[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[El Grillo]

My intuition would be to say no, but maybe if you have a surplus of worker labor and can only hit a specific growth/production timing by farming a plains ivory. This is where sims are really useful for trying out a bunch of different opening variations.

[Amicalola]

I think there are rare scenarios where that would be worth it, but in general it would be considered a pretty poor exchange unless you had very little food otherwise.

[aetryn]

The kind of forests will tell you roughly what latitude you're at and once you find a different kind you'll know for sure. We're either north conifers or south conifers. If we see snowy trees we'll know the pole is in that direction, or deciduous trees toward the equator. Assuming this is a normal map and not Global Highlands, actually, because Global Highlands is only half a hemisphere (pole at one end, jungle at the other).

[Tarkeel]

The kind of forests will tell you roughly what latitude you're at and once you find a different kind you'll know for sure. We're either north conifers or south conifers. If we see snowy trees we'll know the pole is in that direction, or deciduous trees toward the equator. Assuming this is a normal map and not Global Highlands, actually, because Global Highlands is only half a hemisphere (pole at one end, jungle at the other).

Also assuming that the mapmaker took the different types of tree into account when making the map. There are also map-scripts that don't use this.

[aetryn]

Greenshot can take a screenshot of a preset section, upload it to imgur, and give you the link in the clipboard.

There is much more to scouting than optimising double moves. Do you know what units you'll be building before the settler (I suggest scout-scout-warrior) and have you planned their movement as well? Each turn think not only about your current scout but review the plans for everyone. I'd defog thoroughly since a power tile here has a much greater impact than in civ6.

1f is ~1.2h initially and ~2.4 after granary. Since you have plenty of food without the ivory, farming only makes sense after but I don't know what's a good hammer-commerce exchange rate.

Almost certainly not worth it. Too many worker turns for something you'd have to undo, and by the time it's really relevant you want the extra happy for an extra citizen anyway so you can get a cottage started evolving or something. Also, is that exchange rate assuming the citizen whipped off was doing nothing but working a 2 food tile and sustaining himself? Because whipping usually has a cost to the economy that is greater than that, unless you are whipping unhappy pop anyway. I'm not arguing against whipping. By all means do it. Food is in fact the most important resource early. But let's not go crazy on that doctrine either.

[ljubljana]

AH first seems better because if pottery won't come before ~T40 anyway and it would be another few turns to AH, then more would be lost from the unimproved cow that would be gained from bringing the granary forward.

So the worker's timing would be:
T12 out and starts the wheat
T17 wheat ready, start cow on T18
T22 cow ready, T24 start deer
T28 deer ready

Then there are several options for the worker and it depends mostly on where the second city will be and what needs to be done there:
- T29 start ivory and finish on T33.
- Move to a forest and start chopping on T30. Probably at one of the good spots for a future cottage, and probably better than the ivory as it's not ideal to work a food negative tile initially.
- (If workers can improve resources out of your territory) go to prepare a resource at the future city 2.

Btw since the capital must spend at least 2 turns on settlers and workers to avoid dry whipping (and ideally not more since whipping gives you a better than 1:1 exchange rate), it is indeed best to be able to share the wheat and cow on these turns to avoid the food->hammer conversion. Not a huge deal initially but after granary it becomes significant. And for initial defensive purposes having the first 3 cities packed together sounds good too.

For the capital building order (sp means stockpile, +XfYh is the foodhammer output on that turn):
T0-T12 worker
T12 cow at +3f2h
T17 sp15f10h. farmed wheat at +5f3h
T19 grow to 2, sp3f16h, farmed wheat and cow +6f3h
T22 sp21f25h, farmed wheat and pastured cow +7f5h
T23 grow to 3, sp4f30h, continue at +7f6h
T27 grow to 4, sp5f54h, start settler. +13fh

Up to here we have accummulated 54h that can go to 3 units. Maybe 2 warriors and 1 scout since it would be very good to do more scouting and understand who the neighbours are and if they'd be a threat, and maybe even if there is someone we could rush at Impi (even if other neighbours profit equally, we'd all still be ahead of the other players, as long as this doesn't result in us being exposed or a likely dogpile target). Also there is a research bonus when you know civs who have the tech.

An interesting option is if one of the T12-T17 turns goes into a worker since that will allocate 3f2h which won't slow down growth but will 'lubricate' the worker for later immediate whipping while 'wasting' only 3f in terms of foodhammer conversion. The disadvantage is that it will slow down the first and second units by a turn.

T28 camp on the deer complete, continue at +15fh
T34 settler out. 103fh naturally in settler +9 overflow from before (+ 20 from chop optionally)  Revolt to slavery.

From food sharing perspective best would be city 2 in range of wheat, and maybe even the deer as well (the tile at 447 reaches both). This could be just 1 turn travel time so perfect for the revolt.

If the settler travels two turns it may be better to first whip the lubricated worker and then revolt on T35. Or alternatively depending on the copper location and/or other resources it may be preferred to do another quick settler. In that case put one turn's production into the settler and (assuming the first worker chopped instead of ivory) you'll be able to 4->2 whip the settler on T36.

That's it from me for now, will check in at the end of the week to see about leader traits but thinking that FIN would be excellent and the other one is flexible.

finally ran everything to double-check, it looks like if we work max growth every turn from t12 - t17, we will actually be size 2 at the start of t18, i guess because we get to use the wheat food on the same turn the farm finishes instead of the turn after:



so i don't think we have the ability to put a turn into the worker in this range as suggested here without slowing growth

mining before animal husbandry looks fine even with the most cow-optimized start, since there is no way it's correct to improve the cow first if wheat first gets us to size 2 with exactly to the penny the required amount of food on t18 and we do indeed have the time to research both techs before the worker needs to get there. and continuing mining does leave us the option of switching to a delay-AH plan if that looks better in the coming days

after the first scout finishes though, things look like this



which is a bit awkward if we want to start the settler immediately at size 3 as we would have to come off the cow onto the ivory for a turn to get the second unit done too. and if we do that we are then one food short of growing on t22...



ok, so that seems clearly wrong - surely we want to grow to size 2 asap (turn 22) but i believe there is no way to do that which also gets the scout on time. so either we

- start the settler at size 2 (?)
- spend a turn at 3 without starting the settler (which means we will bank roughly 6 surplus food towards growth while the settler is under construction)
- build a third unit and wait for size 4, as you did here (but this seems to slow down the second city too much, and it wastes commerce as it seems to require working a 2f/1h forest for some number of turns at size 3 and forests don't get the bonus commerce from the river unlike the ivory)

the third plan doesn't line up unit completion with growth either, if we want to grow to size 4 with no excess food we would have quite a few leftover hammers after the third unit completes with nowhere to put them



out of time for now, gotta run to the doctor's, more analysis to come eventually

greenshot

this is phenomenal and very time- and labor-saving, thank you <33

[ljubljana]

re the broad chorus of voices saying to not farm the plains ivory: yeahh i'm gonna defer to your wisdom on this, unless as you say a very compelling micro plan arises that requires this

re unit builds: i am leaning towards at least one or two warriors instead of scouts, since as an AGG civ it would be nice to be able to menace any opposing scouts we run into and maybe block them from scouting our land. it seems like in this game it sometimes happens that if open borders are denied our opponents might go long periods of time without knowing what our interior looks like, which would be great for us to maintain if possible. if so we would want to strategically position our warriors on flatground (so not visible from 2t away unless from a hill) adjacent to hills/forest (so a scout may be tempted to park there at EOT) to maximize the odds of a snipe.

re scouting directions: i think my priorities are 1: defog the full first ring and a bit beyond that before the settler comes out so we know where to send them and 2: given that, scout as deeply towards opponents as possible to maximize the amount of tiles we get to scout and opponents we get to meet before being cut off by closed borders. also worth noting is that the borders of our capital will expand quickly and defog some of the tiles, so i should mentally be thinking of the tiles at distance 3 from the capital as "already explored" when planning our moves

[ljubljana]

re fast settler plans, so we COULD start the settler immediately after the first unit build, one turn after we get to size 2. since the scout is 1t away after growth (actually it's one HAMMER away after growth) we would start it with quite a bit of overflow if we swap off the cow the turn it completes:



then as aetryn mentioned, we could either improve the cow OR delay AH and try to chop out the settler. here is the timing with the former approach:



as you can see we didn't actually need the overflow from the scout to finish the settler on t28, so we'd have 3 food more than this in the actual game. the worker has 2t left on the camp so we wouldn't have more improved tiles than citizens for very long.

here is the timing with mining-BW open:



chopping only speeds up the settler by one turn, although getting rid of the forest 1N of the city could speed up the second city founding as well if we find quality land up there. or, we could chop a different forest in the direction of our second city (cow?) to save another turn that way. meanwhile we are delaying working the cow (and a third improved tile generally) by a lot... however, maybe we chop out a second worker immediately after this to alleviate the impact of that and allow us to start improving tiles at both cities right away

i do not think there is a way to speed the settler any faster than turn 26. the issue is that working max food gives us exactly enough hammers to grow to size 2 and we can't start the settler before we grow, so the turn after we get to size 2, the options are 1) work the wheat and put food into the food box or 2) don't work the wheat and starve if we work more than 4h worth of tiles. so even though the settle build takes place with some food in the food box, i don't think there's any way to turn that food into the 2 hammers we would need to speed the settler by a turn

i think i'm going to have to sim these options further out to really figure out which is best...

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

https://asana.com/resources/analysis-paralysis

[ljubljana]

Turn 2 - Zululand



On the theory that we can consider as "already scouted" any tile that is within one tile of our expanded borders (or within 2 if the border will expand onto a hill in most cases) it looks like, if everything out of vision is flatground, E-NE would actually defog the most tiles with 4 (N-NE is too close to the hill NW of the scout which will explore some of the tiles in range of this move when the border expands). If there is a hill within a 2 tile range of the scout that would change this, but i believe that in all cases we would be able to see it from the scout's current position if that were true (right?). So I move east with the first scout move:



Interesting, now we have a choice. NE does still reveal more tiles not in range of the expanded borders (3) then E or SE (2), but the land up there looks pretty bad and there's a chance that that hill would cut us off from being able to double-move south next turn as we would like to. But the extra tiles we would defog with the NE move are in first-ring range (so i think mandatory to defog pre-settler) and once we turn south with the scout it's unlikely we'll want to send someone back up this way with that annoying hilly/foresty region north of our capital cutting off movement to or from the west. 

So I decide that for now we want to move this scout roughly around the perimeter of the intersection of ({first ring tiles} U {eastern region that we can efficiently scout}). Ideally we at least want it to be possible to defog both the eastern and western flatground region (which look from this distance to be pretty thoroughly divided with a band of 2-movement tiles) with just 2 scouts since some of our candidate build orders don't have us building more than this by the time we need to settle, and going around this perimeter seems like the way to do that. That counsels in favor of a NE second move...



and we are majorly rewarded with a hill 2NW that would reveal a ton of tiles, and an already acceptable-looking (if dry) second city with capital cows + first-ring dry wheat + plains hill plant SE of the scout's position. our original plan of E-SE would have missed this wheat by exactly one tile in multiple directions

https://asana.com/resources/analysis-paralysis

what who what me no what never