[PB60] Lazteuq and Civac

[Lazteuq]

That makes sense. With 8 cities, our research rate is already terrible, so that might be 15 or so turns of saving gold. We've expanded really fast and commerce will soon be the main demand. I have a feeling we'll be working water tiles a lot. There are a couple nice rivers to cottage and we will have a second gold mine at least.
Do you think the capitol should stop running 5-turn settlers? Maybe workers instead?
I think the spots on our northern coast should be the next two cities. After that, I'm unsure. We could settle the edge of the jungle. Even without IW that can get lots of forests, a river, and pig.
I'm not sure if the second island site is worth settling now. I sent the galley back toward Lakhama. The workboat from Chichen is going to check out that island to the northeast. Later that workboat should improve the northern coast, but for now it has nothing else to do.

I put Uxmal's overflow into a worker, which can be 2pop whipped later (it will be at 28/60). There are no great tiles to grow onto right now anyway.
Do you think we should whip Calakmul 2->1 for the granary?

[civac2]

That makes sense. With 8 cities, our research rate is already terrible, so that might be 15 or so turns of saving gold. We've expanded really fast and commerce will soon be the main demand. I have a feeling we'll be working water tiles a lot. There are a couple nice rivers to cottage and we will have a second gold mine at least.
Do you think the capitol should stop running 5-turn settlers? Maybe workers instead?

After the current settler my preference is to have the capital develop cottages and grow to 6. As you point out we need commerce. On size 6 Mutal could build the pyramids maybe.

I think the spots on our northern coast should be the next two cities. After that, I'm unsure. We could settle the edge of the jungle. Even without IW that can get lots of forests, a river, and pig.

I agree with the two northern cities. Maybe pause expansion for a bit after 10 cities to get certain techs done. On the other hand, some of the djungle-edge cities have decent commerce potential (river cottages).

Do you think we should whip Calakmul 2->1 for the granary?

Probably. Just make sure all available food resources get worked by some city.

[Lazteuq]

Turn 76:
We're first in food by a pretty significant margin, and last in GNP. Even though we have Stonehenge! The economy is already pretty well crashed. With 9 cities, we're only planning one more in the near term.

Superdeath offered OB and I accepted. He wants to get his workboat through. I'm happy to cooperate with him, don't want to appear confrontational. Superdeath isn't totally insane, and I trust we can have peaceful relations. I hope he attacks Amica or Mjmd to stop them from building too many wonders in peace. Amica/Van got TGL, which should be great, since basically every city is coastal. I'll bet Mjmd is setting his fast workers to work on chopping Pyramids at this very moment.

Someone beat us to Judaism, but we still plan to collect all the early religious techs. We want Monotheism because it gives OR and is a prereq for Theology. We want Priesthood for cheap temples. We want both because then we can get a prereq. discount on Monarchy, and we need all those cheap techs for a prophet to bulb theology. I think it will be fun to do some spiritual tricks swapping between OR and Theocracy later. But we need to recover the economy first...
Demos:

We should think about where to put Moai now that we're about to have stone. I'm thinking Lakhama. It might not be optimal but we could get it pretty fast. Maybe Calakmul is better but slower.
GKC has a galley near that stone island between us. We decided to not contest that right now. We still don't have copper connected so we're still making MP warriors.

[civac2]

Lazteuq managed to secure a silver vs gold deal with Mjmd. That alleviates our happiness problem significantly and is all around awesome. (@Lazteuq: The ingame marker at the desert gold was written without me seeing the resource trade and you deservedly ignored it. )

I changed some tile assignments around to prioritize food and commerce over hammers (oasis in southermost city over deer, whale in Lakamha, bunch of lakes). There is a trend I noticed that you emphasize hammers a lot. This is not necessarily wrong in general but right now it is a mistake. We do not need hammers. We need cities to grow into as many commerce tiles as possible. Right now, the bare lake tiles of our inland sea are better than non-river grasland mines.

A related matter is how you use your workers. Currently, you have workers mining grasland hills near Lakamha and Mayapan. As above, there is nothing wrong with this in principle. Grasland mines are decent tiles and a production focus makes sense for both cities. However, right now there are more important sinks for worker turns, namely cottages near the capital (especially one each that can be shared with Lakamha and Chichen Itza), cottages in the flood plain valley and support for the pig city.

(Just some general hints. Now that they are half done let them finish, of course. Also, I just noticed that the grasland hill near Mayapan is river-side which makes it much better. So, err.. )

[Lazteuq]

Those points all make sense. This is a really awkward phase of the game for me because I don't have a clear priority for what cities should be doing. The age of reckless expansion is over, but all the medieval fun stuff is still far away. We don't even have writing to build libraries, which I would probably build too many of otherwise.
I definitely see the power of IMP, and it's a weird feeling to not desperately need more foodhammers for settlers.

I guess Mjmd is sort of naturally an ally, being the only civ who won't have a border with us at all. GKC, Jowy, Amica, Superdeath all will border us by land and/or sea, but Mjmd is directly opposite I think.

Soon I think we should put our excess pop and hammers into chariots and axes. Nobody's building up serious power yet, but I think that will change soon. We have two distant land borders and a sea coast border to worry about. Fortunately, a pile of unused cheap units will synergize nicely with running HR early.


The economic recovery is already happening, now we have 2 golds and some 3c traderoutes with Superdeath. By the way, I think he might be building Pyramids in his nearest city to us, it's got decent hammers and has been size 5 or 6 for a while now.
I think the settler out of Uxmal should settle the desert spot to the east without delay. Then it can take some of Uxmal's extra food as Uxmal stagnates at 5 making commerce. That's where I plan to send the workboat coming out of Mayapan.

Edit: If we settle the island between us and Amica/Van, we might be able to get a one-way galley attack path. I think that island's cultural borders will be able to reach their islands. I don't think there's enough space between us for Tarkeel to fit 2 tiles of ocean. I guess we could try counting tiles to check. Imagine if we razed their GLH city with a one-way galley attack! OK, maybe strategically we don't want to do that. Sounds fun though.

Also edit: It sucks that we're already paying a lot of maintenance for all these warriors, I don't think we should build any more. They're only worth 15 hammers of savings compared to a chariot. So if a warrior does nothing for more than 10 turns or so, I think it's not worth it. Monarchy is definitely more than 10 turns away.

[civac2]

Yeah, we may have overbuild warriors. I'm not sure.

Do you want those extra work boats for scouting? One for each direction?

One or two woodsman 2 holkans for the jungle areas at the borders would be a good idea.

We will soone have missionaries and temples to sink production in. Right now light houses are worth while as a hammer sink.

[Lazteuq]

I'm extremely concerned about GKC. He just played a double turn, placing this island city Arpinum and then putting a galley directly on our border. If that galley has any serious units, we might lose Chichen Itza next turn. I felt I had no choice but to panic whip a Holkan in Chichen. I really regret not investing a couple hammers into Holkans previously now. Also we still don't have a road on the copper mine, and now he's threatening the tile so we can't safely put a worker on it! Fortunately we have a second source of copper along the river by Xukpui. I'm most worried if he has axes in the boat, then he can easily kill Holkans. Even if he decides to just pillage our fish that will be very annoying. Then we'll need a galley or two just to dislodge him.

One person already has Iron Working, it's almost certainly the guy playing Rome. The question is, does he already have Praets? The trade window doesn't show him having Iron yet , but maybe that's because WE don't know IW yet. I don't know how trade window resource visibility works. I really doubt he has praets on a boat already, but Shock axes are scary enough.
I sent GKC offers of crab4crab and open borders. He did pick AGG Rome though, so I'm not very optimistic about peace. Also he's lagging a bit in food, production, and gnp, so maybe he's feeling desperate.
On the other hand, his power is lower than ours, so I sort of doubt he has multiple units on that boat. I think he's probably bluffing, and I really hope so.

On a more peaceful note, we'll be able to bulb Theology as soon as those 4 religious techs are done, we don't need Monarchy to start building temples. For some reason I'd been imagining we needed Monarchy too? I estimate the bulb is about 15 turns away based on our current beaker rate.

One work boat is intended for the pig/sheep city (it has ocean fish too). The other is for the desert incense/fish city. I guess a third can be for scouting.
That scout build was a placeholder that I'd meant to change but forgot. Thanks for catching it.
To help Calakmul build Moai faster, I think it should take the cow, and then the capitol takes the deer. It's still going to be a pretty slow build...
Woodsman 2 lets you move double speed in jungle, which I had forgotten until just now. That sounds fantastic, potentially enabling some really sneaky attacks. Sort of like Keshiks.

[Tarkeel]

One person already has Iron Working, it's almost certainly the guy playing Rome. The question is, does he already have Praets? The trade window doesn't show him having Iron yet , but maybe that's because WE don't know IW yet. I don't know how trade window resource visibility works. I really doubt he has praets on a boat already, but Shock axes are scary enough.

The trade window will show all resources that player has available for trade, regardless of what you have the tech to see. It is possible to "disguise" resources, by trading iron for iron, but then it will show up in the trade section instead.

[Charriu]

I don't know how trade window resource visibility works.

Tarkeel's answer is not totally correct. This is most likely not well known, but you need certain techs to be able to see and trade specific resources on the trade window. The reason why almost nobody knows that, is because the required techs are so low on the tech tree most of the time. For example you need the following techs for these resources:

Mining: Every resource connected via mines
Calendar: Every resource connected via calendar
Agriculture: Every resource connected via farms
Animal Husbandry: Every resource connected via pastures
Hunting: Every resource connected via camps
Masonry: Every resource connected via quarries
Combustion: Oil
Fission: Uranium
Monarchy: Wine

If you watched Sullla's boreal One City Challenge then you might remember that he never researched Agriculture and was wondering why nobody traded the agriculture resources with him. Well this is the reason why.

You can trade iron if you have Mining, so that's why you will see iron in the trade window.

[Lazteuq]

Thanks Tarkeel and Charriu, That's reassuring.
I'm impressed they bothered coding those tech requirements in to the game, but it's a nice touch. Charriu, is this something to put in Curious Civplayer thread for all to see?
That disguising resources thing is interesting; if you trade a resource away to someone who the third party hasn't met, they won't be able to see the trade in the foreign advisor. Not very relevant on this 6-player map, but surely relevant in other games.

ALSO....... That fish on our GKC border is an ocean tile, so he can't cross it. My imminent war panic wasn't necessary. At least I only wasted 20 hammers with the cold whip. At this stage of the game it's not a disaster.
Whenever the borders of Arpinum expand, he'll actually be able to reach our coast. That is, unless we can push his culture back with culture from Chichen Itza's second ring. That's definitely somewhere we want a temple and library. I think ocean culture wars will be important on this map.

Edit: Crossposted with Charriu