We have graphs on Dreylin now, who has pretty much no real military and is surely thankful to not be bordering us lunatics:
I will switch our EP into greenline, because they technically will eventually border us, and because
they have jumped out to first in city count! and this is with not just imp but sumeria too, so unlike naufragar of PHI america they actually have a way to pay for all these extra IMP cities. i continue to think we have been underrating greenline's ability to contend in this game; their early expansion speed was underwhelming for IMP but if they pick things up now they still have time to race out to a big lead in number of cities, with allllll this open land left
well yall... it's a little unhinged, but sims suggest the fast academy plan is not insane. the main thing in its favor is that, if you can believe it with what is soon to be 10 workers, there is a pretty serious shortage of worker labor in the northeast... we only have 3 up there now, one is farming Mitakeumi's wheat and is pretty committed to cottaging the capital afterwards, the other two are chopping at kirishima and are, IMO, very committed to their next ridiculous task, chopping out settler #8 at size 1 Kotozakura (for the northern fish spot which is also our only real Moai candidate) while we wait for the borders to pop. so we are not really delaying growing onto cottages so much as using our workers to chop instead of cottaging (and i do still think we're at a stage of the game where that should broadly be higher-priority) and then using the library to give Kirishima's food surplus something at least somewhat compelling to do while we wait for the labor force to become available.
Of course, we COULD just chop into a worker instead of the library, use that worker to chop out another, and then not have problems with the labor force anymore.... and I do think this is the main alternative candidate plan, but the problem is that I think we still want to whip out a semi-early library regardless to stay competitive culturally (i value our current state of vision on Ankyra and 2 tiles into Ottoman borders pretty highly and we lose that if we fall behind on culture), and with library whip plus granary whip plus 5 turns of the Kotozakura settler whip still on the books that plan leaves the city under heavy whip anger for so long that it actually doesn't get to grow onto its full complement of cottages for some time. idk guys, i might be rationalizing bigtime here but i also might go for it anyways
Well, it's your game and you can certainly go for it if you want to. I'd just suggest that chopping so much you have no workers free for other labor, and whipping so much you can't work any cottages might themselves be problematic. How are you planning to pay for your expansions without cottages? PRO trade routes, even with Currency, won't be enough. Academy will be very bad if you're spending only 20-30% of the time with the science slider on.
Per Tarkeel's quoted guideline, the aim is to have all cottages at core cities done in 35 turns. Maaaybe you have a bit longer on this map, which is resource poor and will generally be slower than most games. But this is the time to get disciplined and start the cottages. If you don't want to do them in the city chopping the library, at least devote some labor force to it elsewhere and make a point of working them.
EDIT: And I wouldn't chop out more workers either - 10 is tons for this stage of the game. Maybe take some of them off chop duty so they can do other improvements. The chops will always be there later (and worth more after Math!).
i don't thiiiiink we are too likely to miss Tarkeel's benchmark even if we do go for the academy; some of the kirishima cottages will be pretty close and won't come online until the t90s but i think we'll still make it. for paying for expansions, it is thankfully not just PRO TRs but also AGG ikhandas and the two gold tiles keeping us afloat during the crawl to currency, as well as cottages at every OTHER city. and the two scientists we'd work at kirishima are worth 7 beakers too, which is not strictly paying for research but can contribute to that
re chops: they are worth more after math in absolute terms, but i have this sense that they would be worth less in relative terms for vague "snowball reasons" that i don't really know how to quantify.... but like, this Kotozakura settler just is not going to exist if not for the 80 hammers of chops we are about to pour into that city. so the opportunity cost of waiting until math to use them is effectively that the city doesn't get founded until after math, which is a good 20 turns away... so i guess, what, as a first-pass we can say that the city has to make more than 4 * (math chop valie - non-math chop value) = 40 foodhammers worth of value, minus the marginal value of the improvements our workers would be making instead of chopping, for that to be the play.... 40 foodhammers seems plausible (i mean, this city is chopping a fishing boat on turn 4 of existence) but i don't have much of a sense for whether that difference is positive or not...
(February 27th, 2024, 21:22)ljubljana Wrote: i don't thiiiiink we are too likely to miss Tarkeel's benchmark even if we do go for the academy; some of the kirishima cottages will be pretty close and won't come online until the t90s but i think we'll still make it. for paying for expansions, it is thankfully not just PRO TRs but also AGG ikhandas and the two gold tiles keeping us afloat during the crawl to currency, as well as cottages at every OTHER city. and the two scientists we'd work at kirishima are worth 7 beakers too, which is not strictly paying for research but can contribute to that
re chops: they are worth more after math in absolute terms, but i have this sense that they would be worth less in relative terms for vague "snowball reasons" that i don't really know how to quantify.... but like, this Kotozakura settler just is not going to exist if not for the 80 hammers of chops we are about to pour into that city. so the opportunity cost of waiting until math to use them is effectively that the city doesn't get founded until after math, which is a good 20 turns away... so i guess, what, as a first-pass we can say that the city has to make more than 4 * (math chop valie - non-math chop value) = 40 foodhammers worth of value, minus the marginal value of the improvements our workers would be making instead of chopping, for that to be the play.... 40 foodhammers seems plausible (i mean, this city is chopping a fishing boat on turn 4 of existence) but i don't have much of a sense for whether that difference is positive or not...
Sure, I'm just saying that generally the priority goes improving tiles for cities to work > connecting cities for TR and movement purposes > chopping unless you're chopping a special project or just need to unlock something at a city. If we have 10 workers and somehow can't find time to do tile improvements so that we're considering running specialists rather than work bare tiles, something has gone very wrong.
welllll... to be honest, getting home at 11 PM + need to play the turn now before i sleep = kind of a snap decision that may or may not conform to my previously held biases.... i did one more sim of not whipping the library and realized another annoying problem - if we want a library ANYtime soon to contest culture at the border, we have to find a way to knock out 30 hammers for a double-whip, and all our chops are committed in that plan to the granary and 1-2 extra workers. so i'm going to go for it and see for myself how far off my intuition is on this one. sorry if we are devoured because of that D:
Turn 66? - Zululand
Woden Wrote:open the turn to
well. ok, on the one hand we could use further de-escalation here. but on the other i do not really fancy the idea of giving our most immediate rival 5 GPT that they can use to fund expansion or race us in tech, while we get nothing due to being PRO. we do benefit in that we have very little of their land scouted while they have most of ours, but that doesn't seem like quite enough compensation imo. i'm going to reject for now to look around and in the interest of sparking discussion, if anyone wants to give them OB i am probably convinceable
i reject and then
uh huuuh. so, i guess i should be reading this as some kind of threat? ok, you won't give us open borders, now we will make our cowpeace contingent upon it? if so, i don't know if i'm worried enough about them following through to just give our neighbor Danegeld like that. i think i'l send back cow/cow for now, but yeah if anyone thinks i should be taking this more seriously and be more appeasing feel free to let me know
the southeast, which i have been unable to resist taking a peek at, also has silks!
...which is a resource we already have. but it would be nice to not have to found a totally useless fishing village for it!
suspicion confirmed that naufragar is GT's far neighbor. and look at that, we have open borders with them.... i think i'll take advantage of that to start annoyingly defogging their land
we're so close! but mjmd of india is closer and is frighteningly up to 6 cities with a total lack of expansion grease save the fast workers.
status report:
takakeisho: just produced our first impi, will whip granary in 3 turns at exactly 30/60 and then be the recipient of four consecutive growths onto grass river cottage
mitakeumi: wheat farm 2t from completion, about to start cow. granary should finish by natural production about halfway through size 3, on the same turn (t70) as takakeisho's. will also receive at least one grass river cottage after the cow
kirishima: ~*library*~ whip next turn, then overflow into and chop granary, which finishes by natural production about halfway through size 3.
hoshoryu: borders just expanded, about to get 2 chops to finish a worker, then we have 2 workers in place to farm the wet wheat. will then grow to size 4 while chopping settler 7, who is most likely destined for the northern fish + horse spot, which is kinda unremarkable but can at least help horshoryu work all those plains river cottages that don't exist yet. (although, yes, i COULD still be convinced to try to swipe GT's much nicer-looking pigs region....)
kotozakura: is about to finish a monument and then wait around depressingly until borders expand to get its food. so....i guess while we wait we might as well make settler 8 here with the aid of a ton of chops? then granary, which should complete just about when the sheep pasture comes online
we have to think about where settlers 7 and 8 are supposed to go..... the only unclaimed food tiles anywhere near the rest of our civ are GT's pigs and the two fish off the northern coast, and maaaaybe we can count the wheat by the southeast silver that probably constitutes a ginger pinkdot. i am inclined to the two fish spots by dint of general timidity (and lack of desire to crash-build military) but would love feedback as always. including feedback of the form "one fish is not worth a city even if it's all we have", although given the contents of the rest of our land i doubt that will be forthcoming
signing off with an overview shot to hopefully help fit all this gibberish about "southeast silver" and "northern fish" together, and also to throw open the floor to thoughts about how in the world we are supposed to profitably expand into this kind of land...
there is one more decent foodless spot in the southwest i hope to get, with 5 floodplains, a gold, and a new lux in spices. farm everything, work specialists first for GPP and then serfdom desert hill windmills, and i guess that's ok. or we could just work 5 floodplains cottages and gold and have that be the whole city, with most of the desert hills forever unworked. not too sure which is better (or generally what we should be doing with these floodplains + desert hill cities) - i'm typically inclined to farm as much as needed to work all tiles within the city radius but maybe desert hill windmills are such garbage that it's better to just cottage the floodplains and whip whenever the cities hit size 7 for more or less the entire game...
also i don't know how this happened but as of now, PRO is worth 5 GPT for us...and AGG is worth 3
(February 28th, 2024, 03:37)ljubljana Wrote: well. ok, on the one hand we could use further de-escalation here. but on the other i do not really fancy the idea of giving our most immediate rival 5 GPT that they can use to fund expansion or race us in tech, while we get nothing due to being PRO.
Due to the recent war, neither of you will get improved foreign trade for the next 40ish turns.
I'm definitely starting to worry about an economic crash here. Accelerating expansion with chops instead of building cottages, with this much worker labor available, math not terribly far away, and diplomatic concerns about most of the viable land these upcoming settlers might claim, all seems to be pointing towards us expanding faster than our economy will support.
I can buy that chopping now for 20h each into faster settlers is going to net more foodhammers than chopping later for 30h each, but I think the opportunity cost of unbuilt, unworked cottages (and associated commerce) is more significant than you're giving credit for.
As for the 5FP + gold city, five floodplains cottages and a gold is still +5 food per turn at pop 6. The spices are food neutral, so that caps out at pop 12 working the spice plantation and five windmills (but in practice, probably whipping enough that the windmills rarely come into play). A desert windmill is only 1f, 1h, and 2g in serfdom prior to replaceable parts and electricity, which is just a bad tile. Definitely don't pass up cottages to work more of them.
EDIT: also, I'd accept that open borders treaty. Warpeacing killed trade route value for a while, as Tarkeel mentioned, and we want to be friends. For now.
(February 28th, 2024, 09:33)williams482 Wrote: I'm definitely starting to worry about an economic crash here. Accelerating expansion with chops instead of building cottages, with this much worker labor available, math not terribly far away, and diplomatic concerns about most of the viable land these upcoming settlers might claim, all seems to be pointing towards us expanding faster than our economy will support.
I can buy that chopping now for 20h each into faster settlers is going to net more foodhammers than chopping later for 30h each, but I think the opportunity cost of unbuilt, unworked cottages (and associated commerce) is more significant than you're giving credit for.
As for the 5FP + gold city, five floodplains cottages and a gold is still +5 food per turn at pop 6. The spices are food neutral, so that caps out at pop 12 working the spice plantation and five windmills (but in practice, probably whipping enough that the windmills rarely come into play). A desert windmill is only 1f, 1h, and 2g in serfdom prior to replaceable parts and electricity, which is just a bad tile. Definitely don't pass up cottages to work more of them.
EDIT: also, I'd accept that open borders treaty. Warpeacing killed trade route value for a while, as Tarkeel mentioned, and we want to be friends. For now.
I didn't take it as a threat anyway, but as a "We want OB because we have no hostile intentions". That's the fun thing with AI diplo, so much reading into what things mean. Given we have copper hooked up soon I'm not very worried about them scouting us since they already have seen our land, and allowing a scout to watch our border regions is one way of defusing tensions, since they can't be unnecessarily paranoid that we might have an army hiding just out of sight. We'd like to move through Ginger anyway, so I'd absolutely take that deal, especially given it's going to have to last for ages before it gives him anything. And if we have that solid a friendship in 40t, I'm willing to give him some benefit, since it doesn't even cost us anything.
Yeah, agreed; now that I know it won't give them free gold, I'll definitely re-offer this round.
Re overexpansion: what a good game, right - in civ6 more cities asap is never not better and bending your gameplan towards accomplishing this despite the escalating settler cost is basically what drives the infamous CS conquest snowball... Overexpansion, at least, is something I think we CAN quantify, if vaguely, in terms of "time to currency" and "number of cities when we get there". I hardly am in position to know what the standard is for that, but what I've been following so far is
PB74 spoilers
Mjmd's dictum that 7 cities on turn 75 is a good proxy for "competitive" and Commodore's pace in the same game, where they hit currency at turn 90 with 10 cities and received plaudits from Mjmd for a "nice" currency time. Our current plan matches the first criterion (on one hand barely, with our 7th city founded t75, but on the other not barely, with our 8th city coming t76), and is a bit slower than Commodore, with Currency coming more like turn 98-99. Our number of cities looks similar, though, and Commodore is FIN/ORG Darius in that game which, um, can probably be reasonably expected to accelerate their tech pace by at least a couple turns . On the other hand, plemo of IMP/FIN Vikings had 16 cities at the same date and had a post t100 currency (Währung in German) and not only was considered not-overexpanded but the runaway favorite. I don't know that a competently-played non-IMP civ even CAN expand as quickly as Plemo did, but I think it's reasonable to aim for, broadly speaking, somewhere on the continuum with Commodore's t90/10 cities at one end and Plemo's t105ish/16 cities at the other. Our mark of t98/11 cities is not there, but in the other direction, with fewer cities than it seems like we "should" have given that currency time... but the land here is seemingly weaker (though not in the core really) and we don't have FIN, so maybe there will prove to be some slack in that metric in our game. And of course, the point of being TokuZulu in the first place is that even though we have SOME expansion grease in AGG Ikhandas + PRO TRs, we likely won't expand quite as well as the favorites, but will be in a better position to eat or split our weaker neighbors afterwards and can therefore catch up (and indeed, hopefully pull away) in the knights and gunpowder era...
Turn 67 - Zululand
The first thing I do when I open the turn is apologetically re-offer Ginger open borders lol. Hopefully we'll get some green slack here, as the truth is indeed that we rejected due mostly to a mechanical misunderstanding on my end.
It's Mjmd's capital, of course. We don't know what they took with it, but Metal Casting for IND forges seems like a good bet. We know it is NOT Code of Laws for lack of a religion founding, and the fact that they didn't flip civics is weak evidence that it's not Monarchy (but maybe their second GP, which should be coming soon, will be used for that). They have 6 cities too! I think Mjmd has really good odds to win this game, certainly better than IMP-but-only-5-cities Naufragar America. But we'll see
Dreylin is roughly where we expect in terms of The Circle position, to our southeast, but MUCH more northward than we would like, enough so that our floodplains-wheat-silver city would be pinkdotting THEM. It is possible that the city to the SE of our scout is their capital, or it's now late enough that maybe their borders expanded the slow way - I hopefully asked them for OB in diplo in the hopes of determining which one, which I think there's a fair chance they accept since they have a scout by our capital too. And, uh, it's a good thing Ginger loves us forever with the most friendship you can imagine, because their chariot is in position to pay us back for the scout we didn't kill earlier. I think the fact that Ginger/Dreylin have an Actual Border is decent evidence for the hypothesis that they occupy the easternmost extremity of the landmass. aaand it goes without saying that it's bad news for us and our continued ability to usefully expand
GT has, of all things, a promoted spear just kind of sitting on their copper obstructively. Which, I guess, supports our hypothesis that they went with one or more early barracks for some reason, and also means our chariot over here will be less than useless at limiting their expansion and we're going to need real units in this area too :|
Gold city coming next turn to join the 6 cities club, with workers slooowly agonizingly roading in from behind to hook it up. It should come online just in time to support one extra cottage at most of our core cities at the end of this growth cycle.
Mitakeumi finally has its dry wheat online, Hoshoryu chops a worker, Kirishima whips the thing. Next turn we start cottaging the capital, and after one more whip for the granary should be in position to grow on them all the way to the happy cap. It is a bit scary to think that, other than those fish, ALL of the food resources in "our" territory are already claimed, but I guess we just have to cross our fingers, as we have been doing, that the others' homelands are symmetrically barren D:
oh yeah and what do you guys think we should name our impis :D
