[SPOILERS] Dhal gets ready to bungle another game (oh yeah some guy is dedlurking)

[Dhalphir]

I'm surprised Azza hasn't finished Stonehenge yet. Maybe he is delaying it, bluffing that nobody else will try for it since he's industrious?

It'd be hilarious if someone else was building it and beat him to it. My Stonehenge plan could have had us landing it before turn 30, but it would have meant sacrificing any pretense of expansion, and that's just not worth it if we had happened to miss out.

[Sullla]

I'm not sandboxing your start so I can't say for sure, but that feels like a clumsy use of the whip. You sped up the worker by a single turn (with some overflow, of course) in exchange for a pop point and the whip unhappiness penalty. Since you don't have a granary in place yet, this was almost certainly not an ideal use of population. 1 pop whips in general are usually not very efficient in the early game; it's much better in most cases to use 2 pop whips or 3 pop settler whips, all of which carry the exact same unhappiness penalty. If you're going to be dropping your capital's happiness cap from size 5 down to size 4, you might as well get twice as much production via a two-pop whip.

What exactly is your plan at the moment? Why are you rushing to slowbuild another settler at size 2? (That's generally not a good idea.) Are you really going to settle three cities when your current army consists of two warriors? While I'm not saying this sort of thing can't work, you should think about using all of the free time you have waiting for the save to think about these moves in more detail. This seems a bit uncoordinated.

[Dhalphir]

Generally I've always tried to follow the rule of whipping away population that is not working improved tiles.

Obviously, there are exceptions, and I definitely haven't played long enough to be able to say for sure that I think I made the right move here.

There are no barbs in this game, and I don't feel like I have much to worry about with horses due in 5 turns.

[Dhalphir]

I hadn't thought about the reasoning of waiting for two unimproved pop tiles to whip though, that's sound reasoning and I didn't think of it.

[Dhalphir]

Sullla - with your experience, should I continue with the plan of building out the settler, or should I grow for a few turns and only switch to the settler when the chop comes in?

[Sullla]

I would need to look at the numbers in-game more closely to know for sure. Just off of gut feeling though, I'll guess that it might be best to overflow into granary and let the capital grow a bit. On the other hand, if you don't have any improved tiles to grow onto, then it might indeed be better to push out your settler now. (The problem being that your capital should have more than two improved tiles at this point.) There's rarely one obviously correct answer in Civ4.

One other point of advice: don't get thrown off by the cheaper build times on Quick speed. That settler might look cheap at 5t, but that's with overflow and on a faster game speed. Your current foodhammers are 11 per turn at size 2, and that makes for 9 turn settlers on Normal speed, which is not especially fast at all. Maybe you're aiming for a fast expansion strategy, but you're also going to need to get higher population sizes and work more improved tiles ASAP.

[Dhalphir]

The main reason it doesn't have more than two improved tiles is that we sacrificed that to get a road in-place for the second city before we founded it. We didn't have any techs to improve any tiles except for a mine, as Pottery is only just finishing this turn (t27). That was my main rationale behind pushing out the settler. Pottery has finished, so I can start a granary if we want, but I thought it might be better to build the settler, grow a bit with the Granary + an extra warrior build, and then double or triple whip the third settler.

[Dhalphir]

I am aiming for a rapid expansion plan given that we know it's a donut map. While there are islands, donuts tend to require a fairly early land grab so that you can make sure you have a nice fat parcel of land around the donut, rather than getting squeezed.

[Dhalphir]

So we finally have the NEXT save.

Unbelievable how slow this game is going, despite the fact that all participants are currently playing in one or more additional Pitbosses and perfectly able to manage turns in those, yet somehow can't spare the 5 minutes to play this turn and email it off each day.

[Dhalphir]

I'll play the turn later tonight. Going to continue with the settler build, as we don't have any more improved tiles around the capital and won't for a few turns until we can get a cottage up on the shared tiles.