Lizzy's rise to greatness

[mzprox]

I'm almost sure the barb city is building a worker or it would had grown by now..I estimate it needs about 7-8 more turns to finish it then we could capture the worker or wait an other 10 turns to let that city grow and captire it too..

Some of those marked city spots are not that great, but as time goes a settler will be relatively cheaper, economy more stable so we could suppport more. Yet there are 4 city spots (plus the area where the barb city is) which should be filled asap, I agree on that. (the first one is near the mayan border, the second to connect the fur, the third to get the fish and deer in the NW, and one north of Apolyton.) that will net us 18(19) cities. I think right now egypt has 17 and some civs 15-16.

One interesting option is to build a galley and send a settlers to one of the northern islands and build a city on the silver. It would give +2 happyness in those cities which have forge (which are most of them). But then we would need to defend that city.. it could be an achilles' heel of our empire.. waiting to get razed or conquered.

One interesting fact I noticed: we could relatively easily connect the inner sea with the outer one. we would need to build a fort temporarly on the sheep resource whenever our ships wanted to cross, but it's still good if we plan to unify our fleets.

[Dinner]

I'm glad we've recently built a few workers as that is a step in the right direction but that said we currently have 10 workers and 14 cities plus there is the barbarian city we will be taking over soon while we have identified 10 additional city sites which we would like to build. Just about everyone else has filled out their cities and developed their tiles more. I would like to see almost no slaving for a while and instead our priorities should be having existing cities grow to the happiness cap, building workers so that we have 1.5 per city (as of right now we should have 21 workers instead of just 10), and settling those 10 city locations to really fill out our civ. I would like to see that happen before any wars of conquest if possible. I also noticed we currently have two missionaries, that is good, but we will need more, 3-4 to finish converting our existing cities, 1 for the barbarian city, and 10 additional for the new cities we really need to plant. Let's slow down the other stuff and make that our priority while using the remainder of our time to add some military units.

[mzprox]

I do not agree > it will make them ponder war plans against us.

yes, but if we make an agreement with a friendly civ then it must be them.

If the target is RB it requires bigger preparations. converting an Egyptian city will not be easy. As i have said they closed borders with the aztec rather than allow one of their missionary to enter. one way to do it is if we xpect them taking over ince then we convert an incan city and wait with our spies there.

[mzprox]

Furthermore one question: did you use the tactic of building workers/settlers at POP MAX once in this game?
> it allows super fast production of workers/settlers while maxing out science and production..

Apolyton is in the position to use this tactic right now..

I used different tactics like slaving all the settlers so not halting the growth. but no point trying to figure out which would had been better. especially since now i think we want the same thing: make the cities bigger. (and then 10 turns later we will see how urgently we need an army and decide the level of drafting)
I also agree about apolyton, it wil be a settlers factory, but i think it should grow 1-2 more pop.

[Calanthian]

Maya is an ideal target: has a very close city, generally generates low spy points (i think it doesn't matter on who these spy points are spent, only counts how many points generated overall) and they are usually going different roads than the other civs. like they have music which is good for cavalries. They are researching printing press which is a very good tech to steal.
one of their condition to sign the NAP was to stop spending spy points on each other. While i did not explicitly promise this (I said I stopped our spying spending for now) they could still take it as violation of the NAP.

I do not agree > it will make them ponder war plans against us.

[Calanthian]

Going for the GM one turn later makes it possible to do these money changes:
No building wealth, getting more workers, missionairies, optimizing cities for growth and production.

Using the spy in war is also an option, and then we can build those spies some turns later.

Furthermore one question: did you use the tactic of building workers/settlers at POP MAX once in this game?
> it allows super fast production of workers/settlers while maxing out science and production..
Apolyton is in the position to use this tactic right now..

[mzprox]

In general: choose a target civ which:
- has a tech lead and the techs you want
- is unlikely to retaliate within a short period of time (so > not your neighbour)
- (preferably) is not building spy points against you
- (preferably) is or can become of the same religion

>>> so RB might be the one

The other approach is to make a deal with a friendly civ that you will steal certain techs from him...

Maya is an ideal target: has a very close city, generally generates low spy points (i think it doesn't matter on who these spy points are spent, only counts how many points generated overall) and they are usually going different roads than the other civs. like they have music which is good for cavalries. They are researching printing press which is a very good tech to steal.
one of their condition to sign the NAP was to stop spending spy points on each other. While i did not explicitly promise this (I said I stopped our spying spending for now) they could still take it as violation of the NAP.


I'm no sure about making a tech-steal deal.. it's borderline exploit . Would like to hear what others think about it.. we might offer them some gold as compensation.. like 500 or so, but still..

[mzprox]

i'd like to hear it (about the money thing), but please note that sometimes i try different ideas, set a city production to something which i don't intend to leave that way, so i do my final tuning when i finish the turn. I did now, I left only the former cap building wealth, Ankara builds a spy (and i left it working on the cow for now ), Istanbul builds a missionary so no wealth in those cities.
Going or not going for the GM was a serious dilemma for me aswell.. but now I think we need the golden age too much, and the great spy is just to valuable to use it that way. (btw since our science rate is better than RB's our only rival is India, but we agreed to make a decision in the next turn about which one of us goes for economics. since in theory we could get it in 7 tuns and I can't see how could they do the same now that they went for engineering i think we will be able to agree that they choose different goals and we don't need to push it that hard. I just want the option (the finish in 7 tuns) open till this decision is made)

[Ben Kenobi]

I agree with Calanthian. We need greater pop. No more slaving. Happy with some of the things, not happy with the lack of workers. People are the core to a greater economy and we really need the Pop.

Been said many times now, is this Poly's game or is this mzprox's game?

As for the spy, I'd just wait to use it when war has began and we've decided who we are going to war with. He's more useful in war than peace. We lose nothing by stocking him up (as we would any other great person), which is unfortunate.

[Calanthian]

The question what to do with a great spy is much much more important than how to develop a city or even all for a certain amount of time. it could save us 5-10 tuns of research, but could cause diplomatic problems, even wars sooner than we are prepared. But what ever we do we need at least 10 turns of preparation, likely even more so better start it asap. Choose the target civ, choose the target city, try our best to convert it to our religion, build spies, send them there, wait 5 turns, bum..

In general: choose a target civ which:
- has a tech lead and the techs you want
- is unlikely to retaliate within a short period of time (so > not your neighbour)
- (preferably) is not building spy points against you
- (preferably) is or can become of the same religion

>>> so RB might be the one

The other approach is to make a deal with a friendly civ that you will steal certain techs from him...

[Calanthian]

At this point there are so much things I would do differently. I wouldn't race for the free great merchant for one.
But let's not go there, as these choices have been made.

I am just commenting that even with these goals, they can be executed differently. Right now you are building wealth again and pushing coins to a point which is just silly in my opinion. A slightly lower level does reap much more rewards. But you don't even go into these points which I made clearly.

A level of +234 (-10%) gps instead of +255 gps gives much more returns in all other areas. If you want to hear it, I will tell you.

[mzprox]

War is coming.. our rivals draft, our allies draft.. there is no other way to effectively build an army before t170. The last thing we need to worry about is our economy, it's the strongest at the moment and will stay that way.
But in any case the drafting wouldn't start till about 12 turns at least, until then our major cities will grow without slaving.

I'd really like to get comment on the bigger picture as well, not just looking at individual cities and telling it shouldn't build wealth. if we wouldn't race for the free great merchant it wouldn't build wealth etc. by t170 our army should be ready and already standing near our eastern border. We should had finished a golden age and get the most of it (extra income, great persons etc)
The question what to do with a great spy is much much more important than how to develop a city or even all for a certain amount of time. it could save us 5-10 tuns of research, but could cause diplomatic problems, even wars sooner than we are prepared. But what ever we do we need at least 10 turns of preparation, likely even more so better start it asap. Choose the target civ, choose the target city, try our best to convert it to our religion, build spies, send them there, wait 5 turns, bum..

[Calanthian]

temples and hammams might need to be rushed after the drafting to eliminate unhappy population

This is the last time I say it: you need POP. Stop this slaving / drafting spree... draft only near POP limit, develop the city tiles and build stuff normally.
(you know I know how to run a killer economy, you might listen to some advise here and there).

[mzprox]

A third path would be very similar to the last one except golden age would be delayed further to make sure we can choose representation at the end of golden age, thus giving +3 happy face to our biggest cities and we wouldn1t need to have big garrisons. Drawback: delay in military production and constitution tech is not needed for rifling, so it would be delayed too, but representation is nice for research and happyness.

When we are closing to get economics I will collect all these routes and we can decide which is the best. Much depends on whether we could get economics at all..

[mzprox]

Here is an alternative route to link

t143-t148 it's the same, we are getting economics
t149--> we delay golden age and get Nationalism first. We might try to get some big gold loan to get it asap
about t144-145 we start the golden age and switch to nationalism, we get gunpowder and start drafting, at the end of golden age we go back to bureaucracy.

difference between the two: we go into golden age and free market later, we spend most of the golden age in nationalism instead of bureau. We can start drafting a few turns earlier, but we have less time doing it. After golden age we are back to bureaucracy.

I like this path more for the fact that our time in Nationalism is limited and we get our nice bonus for our great bureaucratic capital, but this path is more demanding to make it succesful. Need to push science even harder, and it will be much harder to manage unhappyness in the cities. (we would be under Nat about t155 to t161 instead of t157 to until our second golden age. Yet under that 5-6 turns we would need to draft 1-2 soldiers from each bigger cities. That's 3-6 unhappyness in those cities. I will try to do my best to mitigate this effect. Fur and incense must be connected, temples and hammams might need to be rushed after the drafting to eliminate unhappy population, soldiers must be sorted so they also provide happy faces as we are in monarchy. I could also try to secure some more luxury for ourselves, but it won't be cheap.
I believe that if we would follow this plan (precise planning is still necessary) then in t162 we would have about the world's 3rd strongest army and still have 1st-3rd GNP.