[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[Epoxy]

THE DAILY ROLL

TURN 204: THE JUNGLE DOE EFFECT

This was a traumatic turn for the worse as the Aztecs were confronted with their greatest challenge in over 200 years: a jungle deer. Situated in a rainforest that was unremarked before, this sheltered deer is now an obstacle for the highly tuned build queues and worker orders predicated on the absence of its terrain feature. Grumbling, the nation's quartermasters retreated to their drawing boards and plotted a new timeline to maximise the efficiency of the puzzled workers who are currently twiddling their thumbs. It was thus no surprise that the C&D quickly pointed out a distraction, and a magnificent one at that: Alhazard, Gandhi of the Ottomans, the de facto greatest person for teaching great people, has not yet nurtured a single prodigy to fruition yet! This news comes as the Khmer and Byzantines have seen their first great engineer offspring parented, fostered, and tended for to make their original groundbreaking scribbles. What has the Ottoman Empire done?

[Sullla]

Epoxy: The jungle deer really has been our biggest obstacle to date though!

Updated the sandbox and the micro plan to work around that jungle tile. Don't blame yourself scooter, the tile is visually almost identical to a non-jungle deer tile, and we know that deer do not naturally appear in jungles in Civ4. I was able to keep the micro plan almost identical, with Lurker Killer being slowed down somewhat compared to the non-jungled deer.

If anyone is wondering why the jungle was so damaging here, it's due to the extra worker turns required to remove it. 2 wasted worker turns moving onto the jungle, then 4 worker turns to clear it. When we're riding on the knife edge of improved tiles, we don't have that many turns to spare. We simply couldn't afford to waste that many extra worker turns compared to the old micro plan. Did you know that you can build a camp on a jungle tile without clearing the jungle? I was surprised to find this, and that kind of saved us here. Anyway, I "solved" the problem by having our workers camp the jungled deer and not clear the jungle itself. That slowed us down by only 2 worker turns instead of 6 worker turns, at the cost of having a 4 food jungle deer tile instead of a 5 food grassland deer tile. Not ideal, I know. However, the alternatives were significantly worse, messed up our whip timings and crippling the fifth city upcoming further west at the double rice. We can live with +7 food surplus instead of +8 surplus at Lurker Killer for the time being. The net effect is that we end up about 1 turn behind our old pace a dozen turns down the line.

Scooter, feel free to play the turn whenever, I'm done poking around in the micro for a while. Here's a stack of sandbox saves with the changes if anyone wants to take a look.

[Tohron]

Are you sure Alhazard has been running Mercantilism all 20 of those turns though?

Are you suggesting a Spiritual civ would choose to run Decentralization over Mercantilism?

Well, it seems less mechanically ignorant than running Citizens. (With Mercantilism, someone who didn't run the calculations might get put off by no foreign trade routes, but Citizens are obviously inferior to working any tile or running any specialist)

[scooter]

I was wondering if the camp could be built on top of jungle since it can over forest, but I was too grumpy at myself last night to try . Basically it looks bare on the map, but I usually do have tile yields on, so I should have caught it. Funny thing is I've been semi-worried an errant jungle growth would screw us up, but I didn't want to say it for fear of jinxing it. Surprise Jungle is somehow worse than RNG Jungle.


Tohron, they almost certainly chose to do weird things with citizen specialists to get a pure GPP pool for their first couple great people. I can at least sort of imagine a world where they talked themselves into that (for the Taj or more likely Liberalism race), even if I'm pretty sure it was a bad idea. But not taking Mercantilism for free would be a very special kind of crazy. I haven't checked their buildings to see what exactly they're trying, but it's been weird enough that I'm looking forward to being surprised.

[antisocialmunky]

@Epoxy, I'm tempted to start making fake newspaper headline pictures using this thing for your stuff. Don't really have time so I'm leaving this here for anyone who wants to do it.
https://www.presentationmagazine.com/edi...e-4520.htm

[scooter]

Turn 204-205



RMoG did settle their 3rd city last turn.



I'm thinking it's worthwhile to pull this Explorer back a notch now? We more or less know what's in the fog here, and I'd rather not stumble across a Mackoti longbow and get whacked. Any thoughts?



Plan here is to scout out the land bridge.



Settler is en route to red dot. Any especially strong feelings about what game is next? I've got a bunch of good candidates, but if there is a strong consensus on a specific game, I'm all ears.



Engineer is due in 11T, but he'll sit around for a bit unless for some insane reason Taj is available when we finish Nationalism. It won't be I assume.



Nicolae and REM did an interesting thing by using their Engineer to rush the AP. I was a little skeptical of the wonder, but if you can engineer-rush it and be Spiritual, I think the monk economy could be very good. Their strategy for this game is pretty clear.



Humming right along on schedule. We'll join Nicolae/REM at 4 cities next turn. Still a few more turns until we get graphs on Nicolae, at which point we should probably get Plako next.

[Epoxy]

@Epoxy, I'm tempted to start making fake newspaper headline pictures using this thing for your stuff. Don't really have time so I'm leaving this here for anyone who wants to do it.
https://www.presentationmagazine.com/edi...e-4520.htm

A picture of deer-esque Lorenz Attractor would be perfect

As for scouting out Mackoti, I'm of two minds. We could withdraw and estimate their development from their parity, but at some time it would be really ideal to have their map (speaking of which, I thought Mackoti would recognise it to their advantage to exchange maps with someone, but it appears they haven't done so yet, since they aren't on any of the maps we've traded). Since we're unlikely to be Mackoti's first target, it would be more prudent to keep track of what's happening in the centre and elsewhere, so I agree with your call, Scooter.

There's definitely some sort of island north/south of each of those jungle isthmuses, lands for the upcoming Yellow Dot and double banana city could explore. There might an opportunity to claim the island to our east should Mackoti attack RMoG in the far future.

I also like RMoG's nationality, 100% 'Mapmakers fault' :D

[Sullla]

Excellent reporting as always, thanks for making it easy to follow what's going on. Different thoughts about the current game state:

* I agree with pulling back the southern explorer, I think to the grassland hill right next to the sugar resource. That will give us vision on a wide area and let us make sure that RMOG aren't trying anything aggressive. Unlikely, but better to know. I concur that there's no reason to blunder into a longbow in mackoti territory and lose our explorer.

* Using the initial Great Engineer to rush the Apostolic Palace was a good move for Nicolae and REM. This is an era with a lot of religious-themed wonders: Apostolic Palace, Spiral Minaret, Sankore, Sistine, and Angkor Wat are all available. For a Spiritual team, juicing up their cheap temples makes a ton of sense. A Spiritual temple is pretty much the same cost as our Organized Sacrificial Altars, a ridiculously cheap building that carries a lot of value. I think at this point our best hope is that one of the other Spiritual teams denies Nicolae Spiral Minaret and/or Sankore. It probably doesn't make sense for us to target them as a non-Spiritual team, and we all have to hope they don't run the table on those wonders. At least Scientific Method isn't too far off, which will limit the effectiveness of those wonders on monasteries.

The Nicolae/REM team is playing the best of anyone right now. Asoka's Spiritual/Organized is a great pairing, they have the Khmer to kick in free food in every city with the Baray, they were the first to 4 cities, and now they've managed to land Apostolic Palace as well for +2 production on cheap temples. Very impressive stuff. We can only hope that they're running behind on worker labor for their 4 cities.

* Don't worry too much about the in-game score right now. We just triple whipped our capital, and here on Turn 205, we're missing the "land points" that everyone else picked up from settling their capital on Turn 185. We'll get a big score increase next turn since it will be 20 turns since we settled both cities, plus we'll also plant our fourth city. Hopefully the Demos will look pretty solid, that's more important than the "score points" right now.

* Other teams... plako and Alhazard still haven't settled a third city, while we are about to join Nicolae at four cities. Mackoti can't be too far away from a fourth city either. I think at this point our best hope is that plako uses his Great Engineer to rush Taj Mahal, while Alhazard does something with Great Scientists to take the Liberalism prize. We don't want either one of those prizes going to Nicolae or mackoti.

* One last request: since we have vision of RMOG's third city, we should watch to see how long it takes for them to connect the deer resources there. That will be a good proxy for the strength of their worker force. If we're lucky, it will take some time.

[scooter]

Played today's turn, but the report (and the following turn) will have to wait until tomorrow afternoon. Nothing shocking happened - I settled red dot, and we got Nicolae's graphs.

[Brian Shanahan]

Thinking about a future city name, we should be on the lookout for a Pink Dot location, seeing as the Apolyton demogame is really what got the MP going here on the site.