Where Do We Settle Next?

[MyOtherCar]

How about we settle the fishing village, Tuclam Shakur, first? It needs less worker actions to develop.

[sooooo]

How about we settle the fishing village, Tuclam Shakur, first? It needs less worker actions to develop.

All the more reason to start Sweet Tooth earlier!

We will have the worker presence in the area pretty soon, ready at least for when the settler arrives.

The two-clams site isn't the greatest. It's a fine size 5-6 city but will not be one of the jewels in our crown.

IMO we need to settle Sweet Tooth first and get it going for better long-term gain.

[regoarrarr]

Thus we end up getting FOUR cities in the same block of territory in which Templars planted one. That's how you beat the odds!

Not to mention working the mine tile that Templars built without any city able to work it

[MyOtherCar]

Not to mention working the mine tile that Templars built without any city able to work it

And one mine to be pillaged before settling, thanks Templars!

[sooooo]

Yay, get to bump this thread again.



The options for New Mutal:

The site of Old Mutal. Boring! But the obvious choice.

Or, there's the super exciting: 4E of Pink Dot [EDIT: Cape Town]. That get us the highly valuable 5-food irrigated rice (6 food after biology!) and all the good tiles like the towns, the FP farm and the gold. We then put another city 3N, 3W of Mayapan to get the plains cow that we'd miss from moving Mutal and also we could work the marble, gold and the 3 grass farm tiles. This way we use the rice and gold that would otherwise be wasted and can specialise the cities into commerce and production.

[sunrise089]

I assume you mean 4E of Cape Town. If so, that option sounds good to me.

[sooooo]

Of course the disadvantage would be that the new commerce city cannot hand-build much infrastructure. It would have to whip granary, library, (forge?), university, obvservatory etc. Settling the old mutal spot it could build many of those buildings as it grows. Hmm, I'm doubting myself now, maybe the old spot is better.

[Sullla]

No, that's a much better dotmapping of the area. I'm in favor of two cities over here too. Plus, we don't want to rebuild Mutal. Has that nasty Imperio stink.

How quickly do we want to refound these cities? I'd say to get the commerce one up and running right away, since the floodplains towns will essentially pay for themselves. The other one, the production-oriented location (1NW of former Mutal site) can probably wait a little while. We ARE barely making money at 0% science, after all!

I suppose I should mention that I want us to stick in another city north of Uxmal eventually too! NE-N-N would grab a fish for food and about five different furs. But that can definitely wait. (Once we get the economy rebounding in the post-Imperio age, we truly are going to be unstoppable... 25+ cities on a continent all our own.)

[Zeviz]

I prefer the old spot, because we have so many cities already, that each new one costs over 20gpt. This means that when comparing 2 weaker cities vs. 1 stronger city, we have to discount the two city option by at least 20gpt. (It also takes longer to train second settler, get the infrastructure built in two cities, etc.)

[darrelljs]

I prefer the old spot, because we have so many cities already, that each new one costs over 20gpt.

Surely this can't be true on Noble !

Darrell

[sooooo]

It's prince.

But I'm not sure the 20gpt figure is accurate. The new city itself costs less than 10 gpt. Not sure what the increase in no. of cities maintenence and civic upkeep will be but we can track it on the financial advisor screen.

[Zeviz]

I thought our gpt income dropped by about 18 after a recent city capture, but I am not sure of exact number. If anybody can log into the game now and write down what the current +gold number is, and what maintenance number for newly captured city is, we can compare that with +33$ in Sulla's screenshot above.

(The drop in +gold would reflect maintenance increase in other cities and civic upkeep, and the maintenance of new city is self-explanatory.)

[Sullla]

It's hard to get an exact figure; completing banks, courthouses, and especially the upcoming Forbidden Palace will all have major effects on our finances. The new Imperio cities are coming with a pricetag around 10gpt in maintenance, and I'd tack on another 3-5gpt on top of that in hidden costs (number of cities, inflation, etc.) At a guess, therefore I'd put new cities around 15gpt.

Replacing Mutal with two cities is definitely the best long-term use of the land there. Only question is, do we want to play for the long term or the short term here? (Uh oh, here comes another Upper Burgundy debate! )

[timmy827]

I'm in favor of sooooo's plan. A key thing is that the marginal cost per city is about to drop - we are basically topped out on # cities maintenance, only a few small ones are not yet at the cap of 6 (and they surely will be once we take the remaining good Imperio sites). So we only have to consider the costs of the city itself. Jerusalem is 9gpt and that seems about right - they are about that distance from A1 and/or Jerusalem once it gets FP up. Currently we have 21 cities and 34 gpt in civic costs, so each new city is about 11 gpt base, 14gpt after inflation, and probably slightly less than that since it will ease our unit support. Even without a courthouse, a city getting that gold+marble+natural trade routes easily pays for itself.

However I am leaning no on Sulla's city (3N1E of Uxmal). The only bonuses it picks up that aren't in Uxmal's fat cross are two tundra fur and tundra deer, and every other tile not part of Uxmal is crap (a few coast, ice, peaks). In a space race game it would still pay off in the end, but I don't think it's worth the hammers for settler + guard (I'm wary about defending too many points across the channel).

[sunrise089]

I'm in favor of sooooo's plan. A key thing is that the marginal cost per city is about to drop - we are basically topped out on # cities maintenance, only a few small ones are not yet at the cap of 6 (and they surely will be once we take the remaining good Imperio sites). So we only have to consider the costs of the city itself. Jerusalem is 9gpt and that seems about right - they are about that distance from A1 and/or Jerusalem once it gets FP up. Currently we have 21 cities and 34 gpt in civic costs, so each new city is about 11 gpt base, 14gpt after inflation, and probably slightly less than that since it will ease our unit support. Even without a courthouse, a city getting that gold+marble+natural trade routes easily pays for itself.

However I am leaning no on Sulla's city (3N1E of Uxmal). The only bonuses it picks up that aren't in Uxmal's fat cross are two tundra fur and tundra deer, and every other tile not part of Uxmal is crap (a few coast, ice, peaks). In a space race game it would still pay off in the end, but I don't think it's worth the hammers for settler + guard (I'm wary about defending too many points across the channel).

Ok, I only feel qualified to comment on the military side. Lets say PAL attacks and razes this hypothetical city. To do so I estimate they will loose on average 6 units to kill 3 + the city, and that's generous (IE a city with 2 Oromos and a pike may very well survive even 6 Cuirassiers after the amphibious penalty once it has some culture). 6 versus 3+settler is probably close to even on hammers. We loose out on any hammers sunk into the city's buildings, but we gain off any net income or units the city has produced. I don't know where the tipping point is, but I tend to think a city will produce enough commerce that it will outweigh the cost of the settler and defenders.

Also, once we get naval parity we have a huge advantage over PAL as long as Rabbits and Banana are alive. We don't need to build any galleons, only frigates and ships on the line. Therefore it's conceivable we'll sink PAL ships heading to our shores. It won't take many empty galleons sunk to make PAL think twice about raiding unimportant cities, and it won't take very many full galleons sunk to make the prospect really dicey.