Master builder poll

[Tiberius]

Our poor worker is disoriented and the citizens of Legopolis don't know what to do! They are demanding ho have their own minister, responsible with managing their lives. Help them!

The candidates are listed in alphabetical order. Please choose the one you think would be the best!

Good luck to eveyone! (especially me - sorry, silly joke :stupid: )

Oh yes, one more thing: you can't vote banana (but you can abstain)

[Tiberius]

I forgot to tell you that the poll will be opened for one week (7 days). This should be enough.

On a sidenote: are 7 days long polls OK for elections? (and maybe other important polls, like Constitution amendments) and 3 days for the rest of the polls?

[vondrack]

Re: Master builder poll

Originally posted by Tiberius
Good luck to eveyone! (especially me - sorry, silly joke :stupid: )

Deeds, not words, Tibi... How do you think you can win, if you yourself vote for someone else?

[Tiberius]

Hehe, you overestimate me! One of our members was online for a short time and has voted (guess who ). I didn't vote yet.

[Tiberius]

Now I've voted.

[ZargonX]

Originally posted by Tiberius
Hehe, you overestimate me! One of our members was online for a short time and has voted (guess who ). I didn't vote yet.

I can't imagine who it could have been...

And hey, that's politics, right?

[Kloreep]

I don't suppose any of the candidates want to make a statement/campaign speech? I'd just like to hear why you want to be MB/would be a good MB.

[quantum_mechani]

My plan, if I am elected, involves concentrating on early wonders and aggressive settling. My reasoning being that with numidian mercenaries and cities spaced with two squares between, we can have a strong early game defence that will allow us to focus on peaceful projects.

Also I have lots free time

[vondrack]

Originally posted by Tiberius
Hehe, you overestimate me! One of our members was online for a short time and has voted (guess who ). I didn't vote yet.

[Tiberius]

Originally posted by quantum_mechani
Also I have lots free time

Then you may be a better minister than me
Seriously though, you reminded me a question we didn't discuss: city placement. How close/far should we place our cities? Should we overlapp tiles or not? I suppose the Master Builder can do it in its own style, but we should better discuss a general strategy.
I'm for an opportunistic approach. I look for the best spot, not too close and not too far. Important is to get that resource/luxury and, if possible, have a balanced city: grasslands/plains and hills/mountains. If 2 or 3 tiles are overlapping, it doesn't bothers me.

quantum_mechani, what do you mean by "cities spaced with two squares between"?
City-tile-tile-city?

[ZargonX]

In general, I like avoid city overlap in the cities I construct. I like to make sure that in the future, each city has the chance to reach its maximum potential.

I like to do some rapid area exploration so I make sure I have a full sense of my surroundings to make sure I'm using the land to its fullest. Plus, I like to keep an eye on where future resources are likely to pop up.

I also think we need to be ready to seize strategic city sites. Canal spaces (as I call them), where two bodies of water are touching one square of land, might not have the best terrain, but they can be vital strategically later on.

[quantum_mechani]

Yes, my plan would be city-tile-tile-city, along a diagonal when possible to maximize individual city growth (while still keeping only two tiles between cities). With a strong road network our numidian mercenaries would be able to reinforce an endangered city in just one turn. This would make an early game assault on us difficult at best.

[delmar]

Early cities should be placed so that to minimize the number of turns necessary to move units from one to the other, in order to make a quick reorganization of our defense forces possible. This includes the loose application of the 2-tile-between style mentioned by quantum_mechani and considering the fact that crossing rivers costs a full movement point until Engineering is researched.

Cities should be placed on hills and/or on the "inner" side of a river, whenever possible, to gain extra deffensive value.

Ensuring that strategic resources (practically: horse or iron in the early phase) are within our empire tops everything else in importance, therefore a city might be placed on top of or next to such a resource even if it is far away from other cities. Such a city, if indeed far from the core of the empire, must be defendable (possibly on a hill) and well defended both from military (2-3 units + barracks) and from cultural assaults (early temple, library ASAP).

We might consider to follow a similar approach when luxury resources are slightly out of our reach.

Laborers in cities should be assigned such that the number of wasted shields and bakers (lost when a unit is finished or when population grows) is minimized, and income (commerce) is maximalized. Avoiding disorder is of uttermost importance and perhaps the most important task of the Master Build in the early ages. I believe that the Master Build will have to assign Area Directors to groups of cities in the later phase as he will be unable to ensure optimal laborer assignmet in every city as Legoland expands. Using the built-in governor is a very expensive trade-off that we should be able to avoid given the number of citizens in Legoland. To limit the burden on (and the chance of a mistake made by) any one of the Area Directors, I propose a tentative 5 city/directorate limit with a 3 city/directorate optimum to shoot for.

Dynamic assignment of tiles to cities should be implemented, meaning that a particular tile doesn't necessarily will be worked on by laborers of one and only one city till the end of times. Particularly in the early game, cities at the edge of growing into civil disorder or reaching some artificial population limit (lack of aqueduct/hospital) should stop using high-food tiles and work on productive tiles instead. Cities building wonders have priority access to high-shield tiles as long as they are building that wonder.

Tile improvements should be made keeping in mind that most cities won't have more than 4 citizens for a long time. An important exception to this rule is the city targeted for early wonders. Such city (or cities) should be next to a river (to ensure population growth above 6) and have their own worker for improvements to achieve maximum performance with the given number of laborers.

Improving shared tiles (tiles that are within the 10-culture radius of more than 1 city) has priority in the early phase. This ensures flexibility in assigning certain tiles to one or the other city. Along the same lines, scheduled population growth/decrease (the latter caused by settler/worker building) should be introduced to achieve optimal usage of these shared tiles -- e.g. by the time a city finishes a settler, a neighboring city should grow in population so that it can start using the shared tiles freed up by the departure of said settler.

It is very important throughout the game to optimize the resources available to a particular city such that the drop-off shields that are wasted at the end of a building cycle are minimal. For this purpose, cities producing 5 or 10 shields are generally optimal, cities producing 6 shields are very good for our UU and for settlers, while cities producing 4 or 7 shields are rather suboptimal for almost any purpose in the early ages. While it seems far away at the moment, I would like to emphesize again that this concept should be preserved until the very end -- you don't want to build tanks in a city that can produce 90 shields.

Whether to irrigate or mine a tile should be decided based on a long term strategy, not based on what we want to do in the next 10 turns or so. In general, a city producing 3 extra food is not much better than a city producing 2 extra food, while a city producing 4 extra food is like an "average" city (which produces 2 extra food) with a granary. In particular, irrigating that cow next to our capital indirectly yields 60 shields as we won't need to build a granary.

Also note that irrigation is cheaper (2 turns) than mining (3 turns), so we should prefer plains over grassland.

When in doubt, build a road.

Harbors will become pretty important soon and extremly important later on, especially if we are not on a Pangea map. Therefore we should aim at placing a couple of cities on the shore line early on and more and more later on, as we approach the end of Middle Age. One of the early shoreline cities should be capable of producing large number of shileds (this includes not only good production tiles but also minimal distance from capital, to ensure low corruption) in order to build sea-dependent wonders and should have access to a lot of shore tiles for maximum commerce (tiles actually worked on will be switched based on whether the city is working on a wonder or not -- see dynamic tile assignment above). Such a city can become our cash and science "cow" if we manage to build the Colossus, Copernicus's Observatory, and/or Newton's University in it.

Proper placing of shoreline cities will become very important if we find that the Vikings are one of the opponents. In that case, shoreline cities should be placed in such a way that minimizes the number of neighboring water tiles -- thus minimizing the number of ships necessary to guard against a potential amphibious attack. The afforementioned Sea-Wonder-City will likely be an exception from this rule as it is more important that that city has access to plenty of shore tiles. Consequently, such a city must be defended heavily by ground units.

Building workers and settlers is very important in the early game, therefore this issue deserves special attention. We should attempt to create a few cities whose production can be scheduled in such a way that the production of a worker or settler coincides with population growth. This is important for two reasons:

1. to avoid a fluctuation of shield production capacity (where there are too few people in the city)
2. to minimze the number of (potentially) unhappy citizens (where there are too many people)

To provide an example for this important matter: a city, which produces 6 shields and 4 extra food at size 3, could build 1 Num. Merch. and 1 Settler in 10 turns while growing from size 3 to size 5 and then dropping back to size 3. Such a city would have to have only a single static military unit (asuming no temple nor luxury available) to keep the laborers happy, as the arrival of the new Num Merch coincides with the population growth from 3 to 4. By the time the newly built Num Merch departs with the newly built settler, population is back to 3 --> we created a self-controlling city factory. Also note that this city doesn't need more than 3 improved tiles. The 4th laborer simply needs to produce 2 additional food to keep himself alive until the settler is ready.

Pop-rushing is not a nice thing, but a very important feature that must be used often in the early phase, especially in high-corruption and/or food-rich areas. Most notably rushing Temples is a very good idea as the Temple itself will offset the unhappiness caused by rushing it, and it can start producing culture. Rushing barracks in far-away, high-exposure border cities might be also worth the sacrifice. Care must be taken to initiate the pop rush when it yields most shields, that is when 20 (or in rare cases, 40) shields are missing.

Well, so much at first sight. Does any of the Master Build candidates feels that he can incorporate the above in his program? Or shall I apply for the job myself?

[delmar]

Wow, not a single comment to my post? How am I suppose to choose a Master Build then?

In case it wasn't clear: I was trying to provoke some more details out of the candidates as to what the heck they plan to do if elected...

[Jack_www]

I think they will answer your post delmar, even if it takes a while.