Commitee of Strategic Planning

[Senethro]

With Pyramids/Colossus/Great Library/National Epic we would have 26GPP/turn. We have marble and a forge already in place.

Its an interesting possibility, it must be said.

In representation we would also earn an extra 12labs per turn as well as have the raised happiness.

[binTravkin]

Great Library/National Epic

Yes, that could speed it up, but here I'd rather avoid building any of them before second GP, if we go the route Maniac proposed.
We should also weigh:
- do we want Beijing to be our GP Farm (cant be both good cap and good GP farm due to nat wonder limit of 2)
- do we want to put all our eggs in one, coastal, basket

[N35t0r]

Pyramids should go on tassagrad...

[binTravkin]

Why? That would split our GE points and make it longer.
As I demonstrated in the example above, we can pop Machinery with GM too.

[binTravkin]

There's only one problem with the plan to make Machinery pop available with GM too - we would need to maximize our research and I mean MAXIMIZE, because we'd need to research following techs (after Writing):

Fishing (4)
Sailing (6)
Masonry (4)
Mathematics (1x)
Currency (1x)

But, I guess we could trade mathematics if we ask GS to research it.

[binTravkin]

Damn I just found out we wont be able to pop Machinery with GM anyhow.
The best we can do is cut the choices down to Currency->CoL->CS->Paper->Machinery

[PJayTycy]

About putting pyramids in tassagrad or being:

If we get our first GE from Being at 100 points, the next GP will need 200 GP-points at Being. However, in Tassagrad, do we also need 200 points then or can we still produce one there for 100 points?

If 100 points in Tassagrad is enough, we can build the pyramids in Tassagrad and the Collossus in Being. That way the tassagrad gives us a GE 34/35 turns after our first one. If we add a forge+engineer too, that's only 20 turns.

If it's 200 points, disregard this message :-)

[binTravkin]

I'll disregard it.

[binTravkin]

By the way, Maniac, a better answer to this:

But are they more effective than, say, Swordsmen against Choks?

Choks have +50% to melee units, therefore anything whose strenght is less than 7.5 is worse vs them than catapult.
I would go as far as to say catapults are better against stacked choks (even if there's only 2 of them) than macemen.

[Impaler[WrG]]

As will I,

I'm tempted not convinced on Pyrimids yet but I'll play along and refine the idea further so it has a fair chance.

The only reason I could see to put the Pyrimids in Tassagrad would be A - give the city some culture, B - Combine with an Engineer to make the ciy a guaranteed Engineer factory in 200/5 = 40 turns. By not mixining with the Merchant points that will be acumulationg from the Collosus and Great Light house you guarantee an engineer at the cost of almost doubling the time to completion.

If we were to commit ourselves to running an Engineer in every city then Representation would definatly be the better choice and would be sufficintly rewarding. The net reserach output would be nearly 11-12 points by my calculations. +10% gives +2 in Beiging, and 3 Engineers give 9 points total with the one in Beiging possibly rounding up due to the library . That constitutes an ~40% increse over our current tech rate. Inorder to do it though we will need forges in each city in a 25 turn time frame, IronMonkey (3rd city) would probably need to make this its second build to achive that.

We should calculate the expected tech rate and the speed with which we can reach the key technologies. The key events that will be occuring in the near future to raise our rate are.
- Found 3rd city: +2 commerce, more maintance
- Connect trade on 3rd City: +1 commerce
- Build Library in Beiging: +5 research
- Cottage growth/s at Beging: lets check the times on these
- Any new commerce sources worked: again needs assesment
- Posts Kollos & Pyrimid: one turn anarchy then Representation boost
- Future Growth: new pop in Beiging working 4 commerce coast tiles

Rough estimation: We can more then double our current tech rate in a 25 turn time frame. If we start Machinery in roughly 20 turns (after fishing, sailing, masonry) it should be around 40% complete. After the representation bump it should be only about 20 turns away for a total of 45 turns from now and represents only a modest 20 turn delay over the original GE poping method.

For more detailed analysis could somone pull the exact research costs from the game for all the techs were planing?

[binTravkin]

Okay, here's a plan.

First of all, this would be executed only if Pyramids are available to build in 25 turns.

So.

If we build Pyramids + Colossus + GL at Beijing and run an engineer, we will have 9 GPP per turn, which will translate into 44% probability of Great Merchant and 56% probability of Great Engineer and let us produce next GP at Beijing in ~25 turns.

If we move GL to other city, Beijing will run at 7GPP per turn and 29% chance of GM, 71% of GE popping up in ~30 turns.

If we only build Pyramids at Beijing, the GE chance would be 100% but only in 40 turns.


Apart from saying that the third scenario is pretty unfeasable if we want to build both GL and Colossus and the second is a bit risky too (could lose GL), I would like to point out, that we should keep our GPPs as concentrated as possible, because once you spread out any small amount, it's practically wasted as it will never or very late reach completion (as per costs increasing due to pops in more GPP-productive cities).


So, what would be solution?
Firstly, the chance that have not popped GE, but GM will decrease with each time GM is popped (by theory of combinatorics), like:
44%
19.36% (0.44^2)
8.5184% (0.44^3)

However, it might not matter us what is popped as our 3rd GP as that could be too late to change anything.
So, the idea is to build National Epic at Beijing and later transfer our capital somewhere else for Beijing to become our GP Farm. I know that sounds rather crazy, but looking at our map, I can't really see many suitable places for a GP Farm, maybe only in Banana territory, but there's not much food either.
Beijing has a food resource and a river, so it can build some irrigated farms to help with food generation.

That basically means, we should finish National Epic by the time of our second GP pop.
The odds will be spoiled (10%/40%/50% GA/GM/GE respectively) with that one GA point, but it will be only 15 (300/20) turns to get our next GP out.

Next thing.
Looking at the tech tree
http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/techtree/

and the GM preferences

http://www.apolyton.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=155513

we can see the following chain available to us (if we aim for Machinery but dont pop GE):
Currency->CoL->CS->Paper->Machinery->Printing Press

The first two of the techs can be researched/traded by that time (and we really want them) while the third is an excellent one all by itself, the fourth open the path to Education and Liberalism and the sixth is excellent for boosting our commerce.
If our third GP is GE, we can have both Macemen and Chukonus for the attack way before Bananas could field anything reasonably good in defense vs them (and I mean way before they have Feudalism), while also having greatly boosted commerce (Currency, CS), reduced maintenance (CoL) and increased production at capital (Bureaucracy).
Im not sure, whether one can allocate more than one Engineer under Caste System but I will check, and if its true, we'd be sure to have our third GP as GE and even sooner.


Even assuming the worst case scenario that we dont pop GE even with the third try, we'd be much stronger economically and on the way to important techs such as Liberalism and Gunpowder, as well as being ahead in research in overall and able to research Machinery by ordinary means.

[binTravkin]

Rough estimation: We can more then double our current tech rate in a 30 turn time frame.

I doubt the two of our cities are able to support specialists - they need to grow and have little food for that, but as for Beijing in ~35 turns:

+25% from Library:
+2 from 2 cottage growths (IIRC)
+3 from engineer under Representation
+4 or 8 if we put one or both of the new happy citizens on seq squares
+2 with The Lighthouse
+2 with opening routes with GS and Bananas (expect capitals to give +2 rather than +1 as our smallish cities do)

Knowing Beijing's current output is 20, that gives us 30 - 41 beakers/turn, a 50% - 100% increase depending on our worker allocation

The 4th city will be built too late to change much in this 30-turn estimate, but when up to it's full potential (assuming happy cap of 6), it should be able to output like 20 beakers.

[binTravkin]

If we start Machinery in roughly 20 turns (after fishing, sailing, masonry) it should be around 40% complete. After the representation bump it should be only about 20 turns away for a total of 45 turns from now and represents only a modest 20 turn delay over the original GE poping method.

For more detailed analysis could somone pull the exact research costs from the game for all the techs were planing?

Machinery costs 1001 beakers, if we start it in 20 turns (but I think we really shouldn't do it before we see if we get Pyramids), we can finish it in 45 turns, yes, assuming our research output during that period of now + 20 till now + 45 turns is per average double the current.
I think if we devote the 4th city entirely to commerce and build both Colossus and GL, that's more than realistic.


But I think we must definitely wait until we see are we getting the Pyramids or not, which is 25 turns from now.

[Senethro]

The only good great person is an early Great Person. We're right at the beginning of the game and if we can spam a big bunch of them right now we can settle them all in Beijing for a ridiculous profit. Forget the Great Lighthouse, if we want to be builder whores then lets get the Great Library and National Epic instead.

We'd probably get 5-6 GPs before the Renaissance era as long as we topped Beijing up with a couple more wonders. They'd be great money/labs makers with Representation making them even better. We may be able to afford spending a Great Scientist from the Library on getting Philosophy to play in Pacifism for a while, making 40GPP if theres another wonder/specialist in there.

But lets just either kill the bananas or go for a real wonder. Forget this Great Lighthouse rubbish.

Additional thought: Do any other civs even have a coastal city yet? Apart from Gathering Storm that is, and with any luck we'll be able to see get a look at it soon and deduce what its doing.

[binTravkin]

Forget the Great Lighthouse, if we want to be builder whores then lets get the Great Library and National Epic instead.

Why forget and build instead if we can have BOTH?

Great Lighthouse is NOT rubbish, it's only slightly more expensive than Colossus, gives the same GP amount, BUT +2 trade routes in all coastal cities, which means +2 additional commerce upon founding a coastal city which could grow into +20 and more raw commerce by the time GL obsoletes!

Additional thought: Do any other civs even have a coastal city yet? Apart from Gathering Storm that is, and with any luck we'll be able to see get a look at it soon and deduce what its doing.

GS has one?
I was thinking Bananas and Mercs are the only ones besides us..