[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[El Grillo]

those boxy buildings are what standard barracks look like, yes?

That's correct, and you can check all the building models in the Civpedia.

5 gpt for 1 food

Is that an accurate comparison?

[ljubljana]

lol not really, it's i guess a little grossly oversimplified... after 75 turns it will be 5 raw commerce* which is more post empire-wide multipliers, so the trade will gradually get even worse until biology. if the assumption is that marginal food will for the most part get whipped as soon as possible, it's more like a 2ish hammers now vs 5 raw commerce in 75 turns trade, but i gather the balance of the tile improvements in this game is that there is no general best answer to that trade. unless maybe the food supply is too low to double-whip every 10 turns, which maybe is why the +4-+5 food surplus is commonly cited as when a city should stop cottaging?

the poverty of our homeland is serious enough that i'd expect each cottage to be worth more than in generic circumstances.... but how much more? enough that our cities should go down to +3 food surplus? +2? it probably depends on whether our win condition is hammer-based or commerce-based, but ours is both as we need commerce to get to knights or whatever and then hammers to spam them. i suppose if our win condition is specifically "eat GT who is likely to be backwards-ish in 75 turns" we should be more worried about producing insufficient units than about not reaching knights before them... but if we successfully split GT and don't have a solid economy behind it, nauf will just pull ahead and be in position to keep rolling from there, possibly over us...

i guess this is "one of those Hard Things"

[aetryn]

Ugh. The problem with that city is that not only is it low on food, it has practically no hammers either. If it had hammers but a low food surplus I'd just say be very tight on what infrastructure you build and just don't whip it (It's fine to have a couple cities not whipping - at high-hammer low-food-surplus cities you'll lose hammers than you'd gain by whipping. In PB72 i had 3-ish cities that just never whipped after they got their basic infrastructure up). That's still probably the answer, it's just going to be unreasonably slow to set up since you will need to whip the infrastructure.  I'd think about temporarily building a farm, maybe even 2, whip Granary->Market->Ikhanda->Library (in some order, but Granary first), grow to cap and then cottage over the farms, and just accept it will be slow to a Bank and/or University if we actually get that far.

[williams482]

I agree with Aetryn. The first improvement should be a farm, and maybe the second as well, with the plan of bulldozing it for a cottage once you have the pop to work four floodplains and both gold. slowly growing onto lake tiles at +2 food per turn is fine, you'll be able to double-whip every now and again, and theres nothing else worth a damn to grow onto so whatever.

[Jabah]

Dont forget there is a forresf to chop

[ljubljana]

Dont forget there is a forresf to chop

hahahah i have not  the forest constitutes half the granary after Math comes in, and will be chopped into it more or less as soon as the borders expand (actually i will probably start chopping 2 or so turns BEFORE the borders expand, so it will FINISH as soon as they pop). so we should "only" need to exhaustingly slowly whip the library, ikhanda, and market (or maybe courthouse before the market, since it's not like we'll need the happy)

ok, thank you friends! i am on board with the farm-first plan. one of the core functions of this city is just growing to size 2 to use the first-ring gold as quickly as possible to get us to math/currency; accelerating that seems like it will provide the most marginal value for now...

[ljubljana]

Turn 72 - Zululand

Developments in the great question of "are everyone else's lands roughly as crappy as ours":



Ginger taking for their sixth city a gem/stone spot that looks as bad as our silver spot unless there's food on one of two specific fogged tiles (plains NW-W, plains hill NE-E) AND that also pinkdots Dreylin



GT's second city might have double food in the fog, but WOW is that a lot of bare plains.... also they founded two cities this turn to catch right back up with the pack



We have seen OneTrickHegehog already, but generally I don't see any spots here with even two food resources (among defogged tiles)... and Sore Fox is fully defogged and brings just a sheep, coast, 2 grass river cottages, and a plains hill, and yet was prioritized as one of Nauf's first 6 cities (the 7th was settled this turn). It will be a strong Moai city eventually, but still...

iiii am tentatively going to give a firm "yes this map is balanced" response to that question. Maybe our land is even better than average, although in exchange for the relative strength of our first 4 cities we had to really stretch things in terms of geographic contiguity. If not for our excess of workers, I'm not sure we could have made that work.... compared to the others settling nice and defensively 3 tiles from existing cities, just building roads to our frontiers demanded a huge amount of early labor

actual update on our actual cities:



everyone is working on Impis because our cities have reached the point where we need actual military garrisons to grow further. well, and because i'm concerned about all our empty cities with the potential for further Ginger chariot snooping. will do ikhandas after that and then, i guess, triple-whip settlers as soon as we hit the happy cap?

We are up to two (2!) worked cottages :D with a third coming in next turn at Hoshoryu's floodplains. Double chops coming in to finish the Hoshoryu settler next turn, with the Kotozakura settler a few turns behind. I don't know if we'll be catching up to the IMP dudes anytime soon, but we should at least get our toe across the 7-city line in time for the lurkers' t75 evaluations lol

[ljubljana]

Oh, and



The time has come to decide if we want to reach 3 tiles west of Hoshoryu to establish a normal and fair and completely ethical border city with GT. They just settled twice and it appears to be still open, and we do have impis running around now and could whip more easily in +8 food surplus Hoshoryu. I dunno guys, I'm really feeling tempted - it's leagues better than any other site still within our immediate reach, claims the only stone anywhere near us for Protective walls and castles (and we could slam research into Masonry now to whip some pretty easily), and with Ginger's furs we no longer have a need to be REALLY impermissably mean and try to take that as well. And it's on the right side of the river for the defensive bonus, and in conjunction with Lalibela it neatly locks out any city 1 tile from the pigs so we should be able to retain it long term. And the person we're pinkdotting seems like the weakest civ on the map that we know of, and I don't know if I've even seen a GT unit east of Hoshoryu so there's a chance they don't even know it's a pinkdot, and we're freaking Tokugawa who is literally the single leader most capable of holding a pinkdot.....

[Commodore]

[...]and we're freaking Tokugawa who is literally the single leader most capable of holding a pinkdot.....

[ljubljana]

hahahaha, i mean, point taken but that might be arguable - we'd be chopping a monument 3 turns after founding so we'll hit 20% culture 8 turns after he would have.... but then we'll have shock axes in the city behind it. but yeah definitely playing gilgamesh next game just to be as annoying as possible :D actually he may have been the optimal choice for us on this map instead of dear Toku (though i'm NOT complaining about 3gpt unit cost savings and cheap Ikhandas either)

speaking of which, if we go for this plan, of course i will speedrun actually getting a shock axe here. GT's current forces that we know of are a spear and an axe so our chariot + archer + incoming impi SHOULD be able to hold but, yknow, no need to take chances

we did just sign OB with them a few turns ago, but no cow for cow or anything, and aetryn said earlier that the implied commitments there are a little vaguer... do we think this plant is shitty enough to make us a forum pariah if we go for it lmao

actually i'm thinking it might be masonry time either way. it would be nice to throw up walls in Kirishima and Hoshoryu juuuust to be extra pointy, and we could finally hook up the marble at the capital...