Micro Thread

[novice]

Yeah here's an attempt at rapid expansion towards the center. Vijay has a granary already, we have five workers and a settler ready in the capital. Tech should probably be on hunting and not writing.



Bombay was city #2 and will be a nice production city.

Don't pay too much attention to the dotmap, I mainly wanted to see how rapidly we can expand if we just don't care about wonders. Animal Husbandry before Pottery is a must if we go for a big landgrab like this.

[darrelljs]

Me likey :drool:.

Darrell

[plako]

Been testing also with the latest save. Novice did go North 1st. I think settling besides Copper NW is stronger and more flexible for fast expansion strategy. Improving Copper and chopping 2 fast workers before AH comes is pretty good and commerce from copper and sheep help a little bit. It also has better security with copper online fast and more flexibility as we could then go either south settling the gold there.

[zakalwe]

Here, we have defogged 25 tiles in the N-S direction. The map is 50x50 and toroidal. So I wonder if the land we see to the south and east is the same continent as this one? I'm guessing there are some islands in between, but it's not a given. Any clever pathfinding tricks or similar to check this?

Let's take a geometric approach. Assume that we're on a single circular continent, that the capitals form a regular pentagon, and that the center of our continent is also the center of the circle into which that pentagon may be inscribed. The (euclidean) distance between us and Gillette is 15.13. The radius of the circle would therefore be 7.565 / sind(36). I.e., our capital should be 12.87 tiles from the centre of the continent, in a slightly northwestern direction. (In the area flanked by those lakes, perhaps.) Given that our capital is a couple of tiles off the coast, the diameter of the continent should be roughly 30 tiles. That does imply that there is a fair amount of islands, as well. Also, there are 1300 land tiles. A circular continent with a radius of 15 and no lakes would only have 706 tiles.

With these numbers in mind, a TGL-fueled rapid expansion across the sea also seems like a very viable strategy. (If we want to seriously work with Gillette, we could perhaps propose that one of us expands across the sea, while the other grabs a huge chunk of continental territory?)

Do we know where Gillette's settler started? I.e. what is the exact distance between our starting spots, as opposed to capital locations.

If we go for a maximum landgrab strategy we should sanity check whether we can actually grab a disproportional amount of land without crashing our economy first.

[novice]

Been testing also with the latest save. Novice did go North 1st. I think settling besides Copper NW is stronger and more flexible for fast expansion strategy. Improving Copper and chopping 2 fast workers before AH comes is pretty good and commerce from copper and sheep help a little bit. It also has better security with copper online fast and more flexibility as we could then go either south settling the gold there.

Settling that spot first works too, and I agree that it's safer. Our stepping stone towards the central spot becomes more cramped, but one city can't handle all the resources up there alone anyway.

In both cases the plan would be chopping out 2 additional workers in our second city while waiting for AH. In my "north first" plan I built the settler for city #4 in city #2, in the "copper first" plan I chopped it in city #3 since city #2 wants to grow to size 3.

[plako]

Indeed main continent seems circular. If I had to guess, I would say N/S diameter is about ~35 tiles. That probably means close to ~900-1000 land tiles in the main continent leaving 300-400 out. that would give us ~80 offshore land tiles that is still quite a bit.

We see room for ~6 cities in the coast and ~6 inland cities that I sucpect would be fairly ours.

Asuming border deal with Gillette. I think main alternatives are:
1) Heavy expansion towards the center and TEAM - Gives us probably 2-3 city spots more in the main continent and potentially loses some in the islands.
2) GLH on 2nd city - Means ~T60 GLH. We're giving up a lot in terms of mainland expansion. Probably losing 1-2 city spots (Meaning 3-5 less compared to fast exapnsion). Good chance of getting GLH.
3) GLH on 3rd city (assuming 1st city near gold in the west) - ~T66 GLH. Now having the border deal makes this as bad as 2 expansion wise. Main benefit over it is more efficient utilisation of our resources
4) Pyramids with stone ~T70 - Assuming the plan presented earlier we're again expanding to wrong direction. If we manage to expand towards TEAM and grab stone in that direction this would be very good alternative.

I like the idea of either going all in for GLH or Expansion so my favorites are 1 and 2. We can manage heavy expansion as long as we've sufficient worker force. Now the problem is that 1 requires AH and 2 Fishing so we need a desicion within next 2 turns. Opinions?

[zakalwe]

No idea what gives us the best shot at victory, but I like 1).

[Ichabod]

Going for TGL is too risky, IMO. There are other teams that may have a perfect position to get it. If we lose it, we'll end up with a sort of "this game is already lost" feeling after 50 turns, which I don't like.

Besides, the interior of the map has way better cities than the coast, so we wouldn't profit that much from TGL early. Of course, maybe I'm wrong and a bunch of island cities with TGL will be a game winner, but I'd prefer if we settled for marble and aimed for the MoM (even though the map lacks in calendar resources, which is a shame).

[uberfish]

I prefer to go AH and fast inland expansion. The stone coastal site is not very attractive, and creative + fast workers is good for the inland push. I looked at the settle gold first then copper option and end up with cities 3/3/2 with 1 worker per city and settler just completed @ t54 with bad chopping micro.

And if we do end up in a showdown with Gillette I'd rather it not be heavily sea based since they're viking.

Think we should try and find the north gold for more options, if we can secure both it'll pay for a lot of expansion.

[spellman]

Think we should try and find the north gold for more options, if we can secure both it'll pay for a lot of expansion.

If we can secure both we might also be making ourselves wonderful targets...