Josh's Civ 4 memoir. Chapter 2

[civac2]

Looks good.

I'd probably skip the post currency city and shift the city at the northeastern coast one tile west and the city at the eastern coast one tile north.

[joshybravo963]

Looks good.

I'd probably skip the post currency city and shift the city at the northeastern coast one tile west and the city at the eastern coast one tile north.

Well my thought process was that by this point I'll have my cottages ready and possibly an academy in Rome. So I'll mostly be growing cottages, no whipping , and Rome won't need all that sea food, so would be a shame to let it go to waste, so why not share the crabs and help start off another city aha

[Tarkeel]

I see that your screenshot dump has metamorphed into a full report, very nice! Just a heads up that for those that devour new posts as they come in won't see that you've edited in a lot of new content.

[Amicalola]

Report that was promised (ahem, a week ago):

Overview of the four 'core' cities.


They all have, or are about to have, granaries. One of the two things I pushed was early granaries are The Best, alongside an emphasis on whipping civilians. I think Joshy has executed both very well, so far, especially the 1-turn granary at Rome.  

We have 5 cities as of this turn, settling GemCity in the southeast. I opened the turn to this:


I think it means 'go away,' though I'm not certain. And um, no.  He does have two archers there, but our two axes aren't very impressed by that. 


I suggest chopping a monument->work boat immediately, before even improving the gems, because Jesse has his own monument there. I started chopping the further-away forest first, even though it loses 7 hammers, because 1) the monument only needs 15, and 2) it is much more efficient turn-wise thanks to roads. Following those we can improve the gems and fish, and the city will be up and running!

The plan is to nab an early academy inside Rome, to fund our IMP expansion. It's actually a play Joshy is more familiar with than me, so he would explain it better. But the main thing is we are growing cottages and researching writing ASAP, and will then turn off research for quite a while while a scientist is produced. I suggest that Rome slow-build it's current settler, because whipping would only shave off 1 turn (yay IMP!  ), and a library can be built very soon. 



Demos are pretty interesting.


We are first in food and second in MFG, despite just whipping ClamCity. That is a really good sign - my understanding is that those are the most important early on. That we are near-last in power is also fantastic right now; we are putting our hammers into more useful things (obviously this does not stay the case later in the game). I think Joshy did excellent fogbusting, we have had basically zero barb presence. So really nice job with that. 

Someone is really spiking in power, but we have no idea who. Someone else is probably on the receiving end of it right now. I have a lot to compliment about Joshy's play so far, but the thing we need to work on most is probably scouting. Some chariots or scouts can be built pretty quickly though, and there are much worse problems to have. 

I haven't played the next turn yet, because my instructions are starting to run out. I don't want to gatecrash the game or anything. Mostly things like 'where are these settlers going?' But Joshy and I have got reasonably good communication via discord now, which is also what let me have some input more recently, so it shouldn't hold the game up. Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic.   Is there anything that lurkers would especially like to see?

[Dp101]

What's the rough future settling plan? I see the sign for 6th city, but the rest don't seem to have any particular associated order, is there not one decided upon yet? Also, what's the reason to turn off science while you work on getting the academy? Like, min/max researching strategies make sense in general, but do you mean that you'd be running 100% gold longer than is strictly necessary to get the funds for the next tech, so that you only go back to running science once you have the academy (getting more total research out of the money, but delayed)? Or something else?

[joshybravo963]

What's the rough future settling plan? I see the sign for 6th city, but the rest don't seem to have any particular associated order, is there not one decided upon yet? Also, what's the reason to turn off science while you work on getting the academy? Like, min/max researching strategies make sense in general, but do you mean that you'd be running 100% gold longer than is strictly necessary to get the funds for the next tech, so that you only go back to running science once you have the academy (getting more total research out of the money, but delayed)? Or something else?

That's exactly it. Amicalola was clever enough to realise that gems were contested, so we have to settle it quick, by the time we get the next settler hopefully where we settle will be more clear. We spotted bellarch to the west so we need to decide whether it's better to build near him to stop him over expanding into our area and stealing our land, or settle near gold to improve economy and allow us to build more cities or settle near corn for food and allow us to grow faster. No idea which is better but hopefully by the next settler we can make our mind up by the ever changing situation. 

Yes something along those lines. If we concentrate our worker power to build cottages around the capitol, we can grow the city very large to work all the cottages. With the cottages the capitol city will bring in most of the income. ( say a size 8 city has 8 cottages that have advanced so 8*3 commerce is 24 commerce from cottages alone, plus worked tiles and trade might give you more than 30, while currently the whole empire has 42 commerce, so more than 75% will come from capitol city)
Then you add 25% from library, get a great scientist and build academy for another 50% giving you a 75% bonus. So your 30 commerce becomes almost double. When you change to beurocracy you get another 50% commerce in your capitol. So sometimes it's good to wait and save your gold so that later this gold has close to 75% more value after academy.

[Amicalola]

We settled DeerCity in the north. It's a pretty poor site currently, but it leads the way onto our forward city that we plan to settle soon, and it is a very strong food/hammer city after the borders pop. I foresee many praetorians being whipped here.



Bellarch settled a city here:


So StoneCity just became a higher priority. :/ Bellarch is equal with us in cities (6) and with Stonehenge to boot - they're crushing it so far. 

Monument is finished at GemCity, and the fish are netted. We should connect the gems in two turns, which is great timing because our cities are starting to grow to their happy caps.


I was thinking about CornCity (our next spot, visible in screenshot). I would suggest we move it 1S of the current plan. It loses no tiles except a floodplains (that a later city picks up), and the city is as strong early, while claiming more land.

We found some silver past the mountain islands. I'm not sure if this is an island, or the southern coastline, but I'm guessing it's the latter. The map can only be so big. 



Rome has started its library, which should finish in 6 turns (we save 1 turn with a chop). Then it's 17 turns for a Great Scientist, so 23 turns from now we should have an academy there.  I think we can get the cottages all to hamlets by then, so hopefully we're looking at pre-T100 Currency. We'll see how badly I've crashed the economy by then though.


We have trade routes with JesseL and Bellarch, and we should open our borders with at least one of them. Bellarch's GNP looks a little rough, while their expansion looks great (noticeable Mjmd influence) - for that reason I recommend offering OB to JesseL now, and waiting a while on Bellarch. We don't want to help them anymore than we have too. We do want to sign it with them at some point though, probably once they themselves get Writing.

What's the rough future settling plan? I see the sign for 6th city, but the rest don't seem to have any particular associated order, is there not one decided upon yet? Also, what's the reason to turn off science while you work on getting the academy? Like, min/max researching strategies make sense in general, but do you mean that you'd be running 100% gold longer than is strictly necessary to get the funds for the next tech, so that you only go back to running science once you have the academy (getting more total research out of the money, but delayed)? Or something else?

Top priority for now is getting settlers out to all of the contested spots, followed closely by ensuring Rome's cottages are all growing. Rough order goes CornCity->MarbleCity (by Bellarch)->StoneCity (by Bellarch)->strong eastern coast->filler spots. I don't think we want to settle any further inland, because we want to be able to focus on one target for our aggression in the classical era, without an angry neighbour on the other side. Although, all of this is my general advice, and the overall call is up to Joshy.

[Amicalola]

This spear is doing his best to singlehandedly cripple our civ. He killed an attacking axe at 90% while only taking 2 hits, and now if he gets another good roll he and the warrior might take GemCity and 2 workers. (~5% chance)  I thought about moving the workers to the jungle hill, but I don't want to risk another barb being there when our odds are so good here. The nightmare scenario is if the warrior kills the axe, leaving Jesse to snipe the city. I'm actually quite worried about that happening.



They're also delaying the founding of CornCity by a turn. I don't want to settle it, only to have SuperSpear wander over there and kill that city too. Grrr. I did realise that I could and should have attacked Superspear last turn, when the road was still up (I was hoping he'd suicide, but instead he pillaged the road). That way, even losing this first roll, the 2nd axe could have cleaned up and moved to defend vs. the warrior. So we got unlucky, but I played it very badly by attacking out, and setting us up to be punished. Oops. 

[Amicalola]

I took the risk and founded CornCity (after moving the warrior away.... Appalling play by me all around, prompted by general panic ) and HOLY SHIT it's lucky I didn't move those workers onto the forest hill.  I figured it could be better to lose CornCity (and instantly recapture) than to lose GemCity and 2 workers. I did not figure another barbarian would be out there.



Our warrior arrives in time to defend from the new warrior, and our axe can retake the city if we lose that roll. Sure, I got unlucky here, but this is probably the worst series of plays I've ever made in civ, including PB51. Panic + Tired completely broke my brain - maybe I belong in the greens game after all. We'll find out how bad the punish is next turn. It might be anywhere from 'nothing' to 'complete disaster.'

[El Grillo]

Ancient era combat rolls can be so stressful