[SPOILERS] - social distancing with pindicator

[pindicator]

Hello Pindi,

I played with Gira the game, and it has been a pleasure to read this post, so much good and nice information that hopefully will help me become a better player, right now i barely win on monarch difficulty so it was just impossible vs your brain, we new that i think.

I'm not sure if you will see our post to see the random decisions we made, but im going to try to resume them. We tried to make the second city in that forest, not even in the plain of yamhill, just beacause we were thinking on monuments and 1 tile less of distance cost. Also we thought our area was done on the east so we though that either we take that city or we would be constrained in that area. we didnt have AH yet.

Also tried to make the tataras and mathematics to get then those trees choped and build up a group of spears and axes, but you comed faster. Several of those forest were just 1 turn to chop and with road to that goal.

The useless war we didnt end was with the aim of making you waste some hammers and slow you a bit. Instead of that we get a useless war nad some upkeep cost for our units. Maybe with one of those warriors we wouldnt lose a city by the barbars (you are not the unluckiest of the game i think hehehe).

It would be really instructive if you could tell me the cities you would have build in our position. We didnt make more than 4 cities for the fear of more costs and be unable to defend them.

Also i read a lot about getting 100% o 0% investigating but not any other percentage and i didnt see you doing so, isnt it better? Ive seen you were posting where was the break even point, what breakeven is the one that makes you think you builded too many cities?
And the last question, how do you know how many people investigated a tech?

Thanks in advance.

Pd: Im spanish and my english is kind of terrible, sorry if your eyes bleed too much.

I agree with everything Vanrober said.  I also enjoyed reading this thread.  I am astonished by the degree of detail and clearness (as Naufragar pointed out).

Also I want to add that I admire the lovely way of addressing to the other players (I am not ironical). I appreciated, even we you were pissed off by our warriors.

It was a pleasure to play with you, and I hope to play far away from you the next matches.

Thank you both for the compliments! A long time ago I wanted to be a fiction writer and I like to think that I've kept some of what I learned about writing well.

I think regarding the first settler my big question is why settle so close to me? I know you had scouted out the edge of my capital borders so you must have seen that the city would have been much closer to me than you. That makes it harder for you to reinforce with units than it does for me to send more attackers. I could see why you might like it as it has a lot of resources near there. But settling up on someone in a multiplayer game is very risky. You have to protect the spot very well and then you risk making them upset at you and wanting to conquer it. I was very lucky that my warrior happened to be there when your settler showed up.

Also, I think you relied too much on cheap monuments. Yes, they are very helpful for expanding your borders and only cost 15 hammers to build - but it is not the 15 hammers that makes monuments bad, it is having to wait 10 more turns before you can work the good tiles. So I think you would have been better off by settling cities where you had the good tiles in the first ring of the city and could start working them right away. If you look at how I settled you'll see I tried to do that everywhere I could. Your cities just get going so much faster if you don't have to wait all those extra turns.

In your spot I think I would have settled between the cow & gems for my first city. The Cow is a very good tile and the Gems are the strongest in the game. So close to where you ended up putting Osaka, but one tile to the east. The next city I would have gone for the copper to make sure I had that hooked up in case someone tried to rush me early. There are two good spots for trying for the copper: either on the grass hill between the copper and the clams, or you could also put a city on the plains hill west of the copper and then taken the wheat from the capital to get that city started, or at least until I could expand borders and hook up the clams. After those the gold is the next strongest - putting a city SE of the gold so that the Sheep is also in the first ring and the fish in the 2nd ring would be very strong. That also would be a good canal and actually a very good spot to build Moai for later in the game. This is a lot more spread out than my cities were, but you do not have as much food as I did. Maybe there is more to the east that I can't see. So if there was something to the east then I would try for that, but I think next would be having to go west and getting the marble, the 2 clams, and the pig that are along the coast in that direction. But it's funny: you have a tough time with food, but you have so many early happiness resources.

I don't think your land is easy to settle at all now that I'm looking at it with that in mind!

I like the idea of saving some chops for units - it is actually exactly what I did with my Numidian rush. But you still need to use some forests early on to help accelerate development. Especially if you an Imperialistic: those chops get the +50% bonus and so they are like 1/3 of a settler each. If you look at all the good players here, the first 50-70 turns they are all obsessed with getting out as many good cities as they can, and workers to make sure you are not working any unimproved tiles. You're right that costs eventually cause you to slow down, but generally I find that the limit is around reaching 30% as breakeven. And with you having the Gems and the Gold that should help fund more cities. But even without those, you want to have more cottages because those cottages are going to be what helps you afford more cities later on. I'm probably going to chop all those forests and turn them into cottages.

Right now with me having 12 cities I am very close to having too many. I was gambling on getting enough gold from capturing your cities to fund my research to Currency. And thankfully I have, because otherwise I would be in a very bad position right now.

I've got some more thoughts and I know I didn't answer all your questions, but I'm going to go for a run and try to get to them later. In the meantime if you see any more things i do that don't make sense and I don't explain, please ask! I'd be happy to explain why I'm doing things the way I am.

[pindicator]

099





Oh, now you want peace?  
How about you give me my city back and then we'll talk?  




He actually tried attacking at Lincoln - I'm guessing that was a tilt.  His horse archer lost against my axe, and then he managed a retreat against my spear, loaded up the horcher and pillaged my fish.

And now he wants peace?

Also - thank goodness for Charriu.  I know it sounds weird to say, but hurray that he built the Hanging Gardens.  Now I'm no longer the score leader.  People can stop looking at me sideways.  See?  I'm just like all of you.  Of course, I have plans to try and break away.

Here's the battlefield:




6 horse archers inside of Coos.  Meanwhile I have 8 spears in my main stack 2 tiles south of the capital, and 2 more inside of the capital.  Next turn I'll have 14 spears - I have enough spears now!  But I'm not going to just let him sit in Coos when I have the advantage.  Next turn we're moving 10 spears and a bunch of other units to the hill SW of the capital.  Or maybe I give my stack a turn to heal up and then advance with 14 spears in 2 turns.  Either way, I'm taking Coos back.  Then we can talk peace.

Or maybe I'll just keep going.


I have homework down south as cities start to come out of revolt:




How to quickly get these cities up and running.  Osaka was size 6 and starving at the start of the turn so we just whipped a monument at penalty - I already figured that is better than a granary because we need to get those cows under our borders.  But the big thing we need to figure out is how to chop out the Great Lighthouse out of Kyoto as fast as possible.  I'm bringing a lot of my workers south - as many as 7 - but I messed up the movement and lost a turn on a number of them.  Osaka is going to build a worker while we wait for the monument borders to pop, and then we'll get the granary whipped out.  Satsuma needs a monument first too because all its food is in that sheep in the 2nd ring.  Sadly it will starve this turn and I think that's going to be the gold and all that wonderful commerce that I lose.  (Oh, I'm going to up the slider another notch just to make sure I get Currency.) Oh I wish I could have razed and replanted a few of these, but I really needed that gold.  It was such a boon!

We also need to figure out how to get defense down here.  I promoted a numid to sentry and moved it west of Yamhill to make sure Superdeath doesn't try any end-around maneuver to burn these cities.  There's a neat chokepoint at Satsuma, so I'll probably just build military there after the monument.

And I'm going to rename the cities.  We need our tribute to our fallen hero.


PRO: 10 (363)
FIN: 12 (299)
Though if the starving citizen at Satsuma comes off the gold, then FIN will only be 11 this turn.

[pindicator]

Gira and vanrober, you guys gave me such a gift with all those forests

[pindicator]

100

Sad




You know, I had a plan to chop it out in 4 turns down in the old capital of Kyoto.

I guess now I have to go take it from him


So I moved up my health spears, keeping the rest of my stack hidden while it heals.




Not sure if I attack with this next turn or if I move up everything. If there's still only 6 horchers I'll probably attack since I'll have the Numids as backup.

Superdeath's power has not grown over the last few turns. His cities are all size 2 and 3.


I'll do the turn 100 overview in the morning, time for bed.


PRO: 22 (385)
FIN: 14 (313)

Currency trade routes are amazing!

[vanrober]

Thank you both for the compliments!  A long time ago I wanted to be a fiction writer and I like to think that I've kept some of what I learned about writing well.

I think regarding the first settler my big question is why settle so close to me?  I know you had scouted out the edge of my capital borders so you must have seen that the city would have been much closer to me than you.  That makes it harder for you to reinforce with units than it does for me to send more attackers.  I could see why you might like it as it has a lot of resources near there.  But settling up on someone in a multiplayer game is very risky.  You have to protect the spot very well and then you risk making them upset at you and wanting to conquer it.  I was very lucky that my warrior happened to be there when your settler showed up.

Also, I think you relied too much on cheap monuments.  Yes, they are very helpful for expanding your borders and only cost 15 hammers to build - but it is not the 15 hammers that makes monuments bad, it is having to wait 10 more turns before you can work the good tiles.  So I think you would have been better off by settling cities where you had the good tiles in the first ring of the city and could start working them right away.  If you look at how I settled you'll see I tried to do that everywhere I could.  Your cities just get going so much faster if you don't have to wait all those extra turns.

In your spot I think I would have settled between the cow & gems for my first city.  The Cow is a very good tile and the Gems are the strongest in the game.  So close to where you ended up putting Osaka, but one tile to the east.  The next city I would have gone for the copper to make sure I had that hooked up in case someone tried to rush me early.  There are two good spots for trying for the copper: either on the grass hill between the copper and the clams, or you could also put a city on the plains hill west of the copper and then taken the wheat from the capital to get that city started, or at least until I could expand borders and hook up the clams.  After those the gold is the next strongest - putting a city SE of the gold so that the Sheep is also in the first ring and the fish in the 2nd ring would be very strong.  That also would be a good canal and actually a very good spot to build Moai for later in the game.  This is a lot more spread out than my cities were, but you do not have as much food as I did.  Maybe there is more to the east that I can't see.  So if there was something to the east then I would try for that, but I think next would be having to go west and getting the marble, the 2 clams, and the pig that are along the coast in that direction.  But it's funny: you have a tough time with food, but you have so many early happiness resources.  

I don't think your land is easy to settle at all now that I'm looking at it with that in mind!

I like the idea of saving some chops for units - it is actually exactly what I did with my Numidian rush.  But you still need to use some forests early on to help accelerate development.  Especially if you an Imperialistic: those chops get the +50% bonus and so they are like 1/3 of a settler each.  If you look at all the good players here, the first 50-70 turns they are all obsessed with getting out as many good cities as they can, and workers to make sure you are not working any unimproved tiles.  You're right that costs eventually cause you to slow down, but generally I find that the limit is around reaching 30% as breakeven.  And with you having the Gems and the Gold that should help fund more cities.  But even without those, you want to have more cottages because those cottages are going to be what helps you afford more cities later on.  I'm probably going to chop all those forests and turn them into cottages.

Right now with me having 12 cities I am very close to having too many.  I was gambling on getting enough gold from capturing your cities to fund my research to Currency.  And thankfully I have, because otherwise I would be in a very bad position right now.

I've got some more thoughts and I know I didn't answer all your questions, but I'm going to go for a run and try to get to them later.  In the meantime if you see any more things i do that don't make sense and I don't explain, please ask!  I'd be happy to explain why I'm doing things the way I am.

Well, we thought that those 2 warriors would defend the early and with that stone get some walls and since you were pro we thoght we could def from you. OBV now seeing that you have already 4 warriors around which i am still amazed, we would just insta die.
Several people after writting here fir advices came out to our post to give us some advices, and basically the same spot for the 2 first cities that you said. Our doubt would be what after, and you said the marble and maybe another in gold (i ll let you see how much food we had in our east!) thats nice to know. I ll sim that out.

So i really apreciate your tips and really willing on learning more of the doubts i already asked.

Gira and vanrober, you guys gave me such a gift with all those forests

Thats our amazing skill of pissing someone off and then make him fall in love :P hahaha.

Seriusly, thanks for taking time in answer my questions!

[pindicator]

[pindicator]

I need a break from planning meals for my upcoming backpacking trip, so let's answer some of the questions / make some comments that I didn't get to before.

The useless war we didnt end was with the aim of making you waste some hammers and slow you a bit. Instead of that we get a useless war nad some upkeep cost for our units. Maybe with one of those warriors we wouldnt lose a city by the barbars (you are not the unluckiest of the game i think hehehe).

So I agree with this in general, but I think the part that confused me was how early it came.  Neither of us knew how many neighbors we had or what the general shape of the map was when it happened.  Typically if you have more than one neighbor you want to be cautious about making enemies before you know who you have to conquer to expand or who you need to pressure to slow down.  It turns out that you were right!  I was your only real neighbor, and so it was right to pressure me.  But the annoying part to me was that I had multiple neighbors later on and just assumed you did too, not realizing that both you and superdeath only had me to contend with.

Also i read a lot about getting 100% o 0% investigating but not any other percentage and i didnt see you doing so, isnt it better? Ive seen you were posting where was the break even point, what breakeven is the one that makes you think you builded too many cities?

I often do 100%-0% research (I think that it was called binary research?) early on in a game and if I am about to research something that other players have, or that I suspect they will have when I finish.  The reason is that you get a small boost if you're researching something that another player knows.  However what that also does is if you look on the GNP graph you will see these huge spikes from when I turn the research on.  If I think my research is a little too good and might scare other players then I will try to keep it even.  The other time is if I'm just about to finish a tech I will turn the slider down to just enough to finish the tech in order to minimize the amount I go over.  This is to keep as much gold on hand as possible - sometimes you don't know if you'll need it for an emergency.

And sometimes I just misjudge when it's time to turn to 100%.  I'll do it when I think I have enough gold, but then I build some more units or make another city and soon I realize I just don't have enough.  I probably should just turn it off again, but I feel committed so I just knock it down a few bars.

Basically, the 0-100 thing will save you a few beakers if you do it all the time, and this is all about building up little advantages.  But it won't make or break your game.

I use my break-even point as a way to judge when I need to stop making new cities.  In general, when we're first expanding I want to build new cities until I reach about 30%-40% for the break-even.  It gets dangerous to go lower, but sometimes you find you have to - just make sure it's a good reason!  I find if you go lower then the research rate gets too slow and you fall behind.  And otherwise you're not claiming land fast enough and risking that your neighbor will take it from you.

After I conquered your cities I was down to 10%!  That's way too low.  But I had correctly guessed that I would get enough gold from capturing cities to let me research until Currency was done.  And now that Currency is in, I'm between 20% and 30%.  Still a little low, and so I want to grow my cities taller and have the new citizens work cottages in order to improve that.  Then we'll start looking at expanding again.

And the last question, how do you know how many people investigated a tech?

The demographics screen!

I'll show you how I do it when I play the next turn.  We'll do a guide

Pd: Im spanish and my english is kind of terrible, sorry if your eyes bleed too much.

Y tambien, mi español es horible y nuestros ojos van a sangrar mucho si yo trataria escribir mucho en tu lengua.

[vanrober]

However what that also does is if you look on the GNP graph you will see these huge spikes from when I turn the research on.  

I thought you were seeing something like "raw" gold income in those grafics not actually the beakers you are using right now

The demographics screen!

I'll show you how I do it when I play the next turn.  We'll do a guide

Cant wait for it!

Y tambien, mi español es horible y nuestros ojos van a sangrar mucho si yo trataria escribir mucho en tu lengua.

If you wanna practice... It's probably the only thing i can help u on! hehehe

[pindicator]

101 - tech scrying

I'm going to do a basic version, and if you care to really get into the nuts and bolts of why this works the way it does, the different formulas that we're playing with, etc, we can discuss them.  Basically what we're going to be doing is deconstructing the formula for how many beakers the game really puts into a technology and how that is different than the science rate you see on your screen.

Step 1:  Turn your science all the way up to 100%.  Note what your beakers are at 100%

Step 2:  De-select whatever technology you are researching, so that it shows all the options at the top of your screen

Step 3:  Open the demographics screen with F9.  Note what your GNP is at with no technology selected and your science at 100%




This will give us the baseline that we're going to go off of for all the different technologies that we can research.  This will let us see, or "scry", how many of our opponents have researched those techs.

Step 4: Close your demographics screen.  It won't refresh while it is up.

Step 5: Select a technology to research from the list at the top.  I just go in order and start with Polytheism on the left.

Step 6: Open your demographics screen, and again note what what your GNP is this time with the technology selected.




You'll notice that it's gone up.  That's because the GNP screen takes into account all the little bonuses that you get for researching a technology and adds them into that number.  So the +20% you get for each pre-requisite technology (the ones that have lines pointing towards the technology you are researching) is counted.  The other thing that is counted is the Known Tech Research Bonus, and we'll use that to tell how many people have a technology.

Repeat Steps 4-6 for every technology you want to look at.  I just routinely do them all at the start of my turn and then put all the numbers into a spreadsheet, kind of like this.


Ignore the greyed out portion for now.

Step 7:  What we're interested in, is how much did the GNP change for each technology?  For Polytheism our GNP went up from 66 to 105 - so 39 points.

Step 8:  Take that increase and divide it by the amount of science you make at 100% research.  This will tell you how much of a boost you get.  For Polytheism our boost was 39 points and our research rate at 100% science is 162 beakers.  So 39 / 162 = 0.24074074.  Usually just 2 decimal places is enough, so 0.24.  That 0.24 is the key number, so here's the same spreadsheet with all those filled in.



Step 9:  Now staying with Polytheism, we need to reverse engineer why it gets that additional 24% boost.  We know that we have researched the pre-requisite technology (Mysticism) so that is 20% boost.  But what is the other 4%?  That is our known tech research bonus.  All the details are spelled out more in this old civfanatics article but the formula for how much of a boost you get for other people knowing a technology is 0.3 divided by the number of living players.  0.3 / 7 = 0.042857, about 4%.

So we know that one other player that we've met has researched Polytheism.  (No big surprise that it's Mjmd who has Hinduism as his state religion.)

Doing this down the line of technologies in my spreadsheet I can tell you that in addition to Polytheism 1 person has Metal Casting (Jowy, because he built the Colossus) and 2 people have Calendar (not sure, but probably AT and Jowy due to the timing of it all).  Nobody has researched Monarchy, Code of Laws, Aesthetics, Alphabet, Compass, or Construction.  Why not Code of Laws when that has 0.4 and the others have 0.2?  Because I have researched 2 pre-requisites to Code of Laws: Priesthood & Currency, and those add together.

If you keep track of this each turn you can see when players research a technology - you won't know who researched it every time, but you'll have a general idea where you stand.

And because I was last to play this turn, I also did it at the start of turn 102 just to get it out of the way so I wouldn't have to do it when it was time to play next.  There was in fact a difference.



Somebody finished Construction.

Crap.

Well, we knew it was coming.


Anyway, if you have any questions, if any parts don't make sense, or if you just want to learn more about the details, ask away!

[pindicator]

102

So after I logged in this turn I had a nice surprise - my gold per turn had jumped like 10-15 points between when I rolled the turn this afternoon and when I played this evening.  I thought maybe I had messed up my GNP scrying from last turn, but no everything was the same, just with bigger GNP numbers.  And then I noticed:  I had more trade routes!  No, Jowy did not open borders with me, but either through more cities being founded or new connections made I now am getting at least two 3c trade routes in every city.

When I get compass I'll have to judge when I want to build Cothons, but when I do they are going to be worth 9c in every city I build them in.  NINE!  That's like a late-game super buffed town (for the price of 80 hammers).  But we're getting way ahead of ourselves, we're nowhere near ready to build Cothons.  We can't even fit in libraries yet.

But that did get me looking at the F4 screen some more, and I stumbled across this:


Am I really getting 75cpt from trade routes?  Nice

You can see where I'm getting all my foreign trade routes.  But I didn't realize this screen now also showed gold and gold-per-turn.  That's a nice change from having to select everybody individually.  (And yet -- I like that selecting everybody's screen individually makes me slow down and think about them and look at their trade goods.)  You can see where I'm starting to really pick up, now already at 60gpt where a few turns ago I was at 15, about even with Mjmd and Cairo.  Jowy is really churning out an impressive gpt, over 100!  And Superdeath ... not so super.  If he is really running 0% science here then his economy is really hurting.  He is going to have to limp to Currency like this.  (I wonder how much his GNP is inflated by culture.  Has to be at least a quarter, I'd gather.)

But you're not supposed to be hurting like this after building the Great Lighthouse.  But this is the downside to only having one neighbor.  If you go to war with them and don't have any other way for your trade routes to go, you lose them all.  And here there is no other way for Superdeath to get trade routes except when he's at peace with me.  This is why I'll never give him peace, even if I don't do anything.  I'm not going to give him trade routes.  If I get the chance, I'm going to take his island city and cut that finance off from him also.

Larger strategy ramifications:  I don't have to take the war to him.  My economy is better.  I can play defense, sit back, and then when I have the tech advantage come for him.  There's no need to take needless risks.

It's also why despite him getting Construction this last turn you've seen ZERO whips from him.  His cities are all at size 3 - and they may just be stuck at size 3 due to not being able to get more happiness.  So if I could take out a luxury of his, I could really hurt him.  Which is why I really want to take Coos back.





Elsewhere, Mr. Cairo is doing everything in his power to desperately get my attention.




Okay, on one side I get why you would want to try and deny resources to your opponent.  But on the other hand, there better be something really good that I missed in the fog, otherwise this is just a shitty fishing village of a city and the only thing it's accomplishing is annoying me.  I have deliberately passed on sending a settler here several times because I just didn't see the point.  What do island cities do for you when you're already getting foreign trade routes?  They give your opponents an extra commerce.  Later on, if people start closing trade routes with me, I'll probably need to settle some island cities.  But thanks to conquering Gira and vanrober I've got 2 island locations safely under my control.

Cairo also has made me shuffle my 2 defenders down south as I haven't exactly trusted his scouting warrior to be honest.




Actually, I thought it was kind of funny how everybody's units fell together here.

Changed my mind at Klamath.  Decided that I did need that fur connected sooner rather than later, so I swapped to a settler last turn and whipped it here.  Oh that forge is so nice, getting an extra 25%.  And an extra 2 happiness!  I may actually have to go for Metal Casting next because it will get me triremes against Superdeath and forges for more happiness and production.

I keep changing my mind with what I'm going to do with these cities.  But the first goal is absolutely going to be granaries and border pops.  Sometimes I think they all should get stables built and then build more Numids and then my core cities, being closer to the front, can focus on catapults.

Construction due in 5 turns, btw.  Hopefully the new city doesn't slow that down.

Yikes, this was a long one.  Lots of thoughts about larger strategy though, which is good.  I always feel like that's the weakest part of my game, identifying what other players are doing and keeping a larger strategic focus for what I'm doing.  For example, I don't trust Cairo.  I'm going to get some additional defenders and some walls in my east coast cities.


PRO: 24 (433)
FIN: 17 (345)