[SPOILERS] Dazed and scooter play Stalin of Vikings and make a big mess

[scooter]

Eh, you put a grassland forest 1SE of the clams this was on purpose or a mistake?
Maybe a give it a try later.

Er I just realized what you were talking about. Yeah that was a mistake - as is having that one plains hill be unforested. Just pop into WB - I won't go through uploading a full update quite yet.

[scooter]

Okay, I've messed with it a bit, so here's a first stab at the first 30 turns:

t0 - settle. mining, work boat, work 2/1/0 tile. (most hammers we can get)
t5 - border pop. swap to 0/3/0 tile.



t8 - WB in. queue warrior to grow to size2 asap. work floodplains.
t9 - swap to now-improved crabs
t12 - now at size 2. swap from warr to worker w/ crabs and FP tiles. due 9, BW due 10:



That's pretty much perfect timing. Worker finishing 1T ahead of BW means it has 1T to move onto a forest. Perfect. I think these first 12 turns are definitely ideal.

t21. worker complete. start settler. move onto forest



No hammer bonus so no incentive to work the hammer tiles, so we get the bonus commerce here. Very useful actually.

t22 - BW in. start myst (or w/e). start chopping 1st forest.
t24 - chop in on settler
t25 - move onto another forest
t28 - second chop completes. settler due in 2t
t30 - looks like this:



That's 2 forests chopped (speeds new city by 5 turns), a worker, a settler, and a 3rd chop started for the worker. Researched Mining->BW->Myst->Med(6t left). Ignored: Wheel/Agri.

Now, one problem with this plan is I never swapped back to that queued warrior, so it did start to decay a little I think. Could always take a 1T pause in the settler and keep it alive. I'd have to test to see if a 1T pause would actually slow the settler down - it might not. Extending the plan much past this isn't worthwhile yet until we see more land, but I do think the first 12 turns make a lot of sense.

[SevenSpirits]

I think you are misunderstanding decay. It's not >10 consecutive turns of producing something else that's the problem, it's >10 total turns.

[scooter]

I think you are misunderstanding decay. It's not >10 consecutive turns of producing something else that's the problem, it's >10 total turns.

Really... Hm. I'll have to think about that then.

[dazedroyalty]

So, is your pitboss connection gonna work?

[scooter]

So, is your pitboss connection gonna work?

As far as I know, yes. It worked getting into PB6 with no problems and that's a game in a far move advanced stage (so more data to download), so surely this will work for early ancient turns.

[scooter]

Any thoughts on the opening turn re: warrior move and the work boat 1st plan?

[scooter]

I know this is long and all text, but this is fairly important stuff. I've gone through RB Mod and I want to highlight important things that are most applicable to us and how it affects our play in this game. There's obviously lots of balance changes, but a few of them particularly change the game. First is the big one:

Slavery: 30h for the 1st pop, 20h for the 2nd pop and subsequent pops. So, 30/50/70/90. On Quick speed, that's 20/33/46/60.
Serfdom: +75% Worker Speed, +1h for Watermills and Windmills.

This is huge. Ramifications:

1) Whip for more than one pop ONLY when really necessary. Generally speaking, aim for 1-pop whips only. This puts a damper on us since we may be looking at a seafood island-y start, but that's life. But yeah, 2 pop whipping will generally be a bad food->hammer conversion.
2) Serfdom is a very real alternative here. BTW, Spiritual is absurdly powerful here. Especially when paired with Krill's Sacrificial Altar. He can 1-pop whip whatever he wants, then immediately revolt to Serfdom for 5T... Then after 5T (the amount of time it takes for whip to wear off with Sac Altar on normal speed), swap right back into Slavery and do it all over again. Crazy.
3) Because slavery is so badly nerfed, production is more of an early game bottleneck than it has been previously. This means that in comparison, chopping is more powerful than in the past (makes me feel slightly better about the start), as is hammer tiles like mines in general.

Next:

Tech Trading:
Known Tech Bonus changed to 50 (up from 30), enabled by Tech Trading (so there is no Known Tech Bonus until you research Paper)

This is one of my favorite changes, and even though Paper is a long ways away. This is why a Paper beeline is kind of a duh. The "50" here stands for 50%. That means if you are researching a tech that every civ in the game already has, you get a 50%(!) beaker bonus on that tech (up from 30% in vanilla bts). Basically, you divide that 50% by the number of people in the game. So, if you have met all 9 players and you are researching a tech that 5 of them know, that gives you a (50 / 9) * 5 bonus => 27.7 => 27% beaker bonus. So if you're getting 1,000 base beakers on a tech, that's 270 free beakers per turn. This helps prevent complete tech runaways. Also:

Paper enables Tech trading, no longer enables Map Trading. Requires Metal Casting, Literature and Code of Laws as mandatory prerequisites.
Corporation enables Tech Trading (and increases Known Tech Bonus by 50%)
Scientific Method enables Tech Trading (and increases Known Tech Bonus by 50%)
Cost of Education, Gunpowder, Printing Press and Nationalism increased by 50%
Cost of all subsequent techs increased by 100%
Techs prior to Paper in the tech tree can no longer be traded:

That 50% bonus can hit 150% once you research SciMethod and Corporation. I'm a little unclear why all 3 are listed as enabling tech trading (I asked in the balancing thread), but let's take our past example of 5 players with the tech and getting 1k base beakers. The formula is no longer (50 / 9) * 5... It's (150/9) * 5 => 83.3 => 83% beaker bonus for 830 free beakers! Obviously 1k base bpt is a bit big (just wanted round numbers), but I think the example makes the point. So what does this mean?

1. Since you cannot trade for techs before Paper, the best plan may be to beeline Paper and use the enhanced known tech bonus to backfill on any techs we skipped along the way. Then, attempt to make trades post-Paper.
2. Researching late era techs that no one else has is only worth it if we're SURE we can get it first and flip it for several other techs. Otherwise, save up gold and then turn research back on when several people unlock the bonus for us.
3. This makes it difficult for people to pull the "PBEM14 Gaspar" empire that is small and powers past in tech. The bonuses and TT on all make it near-impossible to blow past the whole field in tech, so ultimately having the most amount of land is even more important than it was in vanilla BtS. By that I mean - it used to be more viable to have a smaller empire that lapped the field on tech, then crush your nearest rivals with vastly superior armies and THEN have enough land to win. Basically, it'll now be harder to get a full era ahead of your neighbor and crush them that way.
4. Note: Paper DOES require Literature, Metal Casting, and Code of Laws. So that lessens the ability to directly beeline it and cash in on huge discounts. Still, it's a high priority tech now.

Alphabet no longer enables tech trading, allows Open Borders
Writing enables Map trading, no longer enables OB

Alphabet is an important tech here, as we'll want OB with neighbors. Writing is obviously important too, as we'll likely want to do some heavy map trading in order to make contact with everyone. This ALSO means that circumnav winner is unlikely to be the person who gets out with workboats, but is more likely to be the person who does some clever map trading/buying. Something to keep in mind.

Watermills: +1 base hammers, no longer receives +1h at Rep Parts.
Workshops: +1 base hammers, no longer receives +1h at Chemistry.
Mines: +1h at Rep Parts.
Whaling Boats: Enabled at Sailing, not Optics. Otherwise unchanged.
Serfdom: +75% Worker Speed, +1h for Watermills and Windmills.

1) Whales don't suck so bad anymore!
2) The changes here are the hammer compensations for losing slavery. Serfdom vs Slavery is a very real choice to make and will depend on the land we get. MAN I wish we were Spiritual.

[scooter]

I also went an edited a link to that post into the first post of the thread so it'll be easy to find at a later date.

[dazedroyalty]

Are you sure that when you get paper, it activates known tech bonuses for the older techs too? It's not like trading where you can never trade for old techs no matter what you've researched?