[Spoilers] Finding OH: wetbandit and ipecac encounter some sharks

[wetbandit]

T36

We have used up our Prince kill on a bear at the most favorable odds possible. Our scout took quite a bit of damage though.




The land the scout has found is very, very good.




In boring news, we have an uncontested city spot and teching archery early I hope actually pays off. Gave cows to SHANGHAI (we need city thematic names), give them back to the cap once the bronze is mined on t38.




Honestly, 28 food!

[wetbandit]

Your "why aren't we creative" sign made me wonder: on lush maps like this and PBEM74, does the value of free culture go up or down compared to more natural maps? In this situation, you have two sites each claiming 2 food resources first-ring, or one site that claims 3 food resources in all, 2 of them second-ring. On a standard BTS script, you might only be able to claim 1 food resource and share another without CRE, or claim 2 second-ring with CRE.

One could argue that the higher-quality land makes the snowball stronger, but alternately, a much stronger 2nd city on a map with lower-quality land could lead to a much faster opening than a non-CRE opening. And when it comes to using CRE to contest early borders, higher-quality land means that you're better off overall, but the other player can probably settle a comparably lush site elsewhere, whereas lower-quality land means that the opposing settler might be forced to settle a filler site instead.

If we imagine a map where every tile has a resource, and another map where there are no resources at all, CRE feels pretty bad in both cases, but for different reasons. In Lushworld, every city can work 8 strong tiles immediately, and everyone would ICS, including the CRE player. In Barrenworld, with its extremely weak commerce potential, claiming more land would take too long to pay off. I would lean towards favoring CRE on more barren maps, but I can't really imagine a non-gimmicky map where everyone would heavily prioritize CRE over the other traits.

Spoiler alert, bar trivia champion wetbandit is answering for now, perhaps sober wetbandit MIGHT be better suited for your inquiry. If sober wetbandit knew much about civ in the first place. This is a good question about the utility of the creative trait with +2 culture. The +1 culture variants (especially without library multipliers) are significantly different.

Creative never appealed to me until lurking OH's game in PB31. I don't think that's a spoiler for his game. For the reasons you suggest, in addition to others, I think creative makes your settling pattern much easier in the early game. Plus, you save 30 hammers on a monument/RTR barracks or a beeline for religion. There is some qualitative benefit to cultural pressure and city defense that I can't quantify as well.

To digress a moment, I think one of the downfalls of our game in PB(whatever it is) Fenn and I played is that we maximized early returns by settling in an ICS pattern to the detriment of our late game. That haunted us in that game competing with super cities destined for specialization and able to produce those specialized multipliers earlier than we did. That may be just a peculiarity of the map. Certainly one of the Good Things about civ4 is that players have a decent amount of time to attempt to play the map (as opposed to civ5). I would say that one of the weaknesses that I have and would like to address in this game is to wean myself off of planning cities for early game returns rather than midgame or late-game focuses.

I'd say that the settling flexibility of CRE is underrated (at least by me). If the map is lush, a non-CRE is more able to find a settling spot that is more likely to work for that player. At the same time, a CRE player largely can ignore those limitations, even in a lush map, and maximize defensive or strategic considerations, thus providing a benefit to the CRE player. That probably works the same with a non-lush or lush map.

Plus you get to save the 30 hammers or trying for a religion. I keep getting hung up on that.

[wetbandit]

And Another Thing: Stardoor isn't even improving the sheep. What the hell is he doing with any workers he has? Improving a 3f3h cow instead of food? If so, that is good for us...

[ipecac]

Also no roading detected from his capital to city #2 (sheep.and corn at capital till lack routes). So my tentative theory is that he's at least decent for settling where he did, but is playingldrunk.

[ipecac]

Cre is especiall useful in this cramped start too

[wetbandit]

T38

Worker->Settler. Worker starts chopping. I want to grab that pigs city. Settle NW of pigs (1w of the designated "C" ). Alternatively we could settle on the bronze hill too.







I guess this goes back to OT4e...

[Old Harry]

Am I right in thinking the land is laid out like this?


If so would this layout make sense of the close capitals?

[wetbandit]

Borsche died. My guess is he was in a similar position to us. Lamentations abound then because our demos are




The workboat does finish next turn, but we are significantly behind.

[GermanJoey]

To digress a moment, I think one of the downfalls of our game in PB(whatever it is) Fenn and I played is that we maximized early returns by settling in an ICS pattern to the detriment of our late game. That haunted us in that game competing with super cities destined for specialization and able to produce those specialized multipliers earlier than we did. That may be just a peculiarity of the map. Certainly one of the Good Things about civ4 is that players have a decent amount of time to attempt to play the map (as opposed to civ5). I would say that one of the weaknesses that I have and would like to address in this game is to wean myself off of planning cities for early game returns rather than midgame or late-game focuses.

Do you mean PB29? I'm not sure if that's the right lesson there... Paying attention to specialization is definitely important, but I think that because that map was pretty lush it really did want something like akin to an ICS placement pattern.

That said, you can still allow for specialization with dense city packing, but you have to be a bit more deliberate about it. Think of it as similar to the pruning that a gardener might undertake... by removing some buds from a step, the remainder now have greater resources to draw from and thus have the chance to flourish to even greater heights. In Civ4, it's a similar deal, except of just chopping the buds and throwing them into the trash, you also want to figure out how to extract maximum value from them too. For example, even though Cities A, B, and C might share a set of good tiles, it's usually a mistake to spread them evenly. Instead, it's better to choose one city to keep all of them and let the other two eat the scraps. That way, only one city is burdened with needing to focus perhaps 1000 hammers into fancy infrastructure, while the other two can support it with workers, units, etc, getting away with only basic infrastructure like a Granary, Forge, Barracks, and Courthouse.

And, even beyond direct tile yields, it's a similar deals with chops... rather than splitting them up to benefit A, B, and C equally (and, FWIW, chopping into settlers and workers is essentially that, whichever of the 3 that the chop actually ends up in), it can be worthwhile to save some trees for later, making up for the lost growth acceleration by whipping the two of the cities a little harder than you otherwise would think proper. Say the trees are saved for A, while B and C get whipped hard. That might hamper B and C's development rate, but the upside is that you now have extra chops in your pocket to funnel into A for something special. That could be an instant forge as soon as MC is available, to maximize the city's total hammers produced over time, or perhaps this gets you a Palace move for a spot that can better utilize Bureaucracy, or some extra science multipliers in a high commerce city that has very poor natural production, or some special mid-game wonder, etc.

[Fenn]

I think you have the right idea...looking back we didn't whip nearly as much as we could have, and deforested our corner of the map as a consequence. Our problem with specialization was (IIRC) as much about city location as it was with tile distribution and building infra everywhere. We didn't have very many cities, aside from I think Shruti, that could claim all of the great tiles in an area. It certainly didn't help that we kept trying to make Courier and Arial (cities #3 and #2) into real cities instead of whipping boys, I'll admit. Chasing after Judaism (and then doing very little with it) despite all the resource-based happy on the map hurt us too; it was a waste of our research lead that could have gone into more growth-oriented techs.

I learned a lot from that game - and from your own PB29 thread. It'll be something to improve from if I play another Civ4 game