The New and Improved Evacuation Plan

[Rhothaerill]

Per my edit in the GS thread, I second Harry's recommendation of monarchy for the reasons I stated there. As to how long before starting our anarchy, it will take five turns (four to move there, one to settle) to get five of the cities up (and one turn less for the other two surrounding The New Voice) after the units are 'ported there. So, unless we want a double anarchy to completely remove unit support during our move, I'd start the anarchy after the units move two turns away from The New Voice. Assuming a three turn anarchy this should give us monarchy the turn AFTER we settle several cities so that the unit support will have kicked in BEFORE we come out of it.

Speaking of the new cities, what are we going to name them all? I like Irony, but the rest should be Voxian.

Oh, and I like Harry's idea of shooting for Democracy. We can phrase it to Lego that we are heading that way and can trade with them, so that they don't have to research two of the "unnecesary" techs for the middle ages.

[Beta]

Of course - the only problem with this is that we do not have monarchy. I couldn't recall - so I just checked the save. We will need to get it from RP, the only ones who researched it AFAIK, and given their current situation - presumably they will not give it away.

[HarryH]

Maybe we can make a deal for future consideration (e.g., Printing Press) to get Monarchy now. We don't have anything to trade right now. Or maybe we can change our Engineering deal to include Monarchy for less cash. Maybe they give us the lump sum and Monarchy and we skip the gpt part.

[Beta]

Would Monarchy be worth the 100 gold to us - if the answer is yes - than I say yes- let's approach RP.

[Rhothaerill]

Originally posted by Beta
Would Monarchy be worth the 100 gold to us - if the answer is yes - than I say yes- let's approach RP.

Yes! If we go to Republic we'll be losing roughly 30 gpt for a while. That number will go down of course, but it's a pretty difficult hit to take when we don't have much cash to begin with. If we can't get them to give us monarchy then I suggest staying in despotism for a while. Unit support is almost a necessity right now.

[Wittlich]

I have to concur with Rhothaerill on this one - If we can't get Monarchy, then stay with Despotism.

[Beta]

OK - I have been doing some research and calculating as well - and I say Republic.

City status - turn number and number of cities

128 1
129 1
130 1
131 5
132 7
133 8
134 8
135 9

We have 37 units until we start building cities (8 settlers) and 29 when we are done.

Towns - which is all our cities will be into the foreseeable future - only support 2 units each. So at the max - we are getting 18 units for free.

Republic on the other hand will give us 1 extra gold for each tile already producing gold. By turn 135 this should be around 15-20 if not higher. And it will go up exponentially after that.

So if we call turn 135 the breakeven point - what happens before that.

128-130 should be anarchy. Same in both.

Tiles around the new voice being improved.

Turn 131 (33 units)

Monarchy 33 -10 (2 per town) = 23 gold loss

Republic 33- 7(gold producing tiles) = 26 gold loss

(assumes two voice tiles with roads)

Turn 132 (31 units)

Monarchy 31 - 14 = 17 gold loss

Republic 31 - 9 = 22 gold loss

Turn 133 (30 units)

Monarch 30 - 16 = 14 gold loss

Republic 30 - 12 = 18 gold loss

(assumes two more tiles improved, or the fish tile being used)

Turn 134 same

Turn 135

Monarch 29 - 18 = 11 gold loss

Republic 29 - 19 = 11 gold loss

(assumes 5 more tiles improved - not unreasonable given that we have 12 workers, and we will be concentrating on getting the road network in)

After that - it only gets better, much better for republic. The minor diffrences in the truns between anarchy and the breakeven clearly do not warrant paying anything for monarchy.

I have assumed a constant size military - which I assume will be the case for awhile.

So - are my assumptions off - or my calculations wrong.

I understand there will be corruption - but for comparitive purposes this works. And besides - corruption will be worse under Monarchy which would even narrow the small gap that does exist in Republic's favor.

We could go all out and do this on an excell spreadsheet - but I think knowing the breakeven point - and what happens before that should be sufficient.

Also - we should be heading into anarchy with some 300 gold in our coffers, and the 5 gpt from RP. This should easily cover us through the deficit period.

[Rhothaerill]

Republic doesn't sound as bad with the hard numbers you have there. Let me think about it some more. I admit I haven't done an extensive test today since I've been at work.

Hmm, one other thing I just thought of that partially disproves my point earlier and helps to prove yours...assuming you have the five cities set up on turn 131 like you show for monarchy that means the tile underneath each city is automatically roaded and provides two gold per city as well (barring corruption loss). That neatly adds 10 gold (or so) to the mix as well as the roaded tiles from The New Voice and makes up for the unit support of monarchy.

Perhaps republic won't be as bad as I thought it was. Good post Beta.

[Rhothaerill]

BTW, any thoughts to city naming yet?

[Beta]

Originally posted by Rhothaerill
Republic doesn't sound as bad with the hard numbers you have there. Let me think about it some more. I admit I haven't done an extensive test today since I've been at work.

Hmm, one other thing I just thought of that partially disproves my point earlier and helps to prove yours...assuming you have the five cities set up on turn 131 like you show for monarchy that means the tile underneath each city is automatically roaded and provides two gold per city as well (barring corruption loss). That neatly adds 10 gold (or so) to the mix as well as the roaded tiles from The New Voice and makes up for the unit support of monarchy.

Perhaps republic won't be as bad as I thought it was. Good post Beta.

Thanks Rhoth. Yes - the cities will have two 'base' gold each. But that applies to both governments. I was not trying to get at the absolute gold loss figure - but the relative loss difference between Monarchy and Republic. As to the absolute loss - well - I know it will be less than the 30 gpt previously mentioned. But we should keep a detailed log for Poly educational purposes. I am sure what we are doing has not been done too many times before - ie - starting a civilization with a capitol and 8 settlers and 12 workers early in the medieval age.

[Beta]

Originally posted by Rhothaerill
BTW, any thoughts to city naming yet?

Good idea - we need a new thread for this.

I will start thinking. Last series were named after members. A different theme this time?

[HarryH]

Buying Monarchy would not be worth very much, maybe 20 to 30 gold. Remember the analysis I did for our Estonia cities when we were thinking about switching from Depostism to Monarchy or Republic? It showed that Depositism had a slight edge but all were very close. Under Despotism you get 4 free units per city (any size). As long as corruption isn't too much of a problem it may prove to be the most beneficial for the first 10 turns (maybe as much as 20 turns when the new cities start to grow).

My testing indicates that the length of anarchy depends on what government you are in befrore the anarchy. It is lowest for Depositism and highest for Democracy. What I am thinking is that as soon as we get all of our Estonia cities are down to one pop (so we don't need shield production) that we go into anarchy and come back out in Despotism. We keep doing that until we get the first bunch of cities established in Legos Minor and then we go with Republic. We keep one citizen as a scientist so that we can continue with 40 turn research even when in anarcny. Anarchy stops all shield and commerce production but it does not stop specialists. Our workers will work slower in Anarchy (half rate) but I think we can live with that for a few turns.

I have a new computer now and high speed cable internet was just installed. I have plans for today but I should have time tomorrow to finish my detailed plans for our new land including, what each city should be producing, worker duties, lumberjacking. and how to speed our pop growth so that when we finish the 40 turns to research PP we can do some very respectable research on Democracy.

For city names how about a rebirth theme: New Hope, Phoenix, etc.

[Beta]

Harry - congrats on the new computer!

The anarchy-despotism approach sounds good. We will need to model when it makes sense for us to switch to republic.

As to city names - well we need a thread.