[spoilers] - Pindicator makes America great again!

[pindicator]

Okay, I thought about it a bit after calming down and I moved the scout 1 tile south. This gives me a 50% chance that the bear will move to a desirable tile (assuming one of YOU aren't moving him -- eh!? I'm on to you!). If the bear moves to the silk or any of the northern forest tiles I can move to the forest W of the rice and slip by the following turn. If the bear moves W or SW I will have to move to the silk tile again and hope the bear doesn't move to the plains tile he's on for the FOURTH TIME IN A ROW.

The worst tile is if he moves to the rice tile. I think in that case I need to move back to the forested plains hill.

[pindicator]

Turn 013

Worker has finished!




Went north and started farming the sugar.

Start on worker #2 but won't finish him until after growing to size 2. The reason I started the worker this turn was because when I grow over the next 5 turns the food will be +4, +4, +4, +5, +5 for a total of 22 and perfect growth to size 2. If I just grow on a warrior right away it will take 6 turns to grow to size 2, and while I'll have 4 extra food in the box, I'll also have 5 less hammers in the worker, which ultimately will slow the completion of the warrior after worker #2 and in turn slows the settler.

And as you can see, the bear, once again, moved SW. And I, once again, moved to the Silk.

[scooter]

So I think the bear is going to keep bouncing back and forth indefinitely unless you move differently. I think the lost scouting time is a sunk cost at this point, and the best play may be to bounce back to the plains forest hill and just wait for him to attack you. If you build up a defense bonus, you can quickly upgrade that situation to close to a 50/50 shot. Scouts die pretty often to barbs anyway, so most of the scouting was always going to have to be done by warriors.

Basically, I don't think you're going to be able to slip past without a fight, so you may as well pick the best tile and wait for him to come to you, especially because of the fortify bonus.


Reverse jinx attempt is officially ON.

[pindicator]

Turn 014

FREEEEEEEDOM!




Also of note: Swapped to warrior, OT4E teched Mining (pretty sure it's mining) at end of last turn.

Edit: Thanks Scooter. i'm 100% sure it was your reverse jinx that did it

[scooter]

Basically, I don't think you're going to be able to slip past without a fight, so you may as well pick the best tile and wait for him to come to you, especially because of the fortify bonus.


Reverse jinx attempt is officially ON.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

edit: crossposting edits are fun

[spacetyrantxenu]

You're welcome, pindicator. After last turn I changed the bear's AI script from "AI_Fuck_with_pindicator" to "AI_Give_a_guy_a_break".

[Hesmyrr]

You mean "AI_Fuck_with_scooter_prediction"!

[pindicator]

From the bottom of my heart, I thank all you gentlemen for your gracious restraint of game-fuckery

[spacetyrantxenu]

Don't thank me yet, any restraint shown now will be added on to your RNG induced times of suffering in the future. If I can gaze into a crystal ball for just a moment, it looks like you're scheduled for a vandal uprising on your third city's border on T54 and a meteor hitting your capital (total loss, not insured) right after you build an academy in it on T126. I don't see how the RNG can impact the meteor situation (bu-dum-ching!) so it looks like you'll get a few extra vandals in that uprising. Hey, better to know now I say! Plan for misery and you'll never be disappointed!

This post brought to you by Gazglum, and the you who will be happy today.

[scooter]

So I've been meaning to write something up about the map script. I have been gradually doing some sleuthing, but I just haven't had the time to write it up. Anyway, this comment that was literally from Turn 0 bears mentioning:

On another note - the hill clumping reminds me of Tectonics which I haven't seen in forever. Those are usually pretty tough maps. Civstats calls this Archipelago, though, which also seems believable.

I've been halfway assuming for awhile this was the script. In fact I had started to write up a post suggesting it was Tectonics before starting to uncover some things. Tectonics does some super weird stuff, but among them it's:

*Often unusually hilly, although inexplicably it'll shoot out totally flat maps
*Often unusually barren, although inexplicably it'll shoot out some lush maps.
*Most importantly, very "clumpy" terrain - large swaths of plains, hills, peaks, or grassland are normal rather than heavily intermixing. Especially the hills/peaks.

In other words, it's a perfectly predictable map script . But for example, here's a nice Tectonics sample that looks kind of in-line with what we're seeing. I originally took this over the weekend with the goal to use it as Exhibit A for why this game might be on Tectonics.



Pretty ugly, right? The other thing leading me down that road was the number of tiles. The wbsave we were given is a sandbox generated from the start from what I understand - meaning your BFC is kept and everything else in the wbsave is turned to ocean. That generated a 104x64 wbsave, good for 6,656 tiles. This game has 1,871 land tiles in it, which means our game world is 72% water.

Tectonics has several landmass settings, but its default is......



70% water! Well that's a slam dunk. In fact, I was very confident until I started rolling Standard-sized Tectonics maps (victory screen says Standard), and I started getting discouraging results.

I got a little stuck on the idea that it was this script until I started investigating last night. First off, I generated a dozen maps or so, and I couldn't get any using the 70% water standard map size that were larger than 1,100 land tiles, and the average was more like 800. That's nowhere close to the 1,781 needed here, so that alone should have pretty much nailed it down.

However, there's one last crucial detail here:



All Tectonics maps are Medium sea level. This sticks on the settings page even after you save as wbsave and start a custom scenario. So going back to our in-game settings screen...



"Standard World Size, Low Sea Level"

Done. I also noticed that Tectonics 70% spits out maps that are 84x52 rather than 104x64, so yeah, this map is definitely not Tectonics.

--------------------------------

Anyway, figuring out the map script from here should be pretty easy, and I think I've got the time for it tonight. The number of maps that meet this land/water ratio along with map dimensions under "Standard/Low" is pretty small. For example, I've already looked at Hemispheres and Big&Small, and they don't generate nearly enough land tiles (I only generated a dozen or so of each, but never once got > 1400 tiles) to be candidates here since Ceilazul presumably didn't hand-add 380 land tiles. In fact, 1,781 land tiles is highly unusual for a standard sized water map of any kind.

I've got a few pretty good guesses, but that's for a later post when they're more than just guesses.