Turnplayer Thread #2.

[Swiss Pauli]

Just as I feared.

If possible, we need to try to get PAL to cancel that deal and trade us Ivory for Wine. Although it is possible that PAL may nix such a trade when Jumbos are available.

[mostly-harmless]

It seems PAL has traded away their only Ivory. I guess they will have access to more than one. Otherwise it is pretty silly.

And let me correct myself. Imperio has of course access to 4 gold mines!

mh

[sunrise089]

Jumbos are crazy-strong. Put it this way, in Medieval, against longbows, people still consider ivory the most important resource. That said, since our opponents aren't likely to use well-executed horse attacks Ivory may be less important in this game.

@Sullla: The road you marked is as good as it's going to get in the short term. In the long term though, when (if) we have horse-based defenders, we want to make a road extension on the tile 1SW of the SW most peak in the new city's radius.

Quick lesson for the guys who never play MP: Skilled human players who rely on a one-move stack will often include lots of catapults in their SoD. Since 10-15 catapults will more or less wreck any number of defensive units, it's often crucial to knock the cats out of play. The normal way to do this is to keep a catapult stack and a horse archer stack in position to cover as many cities as possible (in our case the HA's can cover both southern cities, the cats cannot.) As soon as the enemy stack moves adjacent to your city, and before the enemy can use their catapults, you hit the stack with your cats to weaken the defenders (particularly anti-horse units) and then hit with your horse archers. Ideally you can hit from inside your city, meaning your survivors will also contribute to the defense. If this can be properly executed the defender can kill the entire enemy stack using only catapults. Therefore sometimes a skilled attacker will try and suicide some sort of cheap unit and check for a horse archer stack. Therefore I want the stack as far behind the front-line as possible but still able to make it in a threatened city and attack from it.

In our game of course the ratio of economic development to military development will probably lean much more towards the economy, and big stacks of 30+ units may be rare. But anyways, that's the basis for wanting the roads the way I asked.

[regoarrarr]

I was trying to research some stuff for my Deity Micromanagers game (shamless plug!) about city upkeep / maintenance

And I thought I would test some stuff out in this game as well. So could I get, when someone gets a chance:

Our game speed / difficulty (I believe normal / prince)?
The map script height / width: (I believe we're on standard / terra which would be 104 wide by 64 high). Also, we scroll horizontally, right?

And then: the listed values in the city screens for distance maintenance and number of cities maintenance, for each city we have.

I don't think this will be TOO useful for us, but it should allow us to accurately figure out how much settling pink peaks will cost us, as well as (down the road) when/where to put the FP.

Thanks!

[mostly-harmless]

I will get you the info.

EDIT:
Normal Speed
Standard Size Terra
Prince Difficulty
Scrolling horizontally

Cities and distance from capital:
Airstrip One (capital):
# cities: 1.12

Pink Dot (3 tiles horizontal / 9 tiles vertical):
distance: 2.10
# cities: 1.08

China Beach (5 tiles horizontal / 0 tiles vertical):
distance: 0.95
# cities: 1.04

Cape Town (7 tiles horizontal / 1 tiles vertical):
distance: 1.20
# cities: 0.96

Pink Peaks (6 tiles horizontal / 4 tiles vertical):

Southern Marble (1 tiles horizontal / 14 tiles vertical):

mh

[Sullla]

The second half of our tech trade has gone through with PAL. We traded away Archery and Iron Working in exchange for Alphabet. Obviously, the key knowledge that this opens up is the tech screen:



Here's a full rundown on each team:

Templars
Techs we have: Fishing, Sailing, (Alphabet)
Techs they have: Mysticism, Masonry, Poytheism, Monotheism

Imperio
Techs we have: Archery, Sailing, (Alphabet)
Techs they have: Mysticism, Masonry, Meditation

PAL
Techs we have: none
Techs they have: Mysticism, Masonry, Polytheism

Yeah, PAL's in the driver's seat. We knew that already, and this confirms it. One thing we CAN do is ring up Imperio immediately and see if they'd be interested in a trade. I suggest Archery (85) and Sailing (143) in exchange for Masonry (114) and Meditation (114). This works out to an exactly equal trade in beakers. Or, we can cut them a break to sweeten the deal: Mysticism (71) and Meditation (114) for our two techs. We'd like to get them trading with us and not PAL, so speed is an important factor here.

I think it's better to try with Imperio first, since our relations with Templars right now are kind of a mess.

[Zeviz]

I agree about making an offer to Imperio.

I suggest starting with an even offer. (Note that Templars don't have Sailing and PAL bought it from us, so we have trade monopoly on it.) Can somebody send them a message right away?

EDIT: And how did we get so far behind in tech? Even Templars are ahead of us in terms of raw beakers.

[mostly-harmless]

Remember that Templars popped Animal Husbandry from a hut.
They might got some gold from huts, enabling them to sustain 100% research longer than us.
Also we have not spend a single beaker in 7 turns.
EDIT: And Templars got a tech trade with PAL done already.

mh

[mostly-harmless]

Oh man!
PAL just traded Meditation & Priesthood from Rabbits and can now research CoL right away.

mh

[Sullla]

Yep, PAL's playing us all for fools right now. All we can do is try to stay as close as possible while scouting out the remaining two civs.

This is a good lesson of scenario design, and why it's critical to give every team in these games a fair chance to contact one another. A team in our position is heavily disadvantaged by making it so difficult to contact teams on the other continent. Frankly, we're lucky to be doing as well as we are! (Scary thought: if we don't contact PAL early on, they could just as easily have made the Alphabet trade with Templars, who also have Iron Working and Archery. Then where would we be?)

Once we meet Rabbits and Banana, we can make similar deals with them and stay caught up on tech. Just have to try and remain as competitive as possible until then...

[mostly-harmless]

Wow, pace is really stepping up.
Just got an offer from Templars to trade Myst(71) vs. Fishing(57) which I accepted.
We can now offer the Medi&Mono vs. Sail&Arch trade to Imperio.
And Sailing vs. Polytheism with Templars.

mh

[Zeviz]

Good news about that trade. This saves us at least a turn of research, and allows for a more even trade with Imperio. Can somebody just offer them a trade in game?

[mostly-harmless]

Ok, both tech trades as specified in my post above have been offered.

mh

[Zeviz]

Is the Templar trade an even one, or should we trade for Mono instead?

[Sullla]

Whoa! Great work team on the rapidly moving tech developments! Kudos especially to mostly_harmless.

Just to summarize for everyone (since the events took place in like three different threads):

- We traded Fishing (57) to Templars for Mysticism (71).

- We are planning to trade them Sailing (143) for Polytheism (also 143? I think?) next turn.

- We offered Archery (85) and Sailing (143) to Imperio for Meditation (114) and Masonry (114). This is an exactly even trade, so it's extremely likely they will agree.

Assuming the latter two trades go through, we can immediately research Monotheism, followed by Monarchy. We need to fire off another quick email to PAL explaining that the "100 beaker tech to be named later" is going to be Monotheism. They don't have it, and it fits perfectly with our current tech strategy. Researching Monotheism -> Monarchy gets us another 20% extra beakers towards the latter tech.

So the new tech path will be:

Priesthood (uber cheap) -> Monotheism -> Monarchy.

Awesome stuff guys! I can't believe our neighbors are so willing to trade with us after we walked all over them in the landgrab!