[Spoiler] Desperados: The Black Sword & Agent

[GermanJoey]

Generally, if you build a super early granary (or really, pretty much any time you build a granary), you want to grow immediately afterwards, either twice to work a new pair of outstanding tiles or to grow->whip->regrow. A granary doesn't do any good if you're not getting free food out of it - its just dead weight. And, since your leader is not Protective, its expensive dead weight.

[The Black Sword]

Sorry pretty tired right now. I'm going to set the capital to a settler, and the second city to a worker. I think that's the best plan, will explain tomorrow.

Sandbox attached.

[The Black Sword]

It turns out following Krill's advice is not a bad idea.










I'd suggest expanding toward fish/clam and silver/pig next.

[The Black Sword]

Here's some of what I was thinking when coming up with that.

Our capital wants to whip off that 3rd pop point, since it's not using it very well. Our 2 workers want to put in the 2 chops at the capital, since this is the most efficient use of worker moves. We could put a chop in at the second city instead, but IIRC it doesn't time nicely, only shaving a turn instead of 2 off the worker. Instead the extra chop at the capital, along with the whip gives us roughly 120h to play with, and conveniently for us, workers, settler and granaries all cost ~60h. So, the extra chop ties in really nicely in the capital.

At the capital then we have the option of building a worker or settler straight away, or growing to size 4 and whipping off that pop too. The timing of a worker at the capital isn't great either, we're a few hammers off being able to 1-whip it a turn earlier. We don't have the worker support for a second settler, so we need to choose between worker and granary at the capital. The granary gives almost the full bonus on the 2->3 growth and fits in pretty nicely onto a whip cycle; the anger is running out around the time we hit size 5. So that suggests settler -> granary. The growing to size 4 and 2-whipping the settler option wasn't bad either, we end up with an extra warrior but our capital is about a turn behind.

In the second city then, we really need to get out a worker. We don't have the support for a settler, and we don't have the happiness or worker turns yet for a granary really. We also can't get the full granary bonus on the 2->3 growth if we built it. Anyway, so it's just a case of building a worker the most efficiently. And that's just to straight up slowbuild it. We could delay it 2t to get the warrior out, but the city doesn't need protection, given it's geography, so I don't think that's necessary. Whipping doesn't give us any improvement, since 26f ->30h isn't a great return and we lose more hammers into warriors as we grow.

[agent427]

I haven't actually scouted much yet so I have no news, because I used my warrior to pillage some of the torusland improvements for cash to keep running at 100% sci.

[agent427]

3 cities, new naming scheme.

[The Black Sword]

Nice! Pillaging the improvements was a good idea. We should also decide if we want to pillage the useful stuff like lumbermill and camp. The gold now might be worth more than their use later.

This game is moving pretty fast, I'll try to do some more simming later if I have the time. Some thoughts:

How do we want to specialise The Bad and The Ugly long-term and what short term improvements do we want?

For the moment, I think we want to hook the rice first in Ugly, allowing us to grow quicker and get a few more warriors. I'd like to get warriors out scouting all the major directions. Granary isn't all that great here, since we only have a 4f surplus at size 2. Maybe a warrior, or a barracks to get some more good tiles to work.

The Capital wants to grow and 2 whip something, hopefully a settler. Since we don't have Fishing yet, maybe go for pigs/silver?

Not sure about the Bad, possibly 1-whip something in?

[GermanJoey]

Love the naming scheme! Are you doing Leone movies in particular, Clint Eastwood ones, or Spaghetti Westerns in general?

[agent427]

Lattermost... I think I'd run out of recognizable Leone titles by City #7!

Ugly:
One of the settlers parked on the copper is only pausing there to finish the road before moving onto the rice.

I think I should produce warriors here. I saw a barb warrior briefly to the Northeast before he vanished back into the fog, I believe we're at the point in the game that they start to get mean.

We may not need a Barracks here at all, or at least for awhile. The only tile of value that a border pop would claim (as far as I see) are the clams. But, if we're settling a city 1W of pigs/2N of silver that needs to claim fish, that city will need barracks-- and that would put borders on the clam itself. Saves us 35H, at the cost of waiting a long time to work the clams.

In the long-run, I'm a little iffy.. this city lives up to its namesake. With 4 hills in its BFC, including the high hammer-yield Copper hill, I think it best steered to a basic hammer production city.

Bad:
I think this city would make a good Settler pump once the border has popped and it's working 3 food tiles.
I could whip now, chop out a barracks, and put a bit of overflow from that into a workboat. Then put the rest of the forests in its neighborhood into settlers & workers.

[The Black Sword]

Logged in to take a look. I took the capital off gvoid growth, because I've been known to forget to do that, and put a warrior in Bad's queue when prompted.

Did you notice this last turn?


If not, then it's second ring borders. We probably still have to give up the gold though. Well, let's get some more info with our warrior. Perhaps we should put a border city NE of the wheat instead? Leaves a tile free for a filler in the middle of our territory.

The main reason I logged in was to check out hammer sites, and I think we're a bit lacking. What about making Bad one? Keep 5 forests for a possible wonder, probably chop the one on the grass hill. It has enough hills and forests for an early-mid game wonder and then we can transition it to a HE city later?

Ugly has a couple of commerce tiles, water tiles, dyes, 2 riverside cottages, so I'd like to push it that way. It could be a decent hammer spot too though once it gets set up with the clam for a decent food surplus.

I thought the plan for the silver city was 1SW of pigs for the first ring silver? I think that makes more sense than 1W. Ugly's border pop will get 4 forests and a river grass in addition to the clam.