[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[Cheater Hater]

As someone who isn't following the micro extensively, I like the idea of an explorer and altar.

[Dp101]

I too think the idea of getting a fast altar + explorer is good.

[antisocialmunky]

I kind of like that last option. I don't think you'll need that many units helping prevent a Cotton Gin(or whatever that terrible city was called) plant and it sets you up better for the future with EPs (totally forgot how EP accumulation worked) and mass whips. I agree that units aren't going to be super important as long as you have enough to cover all your cities.

I take it that it will be Explorer first then SA?

[Nekira Sudacne]

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.

Logically there's no way you cannot--you said yourself, a Sacraficial Alter is 41 hammers, while a Longbow is 45. If i'm reading the micro up right, it'll even finish a turn before the longbow would have. No changes required. ((Personally i'd do SA then Explorer, but if you want to build an eairly explorer at all then it has to be first non-worker-settler build for it to be meaningful)

as an aside--why do you hate banana's so much. every time there's a banana resoruce you go "Oh, it's just banana's".

[Sullla]

I don't think that I hate bananas as a resource? I was initially arguing that we should try to grab the bananas resource by planting off the plains hill tile with one of our cities. I changed my opinion for the same reason that scooter probably did: I tried it in the sandbox and it didn't work out in practice. I don't think that the bananas resource works for a fast start in this game, but that shouldn't be read as a general rule in all situations. Hope that makes sense.

I made slight edits to the online micro spreadsheet to reflect our discussion about building an explorer followed by a sacrificial altar. It does indeed work in practice as the math suggested. Since these things tend to make more sense when seen in practice, here's a picture sequence of this particular group of opening moves.

Turn 185 (Turn 0): Move units and revolt civics



Turn 186: Found our two cities, south of the pigs (capital) and on the starting tile. Worker starts a pasture on the pigs, the two cities both begin workers with the intention of whipping them.

I tested having the worker start with a chop instead of improving a food resource, and it didn't seem to work as well. The starting worker can't move onto a choppable forest at the capital on the initial starting turn, only the iron resource which will not be inside cultural borders. Furthermore, chopping instead of improving a food resource slows regrowth in the capital after the initial worker whip. Anyway, it just doesn't seem to play out as well when sandboxing; I consistently had better results from improving the pigs first, and chopping with the whipped worker (instead of the other way around).

Turn 187: Whip worker in capital.



Turn 188: New worker moves to chop the iron hill forest. Second city whips worker. Note that if we didn't plant on the plains hill, we would have to wait another turn to whip at the second city, which slowed things down noticeably. This is the one turn where the capital has to grow without an improved food resource, and it's a bit painful in practice. But we do need the 2 food here from the unimproved pigs resource to hit our settler timing 10 turns later... and there's not a whole lot else for the capital to do anyway. (We could put overflow into a worker here, but that's another turn we're not growing, even at minimum rate. The goal is to spend the minimum number of turns on worker/settler builds. We will 1-turn two more workers and a settler down the road to minimize time not growing.)



Turn 189: Pigs pasture finishes for +5 growth in capital. Second worker starts chopping iron tile. Third worker moves NW and roads. Why that action? We can't move to the corn because it's outside our borders until T193 when the Holy City appearance pops borders. I guess we could Build Culture here, but that delays the work boat completing, and we honestly want to chop another worker more than anything else. So I think it works better to build the road here, then move onto the forest 2N of the city next turn, which causes us to finish the chop on the same turn the borders expand. Furthermore, the road isn't really wasted as it allows movement of the worker out of the second city over to the corn tile immediately, rather than wasting a turn en route. It may be possible to optimize this further though, I'll have to explore and see.

Turn 190: Workers move into forests to chop. Explorer finishes eot in capital.



Turn 191: Forest chop completes a 1-turn worker in the capital. More chopping elsewhere.



Turn 192: Overflow into sacrificial altar in capital. Work boat done eot in capital.



Turn 193: Holy city borders pop. Double forest chops go into two more workers, the one at the capital completely instantly with the Bureaucracy bonus. Whales are hooked up and provide an improved tile for the second city.



Turn 194: Another worker completes at the second city eot, worker #6 overall. Workers farming the rice, moving to chop, and the worker in the north finishes the road over to the corn.

At this point, we will surely be in last place in score compared to our competitors. Two cities at size 1, nine turns into this thing? The Demographics are going to look terrible. However, that's because we'll have been investing heavily into workers and forest chops. Now the investment into that worker labor starts to pay dividends over the next few turns. Don't forget either that REM was in last place by a wide margin in the early game in Pitboss 33, as he aggressively churned out workers left and right. Early score can often be deceptive in these games.



Turn 195: Capital grows to size 2, picks up the dry rice farm for +7 food. Mine also finishes on the iron resource. Workers start farming the wet corn at second city.

Turn 196: Capital works the iron resource this turn, which allows it to finish the sacrificial altar and overflow into settler. We do not have enough production to 1t upcoming settler if we work the rice tile this turn. That iron tile is very powerful at 1/5 yield - we want to use it as much as possible. Second city is 1 food away from growth this turn at 18/19 food; corn tile is also at 4/5 worker labor. I haven't found a way to speed this up and avoid that inefficiency yet, but I'll poke around a bit more.



Capital finishes altar, grows to size 3, swaps to Build Research to preserve chop and build overflow. Corn farm done, more chopping taking place.

Turn 198: More chopping, workers improving the furs.



Turn 199: Double chops complete at capital. Along with the finished horse pasture, and the saved up overflow, it's enough for us to 1-turn the settler:



The settler is at 239/237 production; this is a very tight timing window. However, we manage to be stuck in avoid growth mode for only a single turn, and we also hit size 4 so that we can work pigs + rice + iron + horses. Note that the second city is also working corn + whales + furs, all of them also improved. We have 7 pop points, and they're working 7 improved tiles. That's the whole point of investing in all those early workers: get those improved tiles going ASAP! Not to mention, we did essentially get a 1t settler by cashing in three chops with Imperialistic bonus, while growing the capital on all but the final turn. Not bad.

I don't want to try going any further since our next moves will be heavily dictated by our chosen third city site. There's some nice micro already set up for the next few turns (three workers can finish the grassland farm NE of the capital to chain irrigation on the very next turn, allowing us to swap horses to the second city and run +8 food in the capital, then swap back again on T201) and we should have some workers free to go improve that next city, wherever it may go. Near-term plan further out would be to set up a size 5 -> size 3 -> size 5 double whip cycle at the second city, churning out workers and defenders every 3-4 turns, while the capital triple whips some settlers on size 6 -> size 3 -> size 6 cycles. New cities should have more forests available to turn into settlers/workers with chops. We look to use the first Great Person around T215-220 for a Golden Age to swap civics and pop out some Great People for lightbulbs (ideally 1 Merchant and 2 Scientists). And if we can do all that, we should be in very good shape indeed.

Should be fun. Let's see how much of this we can pull off in practice.

[scooter]

Turn 185

It's that time again. Settings in the spoiler.

Civics as planned. It was nice knowing you, Serfdom.



So next turn the longbows can each move onto a hill to give us a little more visibility, and the explorer can do something like S-SW. Most likely one of them will see something crazy in the fog to completely ruin our entire plan.

I'm more than a little puzzled as to why WarriorKnight/Dave and Plako elected to settle a city on this turn considering they aren't SPI. It very likely won't matter, but surely they're spending this turn in anarchy.



14mfg? I'm much too tired to puzzle that one out, so I'll leave that as an exercise for the small army that is only following this thread.

[Tohron]

Is MFG post-multiplier? If there's a +100% trait bonus, combined with a forge bonus, then 6 base production becomes 13.5 final production. Alternately, founding both cities could get them up that high.

[scooter]

One last thing I neglected to mention. I like slipping in the early Sacrificial Altar as a filler build. The extra unpromoted longbows seem less likely to be useful, especially with barbarians off. I think we'll be nudging up against the happy cap early with some regularity, and having an Altar in place will allow us to continue whipping if/when that happens.

I don't have a whole lot more to add just yet. I really like the proposed plan, but I don't want to get totally married to it until we at least get a little more visibility next turn. If we see a killer 3rd city location in the fog right nearby for example, that could impact our plans.

[Sullla]

14 production is someone moving SW of our starting tile, in that spot that Cheater Hater identified. They work center tile + iron + horses + Engineer specialist = 1 + 3 + 2 + 2 = 8 * 1.75 (forge/Bureaucracy) = 14 production. Will be interesting to see where the team that did that puts their second city.

I agree on waiting until we get to move the units to make any further major adjustments to micro planning. Not sure if I should hope for another resource 2 south of the iron or not, since it will likely force a re-doing of everything we've planned so far.

[Cheater Hater]

Good to know someone liked my idea, even if it isn't us (though this plan is obviously fine--you two spent a lot more time sandboxing than I did ). It'll be interesting, but it's a long time away (probably at least 10 turns minimum, or maybe the end of the game if they're on another continent or something).

Can we get any other judgements from the stats screen? Not counting the high, that's 16 production between the other two cities (though I'm not sure how the demos screen does rounding). Also, why are we 5th in everything? Presumably we're tied with the other two civs that haven't settled, and I thought the demos screen put you at the top of all ties (so we'd be 4th).