Adventure 48: Thoth's Food Filled Wonderland

[Thoth]

I had a lot of fun with this one, thanks for hosting.

20 riverside tiles, one ph to build on and whatever resources I want. This is going to be sweet.

Initial thoughts:

I'll want either stone or marble on the PH (for a 3 hammer city tile) and the other resource available early for some serious wonder spam. I decided to go
with stone on the centre tile instead of marble due to my plans for an early Stonehenge. It means I lost out on some hammers by working the marble instead of the stone, but it meant I didn't need to wait for the stone to be improved before starting my wonder parade.

Other than wonder boosting resources, what else do I need/want? Food, lots and lots and lots of food. Some luxuries would be nice to tide me over until Globe gets finished. Strategic resources iron definitely, copper (boosts Colossus, SoL + spaceship), horses? nah. I'm not planning any offensive wars so horses can go. Luxuries there are 5 pre calendar luxuries (Gold, silver, gems, elephants and fur) so I grabbed one of each. Health is going to be an issue so I plunked down a Deer as well. Since I wanted coastal access 2 Fish were in order. Other than that, I'll want one of each grain (health will be the growth bottleneck between getting Globe and getting the National Park). I added in one extra copper (hammers). Everything else got corn. Then it was a matter of placing forests on most tiles. I wanted 1 6 food source, a commerce tile and the marble available before bronze. So one corn, the gold and the marble were left unforested. Everything else (except the 2 fish tiles) got a forest.

4000Bc:




The early plan: Run the table on all of the early Wonders while teching hard and growing as fast as possible. I'm aiming for 10 Great People by 1 ad with Globe, Nat Epic and Oxford all complete.

Opening tech path:

Mining (gold)
Mysticism (Stonehenge)
Masonry (Stone and Marble, Gwal and Mids)
Bronze
Hunting (happy and health)
Poly (TofA)
Priesthood (Oracle)
Wheel
Pottery
Writing
Code of laws (from Oracle)
Sailing (trade routes)
Math

Initial builds: Worker, workboat, warrior, worker
Stonehenge (2760 BC)
Great Wall (2480, I queue swapped a bit with Mids and ToA to delay Gwall a few turns to cut the odds of generating an unwanted GSpy)
ToA (2080)
Oracle in 1960 bc (again I queue swapped this a bit waiting for writing to finish)
Finished the pyramids in 1680 bc

Great People so far:

G. Prophet (2160 BC, settled)
G. Prophet (1660 BC, Confucian shrine (gold, +1 Gpp, and 3 priest slots)

Once the Mids finished, I made my first civic swap of the game to Caste/Republic. (pic is from the turn I completed Mids, pre-revolt)




Once the Mids were up, I focused on getting some basic infrastructure up (as can be seen from my build queue above).

At this point, my focus was growing to my happy cap (13 pre forge) and getting some scientists up.

Tech path from here was:

Metal casting (a forge was worth +3 happy -->size 16)
Aesthetics
Literature
Civil Service (825 bc) -->Revolt to B-cracy
Drama
800 bc Isabella teched Alphabet and I picked up Alphabet, Meditation, Animal Husbandry, Iron working and Archery in trades)
Philosopy (founded Taoism in 650 BC)
Music (I generated a Great Artist, so I bulbed Music, then settled the Music GA)
Paper
Education (300 BC)
(picked up currrency in 275, my notes are not clear if I teched it or traded for it)
Gunpowder (100 bc)
Machinery
Construction
Engineering (25 Ad)

Along the way I'd built TGLib, national Epic, Globe, Missed the GLH by 3 turns and missed the announcement and wound up finishing the Hanging Gardens by

accident, they'd been sitting in the queue with one turn to go waiting for my pop to grow a bit more). Finished Oxford in 100 BC.

At 1 AD I was one turn (8 freaking gpp) short of Great Person #10 (#1 G prophet->settled, #2 G prophet->shrine, #3 G scientist (low odds)->Acadamy, #4 and #5

GS (settled), #6 G Artist (bulb Music), #7 G prophet->Taoist shrine, every other GP I settled.




Diplomatically, I avoided adopting an early religion. Izzy founded Budhism and I used the free misionary from Col to spread Confucianism to Sury. The early shrine helped auto spread Confucianism to Shaka. This set up some nice inter AI hate (they don't have to love me, so long as they hate each other) although Izzy managed to convert Shaka at some point. The three of them waged a few wars over the centuries.

Surry made the first DOW against Izzy in 400 BC, and a few turns later (250ish BC) I finally adopted Confucianism and Pacifism

At this point I was pushing out over 600 bpt and a solid 248 GPP/turn. I'm on track for getting the National Park up by ~500 AD and I starting to think a 1700s launch might be possible.

(to be continued......)

[T-hawk]

Some luxuries would be nice to tide me over until Globe gets finished. ... (health will be the growth bottleneck between getting Globe and getting the National Park).

Nice analysis. This is the main tension in developing your map here. Extra happy and health resources create short-term gain to reach those two national wonders faster, but then fall behind in the long run. That furs tile at 5 commerce isn't so exciting in the later game when it could be a 7-food farm supporting 2.5 scientists for 15 beakers. It sounds like you skewed highly towards the short-term plan, and did well with it, so looking forward to the conclusion.

Missed the GLH by 3 turns and missed the announcement and wound up finishing the Hanging Gardens by accident

An OCC really makes it easy to blaze through and ignore the world, eh?

[Thoth]

Nice analysis. This is the main tension in developing your map here. Extra happy and health resources create short-term gain to reach those two national wonders faster, but then fall behind in the long run. That furs tile at 5 commerce isn't so exciting in the later game when it could be a 7-food farm supporting 2.5 scientists for 15 beakers. It sounds like you skewed highly towards the short-term plan, and did well with it, so looking forward to the conclusion.

The trade off for the furs isn't quite a steep once the National Park is up. 7f 1h 1c (with levy) vs 2f 2h 2c + 1 specialist (with a Forest Preserve), I lost 1.5 late specialists (and had slightly slower growth) but the extra pop point early made up for it . IIRC I didn't actually work the furs until size 20 or so.

About the only tile I might have changed was the Deer. It's +1 health pre NP, so it's equivalent in food output (5 f +1 health vs 6 food) to a grass corn/wheat pre Bio and weaker afterwards (5f 1h vs 7f 1c).

I'm hoping to have the conclusion up later today.

An OCC really makes it easy to blaze through and ignore the world, eh?

Yes it does. Playing at 2:00 am doesn't help either.

[Thoth]

From 1 AD, I teched up Engineering, Chemistry, PP, Lib to within 1 turn, Sci method, finish lib-> Biology in 350 AD.

Post Bio, I teched out the naval techs while picking up useless junk tech (Monarchy, monotheism, Feudalism, Calendar) from the AIs in exchange for non-monopoly techs.


I hit 1k beakers/turn in 680 Ad


I built a fleet of privateers to help slow down the global tech pace (and earn me a GG and some cash).

Wonders in this era, well over the course of the game I *didn't* build TGLH (missed by 3 turns), Parthenon (the marginal benifit to a Philo leader running Pacifism is small and with an early run at Sci Meth planned it wasn't worth the hammers), Chechen Itza (didn't compete), Notre Dame (didn't compete), Hagia Sofia (forgot about it until too late, the GE points would have been nice). I also skipped Versailles (you can't build it in your capital), the Space Elevator (isn't worth the hammers to build let alone the beakers to tech Computers and Robotics). I built everything else.

Founded Cereal Mills in 1190 AD and started buying up grain resources from anyone with a surplus.

Hannibal turned into the runnaway AI tech leader (I'm not sure what happened to Charlie, he didn't build his usual stack of 34561882 Medieval units or if he did, he didn't actually do anything with it).

Sury turned into an absolute monster on the home continent. He took down Izzy (while at war with Shaka) and then took out Shaka. I'd inadvertantly helped him out by parking a few Privateers off Shaka's coast which caused Shaka to go into "build best ship" mode. His best ships at the time were triremes and simply served as GG fodder for me. I suspect that had I sent the Privateers off to Hanibal's west coast sooner and ignored Shaka the war against Sury would have gone a little differently. The upshot of all that was a very powerful (but backwards) neighbour and a fast teching Hanibal on the other continent that I was unable to contain after he teched Astro and Chem. I wasn't too worried about Sury, by the time he finished off Izzy and Shaka he was fielding Grennies. By that time I had mobile artillery, tanks, bombers and infantry. A war would have slowed me down, but likely wouldn't have proved fatal to me.

From here to the end game it was just teching, settling Great People and building stuff.

Once my levee had been built, I noticed an interesting glitch:



I'm not sure what caused this, but based on my limited four-letter WBing, I'd guess that when the tiles were changed to Coast they kept the "River" flag.

Building SS with AW boosted Priests:



(According to Firaxis, you don't need a computer to run a space-ship, but you do need Rifles. )


Missed my launch target by one turn, and launched in 1800 with a 12 turn spaceship. Looking back on the game, I'm certain I could have launched earlier if I'd played a bit more focused (builing vanity wonders like the Hoover Dam didn't help my finish date).

I wound up having to build a couple of extra workers in the late game to keep my resources hooked up as Sury's spys were being annoying (I really fucking hate the way Firaxis implemented espionage in BTS.) In spite of running counter espionage missions I was constantly replacing my SS resources (and the occasional blown up building). Seriously, who the hell at Firaxis thought that this kind of garbage was fun?

Overall, I'm content with the outcome and had a bunch of fun playing. I might give it another shot later to try out some different approaches.

Fun stats:

Total Great People: 40 (including the 5 from the tree, so 35 generated "honestly")
1 academy
2 shrines
1 bulb
2 corporations
3 for Golden Ages while building space ship
31 settled.

Plus 2 settled GGs


The GE for Mining Inc didn't arrive until ~3 turns before fusion (it was the only one I popped all bloody game) :sigh:

Final GPP rate: 668/turn (7600 required for my next GP)
Total culture: 151642 (enough for 3 cultural victories )

At the end, I was up Mass Media, Ecology, Fission, Composites, Fibre Optics, Refrigeration, Computers, Stealth, Fusion, Superconductors and Genetics on Hanibal (who was my closest competitor) and had all techs the AI had.

Final score: 11
Fun Factor: 10

Victory Screen:


Final City:


Wonders and other fun stuff:

[T-hawk]

Shaka got killed by Sury? That's not something you see every game!

Once my levee had been built, I noticed an interesting glitch:

I'm not sure what caused this, but based on my limited four-letter WBing, I'd guess that when the tiles were changed to Coast they kept the "River" flag.

Really? I tried doing this in testing ahead of time, and could never get a coast tile to show a river bonus from levee or the extra river commerce (which your tiles don't have.) Hence my comment to do whatever you want with the rivers, since it didn't seem like they could break anything. The hammer wasn't from Moai Statues, was it? No, I see 5 other national wonders (NE, Globe, NP, Oxford, Ironworks.)

On another note... I see the BUG mod in your city screen shots. BUG is considered out of bounds for officially scored Realms Beyond tournament events; it creates an unlevel playing field compared to players using the original unmodded game. We don't want players to ever feel they must use a game mod to compete fairly. See this thread for more discussion. We'll include your result in a list of unofficial "shadow" game results.

Anyway, glad you enjoyed it though, and thanks for the report!

[Thoth]

Shaka got killed by Sury? That's not something you see every game!

It's even more impressive when you realize Sury was
a) Fighting a two front war
and
b) Thumping Izzy soundly

Sury lost a city to Shaka early in the war, but Shaka fizzled after that (too many triremes I suspect )

Really? I tried doing this in testing ahead of time, and could never get a coast tile to show a river bonus from levee or the extra river commerce (which your tiles don't have.) Hence my comment to do whatever you want with the rivers, since it didn't seem like they could break anything. The hammer wasn't from Moai Statues, was it? No, I see 5 other national wonders (NE, Globe, NP, Oxford, Ironworks.)

If you look at Ruff's 700 ad screenshot you can see the same effect. As I said, I'm not sure what caused it....I'm simply reporting it.

(and no, I didn't build a 2 hammer Moai )

On another note... I see the BUG mod in your city screen shots. BUG is considered out of bounds for officially scored Realms Beyond tournament events; it creates an unlevel playing field compared to players using the original unmodded game. We don't want players to ever feel they must use a game mod to compete fairly. See this thread for more discussion. We'll include your result in a list of unofficial "shadow" game results.

Fair enough. I play the game for fun and I consider it a lot less fun to play without BUG. All the info is available without BUG, it just takes a lot more time and mouse clicks to get. If playing with BUG means no elligibility for score, then so be it. I still had a bunch of fun with it and I can live without being scored.

Anyway, glad you enjoyed it though, and thanks for the report!

Thanks for setting up the game.

[regoarrarr]

Post Bio, I teched out the naval techs while picking up useless junk tech (Monarchy, monotheism, Feudalism, Calendar) from the AIs in exchange for non-monopoly techs.

Monarchy was very useful for me for HR happiness in a pre-Globe world - same with OR.

Very nice result though!

[Thoth]

Monarchy was very useful for me for HR happiness in a pre-Globe world - same with OR.

Very nice result though!

Thanks.

Since I was focused on a Settled GP/Specialist heavy economy and had no wines Monarchy/Feudalism were just speed bumps on the way to Corporation.

I read your report, it's an interestingly different approach to OCC. Normally I just get Rep ASAP and ignore Monarchy's cheap happys.

OR vs Pacifism: Again, with a specialist focus Pacifism is the way to go. With a gold mine/commerce focus then OR would have been nice for the extra hammers.

[haphazard1]

Very impressive game, Thoth!

I also saw the "levee hammers on water tiles" issue in my game. (Final screenshot of Cahokia in my report thread.)

[Thoth]

Very impressive game, Thoth![

Thanks. It was fun trying to break Philo as much as I could.

I also saw the "levee hammers on water tiles" issue in my game. (Final screenshot of Cahokia in my report thread.)

Interesting to note that only 2 of the 3 water tiles in your city are getting the levee bonus. I'm now officially stumped as to what causes the hammer bonus. If it was just the river flag, then I'd expect all 3 of your water tiles to get the bonus.