Dhalphir makes a stunning return in a blaze of adequacy [SPOILER THREAD]

[Dhalphir]

Here is the final micro plan

T0 - Start Agriculture/Worker
T3 - Work Ivory tile
T6 - Agri finishes, start Hunting (4t)
T8 - Worker finishes, put a turn into plains farm 1S of capital. Start Warrior. Switch to working rice tile.
T9 - Worker starts rice farm
T10 - Hunting finishes, on to AH
T11 - Warrior finishes, start Stonehenge.
T13 - Capital grows to size 2, work Rice & either cow or grass forest. Move worker to hill 1S of Ivory.
T14 - Start Ivory.
T16 - Ivory finishes, capital hits size 3. Work Grass forest, Ivory, Rice.
T17 - AH finishes, start Pasture. Start Wheel
T19 - Pasture finishes. Capital work Cow/Rice/Ivory
T20 - Capital Size 4. Work Cow/Rice/Ivory/Grass Forest. Move worker 1N to grass hill.
T21 - Start mine on Grass hill.
T22 - Wheel finishes. Stonehenge finishes. Start settler. Start Bronze Working.
T23 - Grass mine finishes. Capital works Cow/Rice/Ivory/Mine
T24 - Worker starts roading cows.
T25 - Worker finishes roading cows
T26 - Worker starts roading Ivory
T27 - Worker finishes roading Ivory, Settler finishes.

So at T27 we have Stonehenge, 1 warrior, 1 scout, 1 worker, and 1 settler.
4 improved tiles (Cow/Rice/Ivory/Grass Hill)
We have Bronze Working due in 3T
We have the cows and the ivory roaded

If the plan for the second city doesn't change, we're putting it on the desert tile NW of the southern cows and E of the oasis tile. If scouting doesn't change the location, we can found T28. If we decide on another location, we might be a turn or two later than that.

Capital is due to hit size 5 on T29, I'd like to make another grass mine for it to work, but I also need the worker to improve the new city, so I think we'll go straight on to a worker T27.

[Dhalphir]

Another option for the second city site is 1S of the rice, to pick up cows and clams with a border pop. That would be a dynamite location, with 3 river tiles (that I can see), the river rice, the cows, the lake clam, and the lake tiles in general. Can't build a lighthouse in this city though, so the lake tiles are not quite as useful. Unless I'm mistaken about the lighthouse.

Here's a picture showing the two locations. As you can see, the decision will largely depend on what's in the fog west of the red dot and south of the blue dot.

Both locations could be founded T28, but the western location would begin with a trade route.

[shallow_thought]

Sorry, I've not had a chance to look at this today - I've been playing a turnset in my SG. The site 1S of rice had caught my eye; it's would be better with a lighthouse, but if it's a lake and some other true coastal site can use the clams, then it can probably share them.

[Dhalphir]

Nothing to report this turn, naturally. I moved the scout on to the oasis, forgetting that would cost all his movement. No big deal.

[Dhalphir]

Scout moved on to desert hill, revealing pigs.

Seen nothing yet to help decide on second city site. AH is due in 2T, that'll hopefully reveal horses somewhere and we can decide based on that. Switched to Rice tile as per micro plan.

[shallow_thought]

Nothing to report this turn, naturally. I moved the scout on to the oasis, forgetting that would cost all his movement. No big deal.

I can never remember that an oasis tile has a movement cost of two. 

Sorry about the delay getting back to you; my SG and the start of the rugby have been taking up my attention. I've been working through your revised micro (including that nice little 1t into a plains farm - about the only worker turn that you can avoid wasting with all these hills and forests!).  I've looked at major early alternatives (AH before hunting, for example) and they seem clearly worse. It's quite a nasty problem to be efficient around the big block of turns required for SH, particularly with the so much 2-move terrain around the cap.

The problems I can see that it would be nice to fix (I'm not saying it's possible) are:
- can't revolt to slavery during first settler move (I'm not used to quick, but isn't this a bigger deal than under normal speed?)
- cap sits just under growth cap  while building settler and worker, which I understand will make the experienced lurkers sad
- if new city goes to blue dot (or maybe 1S of blue dot?), then it's a struggle to avoid either the new city or the cap working unimproved tiles for quite a while

Part of the issue is that the tiles around blue dot can't be improved (as far as I can tell) until a border pop or pottery comes in. 


Some of this can be avoided by delaying the settler even further:
- go BW instead of wheel after AH
- build a second warrior after SH
- put a turn into barracks or build a third warrior to let cap reach size 5, then start settler
- move worker to build the second grass hill mine as it can't road yet (this wastes a worker turn)
- settler finishes t29, revolt to slavery
- Blue dot founded t30, can work rice as capital is at happy cap (t28 founding in main line micro, for comparison)
- Wheel comes in t31; in the mean time worker has to put in a couple of chops or get back to plains farming for lack of any other actions


The capital ends up looking like this. Still working one unimproved tile until more labour and cottages (or a somewhat unexciting riverside plains farm) . New city works rice, but needs another tile in 3t, which is going to be difficult to arrange. You can, at least, build holkans if anyone is trying a chariot rush (let's not think about axe rushes...).



I'm far from convinced that this is better than your main line; I think what this suggests to me is that blue dot is not actually a great first site - having the oasis and improvable grassland cow first ring at red dot seems better.

[Dhalphir]

Yes, red dot is my preference so far.

I'll offer more thoughts on the rest of your post in the morning.

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

[Dhalphir]

Regarding the other things you brought up.

I'm a bit annoyed about not being able to revolt to Slavery, and you're right that it's not great

However, to do it we'd have to go BW before Wheel like you said, and the big problem with doing that is that it leaves the worker on top of the completed grass hill mine with several turns before Wheel finishes and nothing to do. I could chop a forest, but it doesn't speed anything up, just gives us more overflow to something. I could go and make the second mine, but that wastes two worker turns moving to it and completes several turns before we need it. Finally, it also leaves our worker out of position to do anything in the second city. The elegance of the Wheel first is that it lets our worker work constantly and leaves him in a good position to do something useful with the second city immediately.

Finally, we're not going to be whipping the capital for a bit, so the need for Slavery is diminished a little. An expansive civ with this much capital production really doesn't need to be whipping out its workers like the standard strategy calls for. At least, that's my gut feeling.

[Dhalphir]

I suppose if going for BW first we could go warrior before settler like your suggested idea, grow the capital to 5, then have the grass mine ready for that.

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

[Dhalphir]

No screenshot for a couple turns, but I'll post a summary.

Turn pace here is pretty slow, we're maintaining 24-36hrs which is pretty silly when each turn takes everyone 5 minutes to play but I guess people have narrow turn windows.

I do wish we had one of those gmail save tracker things so that we knew who had the save, but I didn't think we'd need one.