[PB73 SPOILERS] scooter's Oracle

[Zed-F]

I love seeing the gems pop, that's awesome. I agree it does seem like a great reward for going toward MC. I still think Calendar is next, even if we do get failgold on Colossus, but maybe Machinery would come after that. We'd be close to Compass, too, which seems a great pick-up with all our trade routes.

Note that the bonus from harbor applies to the base value of a traderoute, which is 1.0 until the city giving the route hits sizes above 10 (and after that distance also matters). It should be able to push foreign routes up by 1C though.

It should still help ICTR routes to our islands though, right?

But yeah, probably not as urgent as some other buildings, and we have quite the backlog of stuff to already. I imagine Aestheics/Literature, CoL, and others might be higher priorities, unless we want to move toward Caravels quickly. It’s probably too far in the future to guess at next techs beyond Calendar and Machinery.

[Tarkeel]

From the wiki

+5% for each point of population of the From city over 10
+25% if the city From is connected to its capital
+50% if the city From has a harbor
+100% if the city From has the Temple of Artemis
+100% if the city To is on another continent
for foreign To city, +100% if it is on another continent and the From city has a customs house
for foreign To city, +3% per turn (up to a max of 150%) since the last war between civs owning To and From

By From they mean the city the route is in.

Assuming size/distance 10 or less gives

Base Route: 1.0
Capital connection +25%
ICTR + 100%

Totals to 2.25, which is truncated to 2C and adding +50% from harbor results in 2.75 which is still truncated to 2C.
While a foreign route will have +150%, and adding a harbor changes it from 3.75 to 4.25 and thus gaining a C.

[Zed-F]

That does make harbours pretty underwhelming.

[scooter]

Don't take my questions as doubts of the wisdom of going for Colossus -- I think that's well-justified, and if the capital is the best place for it then I'm cool with that. I'm just trying to make sure we consider the ramifications. Deferring HG in favour of Colossus is fine, especially if we can steal it from Oxy; if that works, he'll have just way too much trouble keeping up with us economically. At some point we'll just out-tech and out-maneuver him on the seas, take away his islands, and slowly choke him to death.

I'm gonna just level with you all. I forgot that Colossus requires a Forge first.

[Krill]

I was wondering when that penny would drop.

[scooter]

Before we get to the part where I forgot how to Civ4.





To be honest I had no idea how to dotmap this island. I basically decided I wanted Fish first ring largely because the (scouting) WB is already here and ready to go, so it was here or the desert. Desert is slightly better for redeeming tiles, but I decided the tactical value of pushing my culture out into these waters and bridging the gap to the other islands was worth it. It's super borderline tbh. I think I'm gonna slip in Archery so I can drop some cheap defenders into these islands. I'm nearing the point where I can't just leave these cities empty anymore.





OOPS. I genuinely forgot this. What can I say, last week was busy so I had less time to sit and think about this game. I'll think about what to do today. I dunno, I may consider just doing it and whipping it with overflow into Colossus anyway.. Will have to check the numbers and see if that makes sense. I do want the Forge here anyway.





Yuris continues to slowly advance, but I just have so much warning thanks to the culture at the front. I've got a cat/elephant/spear/chariot already there, so he already can't do anything, but I've got more units queued. I think he's got a Cataphract now, but it'll be like 6+ turns before it could even get here. I'm covered. I'm gonna try to get peace because Oxy is just way too free to do the Joao things, but I dunno if he'll take it. If I can kill those units, he might have to. The problem is yes, I can dedicate a small portion of my production to stalemating him, but Oxy does not have to do that. So I gotta either start finding ways to squeeze him for enforced peace, or I need to Viking him out of the game. At least Metal Casting puts me quite close to Machinery, so that is a very plausible option at this point.





And uh, those units are apparently enough to be the biggest military in the game? In a game where Artillery, Musketeers, and Phracts are all in the field. Side note: I've gradually lost track of what's going on with Luddite/Cairo other than Luddite has no interest in 3g for OB trade, though he did send back my 3gpt. The two of them both eventually settled their 5th cities, so maybe they made peace. What a disastrous conflict for both of them that was. I really want to know what happened. In my rudimentary pregame testing, Musketeers looked like a total free kill to me.

[scooter]

I was wondering when that penny would drop.

This was a really good case study in what happens in these games when your focus is low for a week. Nothing major, but sloppy compared to the previous 65 turns. We've had a few machines roll through here that basically never made mistakes like this, and I've never understood how they do it.

From the wiki

+5% for each point of population of the From city over 10
+25% if the city From is connected to its capital
+50% if the city From has a harbor
+100% if the city From has the Temple of Artemis
+100% if the city To is on another continent
for foreign To city, +100% if it is on another continent and the From city has a customs house
for foreign To city, +3% per turn (up to a max of 150%) since the last war between civs owning To and From

By From they mean the city the route is in.

Assuming size/distance 10 or less gives

Base Route: 1.0
Capital connection +25%
ICTR + 100%

Totals to 2.25, which is truncated to 2C and adding +50% from harbor results in 2.75 which is still truncated to 2C.
While a foreign route will have +150%, and adding a harbor changes it from 3.75 to 4.25 and thus gaining a C.

I hate Harbors because of all this. Before I (mostly) understood all this, I'd build them and then wonder why they seemed useless. Now I mostly get it, but I still have to break out a calculator just to figure out if they're going to net me anything, and even once I do, there's a chance I'm wrong or something changes afterwards that changes the math completely. So I end up just not building them because I don't want the headache, which is often the right move, but not always.

[Tarkeel]

Completely agree on harbors (in BtS), which is why I like that they're boosted in CtH, giving EXP some late-game love.

[Zed-F]

I guess part of that calculus is ‘how important is MoM?’ and ‘how close to it is Oxy getting?’, since you haven’t mentioned Calendar in the last few posts even though it seemed a priority earlier. Do we have a sense of where he is tech-wise right now?

Hopefully enforced peace with Yuris is possible. We do have other priorities to consider and it would be good to be able to shift our attention to Oxy.

What’s in Gerri on turn 77?

EDIT: Intuitively, I’m not sure I like sacrificing population in Logan to get a faster forge so we can get fail gold by working on Colossus, when that costs us a bunch of gold by delaying growth at Logan and/or delays our ability to whip settlers out of Roman and Kendall. What we’ve done up to this point is say to Oxy ‘you can have Colossus if you make it a priority, we’ll only get it if you aren’t doing so and we can get it cheaply.’ Spending whips in the capital and delaying growth elsewhere doesn’t seem like ‘cheaply’ when competing for a wonder where we’re playing catch up from the start.

[T-hawk]

This was a really good case study in what happens in these games when your focus is low for a week. Nothing major, but sloppy compared to the previous 65 turns. We've had a few machines roll through here that basically never made mistakes like this, and I've never understood how they do it.

Yeah, I had that same experience in a different context. I went to the World Boardgame Championships this year. I know all the strategies for the major games I play, and I can put together a flawless game of something and beat anyone or at least contend within a few points, but half the time I make some glaring mistake instead that sinks me. So what separates me from the top players is that they do it every time perfectly. I've never understood how you can so consistently see everything and never miss a trick, but they do.