PBEM8 - regoarrarr takes over for Meatbalz

[regoarrarr]

Okay so let's first talk about score and demographics. This will kind of build off of the last post I had last night. I think that, with a bit of luck and a few assumptions, I should be able to make a pretty good guess at the breakdown of the land / pop / tech / wonders breakdown of each player's score.

So wonders are the easiest to determine. As I mentioned before, my score is

Me: 239P 186L 101T 16W - 542

So wonderwise, it's India with 2 (including palace), Native America to 2, Byzantium with 3, and Inca with 1 like me. So 32, 32, 48 and 16 points.

Now let's turn to the demographics screen.



Land area is interesting, because the victory screen (posted above) shows me as the leader with 16.43% and WarriorKnight at 16.0%. Wait! I forgot about that - I think it got posted in a PBEM2 post that those numbers get rounded. So WK's screen probably has something like 16.6%, which jives with the demographics screen, where I have 104,000 (104 tiles) and WK has 105.

So 104 tiles is 16.43% of the available tiles, which means that there are 633 total land tiles (104 / .1643). So WK is 16.59% (105/633), which matches the analysis from the last paragraph.

I'm going to assume that ad hoc is last in land with his 80 tiles (12.63%), and calculating out with the average shows that Shoot and Serdoa combined have a total of (95250 * 4 - 105000 - 80000) = 196,000, so an average of 98K. Let's say Shoot has 100 and Serdoa has 96.

Now you only get score points for land that you've controlled for a total of 20 turns. We don't really have any information on that at this point, so I'm going to make my initial assumption that each civ has 10 land tiles that don't count for score.

So from above, I have 186 land points and the 104 land tiles. If I assume I've controlled 93 of them for 20 turns, that makes each land point worth about 2 points.

So now we have:

WarriorKnight: 186L 16W = 212 (853)
Shoot: 180L 32W = 212 (832)
Serdoa: 172L 48W = 220 (685)
Ad Hoc: 140L 16W = 156 (452)

Next post we continue this discussion talking about population and tech.

[regoarrarr]

Okay tech first. We already talked about how many people have various techs last night. Again we're going to have to make a few assumptions here, but that's okay. In reality, despite something I read from meatbalz about how he (I? we?) are "1000s of beakers down", I am not seeing any evidence of that. I do think that we ARE behind, but it's more on the order of 1-2 techs I think.

Okay so on to the assumptions.

The following techs are known by everyone:

Mining, Bronze Working, Mysticism, Fishing, Sailing, Hunting, Agriculture, Archery, Wheel, Masonry, Pottery, Animal Husbandry, Writing, Iron Working, Mathematics.

That's 13 Ancient and 2 Classical

That leaves the following techs, with known or guessed number of people that have them in parentheses, and then my guesses at who those people are:

ANCIENT:
Priesthood (3?) - Serdoa, Shoot, WK
Meditation (1) - Serdoa
Polytheism (2) - Shoot, WK
Monotheism (1) - Shoot

CLASSICAL:
Monarchy (3) - Serdoa, Shoot, WK
Aesthetics (1?)
HBR (2) - Serdoa, WK
Currency (1) - Serdoa
Calendar (1) - WK
Construction (1) - WK
Metal Casting (1) - WK

MEDEIVAL:
Feudalism (1) - Serdoa

So, I have 18 tech "credits", counting my 14 Ancient techs as 1 and my 2 classical techs as 2. Those 18 tech credits are worth 101 points, or an average of 5.61 per credit.

Counting out what I've guessed at, that gives 28 for Serdoa, 29 for WK, 17 for ad hoc, and 22 for Shoot. So here's our revised point estimates:

WarriorKnight: 162T 186L 16W = 374 (853)
Shoot: 123T 180L 32W = 335 (832)
Serdoa: 157T 172L 48W = 377 (685)
Ad Hoc: 95T 140L 16W = 251 (452)

Serdoa seems awfully high - but for the most part, I KNOW that he has those techs (Currency, Monarchy, Feudalism, Meditation, etc). Maybe he doesn't have a lot of pop - I do know that he just had a city razed this turn (200 BC) by Shoot / India.

So let's take a shot at population. Here's the top 5 cities screen.



So here is the population that I know, from this screen as well as the ones that I can actually see. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of scouting.

Serdoa / Byz: Constantinople (10)
Shoot / India: Delhi (11), Bombay (9), Vijayanagra (7), Agra (2)
WK / Inca (Sun): Sun Temple (11), Sunnyside Shore (10)
Ad Hoc / N.A.: Greyhawk (7)

Aaaaand that's it. First let me double check and make sure that I don't have any 8s followed by an end parentheses, since those get turned into sunglass smilies, in the 2nd most annoying thing about the RB forums (next to the post throttler). Okay looks good there.

From the demographics, we have someone (going to assume WK) at 2978000, assuming ad hoc in last at 470000, and myself at 561000. Doing the same manipulation with the average number, we've got the total of Shoot and Serdoa at 3,080,000. Given Serdoa's low score, I'm going to ball park them at about 2.2 mil for Shoot and 800K for Serdoa.

Let's see what I can figure out for Shoot. First let's take the overall population numbers. From the demographics page, my 26 pop points are 16.35%. So that means that there are currently 159 total pop points. WarriorKnight is in first place with 30% (from the victory screen pic posted earlier), so that means that he has 48 or 49 total pop points (depending on rounding).

Ad Hoc has 470,000 let's give this a whirl.

Here's the size to "population" table

SIZE POPULATION
1 1
2 6
3 21
4 48
5 90
6 150
7 232
8 337
9 469
10 630
11 823

I've got 7 cities as a comparison

His capital at size 7 is 232K, so that means we need 238K remaining. Maybe something like 7-6-4-3-2-2-2-1? That adds up, but it's far from the only way to do it. I had noodled awhile ago on creating some sort of program that could brute force a population number and figure out all the different ways you could have cities that added up to that value, but never finished it. Didn't seem like it would be that hard but anyways...

That's 27 pop points @ 9.19 a pop (pardon the pun) which gives him 248P, which puts him ar 499, which is over his actual score of 452 by 47 points. Maybe he has a bit less techs or land? Let's see where we get with the other civs.

WarriorKnight is at 2,978,000, and we know from Top Cities that his top 2 cities are size 11 and 10, which account for 1,453K and of course 21 pop points. From the victory screen, he's got 27 or 28 pop points left, and I'm going to guess 28 because even at 49 pop points, his projection is below his actual score by 29 points.

So 28 points and 1,525K of pop. Hmm that's tough to do. One possibility is that although he has the most pop points, he does not have the highest demographics population. At this point, I think it's probably fairly fruitless to try and dig through this too terribly much more (I know, I know, blasphemy). So there are 159 total pop points, and we've got WK with 49, me with 26, and Ad Hoc with 27. So that leaves 57 for Shoot and Serdoa, which seems low. I'm going to drop ad hoc down to 22 pop points, and give Serdoa 33 and Shoot 47, which adds up to 177, which is 18 too many. So perhaps I am underestimating land or tech points. I may have to revisit this later.

And here's our final guesses (actual score in parens)

WarriorKnight: 450P 162T 186L 16W = 824 (853)
Shoot: 431P 123T 180L 32W = 786 (832)
Regoarrarr: 239P 101T 186L 16W = 542 (542)
Serdoa: 303P 157T 172L 48W = 680 (685)
Ad Hoc: 202P 95T 140L 16W = 453 (452)

[regoarrarr]

Okay before we get into the old "what are we going to DOOOOOO" let's talk about foreign city builds and such. As most of you probably know, there is a formula to figure out how many hammers each foreign city has in the box, as long as you have visibiility over that city's city square.

As it stands, I only have visibility on 4 Indian cities, and none from everyone else (boo!). As of T70 (current turn), Delhi and Bombay have nothing in the box (having just finished builds this turn), Vijay has 11 in the box, and Agra has 7.

You can also, with a keen eye, tell what buildings are in a city. Let's see what I can figure out.

Here is Delhi, as an example.



Red - Granary
Yellow - Barracks
Green - Library
Light Blue - Aqueduct and Hanging Gardens
Purple - I'm not sure what that is. Could be nothing. It seems different from the rest of the buildings (which are just regular town buildings), but none of the things I checked look like that. It's not a Forge, Courthouse, religious building, Market, Monument, Walls or Stable.

Similarly, Bombay has Walls, Library, Granary, and Barracks, Vijay has those 4 buildings plus a lighthouse, and the new(er) island city of Agra has no buildings.

I really need to get some more scouting in play, but that's going to be hard with no spies allowed and AW.

[regoarrarr]

Okay, let's talk a little about settling plan and my cities.

First of all, it looks like Meatbalz started out with a naming pattern of stars but then stopped halfway through and just went with the defaults. Now while I MIGHT have been able to talk myself into continuing someone else's naming pattern, since he himself stopped it, I feel no compunction with just renaming everything.

My only requirement in a naming pattern is that it has to be something that I can think of off the top of my head (i.e. don't have to look up). So after thinking about it a bit, I decided to go with spices.

Here's the updated F1 screen.



Ahhhh much better. Ignore the listed builds as I have not changed some of them - I will talk about that more in a later post.

This post is going to be about settling. My thoughts on the map is that it looks very similar to the PB2 map (which makes some sense as I belive plako made this map and he was a participant in PB2). So it has the outer islands and is toroidal, but instead of a ring with a center island (Centralia), there is just one big (well not THAT big) center island.

Here's my lands, as it stands now.



I've marked the 3 entry points into my lands. There's the southern (red) choke, which is my border with ad hoc near my city of Salt. I currently have 2 archers on the forested hill just east of the peak, and you can see the ruins of a former NA city 1S of my city. Why did you plant on flat land ad hoc?!?!?

The northern choke (green) is a bit more open, and I'm fighting culturally with Shoot the Moon / India. I am currently occupying both the forested hills west of Vijay - the southern one with 2 axes, a holkan and an archer, and the northern one with 2 axes and an archer. Minus a boat attack (which isn't entirely out of the question), he can't attack me through this pass without dislodging one of these two stacks (which might be possible as we get into the Construction phase of the game)

Then there's the middle choke (yellow). For some reason, a) I have little to no information about these lands that border my capital, b) Neither myself nor apparently anybody has settled there, and c) there is a pig tile IN MY CAPITAL'S BFC THAT I STILL HAVEN'T PASTURED?!?!!? It's possible there has been some enemy intrusion here, but if so, all the more reason to get more information about what is over here. This kind of strikes me as a "middle" area that is equidistant from everyone's capital and has some nice goodies. I'm definitely going to try and scout over here and see what I can do.

Before we talk about the islands and cities I still want / need to settle, let's revisit total land. There are 633 land tiles, of which I have 104, WK has 105, ad hoc has 80, and Serdoa / Shoot have 196. That means that there are 148 unclaimed tiles.

Of those tiles, there are 10 within my borders, I can see 22 in the center, I see 2 on Agra island, 1 on Thyme Island, and 4, 8, 7 and 2 on 4 other visible islands.

Overall map size, I have viewed the whole west to east circumference and it is 32 tiles wide. I can see 21 tiles north to south, but I bet there are about 4 or 5 tiles more. We should be able to figure that out from distance maintenance - link

Let's take the island city of Thyme, which is 13.5 tiles from the capital of Cumin.

Formula is [ ([25*Distance*(Pop+7)/10] * Building_m * WorldSize_m * Handicap_m) / DistanceScale ]

25 * 13.5 * (1+7) / 10 is 270. No Courthouse, so multiply by 0.8 for standard to get 216. Multiply that by 0.75 for Noble to get 162, and then divide by distance scale. That's height + width, but we divide both of those by two since there is toroidal wrapping, so height / 2 + width / 2. We know width /2 is 16, and the actual distance maintenance there is 6.5 but for some reason these calculations are not working right for me. With all the other things I want to think about, I'm going to shelve this for now, but one thing is that I may want to consider circumnavigation, which apparently has not been achieved yet. I've got it W to E and am apparently only 4-5 tiles away from doing it N to S. Tragically I only have the one galley, but I'm definitely going to think about that as I move towards immediate tactical planning here in a bit. On a map that promises to have some decent naval action, circumnav could be a great boon.

Okay, so back to land tiles. I'm going to assume 10 more tiles in each of the other 4 players borders, and maybe a total of 40 missing tiles in the center. Here are the islands that I have visibility on.



As I mentioned before, there are the 2 islands that I see occupied (one by India and one by me), and then 4 other ones. I see 24 missing tiles, which leaves 34 unaccounted for. I think there are probably 4-6 other islands all around the center landmass. I could get on board with a total of 12 islands. In any case, the 4 open islands in the above pic are the only ones that I have a decent chance at.

So where and how many cities am I going to settle? I have 7 now, and you can see where I've made an initial dotmap.

Red are my "safe" more backline cities. Red circle gets another spice and more river tiles, and can share sheep and corn for food. Red filled circle is another northern port with cows, shared crabs and iron. Red square can help to control the choke with India - the tiles I'd LIKE to put it on are currently culturally controlled by India, so I may need to up the culture in that area first.

Yellow are my first entries into Centralia and the exact placements there are VERY preliminary. I don't like how these cities allow "forks" but they are both on hills and I just don't have enough map intel to make any better decisions at this point. I do feel like I need to get some buffer in there between my capital and the other civs, and if I'm forced to choose between island expansion and expansion in here - over land seems safer and easier to defend. Certainly could get another city or two in here depending on how close everyone else is.

Green are the islands. Again, these are rough estimates and I don't really know how much I'll be able to claim - "Safer" ones are green circle, filled circle and green triangle. Filled triangle is a bit far, and square and filled square are also sketchy. One thing I have going for me is that (one of?) Serdoa's ports on this side of the map was just razed by India (see the offending chariot 3W1N of green square.

So, if I could get my 3 red dots, 2 yellows, and the 3 "safer" green ones, then the BFCs of those cities give me 134 land tiles, or 21.1%, which I think makes me competitive. If I could claim the other 2 islands and/or maybe a bit more of Centralia, I could get up to maybe 150 land tiles, which would be 23.69% of the land (remember this is a 5 person game, so 20% would be "average")

[regoarrarr]

Okay so here's the list of borders, with forces staring across the border.

First the north



Due to the peaks, the only way India can come my way is through these 2 tiles. I'm thinking I need to leave these units in place, though I think I'm going to detail that chariot towards Centralia to check things out there.

Here's the south with ad hoc



I actually think I am going to pull these units back, as a show of good faith. Ad hoc and I are in last and 2nd to last place, respectively, so I think that we have no reason to fight. Clearly, there is a bit of bad blood due to my razing his city, but I'm hoping with the new management he will not pursue.

And even if he does, giving up that forested hill doesn't really lose me THAT much. He can do just as much damage from the tile where his units are. I think we can both benefit from a bit of standing down on our borders.

[regoarrarr]

Next!

Let's talk workers. I have 8 workers for 7 cities, which is a bit low. I do have a 9th worker in production, so that's nice. But I'm definitely going to need a few more workers over the next bit of turns.

I also like to name my workers, because it makes it easier in MM plans to say "Amy" rather than "the worker over near the capital city who is mining the hill"

So here's my workers with their new names and what they are currently doing.

Amy (in red) - on a plains forest 2S of Cinnamon, I assume preparing to chop?
Beth (in red) - ALSO on a plains forest 2S of Cinnamon, also presumably ready to chop
Carolyn (in red) - once again, ALSO on (the same) plains forest 2S of Cinnamon



Yup, I've got 3 workers all on the same tile, preparing to chop a tile. Meatbalz, man, I'm sorry if you ever read this, but to the ieth power. Generally, unless it's an emergency or time sensitive (or you're India), NEVER put more than one worker on a forest (or hill) without a road, because it just wastes worker turns.

Note also the 2 plains cottages that 8 worker turns were wasted on at Cinnamon.

Danielle (yellow) - 2 turns left on a grassland river cottage
Emma (green) - idle - probably just finished the mine she's on
Frances (lt. blue) - idle - perhaps just finished the road
Gertrude (purple) - 4 turns left on ANOTHER plains cottage (p.s. i don't think so)
Harriet (off screen to the NE) - idle on a plains forested hill

Okay I have to go, but next post will be my worker plan. I also need to talk about my tech plan, because the next techs I research could have an effect (i.e. how long till I research Calendar (for spices and incense) and/or Monarchy (for wines and HR happiness)

[regoarrarr]

Okay, I have a few more things to say, but I think that I probably know enough to play this first turn.

Worker actions:

Gertrude stops the cottaging of a plains forest and moves and starts a cottage on a grassland tile right next door...

Harriet chops the forest hill she's on.

Danielle continues cottaging

Of the 3 workers on the same forest, Amy moves to the NE (had to waste a worker turn there ), Beth and Carolyn chop. That will allow me to delay the chop by 1 turn (instead of completing this turn), so it can go into a Ball Court when construction comes in next turn.

It is unfortunate that I already have 76/100 hammers into the Great Wall, due in 1. I will have to check the rules on Great Spy usage here, and potentially try and hire 2 scientists to get a scientist out first. I don't know what in the we were thinking here. I know it's one of those things where it's late, it's cheap, and you have stone, so you're like hey why not. But... no.

I have 8/20 into a monument at Thyme, but I am vetoing that for a granary. Yes, we're in a (currently losing) culture battle for those horses but we'll pop another ring in a few turns and we should get that back before too long. Also start a granary at Salt.

In non worker news, I move my 2 archers out of Native American land in a hopeful peace gesture (it also saves 2 gpt). The choke remains in the north vs. India though, and move my galley to the north to try and secure the circumnav bonus.

End turn and more tomorrow

[darrelljs]

Wow.

Darrell

[regoarrarr]

Wow.

Darrell

Wow what?

[SevenSpirits]

Wow what?

Wow Darrell.

Man you can't read at all.