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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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Civilization V Solo Reports
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Just beautiful
My singleplayer balance mod of BTS: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/3u6g4b2nfa74qhm...%20mod.odt?
I think it's faster than anything in the CFC HOF above Settler (lowest) difficulty level. That one lets you pop settlers from ruins, so it's a whole different game in terms of acceleration, and there's some results in the 140s.
City-states (maritime and mercantile) are quite valuable in terms of time-to-launch, could be as much as 10 turns over having none of them. AIs are not so important, you gain a few turns by a worker steal or two and ideally a ceded city for peace, but beyond that they're just a little money for your resources, except on Deity where you can steal a lot of techs. I don't really know how much Petra gains; I did miss it one or twice in earlier games but there's way too many variables to isolate it and I have no reason to want to try. 
This is the first time you've used this strategy; is there no way to refine it? I'd think that would be somehow possible, but if your result was truly dependent on that much luck, maybe not.
This was the refinement, of everything else I've done. I've been flipping around the civs and social policy paths and making those the headline feature of each report, but everything besides that has gotten nailed down to some fairly tight tracks.
I could see a number of small improvements to this game: more desert could get to a 4th faith scientist (I came only a few hundred faith short), could have enhanced the religion earlier instead of buying pagodas for a little while (earlier Religious Community to build aqueducts), could attack a second AI early for a second worker steal and ceded city, could fix the one lost turn at endgame with tighter timing on the bulbing, maybe one more city could shave a turn or two, or of course El Dorado. None of that makes me want to play a whole game over again to do it. I can't see any chunks of 5+ turns left to be gained. The luck with ruins and city-state camps was probably about 95th percentile, I'd estimate. Remember that each report you see is the tip of a pyramid. It goes something like 100 map rerolls, of which 10 have enough desert to try starting, of which 2 give enough ruins and reachable luxury resources, of which 1 gets all of the important missable things like Desert Folklore, Pyramids, Petra, Jesuit Education. I'm already operating in the top 1% percentile, and this is the first time I really absolutely can't see any significant improvements to make.
Bravo, expertly done!
 I've been reading along with the various optimization plans for the last few months (years?) and this does seem to be the magnum opus. As far as I'm concerned, T-Hawk's reports are the best thing to be produced by Civ5.
(May 4th, 2017, 17:53)Sullla Wrote: Bravo, expertly done! Oh by a country mile.
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
(May 4th, 2017, 09:44)T-hawk Wrote: This was the refinement, of everything else I've done. I've been flipping around the civs and social policy paths and making those the headline feature of each report, but everything besides that has gotten nailed down to some fairly tight tracks. I might be thinking of "official" speedruns too much, because I'm still seriously thinking of doing one (for an RPG, not Civ), and what's stopped me from actually doing it is that top 1% isn't really good enough. It doesn't really take that long to reroll a map 100 times if you're not going to play more than ~30 turns the vast majority of the time. What I wanted to know is if there's enough to be gained from going from 1% to 0.1%. Another way to improve would be to get a better slate of city-states. You've gamed the system to get a top ~1% collection of city-states, but if you write a script to look at which city-states you have after rolling a completely fresh start, you could reroll until you get top ~0.1% for a few more maritime or cultured city-states (and then base rerolls on that). It doesn't sound like that will gain you much though -- maybe a couple turns at most.  (May 4th, 2017, 18:19)Dark Savant Wrote: I might be thinking of "official" speedruns too much, because I'm still seriously thinking of doing one (for an RPG, not Civ), and what's stopped me from actually doing it is that top 1% isn't really good enough. ... What I wanted to know is if there's enough to be gained from going from 1% to 0.1%. "Good enough" is subjective. Enough to be gained for what purpose? I'm driven by exploration, not by performance. I don't care if anyone recognizes me as the top of anything. I do it for my own satisfaction. I want to learn and prove what the best strategies are. I don't care about actually recording the best records, I care about discovering how to do so. I'm engaged as long as I'm trying paths that have something new to experience. I seek 99% because I feel that's the threshold from where I can conclusively see through to 100%. I can leave off the execution of that last 1% as an unimportant implementation detail. A game is engaging as long as I'm making and trying out interesting choices. I've finally come to where I can't think of any more to make. I did as many games as I did because I kept thinking of something new that I wanted to see play out. Along the way, certain recurring tactics got optimized, like city count, tech and build order, bulb timings, the various tricks like starvation settlers. But the big picture was never about those, tactical optimization was merely along for the ride. If I'm sure I know I'm capable to do something, I don't have a compulsion to actually do it. So yes, what I'm doing is not the same as what you find in a more "official" speedrun context. I can see where it would look like that, but now I've disambiguated here. |
