City Management

[Kylearan]

Hi,

now that you mention it: Yes there is. See here, post #2:

http://apolyton.net/forums//showthread.php?s=&threadid=174077

So we don't really need to prepare for such a sneak attack after all.

-Kylearan

[sunrise089]

I did forget about that rule (which really nerfes one-movers considerably). As long as someone logs in every 24 hours and makes sure there aren't units about to enter our land we should be ok.

OOPS - Nevermind, according to the letter of the rule (it only applies during war). We can still be hit with a double-move. Here's how it works:

Turn 1 - Enemy civ walks unit(s) 3 tiles diagonal of any city's fat cross (assuming the city has 1 border expansion, as is common for these early attacks). We cannot see these units without a hill.

Turn 2 - Enemy civ moves unit(s) 1 tile towards our city, still on neutral ground, at the very end of the turn.

Turn 3 - Enemy civ declares war at the start of the turn, and moves units next to our city. Without hammers invested in a unit we can only start an archer now.

Turn 4 - Even after waiting 24 hours to move again we won't have the archer out, we will only be able to press the whip button. City dies.

[darrelljs]

Originally posted by sooooo
What about starting Pink Dot on a worker? I often do this with my first city and it usually works out well. With no good tiles to work yet there is no real reason to grow. It's the same reason why starting the game with a worker at the capital is a good idea.

I agree we need another Worker, and I will often build one straight off at my second city. However, with a production capital I usually train them there. We've got a pair of Workers heading toward Pink now, they should be able to get the Cow and Rice improved even before we could build a Worker at Pink Dot. I think working the grassland Rice like Zeviz has it now is the correct thing to do, we should maximize growth until the happy cap then swap to production (that seems like the consensus). I guess that means I'm in favor of Barracks.

For the capital, I think we should slow build the Settler, then whip a Worker, then slow build a Granary.

Darrell

[regoarrarr]

Originally posted by sunrise089
I did forget about that rule (which really nerfes one-movers considerably). As long as someone logs in every 24 hours and makes sure there aren't units about to enter our land we should be ok.

OOPS - Nevermind, according to the letter of the rule (it only applies during war). We can still be hit with a double-move. Here's how it works:

Turn 1 - Enemy civ walks unit(s) 3 tiles diagonal of any city's fat cross (assuming the city has 1 border expansion, as is common for these early attacks). We cannot see these units without a hill.

Turn 2 - Enemy civ moves unit(s) 1 tile towards our city, still on neutral ground, at the very end of the turn.

Turn 3 - Enemy civ declares war at the start of the turn, and moves units next to our city. Without hammers invested in a unit we can only start an archer now.

Turn 4 - Even after waiting 24 hours to move again we won't have the archer out, we will only be able to press the whip button. City dies.

Ah you mean like we'll do to Templars in 50-100 turns?

[sunrise089]

Originally posted by regoarrarr


Ah you mean like we'll do to Templars in 50-100 turns?

We'll probably have to have a "letter vs spirit of the rules" talk before that

The really silly thing is that following the spirit of the rules lets teams with 2-movers still play pretty much the same way they always would have.

[Zeviz]

About 1-turn into Archer, we can swap between Archer and Barracks periodically to prevent production decay. That feels like a good balance between having an idle unit sitting around, and being able to quickly deploy units in an emergency. (When I talk about using warriors until middle ages, that implies ability to produce an army out of think air, and tricks like this are helpful for that.)

[ruff_hi]

swapping back and forth doesn't stop production decay (IIRC). Production decay starts after 10 turns for a unit and after 50 turns for a building (again, IIRC).

[darrelljs]

Originally posted by ruff_hi
swapping back and forth doesn't stop production decay (IIRC). Production decay starts after 10 turns for a unit and after 50 turns for a building (again, IIRC).

That would mean every hammer needs its own delay counter, right? I've never tested it but I always assumed if I threw another round of production at the city my hammers' counter would be reset. I can't think of how many I must of lost over my 300 or so games of CIV !

Darrell

[mostly-harmless]

I was also under the impression that the decay counter was reset. I am not sure the 50 turns decay for buildings are correct.

EDIT: I run a crude quick test. Hammers on units decay after 10 turns idle time by 1h/idle turn. The counter is not reset by working the unit again for one turn!
Buildings seems to have 50 turns of grace period. In my test the 6 hammers invested into a barracks did not decay after 50 turns, but 53 turns (which indicates that my test was not conducted very carefully).

So the conclusion is that a turn production spend on an archer (2hammers) is wasted after 12 turns not working on it, no matter how often we spend a turn on it.

mh

[Zeviz]

In that case, could somebody log in and switch production to Barracks, since more people agree with "barracks before archer" plan. (There should still be a couple hours left.)

And I also never realized that 1 turn wasn't enough to stop the decay counter.

[ruff_hi]

done. Swapped to barracks at pink dot.

[sunrise089]

Ok, lets just make sure to swap to an archer for 1 turn the turn before we grow. That should let us strike a balance between hammer decay and whip ability.

[sooooo]

Don't really see the point of barracks before archer. Our archers don't need promotions that urgently. But we do need fogbusters. Would keep on archer.

[Zeviz]

Since this is Prince in unmodified CIV, barbs are just free XP. (IIRC, somebody ran an experiment for the no-improvments SG, using a single archer to successfully defend his civ's single city from barbs until 1100AD or so.) So I wouldn't waste production training or cash paying for fogbusters, as long as we have a couple units to chase down occasional barbs.

[Sullla]

I would also vote for barracks over archer. So long as we are #1 in Power and know exactly what units the other civs on our continent have, there's no reason to build more units. Push infrastructure instead. (I'd prefer a granary even more than barracks, but of course we don't have Pottery quite yet.) No need for fogbusting anymore, and barbs are not much of an issue at the moment.

Glad to see that we successfully grabbed Pink Dot.