The Dark arts - C&D Master Thread

[kjn]

An addendum to the demos from the beginning of turn 21, after Apolyton and CivPlayers ended turn:

Apolyton has finished camping their deer, and get 16F now. They're working 2F2H1C, 6F, 5F1H, 3F right now. Not sure what the last 3F might be - maybe they have a grass cow instead of a plains cow?

This also tells us that Apolyton has no 1C-tiles among their bonus tiles. We are ahead 1.2 in the top cities screen since we settled the turn before Apolyton, but if they could pick up an extra 1C they'd be ahead by 1.8.

Apolyton should research AH T22. I had expected WPC to research AH this turn, but maybe they've been research swapping and put in a turn or two in another tech.

Every team but one is researching a discounted tech now. The last team picks up an extra 1C from somewhere. I think it's the Germans, but I'm not sure.

[novice]

Apolyton has finished camping their deer, and get 16F now. They're working 2F2H1C, 6F, 5F1H, 3F right now. Not sure what the last 3F might be - maybe they have a grass cow instead of a plains cow?

A banana?

[kjn]

[regoarrarr]

Apolyton has finished camping their deer, and get 16F now. They're working 2F2H1C, 6F, 5F1H, 3F right now. Not sure what the last 3F might be - maybe they have a grass cow instead of a plains cow?

How sure are you that they arent working any commerce tiles? The 6F tile would have to be non-river grassland pigs right? If either of those first 2 were corn or wheat, they'd have to be irrigated to get those yields, which would make them also give 1c

[NobleHelium]

Our corn is irrigated but still only 6F. It's next to a lake.

[kjn]

The corn can be lakeside, just as ours.

The thing here is the equation for top cities:

city-score = pop * (culture / 5 + F + H + C)

We have 2 more culture than Apolycapital, and thus appear above them in the top cities screen (we lead with 1.2 or 1, depending on rounding). Reducing our output by one (eg by working a plains hill instead of a forested plains hill) lowers our score by 3, and makes them appear above us.

Thus, we know that Apolycapital can't produce more F+H+C than Adventure One. We already know they have 16F total, a 2H-city centre tile, and a 5F1H tile. That leaves a 3F tile, and no bonus commerce.

Heck, it might be possible to use this method to further tie down specific demo values for each capital right now.

[regoarrarr]

Ah nice. Using the Top 5 cities screen is a neat trick I have never used before. And thanks for the tip on the lakeside corn. So it does seem like it's likely they have a similar setup to us - lakeside corn and forested grass deer.

My vote would be for a grass cow rather than a banana

[kjn]

It might be fractions are dropped in the final city-score value (maybe founding order or play order acts as tie-breaker), since we appear above CapitalFr with a city-score of 85.2, and my upper bound for their capital is 85.6 and my lower bound is 83.6 (corresponding to banana city tlle, camped deer and riverside/lakeside farmed corn). I have a suspicion that they have a riverside corn, but we'll have to check later on, since their city-score grows with 1.6 every turn while ours grows with 1.2.

And I can't get AO low enough in city-score to reach the bottom two :D

(Having three citizens, for 3F 5H 9C gives 76 in score, but the highest they can reach is 68.)

[regoarrarr]

Oh right - i forgot that there is a banana tile at our start (since we settled on it)

Shows how much I am paying attention

[kjn]

Ah nice. Using the Top 5 cities screen is a neat trick I have never used before. And thanks for the tip on the lakeside corn. So it does seem like it's likely they have a similar setup to us - lakeside corn and forested grass deer.

I've never seen the top cities screen used this way ever, and I haven't seen the equation documented either apart from a code snippet. I had to dig into the Python files to really find the values.

So I think I'm the first one to use the top cities screen this way - or at least the first to document it.