What about Hurricane?

[nbarclay]

When we chop that fur forest, a settler and two workers are the same price. And we'll need to chop it if we want EotS churning out two-turn workers with minimal disruption to Hurricane's wonder project.

[DeepO]

Also true. Maybe it can be incorporated in keeping EotS at decent size, otherwise we might need to use Cyclone for workers for a while (which is kind of a waste)...

Anyway, we need to test this, but IMHO it gives a good chance of keeping up military...

DeepO

[nbarclay]

I'd say better than just good. The #4 site will have two grassland with shield tiles available, but getting the city grown and the tiles improved involved a major delay when I ran the test scenario. The advantage isn't just one of getting the city's size up faster; it's also one of getting tiles improved faster. (The bonus grasslands, plus the fact that Bolderberg will already be well on its way to size 3, are why I think the #4 site is the better one to pump up.)

[DeepO]

Well, you may be right... but I need to test it myself once before I can fully comment.

More workers is never a bad thing, BTW, I already thought we were running short now. Not all our cities are connected, a few of them are using tiles that aren't improved, this is somewhat wasteful. We could do better, without focusing so much on the number of cities we produce, but more on quality as well... and part of that quality is how many troops you have to defend it.

DeepO

[nbarclay]

Thinking about it some more, we could actually add one worker each to #4 and Bolderberg and not upset our long-term balance of workers per city compared with if we built another settler in EotS before having it start prioritizing workers. I'm not sure exactly which worker would end up going to Bolderberg, and he'd probably need to work some on tile improvements before joining the city, but it can be done.

[DeepO]

That was what I had in mind, Nathan... we've got 2 workers to share, and two barrack cities to pump. Maybe it's best to put both in one city, but without aquaducts, it's probably best to divide the income.

If we somehow manage to exchange settler #3 from EotS into 2 more workers, we could further divide it, one for #4 (or whatever barrack city needs one atm), one for Hurricane...

DeepO

[nbarclay]

Adding more than one worker to Bolderberg or #4 gets us in a situation where the cities are at their growth limits long before we'll probably be ready to build aqueducts there. And in any case, skipping a settler, even with two of the resulting workers ultimately added to cities, should get us in good enough shape in terms of tile improvements that we won't need to avoid building the other settler to keep up.

Also, I'm concerned that if we sacrifice too much REXing to complete the Pyramids quickly (assuming that's our primary target now), we'll lose a good bit of the advantage of of our GA. One of our goals for our GA needs to be to get courthouses in our outlying cities so they can have something resembling decent production, and the more time they have to grow before our GA, the more they can build during the GA.

Nathan

[DeepO]

Nathan, if we get into a GA, the amount of population matters, and not the amount of cities. If existing cities have in total 2 more population (and thus tiles it can use), it's better than having one extra city with 1 pop. The difference is purely in corruption / waste, and this equation only hold for a limited time as 2 cities with normal food can grow 2 pops in 10 turns, where as one bigger city with normal food can only grow 1 pop.

So sacrificing expansion shouldn't be a problem as long as we're not losing total population in cities... certainly not as we're not counting on new cities to let the amount of settlers being build explode. Of course, we need to make sure we keep the ability to expand at a reasonable pace, but with only Cyclone on the job, we will grow faster then any other civ...

DeepO

[DeepO]

Oh, BTW, you're right about the aquaduct limits, that's why we need testing.

DeepO

[nbarclay]

The catch is that cities that don't exist can't build courthouses, and smaller cities can't build them as quickly. I suppose at a corruption level higher than 75%, building units in the core to disband in corrupt cities would be a faster way to get courthouses, but I think such areas are the exception rather than the rule. It's not just total empire-wide production that counts; it's also having the production where it's needed.

[DeepO]

Nathan, another idea to throw in the open: what if we use the chop, plus some pop-rushing to get a library in EotS instead of a settler? By that time, we should more or less have access to literature, or we should be able to time it that we do the last poprushing after we got literature from RP. No problems with too many settlers, no problems with too few culture, and a library in our second highest commerce city... only disadvantage is that palace jumps are getting harder to swallow (but if we build a wonder, these might become to risky anyway)

DeepO

[Shiber]

Originally posted by DeepO
Nathan, if we get into a GA, the amount of population matters, and not the amount of cities. If existing cities have in total 2 more population (and thus tiles it can use), it's better than having one extra city with 1 pop.

I thought that GA bonuses also apply for city squares. In that case, we'd have the same amount of worked tiles for both examples (2 more population vs. one more city with 1 pop).

[DeepO]

Shiber, that was what I meant (didn't voice it very clearly, sorry about that): 2 workers and 1 city should have the same benefits from a GA, but as any next city is likely to be corrupted, the benefits will be smaller in a second city, as opposed to a core city.

DeepO

[Shiber]

Oh, I see now what you meant. I should have read your post more carefully.

[Randolph]

I wish I decided earlier, I would have gone w/ no worker, but it looks like it's over now.