At what point do you restart a game?

[snoopy369]

A slave city needs 4 food tiles, basically - can be 4 irrigated grasslands, though it's faster with a food resource. Build a granary, and then no other building...
The single hamer from the city tile is all you need, you'll never be using those hammers for anything but getting the pop rush reduction from a single hammer's work.

[NFIH]

Originally posted by snoopy369
A slave city needs 4 food tiles, basically - can be 4 irrigated grasslands, though it's faster with a food resource. Build a granary, and then no other building...
The single hamer from the city tile is all you need, you'll never be using those hammers for anything but getting the pop rush reduction from a single hammer's work.

Damn, I didn't know, as you and rah are saying, that whipping without additional hammers is that much faster than with hammers.

But isn't there something wrong with your math in that, the more hammers you have the fewer turns you have to wait before you can actually whip? For example, a city that has 20 hammers plus food will be able to whip a unit sooner than a city that has, say, 10 hammers plus food. No?

[snoopy369]

The issue is you have a tradeoff of (hammers <> food). You can't have both a huge food surplus AND hammers, and still call it a junk city

4 size city with 5 irrigated grasslands and a granary (at size 4, food surplus 6; at size 5, surplus 7) grows to size 6 in something like 7 turns (less than 10 anyway). This is, in fact, still true even if you don't work that fifth pop when he lands.

When you hit the 10th turn, at size 6, you poprush a building for 60 (raw) hammers, or about 6 hammers/turn. If happiness isn't a problem you can do it sooner - after 7 turns as I stated above - which would be 9 hammers/turn.

For a size 4-5 city, that's not bad, is it? Certainly in the right locations you could get more than that, but the idea is you do this with those locations that are otherwise pretty much worthless. They can poprush even a 3 pop building/unit (90 h) in roughly the same time, again gaining around 9 hammers per turn (if you have a 90h building or unit to rush).

What else would you do with the random grassland(/jungle) in the middle of your territory? This is converting five tiles of grassland otherwise unused into 60-90 hammers every 10 turns...

[Ari]

I tend to restart once I've lost a city that I'm obviously not getting back any time soon. I'd say 90% of the time that's because I've ignored my military and gotten one or more DoW's on me. Once I see that I'm facing 10:1 odds, or once they've naval-invaded with dozens of units, it's game-over for me unless I'm being unusually militaristic by my standards. Until then, though, I'm content to keep playing. As a builder, I often seem to be in the lead technologically, so it's easy to lull myself into thinking I'm winning - right until someone beats me up for my lunch money.

[EternalSpark]

When I get bored (usually because I'm winning) or the situation becomes unfun.

For example, I was playing Willem in a Marathon game. Opened up to the single greatest opening position I've ever seen. However, within about 75 turns I realized the game would never be fun at all, so I abandoned it.

There's a very tiny sweet spot for me in any game between a complete Comp Stomp and a struggle to survive.

(Oh, and if you're curious: I made another city to the right of the screenshot, discovered two civs right next to me, and later discovered that both of them started with bronze and iron deposits in their respective areas, and I had nothing.)