[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Old Harry]

Well I know for a fact that Whosit very rarely washes.

[Fintourist]

Man, I can understand that it is boring for plako if he needs to play the same leader as in PB8, but he had 2 re-rolls to select something non-similar to previous PBs and he gambled them away in the hope of getting something really good (understandably though). Now Catwalk also joined unsurprisingly as he seems to prefer settings as weird as they get.

If this now turns into a trading fest or popularity/beauty contest, where players with better understanding of RBMod try to improve their hand at the cost of weaker players, I won't be a huge fan of it.. Especially, because we need to redo our opponent analysis that is forming up nicely.. :P

Oh well, in the end anything goes as long as we don't get too many rule changes once the game starts.

[Old Harry]

A test:
Helium walks into a bar and orders a beer, the bartender says, "Sorry, we don't server noble gases here." He doesn't react.

[TheHumanHydra]

[Fintourist]

Went through events 1-100 that are still in the game. Here are couple things worth noticing:
- Keeping city ruins in your borders can give you money
- There are several culture giving events so that you never can be 100 % sure what kind of borders/cultural defense your opponent will have next turn
- Making a peace treaty can give you +10 food in all cities --> in theory constant spamming of 10-turn wars can be beneficial early (if this event happens to be selected into game by RNG and you don't care about trade routes and how your opponents thinks about it)
- We should road our strategic resurces even if we don't need them (e.g iron even though copper is enough or our jaguars won't need it)((duplicates don't matter))
- Binary research is even better than it normally is, some good events get even better when you have some money available and there are events that give you the % of remaining tech costs
- Some opponents (or we) may luck out and get Flanking I for all their mounted units, or shock promo for axes, or pinch for their muskets, etc.
- Unimproved forest tundra tiles trigger some good events (so maybe don't chop every 4th ring tundra forests)
- Connecting more than 4 happy resources obsoletes some very nice events (extra deer/silver/whale/wine)

[Fintourist]

I set the password: waves

And checked our start:

PIGS!!!



Thank you Commodore!

Assuming that the starts are balanced, the large amount of river tiles is kind of bad news, because it makes FIN useless, but hey, I would have paid anything to change our PB13 start to something like this. We just can't be now that much behind as we were there.

Re scout move I see two different approaches:
1. Move NW or W to see if settling on a hill would give us more resources
2. Check if there is something nice SE and maybe settle on the plains tile

More to come..

[Old Harry]

Some guesses at what is in the fog:

And the land tiles:

[Old Harry]

Possible scout moves:

N-SW reveals 12-14 new tiles (depending on hills), 6 would be in our settle-in-place BFC.


SE-SW reveals 10-20 new tiles, 5 in our SIP BFC, 9 in the BFC of a city on the plains tile.


NE-? doesn't reveal a huge amount of tiles that still allow us to settle for pigs, so I don't think we want to scout this way.


If we settle in place we'll get 8 forests, grass and grass hill pig, grass spices, 10 grass and 3 plains tiles, 3 grass hills and one plains hill. This sounds good for the early game when our capital is likely to be size 5-6 and we want to run 3-4 mines to build quick IMP settlers, then great for a bureau-cap later on, when we can cottage all the hills after we've got Oxford...

Moving SE to the plains tile we'd lose a grass hill, two plains, a plains hill and a worker turn improving the first pig. We'd probably gain similar tiles, but if there is a happy or a commerce resource this is going to be worth it.

So we could scout N-SW and if no extra resources are revealed move the settler SE in the hope of a happy:


Or we scout SE-SW and if no extra resources are revealed settle in place. I probably favour this plan, but it's close.

Interesting puzzle Commodore - thanks!

[TheHumanHydra]

I probably favour the second plan too, because I think it'd take a pretty compelling reason not to SIP.

[Fintourist]

Very nice illustrations!

Comments to PLAN A:

So we could scout N-SW and if no extra resources are revealed move the settler SE in the hope of a happy:

Moving SE to the plains tile we'd lose....

Actually settling SE to plains loses following tiles (+ that worker turn)(based on your fog gazing):
1 plains forest
1 grass forest
1 bare plains hill
1 bare grassland hill
3 bare grassland
1 bare plains (city tile)

What we get in return are 2 bare grassland tiles (difficult corner fog gaze + former city tile) and 6 totally unknown tiles. If there are resources or lots of grass, then it certainly can be worth it, but for non-resource tiles the above is actually pretty ok, especially 4 grass tiles to cottage out of 7 ain't bad. However, one does not need amazing luck to beat those 8 tiles, but of course 6 of them can also contain resources if our map maker has been generous regarding SIP.

---

So let's say there is something nice in the west that our scout finds with N-SW movement. I don't really want to settle off the river so we would settle W of the original spot.

What we lose this time:
4 bare grassland
1 grass forest hill
1 grass forest

pretty good.. what we gain if corner gazing has succeeded:
1 bare grassland
1 plains
1 plains forest
3 totally unknown tiles

So in this scenario we most definitely lose nice grassland tiles (+1 turn moving + 1 worker turn to get to pigs) so there really needs to be a nice resource that we even consider moving.

Consequently I also favor PLAN B with minor variations:

Or we scout SE-SW and if no extra resources are revealed settle in place. I probably favour this plan, but it's close.

So yes, I think scouting the SE area gives us more useful information and has better potential to improve our start. SE-SW reveals the highest absolute amount of tiles, but moving SE-SE reveals the most tiles of our potential BFC. (I think this is more relevant, because we are not going to settle on pigs or spices and on the very first turn we don't yet need to optimize our hut hunt). Moving SE-SE leaves only 2 potential BFC tiles in the fog (assuming they are not hills), so we would be in a position to make a very informed decision. If there is nothing amazing SIP gives us a change to get something nice on those 6 fogged tiles that are outside the BFC of plains plant.

Conclusion:

I currently vote for moving scout SE-SE and then evaluating whether we SIP or move SE & settle.


Additional info:

In the beginning I was worried that if we settle SE, losing that bare grassland hill from BFC would be bad, because our worker would not have anything useful to do after baconing around, but:

Mining (85)+BW (207) = 292 beakers
Tech pace when researching Mining at size 1: 11 beakers/turn
Tech pace when researching BW at size 1: 13 beakers/turn
(Mining EOT7 --> latest BW EOT23)

+

Our worker will be ready EOT14, 1st pig finished EOT19, 2nd pig finished EOT24

=

After improving our 2 pigs we can straight move to chopping and for example clear the tile W of starting tile and then mine it.

(btw, working our 2 pigs and grass mine gives nicely 5 base hammers that IMP turns into 8 hammers)