Civ4 SGOTM 2
 

Fire away [hammer]

Cool, that was fast!

Thanks, shabba.

So, let's take this thread for a pregame discussion:

First question: Is it worth it to found a second city directly or will maintenance cost hurt us more than the city does help?

The big question for me is what will be the maintainance if we found the second city straight away. It looks like a long way from the first, and it could cost more that we are making. If we do not loose units if we are not paying maintanance for them it could still be worth it. The only way I can think to check is a test game. I MAY get round to that lunchtime.

The other option would be to wait until we have a bit more pop in our capital.

[EDIT] I started a game with similar parameters, if anything the cities were closer than in this game. I was at -5 gpt Straight away, but the scout was not disbanded.

I do not think we can wait the 17 turns untill our capital grows, mostly because I do not think that will help much. The problem is going to be how do we increase our GPT without pottery?

An option would be for our settler to head east until it is closer to our capital.

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Garee. As posted I'll be away until the 20th from wednesday on.

as i can't see the picture of the real start at cfc at the moment, i am not sure, but i think the cities are even further apart ( don't forget that the world wraps to the east)

i also think that delaying founding much is not worth it, as it is also a strategical position to be able to found other cities faster.

at least with this setup, CS slingshot is not the only way to go...

but every city must pay this upkeep, so probably we don't want a third for some time.

I haven't seen the starting screenie yet. Where can I find it? I'll go ahead and sign up, but I don't think that I'll be able to pull 1-2 hour play sessions. I'll do my best though.

Anyhoo, Is there the standard number of opponents on this map? Is it worth making the "colony settler" the capital? (the preceding question might be not relevant as I'm working off of a picture in my head that might not be correct)

Makeing the "colony settler" our capital would be great, but as the 1st city is already founded I think we shall have to build the palace to do that.

I think the only options are;

Found the city near the starting location, on the coast looks like a good bet. This shall mean we will not be able to reaserch for a long time. I expect we will need to grow both cities to 3 before we can have a possitive GPT, but I could be wrong.
Move the settler east. We MAY be able to find a good city spot a lot closer to the capital on this land mass. This would allow us to start reaserching a lot sooner. It is of course risky, as we may just find ourselves hemed in by other civs with nowhere to settle.

http://www.civfanatics.com/news2/arc...July&year=2006

(scroll down)

there you can see a small version but the real one is on the gotm server which is down at the moment.

You don't need to do longer sessions than 1-2 hours, in the beginning it's going fast and later on you could just play 5 turns which is fine.

Every help is welcome!


Maybe there is not much space to the east of the Settler, so I guess moving the scout eastwards might be a good start.

The picture is back, I thought I would post it here to help the discusion.



http://www.civ3duelzone.com/forum/up...TM02_start.jpg
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hey at least we have a fishy smell and plenty of crabs [crazyeye]

EDIT to add content:: I think that moving the settler 1 S to settle there is best since it'll free up a FP.

EDIT for additional blather::: Better yet, move the warrior SW to see if there is any benefit in moving the settler SW instead of just S

I think we should move one NW to grab the fish and means we have a productive sea city (maybe GL or Colossus could be ahuge befeit considering the other city would also allow us to buidl something while we are waiting to get positive gpt and would greatly increase gpt) dunno if that all makes sense :)

I'd move the warrior to the hills, there I think he sees more.Settling S would be nice of there is another resource, otherwise I'd agree with BCLG that NW is mor interesting.

The question still is: How much could we gain by moving a little more to the east, or should we settle in place and go for Forbidden Palace ASAP.


Interesting situation.

Not much by settling east however, though we could move the warrior onto the hill to check. i agree with the FP need and also the eventual need for state property

One of the factors I haven't seen yet in the discussion are the aggressive AI and raging barbs. This would call for early settling to create a save place on a landmass. The gpt thing is an issue but the cap has lots of cash (and little hammers) around it so my gut feel is the gpt should be managable. The 2nd city should be about hammers imo.

And what we also shouldn't forget is that it's our second city which means no automatic border expansion, so it might be worth it settling directly next to a ressource to get that city to grow quickly.

Garee.

I agree.

Again, I agree.

So, normally I think NW would be the nicest spot.

To get the ressources we 'd need a quick border expansion.

I see two options: Foundinga religion (which could also be founded in our capital, we'd have to found two to make it sure)
or build an Obelisk

For both we'd need to research Mysticism first.

At least we'd have the floodplains from beginning to work on and grow fast.

I guess the one who starts playing moves the warrior then stops, posts a pic and wait for the team decision


Things that normally work but seem not so nice here:
- Founding ONE religion as if it starts in the cap you won't see it spread for quite some time.

- CS slingshot. Bureaucracy doesn't looks as good with that capital without much production and without cottages, still wouldn't hurt though.

-An early military rush. The maintenance would probably kill us.


What could be nice:
Colossus.
Or GLighthouse.

Great people in capital. We don't need much military there and I could imagine only building 4 work boats, 1 warrior for happiness and only work those 4 tiles and the rest goes into GPP. With a Lighthouse, the clam produces 5fpt, the fish 6 fpt. so we could grow to size 12 without working any other tiles.

Two religions (and even more. IIRC I saw a screenshot once with Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism and Taoism founded in the same city)can found in the same city, so there is no quarantee we'd get culture expansion in our second city.

Sounds logical to me.

NW will not give a resource (at least not as far as I can see now) in the initial 9, but the floodplains should help growth. Normally I detest Obilixes, but in this instance it might actually be useful to build one. It would at the very least give us rice and fish if we settle NW.

I'd also like to recommend getting fishing ASAP. All Kyoto is good for is the food resources but we have to able to get them. It'll take a long time for Kyoto to build a work boat so we should start as quickly as we can.

We start with Fishing.

If you have two cities, one of which has a religion, the other don't, then the holy city always goes to the one without a religion.
But IIRC that doesn't give +1cpt directly or does it (at least one could build a temple)
Still I'd also vote for an Obelisk.

I think the capital is heavily unfavoured when it comes to choosing which city to found the religion in (ie. it is very likely to be founded in our second city). That gives us 5 cpt if we make that religion our state religion.

I think it is unlikely we would get either of the early religions first, and imposible if we found our 2nd city straight away. Our best chance would be for Confucism, as we will really need the courthouses and FP we get from CoL anyway.

I think we could try for CoL with the oricale. We are likely to have much more prodution than reaserch, so this would be a reasnoble use of 200 odd hammers.

Ah, that's good. I had no idea what Japan's starting techs were. Haven't played them yet. That would mean that Kyoto should begin building its' first work boat immediately.


Thanks for the explanation. I didn't know that.

Doesn't your state religion give you +1cpt for every city with that religion? Still, super mega obelisk go go go!

Things that have been discussed...

- focussing on shields in 2nd city seems to be a priority so move NW
- getting slavery and whipping the capital would be a good. What is the happiness limit? we could just whip it everytime it gets to pop 3. The lower the pop, the more efficient the whipping process
- having a holy city gives you 5cpt in that city. And each city with religion gets 1 cpt. I'm not sure if it has to be your state religion or not.
- aggressive settling without making nice with the neighbors could get us into an early war we're not prepared for... but I'm still learning different strategies [:p]

Yes, you don't get culture if it's not your state religion.

However not having a state religion gives you 5 cpt in every city. If we are going to try and get a religion i think we should aim for Christianity- it'll give us a religion and give us Theocracy which will be very usefull for the wars we will undoubtably end up in.

We could always let the second city grow quickly then pop rush an obelisk or chop it, within the second cities immediate vicinity would be at least 4 forests and a floodplain so it will have plenty of workable tiles while we wait for the city to grow/worker be produced.

I havnt played any games with raging barbs on monarch but i imagine they will be fairly bad therefore i think we need to have a warrior as a first build in our second city and then switch to a worker at size 2 to chop an obelisk.

About the aggressive settling (tub's idea) with the aggressive AI clicked on it isnt really going to matter too much what we do-there not going to like us, so i say we should go for it.

There's the obvious worker steal trick we could do on monarch but im not sure when barbs start appearing so i dont think stealing the worker would really be worth it, if all it will do would be to annoy one AI and lose a worker and a warrior.

Tubs are you on team CDZ or just lurking?

Sorry about the long post-i try not to do it too much :D

why should one excuse for a long post?

One should always give his input, we need thoughts for this kind of game a lot, so don't hesitate to post...

if we want to chop the Obelisk at size 2 we'd have to research Mysticism and Bronze Working simultaneously, I don't really know which tech we should research first, maybe try for a Metal Casting slingshot with Oracle?

it was a joke socral :)

Well we wouldnt really, growing to size 2 would take about the time it would take to research 3/4 of BW and then building the worker would take the rest of the time it would take to research myst as well.

OK, you are right, I agree, and I also don't see any sense in building the worker later than at size 2, so that'd be fine with me.

sorry, I am too tired to see jokes...going to bed now

and to your earlier question: I thought tubby wanted to join but maybe needs a little bashing to make him write the post in the sign-up-thread...

[wallbash] yeah.. I'll sign up eventually

That didn't really work out that good in our previous game, did it? ;)
We could try of course, but we're seriously handicapped because of that stupid capital start. An early second city will hurt our research as well. So by the time we can build the oracle it might already be almost completed. I don't know if we should chop for that.
Besides, the AI got that oracle so fast in the previous game that I wouldn't be surprised if that was modded in some way. We should look into that, probably.

If we go for Oracle before we build a third city (which would hurt us also much), I think building Oracle is possible, but CS slingshot is not possible cause we can't research CoL fast enough.
Researching Priesthood won't take that long.

For an Oracle-> MC slingshot we'd need: Myst , (Poly or Medi) , Priesthood , BW , Wheel and Pottery. We probably also want Agri.

I don't think that's impossible, but surely we don't know if there's an AI that is modded to go for the Oracle (something they only priorize when they can't build a Settler cause they have no space left.
What else would we need to build in second city? Warrior, Worker, workboat, another warrior or Rax?
So, I think a MC slingshotwould be doable and trying won't hurt much cause there is no useless or expensive tech on that path(ok, Priesthood itself) and if we at least partially build it we get some money for our research.

Our team thread at CFC is open, please post once in this thread to say you are there and Tubby please post in the signup-thread first.

i think we need to put the oracle slingshot out of our minds, its usefull but not the be all and end all, we also have very little chance of getting it with the need to adequatly defend our city against the raging barbs and aggressive AI, however i think we have a reasonable chance of getting the Colossus which would be highly beneficial considering the amount of water tiles we have under our borders.

I think any reserch will have to wait a lot longer than growing to size 2. I reakon it is going to take both citys to get to size 3 before we can break even. The more I think about it the more it seems ot be worth moveing the settler east to get it closer to the capital.

About rushing in the capital; every rush give 1 unhappiness, rather than 1 unhappiness for each pop killed. So in pure pop / hammers it is more efficent to rush at smaller size. However if you take into account the work that the citizen can do in these 15 turns it may well be worth waiting for the capital to grow significantly then rush a load of pop. The other question is what are we going to be building? in the early game it is only going to be the work boats. It may end up that we will be rushing wonders in this city just because we have no other use for the pop.

For me the big thing is going to be getting bronze working and copper before too many barbs turn up, and getting CoL for the courthouses and FP before we are totally left behind.

BTW, our thread is at http://forums.civfanatics.com/showth...33#post4355733

GPP could also be very useful in our capital if we don't know what to do with spare pop.

And I do think that we can research at 50-60% and break even. In the savegame you posted we could even be at 70% or so.

Want to calculate it:

It seems the formula is: DistanceMaint = (Pop + 7) * 2.5 * Distance/DistanceScale * Building_m * WorldSize_m * Handicap_m (CVCity.cpp line 4899 if someone has the SDK)

Building = 0.5 if courthouse otherwise 1
Handicap =0.9 for monarch
worldsize=0.8 for standard

DistanceScale = (MapHeight + MapWidth) {from CvMap.cpp L925} (here probably 84+52=136, or what is size of a standard fractal map?)


So in our case:

(Pop+7) * 2.5 * dist/136 *0.8*0.9 =(pop+7) * dist / 75.5 without courthouse

assuming our cities are 40 tiles on W-E axis and 20 tiles on N-S axis apart (dist 50) this means:

at size 1: dist cost 5.3 (probably 5 cause of rounding down)
each additional pop costs o.66 gold

if both cities are at size 1 we already produce 13 trade (8 from Palace), so we should be able to spend 8 beakers per turn at start.

phew, that was hard...

Ok i updated our thread with everything so far from here, hope everyone doesnt mind but we may as well get it partially updated now.

Anyone know of a quicker way other than copy and pasting?-it does take awhile.

I volenteered to write a little script to generate the text, but I did not get a responce from Meli about access to the server. If you want me to do this, is there anyone else I could contact?

Propain. Meli's on holiday, I think...

Ok well sorry for stealing your thunder then :) must have missed your post about that and so i thought we shouldnt get too far behind :)