[SPOILERS]The Tyrant realizes that once the world burns it gets really boring....

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I'll respond to your post when I'm not on a tablet but if you're not going to play the turns don't fuck with my tiles. I had a plan for those cities I just didn't write about it.

Ok, move it back. I'm interested to see what plan makes it worth our National Epic/Bureaucap not growing to its full potential though.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Well that was snarky enough. I'm going to bed, move it back if you want, or don't.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be snarky. I really am interested to see what your plan is, given what I perceive to be the cost to ML.

[spacetyrantxenu]

OK, so here's the response to your post from last night. First the good stuff. You were right, we can get to the area south of Crystal Palace. I hadn't closely checked the tiles in that area but there is a one tile coastal access route we can use. I had assumed Wetbandit had jumped ocean with his culture but hadn't bothered to look. In any event it doesn't really matter where we settle down here, the city will be terrible but it will provide a second ICTR so I guess it will be fine anywhere. South of Crystal Palace has no food but it's surrounded by Wetbandit's cities and he probably won't like us settling there and would just take it from us. So no sense messing with his future filler dot map. Here's the area:




May as well sail around to the end where it won't bother him. So the one tile island SW of Magyar looks as good as anything else, it will pick up two fish once it pops borders. How we get workboats on those tiles in any kind of reasonable time frame is another matter but whatever. Another option would be to build on the one tile chunk of ice south of Bola and get a fish in first ring. We could at least grow on that and whip a work boat fairly soon, and get on with growing the city. But whatever, it doesn't matter much where we place that city, just one the outside of Wetbandit's current dotmap somewhere.

Thanks for the screenshot of William's invasion stack. Here's what he'll be up against:




OK, now for the stuff I didn't like at all. You can't come into a game cold and start messing with tiles and just assume I wasn't paying attention to anything. The only thing I really am spending time doing with this game is looking at the city tiles and optimizing how I see fit. That's the fun I'm having with this game right now. If you're going to screw with what I'm doing without consulting with me then I'm not going to get anything fun out of this at all, and I'll be damned if I'm playing the turns in that case. I'll ALT+click a city billboard, set all the cities to something (wealth, cataphracts, whatever), and click the red button every turn after that and be done with this game.

So since you've tried to rake me over the coals for "questionable management" here's what I was doing with the three cities you messed with last turn. Yeah, Mister Love doesn't strictly need a courthouse but it saves 3 gpt and it's another specialist slot. It pays for itself in 40 turns. Does the game go that long? Probably not, but maybe we'll want to run the spy specialist over the engineer specialist once we're down to building wealth here, and after we've used up the 6 better scientist and merchant slots. That's because I ALREADY PLANNED TO GIVE THE DEER BACK TO THE CAPITAL. This is what the city looks like in its maximum food configuration, which will allow us to run the most specialists (seven when we finally grow three more times and stop growth):




Whether it's better to work crappy coastal tiles and rush to max size or to grow slowly by working specialists along the way, that's a good question and sounds like a math problem someone could solve. But as long as it's a quick few turns to the next size up intuition led me to think it's better to work coast for now and keep growing quickly, and then reevaluate the point at which it's better to start working the specialists later as it takes longer to reach the next city size. However we get there this is what we want to see as the end result, except with working the three town tiles I've pulled off for the purposes of this screen shot:




If the game went long enough and we were left alone (both doubtful) we could let the city grow on a trickle of food surplus up to max size (24) but I don't expect working coast in the larger city sizes is worth sacrificing the production from a representation specialist during the time we'd grow from 21 to 24, so it probably isn't worth it to grow past size 21. I guess that ignores the additional +5% city trade route bonus we'd get for each additional size level, but that's all lost to rounding until we get to a specific size. To get an additional gold out of the route with Happy Face we'd have to be able to grow to size 25. For I Burn it's even sillier and more impossible, and irrelevant since we'll have the new junk ice city providing an ICTR by then anyway. This is getting way off topic for the response, though, and isn't even remotely relevant since I'm talking about a theoretical 2gpt that we can't even get now. And maybe all of this isn't really the main problem anyway -- the summary for Mister Love is that the courthouse is a possibly questionable, but certianly defensible decision. It comes down, ultimately, to paying back over 40 turns and if the gold saved beyond that is worth missing the wealth built gold I could have had now, since in the end we could have run a representation engineer or (blah) priest instead of the spy. And of course ignoring the +2 EP per turn.

Now to the main problem, Happy Face. Here is the maximum theoretical food configuration:




The lighthouse in Happy Face was to preserve the population after giving up the deer because those coast tiles are food neutral with a lighthouse. So they're worth a bit of commerce on their own since we already have the population to work them. It isn't like we'll pay more city maintenance to keep the population we already have, so keeping them versus losing them for the cost of a lighthouse seems pretty straightforward to me. As for the workshops, yeah, when we aren't running max hammers for wonder fail gold, working those workshop tiles to build wealth (which is what we'll be doing here until someone declares war on us again) is way worse than running representation specialists, and I wasn't working them, I was running rep specialists instead. With the lighthouse we can change off the farmed plains tile and use one of the grassland hills to halt growth, or work the plains farm and grow (eventually) and then cap out on the hill mine, doesn't matter much one way or the other. While building wealth it doesn't make a lot of difference, but I'd prefer growth just to save the future population for whips when it becomes necessary again so I'd probably leave the city configured as shown once the lighthouse is built. We'll keep the same number of specialists either way.

Your point about running max hammers for fail gold being a better current value than running rep specialists is true enough (the effective 9gpt for a workshop tile's fail gold versus, say, 6bpt from the scientist specialist), BUT it isn't like i wasn't building fail gold for the turn already, I was just doing it somewhere else. So the question comes down to whether it would have been better to spend the turn building Chichen Itza for cash in Happy Face, as you did, or where I was already doing it at What We Have. If you want to be specific, your way netted a few more future coins for the turn than I was going to generate at WWH, but it has delayed handing over the deer to the capital by a turn, because now we're a turn delayed on buliding the lighthouse. I don't think that's worth it. PLUS there's nothing that says we wouldn't have gone on to fail build the wonder at some slightly lower hammer output per turn in this city in the future. We have a number of turns to go before we research Rifling and obsolete Chichen Itza (and can't build it) so we can fail build this wonder profitably for a while to come. I just expected that the next city to do so wouldn't be Happy Face, as I expect by the time WWH is done fail building it that our forbidden palace city would be next to fail Chichen Itza, since by that time it will be our next best production city that isn't otherwise busy (Beside You will keep pumping catapults until the next invasion to maximize its HE bonus). So yes, maybe squeezing in a turn building the wonder at Happy Face isn't so terrible, except that it delays the growth process at Mister Love by a turn, and I think that that is more important than getting a small extra future fail gold bonus.

I don't particularly like your choice of building the grocer in WWH, though. Now you've sunk 36/150 hammers into it, I guess for the health bonus. We will be growing into an unhealthy city but I wasn't terribly concerned about it. The city was going to have enough food to work its good tiles and run some specialists anyway, and I'd probably rather have the wealth build to get us closer to Rifling for now than to have a partially built grocer. Remember that this city is going to be fail building the wonder for several turns. That grocer won't be finished for a long time. That city, if it was changed off the wonder at all, should have been changed over to wealth, not a grocer. In any case here's the present (actual) tile configuration for WWH that will remain when the turn rolls again:




So that's enough of a justification, maybe I have holes in my decision making process and writing all this out is probably a giant waste of time. But my larger point stands. Even though you may not agree with how these cities are configured it does NOT mean I'm not paying attention and that they're all ripe for quick glance optimization. I'm open to any and all suggestions, but you should suggest them so we can talk about it, not just make the changes immediately. I think part of our failure in this game comes from stuff like this, and we both did it. We were horribly late finishing our core cities' infrastructure partially because of ill advised build swapping, stemming from competing views of how cities should be configured and what they're trying to achieve. We talked about the partially built markets and libraries ages ago, so no need to rehash that now, but I think we both could have worked better as a team rather than co-CEOs. I guess that's a learning point for a future game.

I'll post a short actual turn report in a bit, this is certainly more than enough for my complaints about last turn.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T213 - So for the actual turn report just a quick review of what these cities are going to do for this turn, since I had to double check tiles to fix things from my screen shotting. Mister Love will grow in two turns and finish the courthouse this turn, running a max food configuration (i.e., working 3 coast tiles over specialists). Suboptimal for this turn, but I think better long term. We need to grow to size 21 ASAP so we can work the good land tiles and seven specialists (one free from mercantilism) from then on out. I've given the deer tile back to Happy Face for about two more turns until it finishes its lighthouse and can be food neutral without the deer. After the lighthouse it will go back to building wealth forever. If it turns out that later on Happy Face has time to build fail gold on the wonder before we get to Rifling it can do that, possibly borrowing the deer to run more 9gpt workshops if it makes sense to do so. But for now this city is preparing for its future as a glorified fishing village. What We Have is configured as posted in the last shot, set to grow this turn and working otherwise near max hammers for fail gold. It will switch over to absolute maximum hammers next turn after it grows -- using a workshop tile prevents growth this turn.

Elsewhere Swamp People will finish a courthouse, saving us 5gpt. It will need to start a library so we can dump the mine tiles once the library completes. This city, for casual lurkers, is horribly behind on its infrastructure because it starved for the good of the empire in generating a great person (merchant) after the RNG screwed us again. After that it was whipped into oblivion producing phracts and still has 38 turns of whip anger now. (Only Tyler has more -- still 65 turns there! ) Hell Below is continuing its slow descent into starvation, it will finish its market (a long, long time in production) in three turns. I'll probably want to whip the city 1 turn before the market finishes and overflow into the courthouse that it still hasn't built. The courthouse would have been better than the market but it was started so long ago that the market really had to be finished.

Nothing else interesting is really happening. OK as I typed this Wetbandit offered a map swap, so we did that, but it didn't reveal anything new. So here's more pictures and that's all for this turn.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Thanks for putting your thoughts down. I wouldn't have made any changes for a simple micro switch. My changes were other than micro. I guess strategic? I just don't think that the coastal population in HF is necessary, particularly at the cost of HF working the deer constantly. The turn delay on building the LH assumes that I was going to build it, which I was not. I would whip to whatever size is sustainable without the LH and overflow into CI the turn after so that we aren't pushing that delayed wealth build too far into the future. I am open to being convinced that those 3 population or whatever are worth it, but I'm not so sure right now.

I'd rather build the grocer in WWH over a fail build CI. Health for one, and it does have a few sizes to grow yet and is caped on health, but even from the picture you have up, there is a decent amount of commerce in that city. It is what, +8 food at max food? So it can grow up several more sizes and eventually work a couple of specialists. This build makes more sense to me than the lighthouse build in HF, and this is pretty much a one-off trade.

I agree that we did a fairly bad job of balancing priorities in our city management. I think we ended up being surprised by how badly our economy would suck and with our production being so bad and builds taking forever, we ended up needing to change gears and not being nimble in how we did it. Certainly something to improve on in the future.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Other thought, I don't think cottages are worth it at all, so don't pave over the farms. We aren't going to play this thing long enough to make them better than 1/2 of a specialist in 50-75 turns, right?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Just to repeat the point, the deer is going back to the capital in two turns when the lighthouse is completed. So the trade is saving population for future whips and coastal commerce at the cost of building a lighthouse and waiting two turns to give back the deer tile.

[spacetyrantxenu]

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[Commodore]

Xenu dictio fabulae!