[SPOILERS] Team Unpronounceable Unicode Symbol: True Grit

[Sisu]

Okay, giving up on wines shenanigans for now. In frustration with trying to optimize the more complicated swap patterns, I tried the simplest version I could think of: just get out BW a turn faster and then do everything the way I did in my first sim. Ended up actually slower (!) towards the end of the sim because the chops got desynced and I wasn't able to grow on corn while building a warrior like I could in the original plan. Maybe I'm just terrible at micro? (Probably true, but what I lack in intuitive understanding of yields and timings (seriously, research overflow doesn't make a damn bit of sense to me) I certainly made up for today in just throwing a ton of shit against the wall and seeing if it worked)



When the game goes live (tomorrow? Monday? on the release date of Half Life 2: Episode 3, the next George RR Martin book, and the second coming of Christ?), I'll scope out the southwest and sim out the wines plant (heh. plant. I kill me.). One thing is for sure: working unimproved tiles is of the devil.

[Sisu]

It occurs to me that the number of posts in my thread, and me being Industrious and non-Creative, may cause other teams to think I am attempting to nick Stonehenge from Byzantium or something ridiculous like that.

If this inspires other teams to speed up their own plans somehow and sacrifice growth in the process, I am 100% okay with this.

[Sisu]

Ah, sunrise is moving, hence the delay in getting things started.

Now I feel kind of bad about my previous cattiness in this thread

[Ceiliazul]

I scootered around in the sim and kind of agree with you: faster BW doesn't help as much as I thought. I was able to get the settler 1t faster, pasture 1t faster, but the city grew to size 3 1t slower... pretty much a wash.

Also, I was wrong about t40 Oracle times... that appears to be more for 'quick' speed PBEMs. I looked back at some of our recent Pitboss games for a rough target time:


Pitboss Oracle times

• pitboss 4 - t54 (Luddite)
  
• pitboss 5 - t68 (Scooter/Dazed)
  
• pitboss 7 - t64 (Lewwyn)
  
• pitboss 8 - t56 (Serdoa)
  
• pitboss 9 - t90! (Cornflakes)

[Ceiliazul]

Also, with WilliamLP (keeping up in post count all by his lonesome) getting a teammate, looks like your thread is doomed to third place in that race... unless you can get regoarrarr to ded-lurk or something.

Edit: you're currently in 4th, but I don't see EITHER Kuro or Baii keeping their head in the game. So yeah, 3rd.

[Sisu]

Total post count is a sucker's game anyway. What matters is global lurker involvement, and we're losing on that only to team BXB (judging from the window that pops up when you click "Replies"). I think that once the game gets rolling, we can take the lead in that race with our natural charm .

Thanks for checking the Oracle numbers! I was thinking about it more and it occurred to me that Oracle is strong for us on another ground - Priesthood is on the short path to Monarchy, which turns on our wines and enables Hereditary Rule! Maybe a tech path like (Hunting, Mining) BW -> Agriculture -> AH -> Wheel -> Pottery -> Mysticism -> Polytheism -> Priesthood? If someone else rushes it down, they'll beat us, but I'm okay with that if it means they're not accelerating their growth curve like we are, and then we can put off going for Priesthood in favor of Writing. The major weakness of this tech path is not having a way to pop borders until after t50, and the need to derail to Fishing if it turns out our first ring has strong coastal sites (but Fishing practically makes up its cost in prereq bonus towards Pottery, so I'm reasonably okay with that).

Guess I'll be learning to tile share whether I want to or not!

[Ceiliazul]

The classical Oracle - MC play involves teching Pottery while Oracle is being built. Before that though, there's a bit of a minigame in teching your religion. If an IND civ techs religion very quickly, it basically screams Oracle to all involved. If you do it fast enough (say by skipping wheel for a bit) it might just scare the other IND teams out of the race.

Sometimes you need wheel, but with a river connection to your SouthWest and multiple FPs in view there, you may not need wheel so fast. All depends on scouting. What I'm suggesting is:

BW > Ag > AH > Myst > Med/Poly* > Wheel > Priesthood > Pottery

*That's another discussion with far-reaching effects. I like Meditation just because anyone else racing for Oracle will take Poly, adding ~3t to their plan. Poly provides some nice bulb options later, and speeds the way to Organized Religion.

[Sisu]

Hunh, I hadn't considered delaying Pottery like that. I suppose it depends on what we see out of other civs (both in terms of religion popups and in C&D), but is it really ok to put off granaries that long, especially with BW first?

Which reminds me - when's a good time to squeeze in revolting to Slavery?

[Sisu]

We're at the bottom of this forum? Okay, that can't be allowed to stand.

I got up early today (if you knew me IRL, which you don't, you would have done some kind of spit-take or record scratch or dropped a glass or something) in order to sandbox before work, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The game went up late last night, just as I was hitting the sack, so I didn't have time to do much more than log on, set my civ password, and move the scout. This is what I saw:



Which is not overtly spectacular. I then had a quick chat with Ceil before bed (various personal tidbits excised):

Sisu
I moved the scout 14 and didn't see new resources, just 3 fp and some river plains.
two civs had already settled t0 when I left game
either they aren't sandboxing or had really easy decisions

Ceiliazul
well hustle up then :-) Sounds like the FP is tempting you to move south?

Sisu
A little - our start as it is now is kind of food-light
dry corn plus plains cow
moving SW onto the wines would enable some FP farming
but I want to see what wine settle does to our tech/build rate
The wine settle also gives up a fair amount of grass for plains + fp, so idk

Ceiliazul
and gives up some forests, sounds like

Sisu
whatever, will update the sandbox and run the sim and see what happens
yup
my gut instinct says that SIP is probably strongest because it's the fastest possible second worker

Ceiliazul
look forward to it

Sisu
but we'll see

Ceiliazul
FP is always a good 2nd city, especially if you decide on prioritizing buddha/hindu

Sisu
yeah
2s of the wines shares them, the cows, and brings in the floodplains, while being on a ph and behind a river
depends if there's food in the fog I guess

This morning, I updated the sandbox with the newly revealed tiles and did some quick simming for settling on the wines. My gut instinct turns out to have been correct - we are getting tech faster than we can really make use of it, owing to the lack of a 2h plant. What's really damaging about losing the second hammer in the city tile is that I have to spend many more turns bringing out the warrior I need to cover my settler (I have no intention of losing it to a barb animal, cough Commodore cough PB5 cough cough), since it's hard to efficiently lumberjack out the warrior without wasting overflow hammers.

I have a friend coming into town today, so I won't be able to check the forum as much and do my usual threadspam. Ceil, right now I am 99% sure I want to SIP. Do you have anything you want to add before I do so? Only 5 teams have ended turn so far according to civstats, so we aren't holding things up just yet.

[Ceiliazul]

I like SIP, for the reasons you stated. It looks to me like a really good production city. That means your 2nd city should be your commerce center, and the FP looks good for that. Hopefully there some food down there to offset the plains...

also, we can't be sure until BW and/or AH comes in.