[SPOILERS] Team Unpronounceable Unicode Symbol: True Grit

[teleh]

Thanks! Re the scout, guess it depends most on where you want him to travel ultimately - which you've covered well.

Good show :flourish:

[Ceiliazul]

Wow is all that land is safe backlines, that's pretty exciting! But somehow I doubt it... how many land tiles are there total? (mouse over your score for land count)

[Sisu]

2077. I did the math earlier in the thread, that's about seven tiles in each direction per player (assuming no major uncharted islands). If memory serves, my scout is currently about 9 tiles south of my starting position; my best guess is that I'm competing with suttree for this land, given where we originally met him. I don't intend to Pink Dot for the south - maybe if there were a wet corn/floodplains/gold site, but nothing so spectacular has shown up. So now I just want to follow the coastline up in the hopes of locating some seafood in "my" land, then finally start exploring the jungled north before human barbs show up and kill off the Merovech Patrol.

[Sisu]

T32 ahoy:




Looks like my fog-reading was right. Next turn 98, then... not sure. Moving in and out of those forests is going to cost the scout a lot of time both ways without Woody II. Hard to say what's best.




Finally grew and finished our warrior, named after the second lurker post in the thread... which was also Merovech :P. Putting a turn of production into a second warrior and a turn of growth in the bank before we get chops coming in again next turn for our settler. BXB's scout is passing by our west; I'm guessing they have a better view of our south than we do, looping around our capital as they did, and now heading back north. Maybe the same bear that ate suttree's scout will get theirs?

Demos for the last two turns. Still dead last in food (owing in part to having only one "real" food resource at our start), but competitive on production. We now have graphs on suttree, so switching spending to Oxy. Not much to be learned from the graphs this early, though, I don't think.

[Ceiliazul]

Scouting:
Merovich should scout the full shoreline, because you aren't likely to be coming back this way until you're escorting a settler.

Micro plan:
there's some slop in it (the corn could have been done 1t earlier by putting off the unworked mine.) but it's good. I especially like the revolt to slavery while the settler is walking AND while the workers pasture the cow. Nicely done. Have you tried farming the wine? It becomes a 2/1/3 tile, and may cut full turns off your meditation run.

Dots: They're hard. I think Pink is locked in. After that, what about this?



After Pink, Blue Yellow dot brings 3 food specials into the empire. I really don't think the capital can give up corn, like, ever. This gives that city clam instead of sharing corn. All depends on scouting, if seafood is in range of the little spit in that area, yellow will orphan the food.

Keep up the good work and good reporting. Crop will improve with cow, no sweat.

[Ceiliazul]

By Blue I mean yellow, obv. Blue is more a support city, and will grow when Pink doesn't need corn.

[Sisu]

Thanks, Ceil. A lot of that hadn't occurred to me even to consider at all; I guess that's what a dedlurker is for!

Luckily by the time we have to make the next dotmapping decisions, the Patrol should have scouted our coastline. My issue with the proposed dots is that none of them can work food until t50, and I'm going to want my next city in the 40s. The capital will definitely have to work corn most of the time, but can afford to give it up to the eastern PH city if working a foodhammer item or happycapped, and it's not like that site is handicapped by lack of corn (first ring grass cows! awesome tile!). I agree with you that it really depends on the seafood revealed (or lack thereof).

Thanks for the idea to farm the wines, though. I'm definitely going to try that; farmed plains wines are basically a river grass cottage with bonus hammer, which is totally a worthwhile tile. I think that's a great fourth tile to work in the capital when I'm trying to grow, before I get real river cottages.

Just need to find a chance to revise the micro plan factoring in Wheel/Pottery first instead of a run for Buddhism... hopefully can get to it tomorrow night.

EDIT: To clarify, I like the BFC for the proposed yellow dot. It'd be a solid place to build Colossus after slinging MC, for instance. I am just leery about its weakness until I have cows/banana farm in play.

[Sisu]

T33:

Our first Settler comes out at EoT (thank you, my faithful lumberjacks) and will found on t36 (overflow and next turn's chop going into a fourth Worker). I'm expecting a lot of city settlements coming in the next few turns; that, or everyone is trying to grab Stonehenge! One consequence of that will be that as soon as there are 15 cities total, animal barbs will start dying and be replaced by humans, so the age of the Scout is coming to a close.

Speaking of which...

Anyway, Oxy is creeping around to our northeast, but looks to be ready to vanish into the jungle belt. Bye! May the panthers grow fat on your flesh :P.

It appears "Lion Evader" used up all his luck on lions and had none left over for other members of genus Panthera .

Down in the southeast:




Seafood! Albeit far away from my capital, and second ring to the mainland - most likely I'll try to settle what appears to be that tiny island, for first-ring food and IC trade routes, but that will have to wait for Sailing, which is a long way away on my current tech path.

I know the tech bar says we're getting AH in three, but next turn we're working wines instead of corn (loss of three fh for three commerce) to pull it in at EOT 34.




Demos. It amazes me that even given our low-food chop-all-the-forests-instead-of-improving-tiles start, we're beating someone on the Food stat. We were tied for last last turn; maybe someone is doing the same sort of tile micro I just described? It'll certainly make us look pathetic on Food for a turn.

[pindicator]

Oldavy's 38/PB6 (Gandhi), Pindicator's PB6 was sublime Phi goodness too.

Mine was in PB7, and not a team game. Davy is a good person to read -- try his pbem17 too -- because he does a great job explaining what he's thinking for strategy. And he's entertaining

Did you really go 3 workers before a settler? Wow, I don't think I've seen that done before

[Sisu]

Mine was in PB7, and not a team game. Davy is a good person to read -- try his pbem17 too -- because he does a great job explaining what he's thinking for strategy. And he's entertaining

Did you really go 3 workers before a settler? Wow, I don't think I've seen that done before

Thanks! I've been really enjoying your exploits over in PB8 as well.

Yeah, I did. I can't take full credit; Ceil suggested Warrior-3x Worker-Settler, then I modified it to Worker x3-Warrior-Settler. The issue was that literally every tile in my BFC was either forested or a resource that I lacked techs for. Most everyone else seemed to have started on the coast, so they could workboat while researching worker techs (or, vice versa, started with worker techs and could improve tiles while researching fishing), but that wasn't an option for me. My only relevant starting tech was Mining, as I lacked Hunting resources. It seemed to me from my early simming that my best bet was to double down on my lumber-heavy start and get out a team of workers while I researched techs to actually improve the resources, who would then be able to get my future cities up and running that much faster.

Was this my best possible option? Probably not. I'm sure if one of RB's vets had this start, they'd have done it better (and for all I know the lurker thread has discussion on how to do just that and will make me feel very silly postgame). I still think it was a "good" opening; not the best, not even fully optimized within itself (Ceil pointed out just a few posts ago how I could have gotten improved corn up a turn faster, which would have put me at 22 food and size 2 several turns earlier), but I hope to be competitive with my fellow newbies .

As for it never having been done before...


Time will tell.