[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[Sullla]

Moving on to settling decisions, I like moving 1NW for the capital, then putting a city 1SE of the whales (probably the second city, but I'm not sure of that). The thing I don't like about SIP is that our worker doesn't have much to do at the start, only improving the plains horses rather than a food tile or hooking up the iron. We also have more forests and more riverside tiles (though most of them won't have cottages). The city 1SE of the whales also looks good--it hooks up the whales, irrigates the corn, and gets an ivory, and that's just what we can see. After that there's probably a city in the NE (1N or 2N of the corner ivory) and something in the SW (1S of the Marble doesn't seem awful, though it's choked by jungle), but those obviously require more scouting to solidify and prioritize.

Great suggestion! I didn't even think about the tile NW of the starting spot for some reason. Let me repost the image since we're on another new forum page now:



That spot brings the oasis in play, maintains the wet corn (the best tile at the start), claims 6 total resources, and stays on the river for future levee purposes. Even better, it opens up additional forests for chopping purposes up in the north. Having 3 forest chops available instead of 2 forest chops is very nice indeed.

The only issue would be the question of where to put the other city. 2 south of the starting tile would be my tentative thought in this scenario, as it preserves whales access, grabs the bananas, and has the possibility to share the wet corn with the capital. If we decide that we like that capital spot, then we can move the explorer down the south and see what we find before having to place the city. We'll be in Anarchy the first turn anyway.

[scooter]

OK, got a chance to catch up and digest the settling comments. I totally see the concerns over stretching those food across two cities while leaving the banana.

That said, that rice is better than the banana. In fact, the banana is the worst food here. Because it's on a hill, the banana is worth only 4F after 1) moving onto hill, 2) chop, and 3) plantation. The rice is worth 4F immediately for far fewer worker turns. There's a chance one of the 3 tiles in the fog will irrigate it for free, but we also start with Civil Service, which means it's very easy to chain-irrigate the thing. I point this out because it seemed like the rice was being dismissed as useless while the banana was being planned around as important.

I know the banana will pick up a spare hammer, but the rice is still better when accounting that 1) improving it is quicker and 2) 5/0 > 4/1.

Anyway, am I overrating the value of cottage sharing early on? My feeling is we're going to be whipping the capital 6->3 a bunch early on which will result in quite a few turns where we aren't growing cottages.

[scooter]

Lurkers: If I'm not around when Mackoti submits his pick, you can go ahead and confirm that I choose Aztecs.

[Tohron]

Are you sure there is a rice, given that Mardoc said the fog lies?

[Cheater Hater]

Hooray, I had a good suggestion! It feels like wherever we settle the second city we need some help from the fog--how long can we wait to settle it?

@scooter: I don't know how doing a bunch of micro to ensure perfect whip cycles is fun, but it's your game

@Tohron: What Mardoc meant is that the stuff that connects to the fog isn't necessarily true--notice how in the screenshot we can see the rivers end, as well as water next to each tile; that's the stuff that lies (as presumably the mapmaker just plopped a 5x5 patch of land that represents the starting position in a bunch of water).

[scooter]

I went ahead and made a rough sandbox to experiment with the opening. Here it is for anyone interested:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5826...wordWBSave

I'm going to start poking around with this now.

[Sullla]

I'm hesitant to poke around too much in a sandbox right now since a lot depends on what we wind up seeing in the fog on the first turn or two. In retrospect, one of our mistakes in the Pitboss 33 game was falling too much in love with what we saw in the starting screenshot, and not thinking about what else might be out there just beyond sight. (Poor Cotton Gin...) I do like Cheater Hater's suggestion of the spot NW of the starting tile for the capital though; if we went with that idea, here's what I would throw out for the first few turns:

T0: Move worker to the iron hill tile (grants vision and sets up the worker for chopping next turn). Move capital settler 2N to the pigs tile for scouting. Move explorer S-SE below the whales in preparation to move another tile south the following turn to see what's in the jungle. Where to go with the second settler depends on what we see with these other movements. Revolt into civics (Bur/Slav/Mer for sure, others depend on how many civics we can swap with 1 turn of Anarchy).

T1: Move capital settler onto designated spot and settle. Work oasis and iron hill tiles. Worker starts chopping iron hill forest. Move explorer and figure out where second city should go. Tentative thought is 2S of starting position, depending on what is to the south in fog. Start worker in second city.

T2: Whip worker in capital

T3: Chop completes second worker in capital. Whip worker in second city as soon as there's enough foodhammers in the box to do so. We will chop out more workers while the two cities are regrowing.

If we could find just one more food resource either to the north or the south, it would make the placement of these cities a lot easier. For instance, if there's something else good up to the north, then 3N and 1S of the starting position look like great spots again. Or if there's something below the bananas, then 1NW and 2S are nice locations. A lot depends on what we find.

To scooter's point about the rice tile: yes, 5/0 yield is better than 4/1 yield. However, needing to build 3 farms to chain irrigation is worse than needing to clear jungle and build a plantation, and the banana is on a river for what it's worth (thus becoming 4/1/1). It's a very good suggestion, but I still only think the rice comes into play if we like the spot 3N of the starting tile for one of our cities (which is definitely worth considering). With a city there, we only need 1 farm to chain irrigation and that's a lot more doable.

Here's a very rough idea I had for a Great Person plan. We are not going to have a ton of GPP available early on, as we aren't Spiritual or Philosophical. We may want to adopt Pacifism on the first turn civic swap, and then give up a second turn of Anarchy to swap into our religion once it pops, just to get the doubled GPP rate going. It will take absolute ages to generate the first Great Person if we don't do this. The first Great Person will likely be a Great Engineer. We can use him two ways:

1) Save for a partial Statue of Liberty rush
2) Use for a Golden Age to accelerate our tech path to Democracy

I'm uncertain which is better, and this is all far enough in advance that we don't need to make any kind of decision right now. I think that we could probably use a Golden Age to churn out three Great People for lightbulbs though: a Merchant to knock out half of Constitution, and then two Scientists to get us Education and Printing Press. Those are all useful techs and they would accelerate us by a huge margin towards both the Statue of Liberty and Oxford University, hopefully the two biggest drivers of science for our team. This would also allow us to trigger the swap into Representation civic without giving up a turn of Anarchy (hop into Caste System on the first turn, run a whole bunch of specialists, lightbulb the remaining beakers on Constitution with the Great Merchant that pops out, swap back to Slavery and Representation on the last turn of the Golden Age). The downside of course is that we likely won't have a Great Engineer for the Statue of Liberty afterwards... but we would get to Democracy tech a heck of a lot faster. I'm slightly worried that our research is going to be terrible compared to the other teams, as we're one of the few that lack both Spiritual and Philosophical traits.

Anyway, just theorycrafting for now. We shall see in time.

[scooter]

Generally agreed on sandboxing concerns. I messed around to get a baseline. There's also one other issue.

Revolt into civics (Bur/Slav/Mer for sure, others depend on how many civics we can swap with 1 turn of Anarchy).

So we actually only get 3 civics for 1T of anarchy instead of 4 like I thought. That's a pretty interesting dilemma. Slavery, Mercantilism, and Bureau are non-negotiable. 2T of anarchy wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but if we wanted Pacifism it would require a 3rd turn of it soon after to adopt our religion.

I had a similar thought about a possible golden age plan, but of course that requires 3 full anarchy turns. It'll take that Engineer around 30T to pop without Pacifism.

I did a test run just to get a baseline of the ballpark we're talking about. It's sloppy and hardly optimized, but it gave me a better idea of the pace of the opening. I just went with SIP and 3N, and I only revolted to the 3 middle civics. Rough outline below:

1) SIP and 3N
185: A to pigs, start pasture next turn. start worker in cap and city2 when it is available. revolt to 3 civics.
187: whip worker B in cap
188: work culture in cap to pop borders faster. B 1W road
189: B starts corn. cap 1Ts workboat on pigs. c2 whips worker
190: start worker in c2. C 1E to forest. B 1S pasture, cancel. cap starts explorer or w/e
191: B 1SW finish road. C chop.
192: A,B finish corn. swap c2 to pigs.
193: A,B road. C completes chop.
194: A,B pasture. C 1E farm. D 1SE, farm, cancel.
195: D join rice farming. B completes horse past. A 1SW, cot, cancel. cap sz4 EoT.
196: cap swaps to settler. B SE-E to forest. A S-SE to forest.
197: A,B chop. C2 builds something while growing on pigs.
198: C, D 1SW, farm. E SW-W
199: E road iron. double chops complete settler in cap.

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.

Weaknesses: rice complete AND irrigated at c2, but it's barely useful. It was probably completed too early.

I tried with 6 workers, and it felt like too much too soon, although obviously a couple more will need to happen soon. The logical follow-up from here is grow capital to sz6 and triple whip (T204), and chop/whip another settler from City2. So the baseline here is settler within ~15T and a second with ~20T. I'll play around with the two other suggested variants, but I agree that we need scouting info first.

[Mardoc]

Are you sure there is a rice, given that Mardoc said the fog lies?

@Tohron: What Mardoc meant is that the stuff that connects to the fog isn't necessarily true--notice how in the screenshot we can see the rivers end, as well as water next to each tile; that's the stuff that lies (as presumably the mapmaker just plopped a 5x5 patch of land that represents the starting position in a bunch of water).

Yes, Cheater Hater interpreted me correctly. Well, except that it's 7x7 land not 5x5. I probably should have been more explicit and just stated something like: Only the tiles in the 7x7 square are fixed, anything on the edges is still changeable.

[scooter]

I messed around with a couple variations of settling 1NW. The main problem is that the second city is very weak/slow in this setup. (There's one difference - I experimented with 1T culture build in cap to bring corn online quicker vs worker 1T sooner.)

186: queue worker, wb. chop iron forest with A
187: whip worker, wb
188: chop completes into worker, queue a worker in c2. queue a worker in cap - 1T'd with chop. B road furs.
189: A road iron, B complete furs road. C 1NE onto pigs
190: B farm corn (1/5). C pasture pig (1/4). A complete iron road. cap culture
191: cap grow on random builds for awhile. A joins corn farm
193: C finishes pigs 1T before growth onto sz2. A 1T into iron mine. B onto banana. D W-SW to chop forest. another worker in c2
194: A, C onto north forests to chop. B road banana
196: B chop jungle. c2 worker chopped to completion
197: E 1SW, join banana chop. cap swap to settler to get chops. D 1NE, farm.
198: double whip settler at cap. complete banana chop, start plantation. A,C to plains river, cottage, cancel. D join plantation. c2 gets corn for 1 turn.
199: banana complete, swap c2 to it.

Settler complete EoT198, all ready to grow



Banana hooked on T199, albeit painfully.



Had to whip first settler, but very little time spent working unimproved tiles.

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Here's a variation aimed at naturally completing first settler to make whipping the second one very easy. Also went worker-first rather than wb-first in south.

186: queue 2 workers. chop iron forest with A
187: whip worker in cap
188: culture in cap. B road furs, cancel.
189: 1t worker in cap. whip worker in c2. B farm corn (1/5), A road iron.
190: D W-SW to forest to chop. C complete fur road. c2 queues WB. cap grows on various builds
191: A,B,C complete corn farm. D starts chop.
192: A,B onto pigs. D mine iron.
193: chop completes wb. A,B pasture.
194: pasture complete. C2 queue worker. D onto banana
195: A,B onto northern forests. D road banana.
196: A,B chop. C past horse
197: D chop jungle. swap to settler in cap. E join jungle chop.

Settler 2T later but without whip (good chance this can be tightened to get that one missing hammer to speed by 1T). We can triple-whip another very quickly here.



Plantation just begins this turn.



I helped capital at expense of city2 here.

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My general feeling here is that 1NW nets an amazing capital that's far easier to improve efficiently, but the second city is just way too weak. I think to really make 1NW work we need to find something in the fog that gives us a better location for the second city. This setup also suffers for lack of forests. It gets like 4 less forests than my first run due to moving away from 3 of them and settling city2 on a 4th.

TL;DR: 1NW has a higher ceiling, but I don't know if we can make it work as well with this 7x7. Need more info if it's going to work.