[LURKERS] Setting Up Tents for a Ren Faire

[GermanJoey]

Man, Cha over Fin? In a BTS game? No way, at least Fin does something for you. You can't even get the +1 happy from monuments here, as they obsolete at one of the first techs you'll want to research!

I don't think Mack is too sad here. He originally said he wanted Vicky so this just gets him Spi instead of Imp, which is probably better anyways, as Krill says.

[GermanJoey]

Man, CH is so obtuse, you can't ever tell that guy anything. And here I thought I was crossing the line as a lurker. Well, that whole team, they're so stuck into thinking about things one certain way.

There's no point in looking at whether a Hammam is better than a Sac Altar over a 10 turn window because the game lasts longer than 10 turns.

During a 10 turn window, a Hammam is inded about equal to a Sac Altar in a city that whips 4 times. However, what about when you whip 20 times in a 50 turn window? The SA city has 10 unhappy, while the Hammam has 13. This is actually a pretty big difference because you'll only be able to get about ~15 total happy cheaply, if that, and you'll need 4-5 for the city population itself. That means the SA allows you to utilize the whip for longer. Furthermore, the SA city can transition very easily to spreading out onto workshops because it recovers from whip anger twice as fast, while the Hammam city is pretty much wrecked for the rest of the game.

[Krill]

Best explanation I've seen of the SA for a while. Defo underrated, especially if someone, you know, settles for double food and sets up for 1 pop growth per turn.

[GermanJoey]

Yeah, and that's so easy to do too. Like, going back to my example, 20 whips in 50 turns - lets say 10 of those are single pop whips, 10 are double-pop whips. (and you'll definitely want to single pop whip sometimes, between the 10% cost discount, the free forge, and OR). And lets say our city's base size is size 4, because that kinda city should be able to work all its good tiles. How much food does it need to whip 30 pop in 50 turns? Well, 10*14 (ten singlepops from size 5->4) plus 10*(14+15) (the ten doublepop whips from size 6->4). Well that's (140+290)/50 = 8.6 food per turn! That's like, what, a pig and 3 grass farms, while still having 20 excess food? And yet you still net, remembering to count the city tile, a total of 10*30+10*2*30+50*1 base hammers (meaning, without counting multipliers), or 19hpt per turn!

For reference, that's the same as the above city working 6 grass mines (or 6 grass workshops w/ RP), not counting for the fact that the workshop city will need ~30 turns to grow onto all those workshops while the whip city is ready to go 10 turns after planting and needs less up-front worker labor.

And we're just talking about a single-food city too. A Pig, a fish, a clam, and a grass farm nets 14fpt, enough to grow, as Krill says, from size 4->5 in a single turn. Having 2 more grass farms available means it can also grow to size 5 and size 6 in a single turn... which means it can do 20 *triple* whips in that 50 turn period! That's a total of 20*3*30 + 50*1 = 1850 base hammers, or 37hpt. That's 12 grass workshops w/ RP (which is a size 16 city), or 9 w/ Caste and RP. (a size 13 city) And again, you get this kind of productivity right away instead of waiting around for the city to grow.

Needless to say, it's really awesome....

[picklepikkl]

Saving this thread for reference; I've wanted to play ORG Aztecs ever since I saw their UB.

[Krill]

Easy way to think of ORG Aztecs if you can get enough food:

Globe Theatre in every city, but only for whips.

[Krill]

How is the map coming Mardoc?

[Krill]

Quick point about whip cycles: ignoring happy constraints, the fastest you can triple whip a settler is 5 turns per settler (dry whipping require more pop ergo still takes more than 5 turns). You need 1 turn to dump hammers into the settler, minimum 3 turns to grow the 3 pop, and 1 turn to whip it for 5 total. To me it always makes sense to compare a set up for a whip cycle against what'ed needed to just hammer out the crap you need. So to make a settler in 5 turns, you need 50 hpt. That's the figure to aim for.

If you can get a city to produce 50 adjusted hammers, you can build them faster than you can whip them, without the happy issues. The problem is you generally need more worker turns into improvements to hit that hammer output than exist in the early game (for ancient starts, or any other).

IMP leaders make 50 adjusted hammers in a bureau-capital from 23 base hammers (=51 adjusted hammers). The pig city with 4 mined hills (one iron), pasturized horse, and pig makes 22 base hammers and no spare food at size 6. That's a total of 41 worker turns, without improving the rice (or irrigating it) with none wasted on roads or inefficiencies.

SPI leaders aren't so lucky, and need 29 hammers with no spare food to make that 50 (or 28 base hammers and 1 spare food). OTOH, they get Serfdom. Using the same tiles, plus the rice (irrigated) and either 2 more hill mines or caste workshops they can hit that total hammer output. That's an additional 21 worker turns though, for a total of 62 worker turns. Serfdom really helps with this, especially as it's possible to get 2 workers from the whales city (1 whip, 1 chop) eot 4 and 7 (yay Serfdom) to manage to hook the corn on T10 with no additional support. At pigs, it's possible to get the pig hooked T4, rice hooked T8 and irrigated T9 with workers built eot 2 (whip) and 6 (chop) for 5 total workers. More isn't necessary, expecially with Serfdom, and with the available forests it's trivial to work in a double or triple pop settler whip at the capital, given the food output from the rice, pig and grass farm.

There aren't any other visible sites that concentrate that hammer output into a single city. IMP still wins out on going wide via chain whipping settlers from new-ish cities with a couple of forest chops, SPI can't get close to matching that. SPI can still get a good hammer city set up though. I think SPI is actually forced into that dot map, but IMP can use alternate options. But as scooter has pointed out, if you keep the corn and pig at one city, the second city is much harder to set up without Serfdom.

EDIT: And some extra numbers for that first settler being built: You can see scooter running the numbers for a settler around T15. Pigs capital can use a double chop and double whip to get a settler around T14, due to Serfdom enabling extra food/chop speed. If SPI can keep up with the worker numbers and third city development (which I'd expect with good Serfdom usage) then IMP might not actually get out to much of a lead early on and get reeled in much sooner than we saw in PB22:

Baseline: Settler EoT199. 5 workers. Cities size 4 and 1. Cap can now grow up to size 6 to triple whip another settler pretty quickly. City2 has many forests left to chop.

compares with:

Baseline: Settler EoT198. 5 workers. Cities size 3 and 3. Enough spare worker turns to have banana hooked with double workers or hook furs (or almost complete both). +1 forest at whale, -1 forest at pig.

[Mardoc]

How is the map coming Mardoc?

It's weird, but I seem to have more time and energy on work nights than the weekend. Maybe because I stop work at quitting time and leave it at the office, but the house could always use something else done. Didn't get much progress, aside from installing Perl on my new computer.

Anyway, still think I can have a first draft ready for comments sometime this week and ready for the host next week.

[darrelljs]

I'd normally reply in the tech thread, but that well has been poisoned...

If you build culture and queue up anything behind it, when the city pop's its borders, it will carry over production from the previous turn into the queued item. I had no idea this existed also until I was playing some SP Renaissance games and did it accidentally.

Wow. Honestly I think the cure is worse than the disease; losing the ability to build Culture to pop new city's borders feels more important than some free hammers.

Darrell