ullswater Lake. Eh, it can stay there for the time being. However, it also means that I need to escort the builder to the horses with the warrior. If I get lucky the scout will move adjacent to my warrior and I’ll be able to kill it. Otherwise it's a pillaging threat.

Over at Birmingham I leave the warriors in their stalemate. I’ll stay fortified until my unit heals up enough to kill the barbarian in one shot – if I redline it now it’ll likely run away and I don’t want to have to chase it. Slinger moves north, sees nothing out of the ordinary. One more turn and I should get a glimpse of the coastline up there.

Internationally nothing major this turn except for Ichabod being the next player to one domestic tourist. That leaves me in last place with no tourists. I’ll get my next inspiration in seven turns when both of my cities grow in population and I get Early Empire boosted.

[suboptimal]

Turn 26

So, some very mildly interesting movements on the part of the barbarians…




I send the warrior/builder pair at London west to pasture the horses. Depending on what that barbarian warrior does I’ll either move the pair northeast to try to chase off the scout or go straight east to get the builder back into the city. Over at Birmingham I attack the barbarian with my warrior for 39 damage and redline it.

Up north is where my interest lies. Slinger moves towards ‘A’ and finds a little bit of coastline:




This is a pretty good city spot. If I’m lucky there’s a sea resource in the fog. I’ll be able to improve that plus only one of the crabs at the southern location to get the Celestial Navigation eureka. That, in turn, would let me use a builder charge at the southern location for a jungle magnuschop to speed along that city’s RND. I’ll find out next turn by moving up to the coast. After that I’ll head northeast to go locate the barbarian camp.

[Alhambram]

Spot A is looking really good, thank god no reefs at coast which mean we can put down RND there.

About builds in London, I do question slinger one. We already got one for euerka which we got. We can save up more gold for tile purchases of monument/granary if we just produce archers right away with 50% Agoge policy card in our production strong cities.

And interesting bit about barbs, maybe there is really other player 7 tiles away from camp in west or south west.

[suboptimal]

I was thinking of having the slinger for settler escort, though if I have two warriors I could bring one back in time to handle that task. You do make a good point about the archers, though - it'll be easy enough to build the straight.

That leaves the question of what to do. The two constraints on the production queue are that the Govt Plaza can't be placed until around T55 and London's settler can't complete before Birmingham. In looking at potential yields I think there are two "good" options:

1) Some combination of warrior, scout & Campus early, granary + 30 into something else later
2) Campus -> Granary early, warrior -> scout later

In the first case I get an extra barb-buster/settler escort out and the scout can go far and wide while all my main military stays put and defogs only the near west. In the second case the earlier granary ulitmately gets the city growing a bit faster and the settler gets done a turn earlier. In both cases I'd manage food yields to avoid having London grow to 5 population while building the settler. That'd keep the city at 4 population when the settler completes (hiding the fact I've built two settlers instead of just one) and helps with city growth. Of course, if we don't think we'd need or want the warrior & scout later there's about 65 in the "budget" between the builder and the Government Plaza we could put towards...something (library, start another settler, second builder?).