[SPOILERS] Magic Science and Mr. Cairo in Pitboss 40

[Magic Science]

So, for our start do you agree that this should be the plan for the first nineteen turns?
Turn 0: Settle in place, start building a worker and researching Mining while working a grassland forest hill.
Turn 5: Switch to working the grassland hill sheep.
Turn 8: Mining done. Start researching Bronze Working.
Turn 10: Worker One done. Worker One starts farming the corn. The capital works the corn tile and starts building a quechua.
Turn 14: Corn farm done.
Turn 15: Worker One starts farming the sugar.
Turn 16: The capital has grown, stops building the quechua and starts building Worker Two while working the corn and grassland hill sheep.
Turn 19: Sugar farm done.

Also, before the game starts, there are a few other topics I would like to state my thoughts on. I’m kind of just thinking out loud here, so sorry if it gets a little rambly in there.

Religion: We are the only civ in the game that starts with Mysticism, so we are guaranteed a religion if we want one. The question is, do we want one? I don’t think that we do. I tried a start in which I began by researching Meditation and it is, as would be expected, painfully slow in comparison to the Mining, then Bronze Working start we have been working on optimizing. For a combo that I think needs to have a strong early game, in a field full of threatening early game opponents, having a slow start is very bad. Also, the culture from religion is not very useful due to the Terrace. A shrine would be nice, but generating a Great Prophet would be a pain, in a standard-sized, six-player game it won’t be AWESOME like in some bigger games, and it also makes us more appetizing to attack.

Scouting: I can’t be too sure about how I want to do my scouting because I can’t trust the fog yet. However, if I can, then my plan is to head south for two turns to reveal information about a potential second city site that shares corn and sugar with the capital, then circle around to the northwest of the capital to reveal information about a potential sheep-sharing second city. After that, I am not sure yet. However, I am considering trying to have the scout help escort my first settler to its spot, because the current plan has only one quecha to do the job, and I want to avoid relying on RNG if an animal is in the way.

Third Tech: After Mining and Bronze Working, what do we research? If our second city also has a Hunting resource, then I think that the answer is Hunting. However, if it only has Agriculture resources, then we might be able to mine the sheep at the capital and skip Hunting to go for The Wheel and head for Pottery faster. Although Hunting does unlock Archery, and I think that we will be wanting that quickly in this game. We will just have to wait, scout, and see.

And that is all for now…

[Mr. Cairo]

Opponent review, I'm mostly going to focus on what I think about the pick in general and what conclusions/assumptions we can reach/jump to about our opponents.

Charriu and Zalson, Tokugawa of China:
This is a pretty reasonable combo, good early game traits that have a military impact for the entire game. China is the better of the two Mining/Agriculture civs, so no complaints there. However, China was taken first, which is interesting. The way I see this is that Charriu and Zalson saw the start, saw they were first in the pick order, and basically decided there and then to pick China first, because they have an early game already decided. The leader didn't really matter, and they picked Toku as the best leader remaining at the end of the pick. Personally I'd rather pick the best leader, and the civ last. Much easier to find synergy that way.

RFS-81 and haphazard1, Pacal of Mongolia:
Pacal is an old school choice, considered one of the best leaders back in vanilla when FIN was king. FIN is still good, and if the starts aren't mirrored this could mean that they have fewer rivers/more coast than us. Mongolia doesn't really fit with Pacal however, so I'm thinking they knew they were unlikely to get much synergy, picked what they thought was the best leader, and when it came back to them they picked an aggressively-minded civ. Expect them to attack someone with Keshiks, since there's really no other reason to pick Mongolia.

superdeath and masterjason, Boudica of Zululand:
Boudica is a combo all by herself when it comes to combat. Adding the Ikhanda just makes it all the nicer. In fact, Aggressive Ikhandas + the bonus Library production + the 2 happy pretty much add up to a decent eco trait all by themselves. Like RFS and haphazard, they will attack someone, but we can't really know when.

shallow_thought and Hitru, Genghis Khan of Persia:
I do not know why they picked Persia first, sure Agri/Hunting are good starting techs, but did they really think someone else was going to pick it before it came back to them? If they had a specific combo in mine (and Ghengis + Persia isn't exactly synergistic), it would be far more likely that they lose the leader to Coeurva and OT4E than Persia. Perhaps, like Charriu and Zalson, they had a plan in place for a Hunting/Agri start, and didn't really care about their leader. That might make sense, since the other Huting/Agri civ of Zulu was already gone.

Coeurva and OT4E, Shaka of Rome:
This is a combo designed to kill someone. End of. Let's hope it isn't us, since even if we're able to beat them, they'll drag us down with them.

Magic Science and Mr. Cairo, Mao of the Inca
Ours is the only pure economical combo in the game (with the possible exception of Toku of China). So, our path to victory is to leverage that advantage as much as possible. Grabbing more land than we should, growing faster, improving more tiles faster, etc etc. But, we have to survive while we do it. If we get lucky and no-one attacks us in the classical era (with Keshiks or Praetorians), we could find ourselves in a winning position, which would certainly put a target on our backs, but is probably the best outcome of the early game. If we do end up in a classical era war, well, hopefully our ancient era advantages would put us in a position to win that war.

I also just realised we don't have as much to worry about with Mongolia, since our Holkans are a pretty good counter to the Keshiks, negating their extra first strike, and we can build them even without copper, if they disconnect it. Not much help against Rome though. 


Your plan for the first 20 turns looks good, as well as the scouting and tech plans. I like the idea of skipping hunting for and early Pottery, but it will of course depend on what we find with our scout.
First scouting move should probably be 2S to that grassland hill. I'd like to see how much of that desert down there is flood plains (if it's still there in the final version of the map)

[Magic Science]

Good analysis. I will have to keep all of that in mind once we start meeting the other players. The only nitpick I have is about this part:

I also just realised we don't have as much to worry about with Mongolia, since our Holkans are a pretty good counter to the Keshiks, negating their extra first strike, and we can build them even without copper, if they disconnect it. Not much help against Rome though.

We have Quechua, not Holkans.

I am about to go play the first turn as planned, so the first turn report should be coming soon. However, before that I have one more thing I want to mention…

Cloak and Dagger: I am not interested in trying to figure out every last detail of each player’s opening, but there are a few pieces of information that I want to try to determine with Cloak and Dagger methods. I want to keep track of the tech paths of other players so that we can know what their military capacity is. I want to keep track of other players’ city and population counts to get a general idea of how well they are doing. I want to determine how mirrored our starts are, and especially how many/which players also have a coastal start. I think that we might be able to glean some info about the wider map structure from that. I suppose I should mention that I haven’t ever done this before We will just have to wait and see how well this goes. My plan is to take some demographics screenshots, then take a crash course on cloak and dagger and puzzle through it.

[Mr. Cairo]

haha, crap, you're right, I always get those confused, but still. I even did some simming with the quecha and all that

re: cloak and dagger, I'm not particularly good at/interested in all that. I keep track of civstats and the demos and stuff, but I don't spreadsheet score increases to see city foundings/tech/etc. After a while it seems to just end up with diminishing returns.

In our case, it might end up being nice to know when Coeurva gets IW.

[Magic Science]

Turn 0
   
Here we go! As we discussed, I settled Cuzco in place, started working the grassland forest hill northwest of the capital, building a worker, and researching Mining. I then moved the scout two tiles south. That, besides taking demographics screenshots before and after settling the capital, was all.

However, I did find some important information while I was in-game. One, technologies are cheaper in the game than they are in our sim for some reason. Hunting and Agriculture are 89, Mining is 71, and Bronze Working is 179. I don’t think that this will impact our opening plan, but I’m not sure why the costs are different, do you know?

Two, the south is not looking very appealing for a second city right now. The second city is supposed to quickly grow and then produce military, workers, and settlers to help the snowball of expansion, and floodplains and riverside grass and plains, while nice for cottages someday, aren’t going to do that. The second city needs to get some new food resources of its own.

Three, it looks like the area to our west, by the sheep, is probably a small peninsula. Do you think that any of this information means we should change our scouting plan? I’m not sure yet, but I think not. We can’t have a good food-sharing second city in the south, so trying to find one in the west is probably our best bet.

[Mr. Cairo]

I have no idea about tech costs.

Settling to the south can still work if we give it lots of food to grow quickly, then whip out workers and settlers. But somewhere else, with some forests might be preferable. A possible southern location would be 1W of the incense, it can grow quickly on the corn and sugar, although that would necessitate getting Hunting after BW so the cap can have the sheep for food.

No, I still think scout to the west, I wouldn't be surprised is this is a lakes map of some sort, or snaky continents, they often are for smaller games.

[Magic Science]

   
When I logged in, I tried to declare war  like I was instructed to do by the in-game message, but sadly I could not because I still hadn’t met anyone. Sorry . 

In other news, Cuzco kept doing exactly what it was doing on Turn 0, and the scout moved two tiles southwest. Next turn I intend to move him west, then northwest, and then head on to reveal the area west of the capital on later turns. I did notice that the grassland hill two tiles west of the sugar is freshwater, but not on a river, so the water tile to its immediate southwest must be a lake. I don’t think that this impacts our scouting plans, though.

I am not quite sure what to do with the scout after revealing the area by the sheep. I think that revealing the immediate area around the capital is more important than darting off far away into the fog, so right now I think that I will send the scout east back through the capital’s borders after his current task is complete. What do you think?

Also, this turn I remembered to check the land and population factors in score. If I am understanding the score mechanic correctly, then there are 764 land tiles on this map, so 127 and 1/3 land tiles per player. If I have my way, that should be 382 for me and 76.4 each for everyone else...

Lastly, I will try to get a sim set up with the proper tech costs. If I succeed, then I will post the save for you.

[Mr. Cairo]

Yeah, sending the scout back to the east might be the best option. Perhaps it would have been better to go west first, then circle around to the east via the south, but too late now

[Magic Science]

Turn 2
   

Cuzco kept doing what it was doing, and the scout moved west, then northwest as I mentioned in the previous turn report. As you can see, he found ivory under a jungle. That makes three happiness resources, but, unfortunately, none of them are true early happiness resources. I think that the scout will go west and then northwest next, and after that two tiles northeast.

Also, I have done a little bit of Cloak and Dagger work, and I have determined that everyone else also has at least one water tile in their start, and I set up a sim with the correct tech costs (and Montezuma closed in the mountains to stop a conquest victory).

  Mao of Inca Sim Start.zip (Size: 26.28 KB / Downloads: 1)

[Magic Science]

Turn 3
   
Food ho! I moved the scout (who could really use a name) west and then northwest, and he found our first non-capital food resource, a dry rice. In the absence of any new map information to convince me otherwise, I still plan to move him two tiles northeast next turn. However, fog gazing does not look promising. See this closeup image:
   
It looks to me like there are only two unrevealed land tiles by the sheep, both of them forests. That means that there aren’t any land food resources by the sheep unless Commodore placed some unnatural tiles, and I haven’t see any unnatural tiles so far. This is not good news. There may not be a second city site that can share food with the capital and get a new land food resource of its own. Hopefully I am wrong, we will just have to scout and see.