GL revisited

[nbarclay]

EotS has one fur that is not in Hurricane's radius, although the tile needs chopped and mined. I'd have to do some testing, but with proper laborer-shuffling (and sufficient irrigation and mining), that might be enough to do 5-turn settlers without borrowing a Hurricane irrigated fur at all. Worst case, it could get by borrowing one of the irrigated furs from Hurricane one or two turns out of five. The idea would be to grow from size 5 to size 6 in two turns and then from 6 to 7 in three, producing the settler as it grows to size 7 (so by the time the turn starts, it would be back to 5). During the three-turn leg, it works two FPs one of those turns and only one the other two. So as long as we take the time to improve enough tiles (admittedly, delaying adding some of the workers to Hurricane a little extra), we don't have to have a long-term slowdown in our settler pump.

In regard to Cyclone, if we chop and irrigate the game tile, we should have a four-turn settler pump. At size 5, it could work three shielded grasslands, a mined wheat, and an irrigated game, yielding 8 pre-corruption shields (including the city tile). At size 6, add a fourth shielded grassland for 10 pre-corruption shields. I may want to pull out the test scenario sometime to verify that corruption levels don't interfere more than I think they will, but there's no way Cyclone would be slower than EotS at churning out settlers if we focus it correctly. The only real problem is that getting it up to speed will take time.

As for the idea that we might abandon Bolderberg's barracks in favor of another wonder, that crosses the boundary from a serious, legitimate objection into the realm of the ridiculous. For one thing, it's hard to imagine players of the caliber we have here not recognizing how important Bolderberg's barracks becomes if we switch Hurricane to the Great Library. And for another, Bolderberg doesn't have the production to be a particularly credible wonder-building city even if we wanted it to take on such a role. There are valid arguments that we might be better off focusing REXing and building up our economy and defenses, but please don't insult our intelligence.

Nathan

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Dominae
I guarantee our human (smart) opponents will get to Education as quickly as possible just to thwart our efforts.

I was a thinkin bout this problem.

If civs work towards edumacation to render the GL useless to us, who else would the library be useful to?

........


hint: if we dont give vox education, then.......


and we wait some turns, when the trading picks back up, after 20 turns or whatever, we could trade the city to vox for a turn.

????????

[Harovan]

Originally posted by nbarclay
As for the idea that we might abandon Bolderberg's barracks in favor of another wonder, that crosses the boundary from a serious, legitimate objection into the realm of the ridiculous.

I'm sorry, I didn't intend to entertain you, but it's not that I haven't already seen a similar move, just because one had "an idea". *cough*Hurricane*cough*. I said you more than 10 turns ago, that we have a paper thin defense and are getting short of warriors to escort our settlers. Your response was, no need to waste shields on regular warriors, let's better produce veteran spearmen. Ok, but now where are the spearmen?

I'm fully aware, that Cyclone can produce settlers fast. But as you already said, the question is, when? And without doing the math now, I can imagine that it needs at least 20, if not 30 turns to get there. And the second question is, will we be still alone at this time. Want to have a heavily fortified Luxian colony city at our incense? Just wait till their galley shows up.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph


I'm sorry, I didn't intend to entertain you, but it's not that I haven't already seen a similar move, just because one had "an idea". *cough*Hurricane*cough*. I said you more than 10 turns ago, that we have a paper thin defense and are getting short of warriors to escort our settlers. Your response was, no need to waste shields on regular warriors, let's better produce veteran spearmen. Ok, but now where are the spearmen?

If we didn't have ready access to iron, I wouldn't even seriously consider leaving our defenses this thin. But once we get our barracks completed in Hurricane (and after some thought, I definitely would not support changing the barracks to something else), we'll have the ability to upgrade warriors to swordsmen to bolster our defense. Our large gold reserve also helps out in that regard; we'll have a second barracks to produce new vet units by the time our reserve drops below enough to pay for a full warrior upgrade. And while Hurricane won't have produced any vet units, its potential to do so between the time Voxian forces are spotted and the time they arrive would be at least double what the original plan would have left it with.

If we were expecting a war, there is no way I would settle for latent power over actual, current power. But with peace the most likely situation, as long as we have a back-up plan in case of attack, we can focus our priorities on areas other than military preparations.

I'm fully aware, that Cyclone can produce settlers fast. But as you already said, the question is, when? And without doing the math now, I can imagine that it needs at least 20, if not 30 turns to get there. And the second question is, will we be still alone at this time. Want to have a heavily fortified Luxian colony city at our incense? Just wait till their galley shows up.

You think they'd be that stupid? Or are MP players more inclined to put up with such peaceful invasions than I would expect them to be? Also note that they'd need more than one galley to found a city and have more than a single unit to protect it.

[notyoueither]

My observations of humans in MP leads me to believe that most teams will opt for expansion and delay wonders til later.

The exception to that would be builders who are isolated. They will set a second or third city to wonders very quickly. Question. Are there any builder civs so isolated?

Then there is the proposal that we detail our first and second cities to wonder building. I find this to be folly when combined with the above and the fact that we share a continent with Vox.

The middle, safe road would be to continue REXing with EotS. If a wonder is desired Hurricane should be left to pursue that, but seriously, I doubt that any other civs are even close to beginning wonders for another 10 to 20 turns. Maybe Lego is beginning one about now. Fine, they get one. That leaves many for us. Maybe it would be a good idea to complete a few veteran spear, yes?

/Edited to seperate two destinct topics.

[notyoueither]

re Fairness

I have not voted yet, btw. I do note though that polls begun prior to discussion are regarded as... not entirely acceptable in the major demo games. That is because they lead people to vote for the decision proposed by the thread starter if he or she states the case well. Then the opponents come later and begin to propose other views, but many votes are already cast and cannot be changed. Also, it is considered very poor form for the first post of the poll thread to contain arguements for or against by the thread starter. Again, this is for reasons of fairness and balance.

I do not want to come off as a jerk, but some of the team are beginning to state... reservations about how thier views may be being taken into account, or not. That leads me to conclude that we need to be more sensitive to the views of all the members of GS, and on how to properly gauge them through polls.

Thanks for listening.

[nbarclay]

As far as I'm concerned, a poll started this early in the discussion process should be considered preliminary, just feeling out people's views. Let's give the issue another day or so for people to think about what angles we might be missing, and then I'll post another poll to get a final opinion reflecting not just people's preferences but also how strongly they feel about those preferences. (One of the flaws of pure majority rule is how a majority who leans very slightly in one direction can overrule a minority that feels much more strongly in the other, and I'd rather have an opportunity to know if such a thing happens and consider what we want to do about it.)

Nathan

[Dominae]

I agree about the poll. Many people have changed their minds concerning the GL issue, tainting their initial vote (this includes me).

Ideally we want all players to "feel strongly" about all votes they make, but this, as in real life, is not the case. I see no way of compensating those who feel strongly about an issue if the vote does not go their way, at least not within the confines of a democracy. If they feel so strongly it is their role to convince others to think as they do.

Edit: Actually there are ways of addressing the problem you just raised, Nathan. I'm not sure what name is given to this procedure, but instead of voting for one option, you rank all the options. Then the tally of all the ranks picks the winner. The idea is that those who are sitting on the fence about an issue will place their rankings in a less decisive fashion than those who know what they want, yielding accurate results of the "will of the people" for a large population. Is this not the method we used to select our civ?


Dominae

[Harovan]

Nathan, I won't quote anything, because I don't see the need to continue this discussion. But I ask you for good, don't take my posts and demands word for word. They contain often analogies or are meant a bit sarcastic, so don't look for a sense in every word. Keep also in mind, that I'm not posting in my native language and may fail to understand the entire sense of a word or a phrase.

Re "cancelling barracks in Bolderberg", this was meant sarcastic. It should read more or less "People, do you think this is impossible? Remember Hurricane". It was in no way meant as an insult of your intelligence, and if it was taken as such, I apolozige. But try to see things from my point of view. I come in this (opened way too early) poll, disagree with the matter, but see, that I'm already hopelessly outvoted by a couple of "Hooray GL!" voters (no offense). So the only chance to get my opinion heard and to cause some teammates to rethink their a bit hasty casted votes is to raise the discussion again and make a point myself. In order to gain some attention, I have to resent to, well, some unusual means like exaggerations or sarcasm. Dominae (who agreed with me) also got confused, see my remark above on his "sarcasm detector" being out of order. I didn't expect, that you would get in the same trap.

Re "Lux plopps a city at our incense". I know, that a galley has only 2 seats. And my addition "heavily fortified" should imply, that it wasn't meant to be done with one galley. It was more an analogy, a "what if" scenario. Sure it would be stupid of them, but at the moment and, if we continue the GL project, now and in the near future we wouldn't be able to deal with such a city for the reason of our military weakness. So -again theoretical- they could send more galleys with units in and build a fortress out of it, which could, if we again fail to take appropriate means, be the base of an invasion. Apart from this, it would simply suck, because it would interfere our own city plannings. It sure was an exaggerating analogy again, but the message was "don't want nasty things to happen? Let's build a military", which is valid in my opinion.

[nbarclay]

I have no great objection to the idea of leading in with exaggeration and sarcasm as attention-getters, but it would save the rest of us a lot of trouble if you would then move on to a more objective analysis. Without that, the exaggerations and sarcasm tend to be a distraction (and in the worst case, people may even dismiss your rhetoric as too overblown to be worth seriously considering). I guess what I'm saying is that if you want a serious discussion of your concerns, it would be useful for you to present your concerns in a more serious manner, at least once you have people's attention.

[DeepO]

Re: early poll: I started this, to get an idea on what opinions there were on the GL idea, and to get it our of the comments-thread, where it didn't receive the focus it needed. As there was no final, detailed proposal on how to do it, you can't consider this something final... However I thought that people who weren't sure about their opinion would just wait to voice it, at least that's what I do in things I'm not sure about.

If my polling early broke some unwritten rule, my apologies, but we needed to get the discussion going, and I think that has succeeded wonderfully.

Some replies (as I missed quite a bit of points here):
The GL will not give us 3 techs, but a minimum of 11 techs. My guess is that it will net us over 2000 beakers, or some 2000 gold. Please consider this when talking about that worthless wonder, I consider 2000 gold a good price to be 12 turns late in our expansion, certainly as we're already on top, and keep the possibility to outgrow anyone later.

Defense: of course we'll need defense, which was one of the reasons why I asked to have one more settler before we started building on the workers: with the gold city settled, we can have another barracks city up before anyone is going to bother us.

Timing: as said before, I think that people will start on a wonder from city 3, or from #1 or #2 after the #3 is settled. If so, we have plenty of time to get to the wonder first. But, as others will certainly know about adding workers, and as at least one team got a free settler / city, we have to add a few workers, which we can spare as we're the only ones with a granary. There's a good chance that by the time we get EotS on another settler, no other team has build an extra settler, simply because they need to let their cities grow. It is highly unlikely that at this point in the game, they are going to divert their growth potential by sending a settler in a mission over seas, not knowing where that settler is going to.

DeepO

[nbarclay]

Your estimate of techs and beakers assumes we would research everything ourselves and not benefit from any trades, right? If we could research half and trade it for the other half, would that not cut the value of the Great Library in terms of beakers in half?

I also don't especially like the fact that the Great Library is wasted unless its owner settles for being a tech follower rather than a tech leader. I almost never build it in SP for exactly that reason, although on a few occasions, I've made exceptions. My rule of thumb in SP is that I'm only interested in the Great Library if I expect not to be the tech leader. And I'm not convinced enough that we can't become a tech leader in this game to be as enthusiastic about the Great Library as I would be if our economic position (and skills) were weaker. (Yes, my enthusiasm for focusing on the project at the expense of developing our economy is starting to waver.)

[Harovan]

Originally posted by nbarclay
I have no great objection to the idea of leading in with exaggeration and sarcasm as attention-getters, but it would save the rest of us a lot of trouble if you would then move on to a more objective analysis.

I don't consider my last posts to be entirely exaggerated. Indeed we (or better you and DeepO) are going to sacrifice or at least severely hurt our settler factory, thus hampering our growth. We are completely neglecting our defense, first vet spearman in 30 turns like DeepO proposed is inacceptable. We put our fate in the hand of our neighbors by leaving it up to them to attack us or not and are ready to throw away the whole work we did for the wonder if they do. The Great Library is a very precious wonder, but the price we're going to pay is simply too much. Where are these points in an inacceptable way exaggerated?

Without that, the exaggerations and sarcasm tend to be a distraction (and in the worst case, people may even dismiss your rhetoric as too overblown to be worth seriously considering). I guess what I'm saying is that if you want a serious discussion of your concerns, it would be useful for you to present your concerns in a more serious manner, at least once you have people's attention.

And we Germans are told to be dry and humorless... You beat me by far. Sigh, I agree, if you in return abstain from patronizing statements like this. And btw, my "Alphabet" gamble I got attacked for is a laugh compared to the hazard we're going to play now.

[Dominae]

By my count, we get 10 useful techs from the GL:

Warrior Code
Mysticism
Polytheism
Mathematics
Currency
Contstruction
Monotheism
Theology
Education

Edit: Forgot Horseback Riding, which is required.

I've cut out the entire Writing branch, as we'll need it all to give us a reasonable shot at the GL in the first place.

From the above list we can cut out Warrior Code and Mysticism, as they're so cheap we should be able to get them for essentially free in trades once we get contacts.

So we're left with 8 techs. That's still pretty good, and will net give a nice sump (edit: that the abbreviation for "lump sum"...) of gold. Now we have to decide if its good enough to warrant all the risk.


Dominae

[DeepO]

Nathan, no... 2000 gold is my guess with trading, not researching everything ourselves. You can count if you want, but I counted on an average 17 tech edit cost per tech, 11 techs, 24 beakers / level. I think it will be more, as later techs are more valuable... but with these numbers you get to 4488 beakers if we were to research everything ourselves.

This is, BTW, without any trading we can do, so in reality, I think the profit of the GL will be closer to 3000 gold, also because most likely we will get more then the 11 techs out of it (which is the absolute minimum).

Now, I'm going to work again, so sorry if I don't respond for a few hours

DeepO