Smith's College - General Discussions

[notyoueither]

Did some noodling around.

Hunting(3760)-Mysticism(3520)-Meditation(3240)-AnimalHusb(2920)-Archery(2720)-Agriculture(2520)-Pottery(2240)-BronzeWorking(1920)

Warrior(3640)-Scout(3360)-Worker(3000)-Scout(2800)-Worker(2520)-Skirmisher(2440)-Skirmisher(2240)-Settler(1920)



An AI grabbed Buddhism.

The health cap doesn't mean a lot, given that we can turn each unhealthy pop into a cottage to break even on food and rake in the gold up to the happy limit. The hard part of the cap is getting enough food to work hills.

Hopefully there's another animal or grain handy.

[Aginor]

You've opened what is the big can of worms in my mind - AH or Pottery?

The bad news on Pottery is that we've gotta go through Ag (this is NOT a Fishing start) to do it. OTOH it will speed up getting to further techs *very* dramatically out of a flood plains start.

2240 strikes me as way too late for us to be tossing up Cottages; if we want to get our money's worth out of Worker #1, he'd better be throwing up farms and cottages on those flood plains for all he's worth IMO.

Early Pottery could easily be the difference between catching Mono/CoL if we get shut out early and having to lightbulb a late tech. Plus, we could easily use a pair of early farms to power a mine.

[Blake]

I'd like to point out that improving the sheep tile basically gives us +1 food (The health) and +2 hammers over a free floodplain. In fact until we hit the health cap and road it we get no more benefit than mining a river plains hill - mine a hill for +2 hammers, or pasture the sheep for +2 hammers.

Animal Husbandry isn't a cheap tech, I honestly think we should delay researching it unless another animal resource shows up.
We can get Agriculture and farm floodplains, to get to writing we can via Priesthood or Pottery.

I think our starting tech should be along the lines of:
Hunting->Myst->Meditation->Agriculture/Archery->Archery/Agriculture
(hitting the event horizon after that :P)

We can farm the floodplains and just grow bigger, each +1 pop is +1 commerce from the river, on a start like this farms/mines will do fine.

Once we've finished off Ag and Archery we should go to pottery, AH or maybe masonry, depending on what resources have been revealed. (Another benefit of delaying AH is it'll be cheaper when we get around to it. Ag makes it cheaper since it's a pre-req tech.)

If we do go for farms/mines at capital it'll be a freaking settler/skirimisher pumping machine, we'll need to look to our commerce and food (specialists) needs at other cities.

Now, I don't think our capital can be a good commerce powerhouse (or there's opportunity cost anyway) because there are just too many plains hills to be utilized; it doesn't favor being specialized, it favors being generalized (in this case generalization is a form of specialization ). Altough I'd love to hear others thoughts on this.

[Arrian]

Interesting thoughts, Blake.

Hunting-AH is another idea. I grant you your point above about farming the FPs, but on the other hand AH not only allows us to throw a pasture up on our sheep, but it also reveals horses, which is no small thing.

-Arrian

[Blake]

Indeed. Horses are the main selling point. But, I don't think there will be horses being in our fat cross (it's possible... but rarely see horses near floodplains), so I think it can be delayed for a bit, like at least until we have a settler coming out and can thus actually do something about any horses we see.

[Arrian]

True, as long as we get AH before our first settler is ready, the horses thing is moot (I agree the odds of horses inside our fat cross are very low).

Ideally, I'd like to have both BW and AH prior to that first settler, though.

-Arrian

[Theseus]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by notyoueither

We are surrounded by a sea of plains, with no other resources.

Err... strike that; I had not realized I was playing on a "cleared" map that nye had put together.

DOH!!

[Hot Mustard]

Originally posted by Theseus
nye... I haven't even read everybody's posts today, but I gotta respond to what you posted, especially the screenshot (six posts up) .

I went ahead and played out from the save too.

First, I was not aware that the teams had agreed on playing forward from the start (nor had I been aware that it possible in Civ4 PBEMs). So, given that nye did it and posted it, I guess it is okay.

Second, I played a LOT further ahead. And we have... a situation. Our initial city site is pretty much all we have to work with in the early game.
We are surrounded by a sea of plains, with no other resources.

[DeepO]

When looking at stuff to do in EotS, and on topic of specialization, please consider our capital can make a great GPP factory.

It would be worth looking into that option too. Sure, we won't have loads of production, nor of commerce, and bureaucracy would be less attractive. But every irr fp gives us half a specialists, even after we bump into the health limit. Before that, every irr fp gives 1 specialist if we decide to do so. 1 temple and a lib can get us to our 3 GP in 67 turns, well in time to use them to gain e.g. a tech lead.

DeepO

[DeepO]

And another topic (I try not to mingle these overall discussions into the turn threads, sorry if this copies stuff): slavery, and pop-rushing!

Our capital can make quite a nice pop-rush city (slave trading camp?). Doing so, we might avoid the production problem we're undoubtedly going to run into... the plain hills are okay, but limited. After that there is very limited option to find good production tiles. And plain hills are costing us food... it'd be interesting to see if we can come up with a strategy that lets us use our pop as efficiently as possible, which means very early on and in large numbers (preferably at least size 6 so we can rush 3 pop each time)

DeepO

[Aginor]

Given that we're not playing Philo, I don't think that turning the capital into our GPP farm is realistic. We're just not going to get return on investment fast enough.

That said, it makes a good deal of sense to farm 2-3 fp's to grow quickly and ultimately power mines. However, if we're running Financial, the best way to make use of that trait is to get some cottages on the ground ASAP.

Also note that with a Granary up, once we get BW and Slavery we can do some pretty obscene things to turbocharge our hammer production out of this start if desired.

The chance of Horses on one of those Plains squares to our west probably should not be discounted - I'll grant that. However, there's no rush to hook Horses up at this point given that Archery is cheap and gives us what is (for us) a better unit anyway.

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Aginor
Given that we're not playing Philo, I don't think that turning the capital into our GPP farm is realistic. We're just not going to get return on investment fast enough.

I wouldn't discount that so easily... instead I'd like to sim it out to see what exactly will be th gain. For the moment, it doesn't matter though, we need at least a religion to start considering it.

BTW, I'm very much in favour of having at least a few cottages asap. FIN on a river, and not using it would be asking to get beaten. However, these don't need to come from fp per se: a plain hill with cottage combined with a irr fp works quite well too.

DeepO

[Arrian]

I like to farm FPs rather than cottage them. The cottages can go up on grassland and/or plains (we have 3 such tiles on the river - 2 plains and 1 grass). The FPs can be used for fast growth, and when we hit caps, we switch over to the cottaged grass/plains tiles. Hills, IMO, are to be mined.

-Arrian

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Theseus


nye... I haven't even read everybody's posts today, but I gotta respond to what you posted, especially the screenshot (six posts up) .

I went ahead and played out from the save too.

First, I was not aware that the teams had agreed on playing forward from the start (nor had I been aware that it possible in Civ4 PBEMs). So, given that nye did it and posted it, I guess it is okay.

Second, I played a LOT further ahead. And we have... a situation. Our initial city site is pretty much all we have to work with in the early game.
We are surrounded by a sea of plains, with no other resources.

Umm... I guess?

-Arrian

[Dominae]

Even if the chances are slim we have Horses within our fat cross, I think Animal Husbandry is our best bet for second tech, neglecting Religions for the moment.

Improving the Sheep tile ASAP fits into whatever strategy we might employ, simply because it's our capital's best tile.

Being able to see Horses as we scout could prove an important advantage. The long we delay seeing Horses, the more potential for making bad decisions bad on insufficient information (the same can be said for Bronze Working by the way, let's not get too caught up in Writing and such).

---

An important consideration regarding our tech choices is when, exactly, our first Worker will be available. Right now we can Mine and lay down Roads. A Mine doubles as a farmed Flood Plain with respect to Settler/Worker construction, so there's little point in researching Agriculture too soon unless we want to grow as fast as possible into our Health cap and use Mines from then on to offset the extra Food.

I think we need to decide right now "Cottages or not" and go with it. Worker-turns are at a premium since we need so much early defense, so it will not do to build tile improvements that see little use.

I personally feel Cottages are our best bet. Going Farms/Mines will help us expand quicker and be better prepared to execute a Skirmisher rush if the opportunity arises. Going Cottages hampers our expansion/military somewhat, but in all likelihood puts us in top tech position. Another advantage of Cottages is that the faster research allows us to be more adaptable in general.

Fishing is a faster way to Pottery: if we have no short-term use for Agriculture we might consider researching Fishing instead, despite it also being useless to us, as far as we know.