Strategic directions - long-term planning

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I had a chat with Seven earlier. He made the point that we can get away with that trade-away-copper trick by simply signing as many NAPs with as many people as possible. I don't like it, but considering their metagame is a few years behind ours (and we are heavily focused on evolving our metagame), we might be able to get away with it. I personally wouldn't guarantee it, considering a coalition is going to be formed soon.

As for getting CFC to do the weird copper trade, Seven thinks we can simply add a clause to our NAP, saying that if we're forced to, we can do a quick DoW and peace just to break the inappropriate resource trade. My counter-opinion is, this is a fairly strange request, in the scheme of things.

Since we're asking them, CFC's question is going to be, "what's in it for us"? If they want a later favour or simply friendship, then that would be a good thing, as that trade would be even more in our favour (as we can utilise peace better than they). If they want a favourable land deal, then hell no, I'm less inclined to accept. In that case, it might look weird if we simply drop that negotiation.

I dunno, what do you guys think.

Personally, I'm in favour of keeping to this plan, connect copper for the quick spear and potential 'henge, we can worry about the resource trading shenanigans later.

[SevenSpirits]

I think this whole copper kerfuffle is a bit silly. Right now we would really like to build a couple strong units so we can be proactive vs the human barbs we will soon face. Quite unfortunately, we have no horses. Therefore, right now, we would like to build some copper units. My inner builder suggests not roading the copper for just a few more turns to squeeze out more warriors, but ultimately this is not that great: HR is still many turns out and barbs are on, so the whole bodies per hammer metric is a bit dubious at the moment. Getting a few metal units will feel expensive but will nevertheless be useful in continuing our exploration and securing our expansion.

When would building additional warriors potentially be strong? Well... later, when we have monarchy, and sufficient real units to defend our borders, and peace with our neighbors. So here's how I imagine that will look:

* We will have horses by then.
* We will have some actual units defending our border cities.
* Our neighbors will have thin, non-threatening militaries too, because of all the NAPing.
* Any actual danger will be forseeable many turns in advance, because we are allowed to use diplomacy in this game.

So we ask another team: Hey! Could we gift you copper for 10 turns? We will give you 10 gold. In case of an emergency, we reserve the right to pillage our copper and re-mine it, to prematurely cancel the deal. We'll let you make the same deal with us afterwards, if you want to build some warriors too.

And there is next to no chance anything could go wrong; we have horses, no enemies, and a complete lack of caring about that copper. Some of you need to have more faith in diplomacy, which is the most broken mechanic in this game.

[Bigger]

And there is next to no chance anything could go wrong; we have horses, no enemies, and a complete lack of caring about that copper. Some of you need to have more faith in diplomacy, which is the most broken mechanic in this game.

Agree with this. More importantly, I agree that we need copper units now, if we want warriors later we can figure that out then.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Sounds good. I won't argue with that line of logic!

Besides, regarding the diplo shenanigans, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Scooter, good luck!

[mostly_harmless]

I can see the benefit of being able to save hammers on MP later on, but I am not at all convinced that any copper trading business is that useful. Sure the copper units are more expensive, but they also add greatly to our soldier count (always a good thing) and will be able to rush out and actually kill an invading barb! So those extra hammers are actually well invested.

mh

[scooter]

Some of you need to have more faith in diplomacy, which is the most broken mechanic in this game.

Pretty much. I think you guys are forgetting that one of the things that sucked when we had diplomacy on for games is that it made surprise attacks difficult to impossible. There were many attempted, but with diplomacy on and all the silly NAPing, it's incredibly easy to forsee attacks. The amount of paranoia here is kind of odd to me, though I guess paranoia is a useful thing sometimes. Honestly, even when you DO get surprise attacked and/or see it at the last minute, you can often talk someone down by cutting a deal pretty quickly. There's a reason people used to complain that full-diplo games were 70% diplo skill and 30% civ skill. They were exaggerating, but not by as much as you'd think.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

If we are first to Masonry, will we consider building TGW?

1) Spies are on, so if we popped a low percentage GSpy, that would be solid.

2) Barbs are on.

3) We might end up dogpiled and defending.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

GSpy would be nice but I don't think we necessarily need to target this one. The dogpile will be some time from now and we can invest hammers in expansion/defense instead. 150 hammers for the wall or 160 for worker/settler... Also, I think we'll have a handle on barbs fairly soon, once we have some axes and WCs online. There ARE horses on this map, right?

[kjn]

I think we should build the wonders named workers and settlers first and foremost, and wonders that tie into REX.

Stonehenge fits nicely. So does the Great Lighthouse, if the map is right. The Hanging Gardens also fits, the Mausoleum most certainly does, and one can say the Pyramids or the Parthenon does too.

But lets leave some consolatory prices for the other teams, right?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I say leave scorched earth for the other teams.

Simply, if it is more beneficial for us to have a wonder over a new, developing city, build it. That's my feeling, for now. When land is scarce and we aren't yet ready to fight for more land, we can wonder-whore. If our borders were being hotly contested in the immediately foreseeable future, I could see a compelling argument being made for GW, but not as it stands now.