[SPOILERS] Bismark of Sumeria (luddite + Atlas1998)

[luddite]

what do you mean, second in line? We're already two turns in to hunting, so we shouldn't abandon it now. And we don't start with mining, so we'll need to research that first. I was planning on teching hunting, mining, BW, then AH. Chop out the worker and settler of course. I'm not really a big fan of stone henge- it is 4 chops if you're industrious, but we could be getting an extra settler for that instead. And we don't really have a whole lot of forests, just 7 in the BFC, and two of those are on deer so we don't want to chop there.

[Atlas1998]

I meant research bw after mining in order to be able to get the chops in. I think your right, better to get those hammers on settlers than SH.

[luddite]

Ooh new turn is up. btw we still need a name for our civ.

[luddite]

I'm having second thoughts about the build order. The main problem I see is that we just don't have many forests. I've summarized here the results of three different starts. All begin with a worker and researching hunting.

warriors to grow to size 3, while researching AH: On turn 24 the 2nd worker finishes, and the city will have 3 food 14 hammers towards a warrior
2nd worker at size 2, then build a warrior while growing: it grows to size 3 on turn 24, 0 food 8 hammers in the city, but the warriors have time to build an extra road.
With either of these options, the settler will finish on turn 31, and bronze working will finish on turn 29.

mining and bronze working first: The 2nd worker finishes on turn 21. By chopping two forests, the settler will finish on turn 26. AH will finish on turn 31, and the pasture will be done probably turn 33.

So basically, getting mining and bronze working before hooking up the horses gets the settler 5 turns sooner. However, it does that by chopping two extra forests, and we've only got 5 forests in the BFC to chop. Getting AH first gets a 3rd improvement done 9 turns earlier. That pasture produces 3f/3h/1c, or an extra 1f/2h/1c per turn. For 9 turns of building workers and settlers, that's effectively an extra 27 hammers and 9 commerce.

If we had more forests than bronze working first would be better. However, we have so few forest that I think we really need to make the most of what we've got. Let's hook up the pasture first, and save a forest. The first settler will be delayed a bit, but I don't think there's any hurry there, and this way the 2nd and 3rd settler will come out faster.

edit: this is wrong, because the high tech costs screw up the build order

[luddite]

stonehenge is a great deal for Bismarck, though. Effectively 80 hammers, to expand borders faster, save 30 hammers per monument, and it gives an early prophet. With free monuments and cheap granaries you can expand like mad. Too bad there's 3 other industrious civs to fight for it.

[luddite]

Thar be whales here!



Hunting will finish this turn. Some thoughts on where to go from here:

By looking at the map info, we can see that there's 2435 land tiles, and it's based huge world size with cylindrical wrapping. Best guess so far is that, with all the water we've seen, it's a Lakes map script. Allocating the land tiles evenly between 10 players gives us 243.5 tiles each. More realistically, some of that land will be on island, or far away, or just bad terrain, so I'd guess there's about 120 land tiles in our immediate vicinity that we'll want to settle. That's about 10 cities, assuming some overlap.

Also, research is slow because of the huge- techs are about 50% more expensive than in a normal size Monarch game. Not a lot of green land either, which also slows down the tech rate. And not a whole lot of forests for chopping. I think this game will be a bit slow going in the early stages.

The only thing we DO have a lot of, to start off with, is hammers. We've got a 2-hammer city tile, which pretty soon will be working two 3-hammer tiles (plains cows and plains forest hill deer.). With the forest grassland deer, that's a total of 9 hammers.

I'm thinking about going for stonehenge. It's only 120 hammers, so it'll only take 10 turns to build while generating 8 (*1.5 = 13) hammers. Mysticism takes 9 turns to research, though.

The problem of course is that there's 3 other industrious civs to compete for that wonder. Presumably SleepyMoogle won't, since he's creative, but I'm worried especially Parkin, who's Ind/Cha for maximum synergy with stonehenge, and I know that he loves wonders. If we want to go for stonehenge, we might have to start researching mysticism right away. Being expansive gives us the fastest start, so I think we're guaranteed to win it if we go for it immediately. That would mess up the build order a bit, but I wouldn't mind having an extra warrior to scout the southwest direction. Also, so far we haven't seen any really good city sites- the best so far just have plains sheep and plains deer, for 4 food. Those aren't city sites that we need to rush for.

[luddite]

I did a sim test of going for mysticism/stonehenge. It will finish on turn 27, and then we'll get a settler out on turn 34 (skimping on workers because there's not much for them to do). The settler is only delayed by 3 turns, and that's fine.

[luddite]

Everyone's score increased, except for Sunrise/Rego, Gaspar/Nakor, and Warlord DR. Sunrise/Rego settled on turn 2, and the other two civs start with hunting, so I guess everyone else was researching hunting at the beginning-maybe we have identical starts after all? This is looking like quite a food-poor map.

I've begun researching mysticism, which commits us to getting stonehenge. I'm still not sure this is a good idea. What's really convincing me to go for it is how slow the tech pace is. It will take another 26 turns at this rate to get mining/bronze working! We can actually finish stonehenge faster than we can research bronze working. And without bronze working, we don't really need a lot of workers. I'd like to get animal husbandry first, but I'm almost sure that someone will beat us if we do that.

[luddite]

I did a few sims, and I think we'll be guaranteed stonehenge if we go for it now like I'm planning. It will finish on turn 27, with some overflow. Non-expansive industrious leaders can also get it on that turn, but- and please correct me if I'm wrong here- they'll have less overflow, which means we win the wonder race.

[Tatan]

but- and please correct me if I'm wrong here- they'll have less overflow, which means we win the wonder race.

I believe you are mistaken; in Pitboss a wonder finished by two players on the same turn is decided via coinflip, IIRC.