[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

I'm going to do a very brief write-up of players in this game, mostly because there's nothing else to do right now while waiting for picks to resolve. I'll revisit this a little bit once leaders have been assigned.

Tier Lists seem to be the trendy thing to do as of late, so I'll go ahead and do that for the opponents in this game. This is one of the tightest spreads of talent I've seen around here in that there's no obvious favorite here, and there's no obviously weak player here either. No sharks, no greens, just competence. So I'll split these into three tiers, but I think the gap between the tiers is pretty small.

Tier 1 - Veteran Favorites

I'm pretty confident that one of these two will be contending for the win deep into this game. Not certain as to which it will be.

Pindicator - Easily the player here whose game I know the best. I expect his early micro to be very strong which is normal for him. His weakness is probably the occasional big-picture glitch (particularly getting dragged into the wrong war or the right war at the wrong time), but mackoti is apparently ded-lurking him, and that'll be a very large boost in that area. I think he's the favorite, but in this field that's still only good for roughly 30% chance of winning. If he wins, it'll be because he picked a good leader, executed a near-perfect opening, and avoids any big mistakes. If he loses, it'll be because he finds himself in an ill-advised war that he doesn't de-escalate himself out of before it's too late.

Gaspar & NobleHelium - Noble may be called a ded-lurker, but I expect that they'll be more like 50/50 or 60/40 teammates like normal, so I'll lump them in together. These two typically execute very well, but they're less consistent on picking the right plans to actually execute. They've also got a knack for joining games loaded with good players which means their results probably under-sell their play level. If they win, it'll be because they both stayed focused and played to their ceiling which is very high. If they lose, it'll be because they miss the forest for the trees.

Tier 2 - High-Variance Players

I think the odds of the winner or last place player (or both!) coming from this group is equally high.

Boldly Going Nowhere - His reputation took a sharp step up after playing a very good (and dramatic) PB18. I took a break from Civ when that game got going so I've only caught bits and pieces of his game there, but he certainly could have won that game in a world where a couple things went differently. That said, there were a few self-sabotaging choices he made, and I think for his own sanity he won't ever devote that type of insane attention to a game again. So it's really unclear what to expect here. If he wins, it'll be because he played as well as he did in 18 without any glaring blowups. If he loses, it'll be because he's playing this more casually.

Really Evil Muffin - No idea where to rank this guy. Following him in 27, I can't figure out how good he is. He's obviously very capable at warfare and skilled at being opportunistic, but I don't have a great feel yet for how much of that was good fortune and how much of that was just outplaying much of a large field. This is also his 3rd ongoing game here, so his attention may be divided (especially because he's in the running to win the biggest game). If he wins, it'll be because he's as good as his position in PB27 says he is. If he loses, it'll be because it's his third concurrent game and he plays it like it's his third concurrent game.

Tier 3 - Steady Dark Horses

I'm ranking them lowest, but I don't think they'll look out of place at all in this game. I also would not be surprised if they beat some people higher up the list, but I don't expect either of them to win.

Dreylin - One of the original guys here at the time when RB shifted to MP games - he was in both PBEM1 and PB1 if memory serves. He was gone for awhile, but he's returned and played well. He's a good player, but this is also his third concurrent game. If he wins, it'll be because he picked a great leader, and a couple of the better players stumbled. If he loses, it'll be because he just doesn't have the time to devote to this.

Cheater Hater + Donovan Zoi - So I don't know Cheater Hater very well at all, but a brief glance suggests that he's probably the weakest player in this game. Consensus seems to be that he's been quickly improving, though. He's near the bottom of the pack in PB27 right now (though still alive), but I know nothing about the circumstances that got him there. If he wins, it'll be because this game is his coming out party. If he loses, it'll be because he joined a veterans game.


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I won't precisely rank myself here. I'll let one of the other players do that. My pragmatic approach to handling other players often keeps me in contention by avoiding unprofitable conflicts, but it sometimes prevents me from having the ruthlessness required to convert a good position into a winning one. I think I currently hold the RB record for most draw or second place finishes without an outright solo win, though I've also never joined a game where I was the favorite to win on T0. That all probably puts me in roughly the high end of the middle tier or low end of the top one, depending on how generous you're feeling.

So much for "very brief." It really was the goal when I started.

[Sullla]

I wouldn't want to try ranking players. I stopped reading most of the Civ4 MP games when most of the community started playing mods of various types, which never held any interest for me. It seems like there are a lot of talented people in this game, which should make things fun.

I will say that I don't think it's a good idea to try playing this setup alongside two or three other Pitboss/PBEM ventures. If anyone's had a chance to try downloading the sandbox file and play a few turns, you'll see how quickly things get moving in an Industrial start. This is not like your standard Ancient opening where nothing much happens for the first month or two of gameplay. We have a ton of decisions to make immediately, starting with the civics swaps on Turn 0 and where to plant the initial three (THREE!) settlers, and it only ramps up from there. We're also venturing into uncharted territory here when compared to past community games, which means fewer/no past games to use as guides. A good opening is going to require some real work at simming different options. I'm looking forward to running ideas past scooter and seeing what we can come up with. I don't think anyone's ever quite run a free-for-all Pitboss Industrial game before - new territory to explore, woohoo!

But yeah, I think a lot can go wrong in a real hurry if you aren't paying attention. This is not the game to be playing casually between several other projects.

[scooter]

Since we have literally nothing else to do right now, here's one thing worth thinking about. Where do we want to send the explorers off the start? Sending one northwest up to the sheep/iron/wheat to verify that dot's in the correct spot seems like a no-brainer, but the thing we don't know is if it's worth trying to go east to see if the land opens up by the iron (kinda looks like it), or if we can find a better food resource next to the deer to the west. Leaning towards checking out the iron for starters. Any thoughts on this? Coast tiles are junk since Moai isn't buildable, and that's my main hesitation with going down that way. Seems more likely we'll find a strong city north/west.

All in all, I'd rather slightly delay settling the third city than settle the wrong one. That may be an argument in favor of checking both irons, and the northwest explorer can just circle down near deer in a couple turns.

There's some tile bleeding next to the deer, and it kind of looks like stone if you zoom way in. Though now that I think about it - we probably wouldn't use it until Oxford.

[Sullla]

Posting from my cell so I'll have to make this brief. I'm fine with 1 scout SE and 1 scout NW. But I think both settlers go west. I like the spot west of the pigs where you put the city in the sandbox. It's a good spot, 3 resources, can share pigs, forms a nice core.

But we also need it there to get pigs in borders on Turn 2. Otherwise it takes too long for capital to pop borders. Build Culture bug is prohibited, right? That would make things easier...

Long story short: turns are really valuable in late era starts. I don't like wasting them wandering around hoping to find good stuff. Why not plant immediately with 3 good spots and infrastructure the daylights out of them?

[Sullla]

Ah, so much nicer to be typing on an actual keyboard. So here's what I've thought on this matter since the last post earlier today. I still like that spot between the pigs and the deer for one of the cities, the same place we were putting it in the sandbox simulation. Both the capital and that city will have one strong native food resource (the 4/1 plains deer and the 5/0 crabs tile - remember, we get free lighthouses on this start so the crabs are quite good). Then they also have a 6 food pigs tile to pass back and forth between them, and we've seen from past games how powerful that can be at getting cities off to a quick start. Getting the pigs into our border on Turn 2 instead of Turn 5 does make a difference as well - everything snowballs in this game. In my informal sandbox, I was getting the pigs pastured before they were even in the capital's expanded borders. We also have the ability to share some grassland tiles with the capital and the other starting city, great for developing cottages, and I imagine we'll want at least some of them in our core, if not in our later cities. Obviously this all goes out the window if we see another juicy spot nearby, but I've thought about this and I like that spot a lot more than the corn/iron spot, and more than the idea of wandering randomly for a few turns hoping to find something good in the fog.

Speaking of wandering, I'm thinking something slightly different about moving the scouts. Rather than send one SE and one NW, what if we send them both to the west: one to investigate the city spot to the north in the sheep/wheat/iron region, and one to the south to investigate the pigs/deer region? I feel like having info on those two immediate regions is more important than scouting to the southeast in a water-heavy (and likely weaker) area. The explorers could split up from there and keep defogging in an outwardly spiraling pattern. I also like the idea of building an early explorer out of the capital to head off in that SE direction, and this map should be big enough that 3 explorers will likely be a good investment. I see a way to get one out quickly while we're growing between the worker builds. Worth thinking about, at the very least.

[scooter]

I like the spot between the pig/deer too, but I'm still kind of hoping we luck into another resource in the fog to help that site's longterm potential. The point about it bringing the pig online quicker is a good one, though, and it's probably a clincher short of finding something amazing in the fog. It's all about servicing the Bureaucap here early on. Either way, it'll take 2T for the settler to move onto that tile and a 3rd to settle, so that allows the pair of explorers to cover 6 tiles apiece in the meantime. So that's more than enough time to verify that we're not missing out on something better.

Yeah I think I agree with your thought process on Explorers. Particularly because I noticed in testing that there were a lot of turns where all I cared about was growing and didn't have a lot to infrastructure to build that seemed pressing. I think there'll be plenty of spare hammers during a growth phase to afford an extra Explorer. Getting the lay of the land will be pretty crucial here.

As an aside, here's something I don't know. Is circumnavigation available on Industrial starts? I'm guessing no... but if it is, it's surely worth pursuing. Our explorers may well get ambushed by barbarian rifles though. That would be a new one for me.

Cottages is another thing you mentioned that I've given some thought to. I don't think we want to build them at all early, because early growth curve is still king here, and we aren't heavily happy constrained like ancient games. What I don't know is if it'll be worth it to find a spot to be our science center and invest in getting some towns before the game is over to help tech through the space techs if we get that far. Lots of time to think about this, though. I'd really prefer it if a neighbor would just build some and we could just capture them.

[Sullla]

Here's my question about cottages, scooter: if we don't build them, what else are we building for tile improvements? I thought we would want at least some in the core to fund early research. Communism is a long way away, and workshops are pretty meh without States Property (1/3 = grassland hill and all that).

Do we want to try to put down watermills on river tiles? I think they are 2/2/2 tiles at game'so start, is that right (?) They are slow to build though, 7 worker turns, so we have to remember that too.

[scooter]

Here's my question about cottages, scooter: if we don't build them, what else are we building for tile improvements? I thought we would want at least some in the core to fund early research. Communism is a long way away, and workshops are pretty meh without States Property (1/3 = grassland hill and all that).

Do we want to try to put down watermills on river tiles? I think they are 2/2/2 tiles at game'so start, is that right (?) They are slow to build though, 7 worker turns, so we have to remember that too.

The thing with cottages is that they're going to take an eternity to catch up to Representation scientists if tech output is what we're concerned about. Those are 6 raw beakers immediately (+GPP), and it'll take probably half the game for 1 cottage to match 1 scientist. The upside of going all-in on farms and workshops (and probably some watermills, yeah) is we've got immense flexibility between going full hammer mode and reasonably good teching. Take PB6 for example - your team had better commerce output than oledavy's team, but they didn't fall too far behind you because at any time they could just run scientists and build wealth/research and basically match you, and that game started a full era sooner. The extreme flexibility of hammer economy in this era is pretty great, especially if you don't have the luxury of 200T of cottage development giving you a nice village/town core. The later the starting era is, the more cottages are essentially nerfed. Also, cottage civs get their early production by whipping and just growing on cottages, but I don't think we'll be doing tons of whipping here with a generous happy cap and Serfdom/Caste.

So my early thought is basically farms + workshops. I think the bureaucap is the main thing that's unusual here. Normally it's best to leverage that into commerce, but I think with this start, turning it into a production pump ASAP will be huge and allow us to afford some settlers and claim some land. Not to mention the possibility that we'll probably need it to get some boats out. The only real way we can afford 330h early on is with a workshopped capital. A couple farms will let us grow it large, and workshops will let us convert that pop into a ridiculous production pump that will only get better as we knock off the first 3 techs.

We won't fall behind early in tech because Rep scientists (+bulbing with great people that result from it) will outperform any neighbors who decide to build lots of cottages anyway, and by the time their cottages catch up, we just take their land with our significantly better production base.

Those two grassland river tiles for example are 1/3/1 initially (uninspiring but still solid), but we're 3 techs and a revolt away from them being 2/5/1 (Caste, State Property, Levee), and all 3 of those techs are possible to partial-bulb. Even if we built cottages, I think we might just want to pave them over at that point. I'd guess we'd remain in Serfdom until our 3-4 core cities are very developed, at which point the scales would tip towards Caste pretty quickly. I don't think there's much room for spending time in Emancipation given how strong the Serfdom/Caste/Slavery trio of options are, and I think that's the final nail in the coffin for early cottages.

Ok there's my logic. Please do poke holes in it.

[scooter]

There is a scenario I can envision where cottages make a lot of sense. If nearby we can find a juicy cottage cheese riverbed, I could see devoting one city to quietly sitting there and growing cottages. Then near the end-game we could move palace there and let it help us burn through the expensive late-game techs along with a couple golden ages.

I could definitely see that making sense, but I fear we'll really fall behind on expansion if we do it with our capital.

[Sullla]

No poking holes here, you make a very convincing case in that post. Even if you're wrong, I still want to try it to see what happens.

I actually think beakers will come less from Representation scientists and more from Build Research. With the amount of production we'll be getting, I expect we'll use it a lot. But yeah, some use of Rep scientists, some building of research, some commerce from resources and trade routes and water/river tiles - it makes sense to me. Agree that it'should hard to justify 50 turns of working non-Fin cottages when we can immediately grab 2/4 and 1/5 tiles instead.