[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[Nekira Sudacne]

Question: the cost on rennicence of an explorer (36) and longbow (45) is exactly the same as a Sacraficial Alter (81), and that's without counting in the organized discount. it seems to me it should be possible and in fact preferable to slow-build a Sacraficial Alter while growing, with the discount in one and Beaurcrasy in the capitol you might be able to get it built in both in the same amount of time as your schedule there. Remember the organized bonus: you effectively double all your overflow when it goes into a sacraficial alter. you can squeeze out the alter and a longbow to guard the new city without effecting your micro plan, i'm sure of it.

After all, maximizing those chops is vital, you don't have a lot of forests, so giving that +100% boost to the overflow of the worker builds in the capitol is a good use

[Caledorn]

I never should have opened this thread, because now I have to keep following it. You got yourself another (although mostly non-contributing, quite rusty) ded-lurker. You also got me out of my long period of hiding with all this highly interesting strategising going on here.

[Epoxy]

THE DAILY ROLL

TURN 185: SERFS OR SLAVES

The first turn of a brand new era was met with many muttered deliberations of city optimisation and planning, amidst a lush yet dividing start that saw the planners and micromanagers digging through their sandboxes and taking clues from past victor REM's PB33 game. But the decision of where to place the up-and-coming jewels of the Aztec nation will have to wait, for now planning turns to the question on everybody's lips: should slaves be afforded basic rights to property and land, in a bid to accelerate early infrastructure and growth, or are they the forsaken food-to-hammer transformers that eclipse the best technologies of the industrial age in producing anything anyone could need? Alas, the feudal renaissance will have to wait, for there is such a thing as too much anarchy.

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I'm participating as a dedlurker for this thread. I thought it would be useful to have a summary archive for events and referencing ever since following PB33. Suggestions are welcome.

[Sullla]

Tohron: yes, it's a concern about getting rushed. With iron and horses at the start, mackoti could potentially have 4-5 cataphracts out on the map within the first 20 turns. We're going to have to watch the Demos closely and adjust our plans accordingly if someone starts stacking a lot of power early on. A couple things that do help us:

1) There's ivory at the start. Elephants are cheaper than knights/cataphracts and counter them better than pikes (since it's harder to reach Formation promotion than Shock promotion).
2) This map appears to be pretty big. That might make it harder to rush.
3) Anyone rushing will be starting from a smaller base of cities. If we have 6 cities and someone's coming after us with 2-3 cities, we have more pop to whip into defending units.
4) If all else fails, there are 5 other teams. Our odds of not getting attacked are 4 out of 5, which are pretty good.

Nekira: We can definitely build something else other than an explorer and a longbow. The main thing is that we need to be building something other than a worker/settler if we want our capital to be growing. This is a discussion worth having once we decide what our overall micro plan will be. I like the idea of a second early explorer, although this is another game where map trading is enabled from the start, so it does tend to devalue the need for fogbusting somewhat.

Caledorn and Epoxy: Welcome aboard! Glad you're enjoying the discussion in this thread. If anyone else wants to take a stab at sandboxing this start, I have a savefile linked in post #121. I think scooter gets back from travel tomorrow, and we'll likely have more to discuss then.

[antisocialmunky]

I take it that the Sacrificial Altar is not good enough as the capitol's hammer sink because you don't have enough food and enough happiness that the whip timer? I actually prefer a military unit for garrison duty as a hammer sink all things being equal.

@Epoxy, I hope you keep those up periodically so we can string them together in one post at the end :D

[Nekira Sudacne]

I take it that the Sacrificial Altar is not good enough as the capitol's hammer sink because you don't have enough food and enough happiness that the whip timer? I actually prefer a military unit for garrison duty as a hammer sink all things being equal.

@Epoxy, I hope you keep those up periodically so we can string them together in one post at the end :D

To do what? Barbarians are turned off, so no fogbusting or or defending is no help. To stop an eairly rush? if anyone attacks in the first 30 turns they'll have nothing but a couple units themselves. To explore a few tiles? Your starting explorer and longbows can handle that. To sit in a city? It'll be a long time before you need to worry about that, especailly as we won't be in HR for 30+ turns as it is so no MP.

I am not much of a fan of spending hammers on eairly military at all unless i'm playing raging barbarians or what's likely to be an agressive multiplayer. Military units just come out so much faster around turn 40. Scooter and Sullla have clearly decided on a farmers gambit for their opening, so spending hammers on military in the first 15 turns just does not synergize with that very well.

So basically here's my logic: Anything you spend hammers on is going to be a "sink" in that there is no infastructure you really NEED in first 30 turns for this stratagy--but funneling that chop overflow through the organized courthouse boost gets the most out of those precious few chops AND saves us from wasting a whip or chop on one directly later.

I am open to being corrected on this--I havn't done any multiplayer in years, and if barbarisn are on i'm really off the mark--but I just don't see how an extra longbow is going to make a difference until at least turn 45, while knocking out SA eairly is a good long term investment in overflow.

[Epoxy]

@Epoxy, I hope you keep those up periodically so we can string them together in one post at the end :D

Will do, I intend to have every bulletin indexed with links to every other bulletin, T185, T186, and so on.

Incidentally with the delayed city plant, if we want a trendy naming theme, now is the time.

[scooter]

A whole ton to catch up on. This thread's been busy! Two random comments first.

* No, I am not worried at all about a bunch of Cataphracts showing up immediately. Doing that blindly would be betting the farm on luck, and Mackoti doesn't leave things up to luck because he doesn't have to. If for some reason he loses his mind and does so (after ignoring Genghis and Cyrus for Mansa), AND he just happens to pick us, well GG and on to the next one. Anyway, Sullla outlined a bunch of other reasons why I'm not really afraid of a rush, but I think Mackoti's leader choice is the biggest tell that rushing is not the play he has in mind. I don't blame him.

* In case it wasn't clear, I am actually away on vacation all of this week FYI, so my presence will continue to be sporadic. Somewhat unfortunate timing, but with Mackoti being gone a little longer too, there's no real rush.

* On the big point about Slavery versus Serfdom... I spent a half hour this morning testing out Serfdom openings. I couldn't find anything that I liked that much. I kept getting stuck in awkward timings and things that didn't seem to line up. If the starting worker went for an early chop at the capital, then there was no food to grow (which was the whole point of not whipping immediately). If the starting worker improved the pigs first, then it took forever to build the first worker. The second city was even worse off, with no ability to whip an immediate worker to start improving tiles.

I think I'd summarize the problem like this: by swapping into Slavery immediately, we get more workers out faster by opening up immediate worker whips in both cities. This cancels out most of the benefit that we'd otherwise gain from being in Serfdom. I'm open to being proven wrong on this, but so far I haven't been able to make Serfdom work. Please do try to show me how I'm doing it wrong.

I was hoping I could find a way to make Serfdom work. It felt theoretically possible, but in practice I don't see it. (I do think a SPI civ ought to be making good use of mixing the two, but that's obviously not us.) It was funny to read you explain all the ways it didn't work out for you, because I kept running into the same roadblocks. Anyway, I'm pretty convinced that Slavery first will work well. So I'm pretty sure at this point we want to commit to slavery and hold off on any other civic changes until a golden age.

There was one quirk here that nobody mentioned - the jungled banana is no longer on a hill! I saw it on flatland in Sullla's sandbox, but I actually assumed he made a mistake because it was on a hill in our starting screenshot, and the implication was that the starting area wasn't changing. I just logged in to take a look (re-playing what Sullla did in the process due to the rehost), and I noticed the change is real. I don't think that changes anything for us, but that's an extra 1F for that tile.


So I think we have our T0 just about figured out. The plan is to move the worker onto the pigs, move one of the longbows towards the pig/iron location, move the other 1E (so we can get onto the hill next turn), revolt into Slavery/Bureau/Merc, and press enter. We can use the little bit of extra scouting info next turn to update the sandbox and make any necessary recalibrations before diving in.

Is there anything glaring I'm missing? Only 1 person has ended turn and 2 have yet to login, so I expect this turn will run for a few more days. Definitely no rush right now.

[chumchu]

The plan looks sound. You will need more hapiness to run the 6-3 whips. If you build altars while growing you will run into less happy issues in the 30 turns without HR and religion. You will need to prioritise the happy resources more than in my serfdom sims. Even if you go slavery, funneling the chops through the hammer cap look great. My advice is to avoid waiting to long with the first settler if there is good spot to claim. With chops you can build the settler efficiently on any pop and it is hard to grow the city really fast until rice is farmed and irrigated. I think it will be faster to improve hammer tiles and chop directly after the pigs for the extra bonus to worker/settler production and start on the rice farms while the first settler is building.

[Sullla]

More good discussion in this thread. If we’re in general agreement on using Slavery civic and forgoing Serfdom, then we can probably finish up with the remainder of our Turn 185 (Turn 0) moves: moving the longbows, moving the worker to the pigs hill, and revolting to Bureaucracy/Slavery/Mercantilism. Scooter, let one of us know if you won’t be able to log into the game and make them before the timer runs out. We’re in no rush here, and it looks like we’ll have a few more days before the next turn starts. If anyone wants to continue testing a Serfdom opening, you’ve got a little more time left to work in the sandbox and figure it out. I would honestly love to run some Serfdom civic here if we were Spiritual for this game, but we’ll have to make due without frequent civic changes this time. Imperialistic and Organized are going to be really nice to have.

The jungled banana being flatland instead of on a hill… yeah, I don’t think it actually changes anything. I didn’t spot it while playing; I assumed that it had been flatland all along for some reason. It’s really the same problem as we discussed last week when we were first doing the preliminary theorycrafting, with the jungle area just being too slow to get started. I did quite a bit of testing with the second city going one tile north of the starting plains hill, which brought the bananas into play, and it never was worth the tradeoff. In particular, by settling on the starting plains hill, the second city can whip a worker on T188 instead of T189, and it also finishes the work boat for the whales significantly faster. The starting tile also lets the second city work the oasis tile – which requires no improvement – and that accelerates the start further. Maybe the northern spot would eventually come out ahead far down the road, but I’m not even sure that’s the case. The starting tile has wet corn, whales, furs, ivory, the oasis, and a ton of riverside grassland tiles. That’s really good stuff, and it seems to work better to grab spot instead of taking a slower but potentially slightly better longterm location further north. We’ll probably use the bananas to feed a later city up in the north.

Regarding chumchu’s point about an early sacrificial altar in the capital: I think the discussion of what to use as our “hammer sink” (i.e. what to put production into on turns where the capital is growing and not building workers/settlers) is a good one to have. An early sacrificial altar has some nice benefits, as it’s effectively an investment into happiness at the capital, making it so we can whip more frequently and avoid a whip penalty accumulating. Economically it won’t do anything at first, but it will eventually save a few gpt in maintenance. The EP benefits aren’t bad either, as we get an immediate lead in the passive EP accumulation. Remember, the most important factor in espionage stuff is “total EP ever accumulated” compared to the same thing for other civs. And finally, because we are Organized, the sacrificial altar is even cheaper than it looks on paper; it’s effectively 41 production and not 81 production since we get the doubled benefit. That’s why I love us getting the Organized + Aztecs combo, since it makes the sacrificial altars insanely cheap to build.

On the other hand… I threw out some early units as a possible build suggestion, an explorer + longbow combination. I think that the value of early exploration is not to be underestimated here. This is a pretty big map for only six competing teams; it’s 1370 land tiles = 228 tiles per team. In comparison, the Pitboss 33 Industrial game had 1132 tiles for 7 teams = 162 tiles per team. This map has almost 50% more land per team, and we’re probably looking at about 15 cities per team as opposed to the 10 cities per team in that game before everyone started to run out of land. Needless to say, an open map is great for our trait setup here. It does mean more total tiles to reveal though, and even though we do have map trading turned on, there are a couple of changes from the Industrial game:

1) Everyone starts with fewer exploring units. This game has 1 explorer and 2 longbows instead of 2 explorers and 3 rifles.
2) The map is Cylindrical instead of Toroidal. That means less immediate contact and less chances to meet teams for early map trades.
3) The capitals aren’t on the water, and galleons aren’t enabled from the start. That also should slow down exploration a bit.

All of this in addition to the map simply being bigger in terms of land tiles, with one fewer team occupying space. Another explorer certainly isn’t the only hammer sink to use, but I do like the idea.

Here’s one possibility that I’ll throw out: because we’re Organized, we may be able to build an explorer AND a sacrificial altar before the first settler. Although that would mean no longbow defender, our northern city should be pretty safe in the early game with the Cylindrical wrap. I can test this in the sandbox tonight to make sure it works out. What about that as one possibility? Never tried anything like this before but it sounds like it might be a good choice.