Adv48 - Timmy's hodgepodge

[timmy827]

Only time for a brief report. I may fill in more later when I have time. (Anyone who "followed" my PBEM3 may commence groaning, eye-rolling, and tomato-tossing).

Layout:


This is for clarity. I put forests on all but the nearest wheat/corn/gold, so the first worker would have something to do before BronzeWorking finishes

Reasoning:
Obviously we want all 4 stone/marble/copper/iron, and after hemming/hawing I figured that would be plenty of "hard" production. In terms of tile yield I'd rather the marble under the city than stone, but need stone sooner for wonders, and quarries take long time to build so put stone on the start tile. Food is king, so every land tile stays grass. In the long run corn is better than gold for research but early game gold is great, I unscientifically guessed that 5 was a good number of early commerce tiles.

A couple coastal tiles seemed like a fine trade, allows overseas trade routes, Harbor and Customs house further boosting. (Harbor health useful too.)

Extra rivers are not for more watermills, but just to make sure resources can be hooked up without Wheel/roads.

Globe + NP solve all your cap problems but not for a while, so it would be good to have some "alternate" resources to raise those caps instead of strictly the best tile yields. (This was part of the reason for water in the first place also).

The lake fish vs. river corn/wheat is interesting tradeoff. The first is 7 food once lighthoused vs. 6 for farmed corn, and an extra commerce (and another with Colossus), the corn eventually ties in food (Biology), wins in hammers (Levee). And of course the fish requires a work boat, and can't have a forest chop either. Seemed interesting enough to try some.

My edits had an unfortuante side effect with levees:

Sponsor's decision on whether to dock me. Obviously its an advantage and "unnatural", though less than floodplains on grass corn...certainly didn't intend it, and here's a screenshot from an early save showing that as far as I could tell, no way to know I screwed that up until building the levee.

Believe I just made those two tiles coast and did not touch those rivers, curious if anyone else wanting sea access had the same problem.



Score: (1735AD finish)

Have everything else to the left.

Darn, Hannibal got Arty just that turn.
By my count I have the following monopolies:
Electricity
Radio
Refrigeration
Mass Media
Superconductors
Computers
Industrialism
Plastics
Satellites
Composites
Ecology
Fission
Fusion
Fiber Optics
Adv. Flight
Genetics
+16

Play direction:
Two workers out of the gate, followed by WBs and starting Pyramids. (mining->BW->masonry). Despite the fast growth, two was plenty for the development stage.

Wanted to hog the water wonders so spend a lot of chops on TGL (weird but wanted something different. Sadly I missed out on Temple Of Artemis, that may have been useful for once), and went Metal Casting before Aesthetics (forge was +3 happy which was nice, but perhaps straight Globe beeline made most sense). Globe came before Great Library/National Epic. With the gold/silver/gems goosing research I delayed Caste quite a bit, actually whipped a lot of wonders (not too bad when you have resource + forge + OR + Bureacracy). After the first half it was a lot more routine for OCC - sling Lib>Biology for National Park, beeline to Superconductors, standard space tech order.

Charlemagned declared once but he was most backwards of AIs. If he landed all 8 galleons at once he could have killed me, but he didn't, allowing some quickly built Modern Armors and one Destroyer (upgraded from my exploring caravel) to deal with it easily. Towards the end I was trading my Oil for Mining resources with Sury, but got nervous, and when I couldn't cancel the deal actually DOW'd him to get it back (right after he launched a cross continental invasion against Charlie). He had more Cavs than I expected, but still had time to build/draft (this was after launch) and withstand that without much trouble.

Decided not to start any other wars myself, but as my continent was more advanced I did some bribing among Izzy/Shaka/Sury. Obviously that paid off in the end with Hannibal becoming most advanced, but could never bribe his neighbors to fight him. All religions save Hindu were founded on my continent so that limited warring opporunities.

Key mistakes:
Not knowing how this was going to go, my tech plans were thrown off. I was assuming I'd get more in trades and realized that I would not want to trade as much until I knew who the laggards were, but did not realize just how far ahead of the AIs I would get. Should have self-researched Alphabet instead of stubbornly waiting for one of them to get it.

Some silly forgetfullness - not getting Animal Husbandry for a long time (see above about expecting trades - no one got Alphabet! should have researched that myself), then forgettign to actually go pasture the damned pigs. In a later golden age, forgot until turn 9 of 12 to adopt free market; another 10 commerce traderoute . Holding off on Astro to milk the colossus, then realzing the observatory made up about 10 times as much as I lost from 6 water tile commerce.

Not founding Mining sooner. I got a great engineer near railroad, but I initially thought mining would be only 5 hammers, while settling is 3, plus 6 beakers, plus I feared corporate costs might make me run <100% science sometimes. Forgot that I could trade happy/health/coal/uranium for more resources; corrected this error with the Fusion GE. But in the end costs were manageable even without a Courthouse (never built one earlier because I hate Spies, and didn't have time at the end).

_______________________
Very cool idea though to be honest I'm not sure the scoring mechanism was the best - even more so than usual you are quite reliant on the vagaries of AI behavior in the competition. Great to see 20 reports as I sneak in under the wire at 11:45 PM PST on 1/10.

Perhaps a 2nd challenge with this setup would be a straight fastest win OCC space race with Always Peace/No Tech Trading, to evaluate in the most "pure" fashion possible the terrain choices

[Thoth]

Impressive finish date.

The Levee-giving-water hammers glitch seems to be cropping up in a few games.

[T-hawk]

Hey Timmy, great to see you got to play and report.

I didn't think that any of marble/copper/iron were necessarily obvious. Stone yeah for the Pyramids, and since you can hide one resource under the city center without having to work it. But the marble wonders come somewhat later (Oracle is cheap enough without), and marble does nothing between Taj and endgame. I learned from Adv 35 when you showed me that the wonder doublers aren't so important.

Extra rivers are not for more watermills, but just to make sure resources can be hooked up without Wheel/roads.

Nice catch, I didn't think of that one, but in part because I didn't take many resources needing hooking.

The lake fish vs. river corn/wheat is interesting tradeoff. The first is 7 food once lighthoused vs. 6 for farmed corn, and an extra commerce (and another with Colossus), the corn eventually ties in food (Biology), wins in hammers (Levee).

Lake fish ties on hammers (and much sooner) with Moai Statues... which occupies a national wonder slot and pushes out probably Ironworks (with Globe, NP, NE, Oxford inviolate.) Yes an interesting tradeoff indeed. More in my report, up soon.

Great Lighthouse can be useful for an OCC. I often build it, though didn't here as I raced for earliest Globe. With a high population and early harbor, the routes can profit fairly well.

No points penalty for the river levee coast. I did say you could do whatever you want with the rivers. I tested ahead of time and couldn't get river coast to happen (and couldn't again testing quickly last night), so didn't think that would be a problem. Notice that the tile does not get the river commerce though. Very strange.

As for the scoring system, it was not meant to be a game of pure fastest finish economy. The intent was to still gauge efficient play, but in an open-ended way, allowing focus on war or non SS techs, and to make trading require consideration rather than the one right option. I do try not to overuse fastest finish for scoring, we did that recently in Speed Racer and Hannibal's Muse. Agreed that it was more AI dependent than I originally expected though.

[haphazard1]

I didn't think that any of marble/copper/iron were necessarily obvious. Stone yeah for the Pyramids, and since you can hide one resource under the city center without having to work it. But the marble wonders come somewhat later (Oracle is cheap enough without), and marble does nothing between Taj and endgame. I learned from Adv 35 when you showed me that the wonder doublers aren't so important.

The strategic resources were an interesting decision. I would change my choices a bit now that I have played the scenario once.

Horses -- I did build some knights and cavs and they were useful, but I could have lived without this.
Copper -- Skipped in my game, and I did not miss it. We had dog soldiers for early barb defense (plus protective archers). Colossus is cheap enough without it, SoL is not worthwhile even with it, and most SS parts do not need it. I managed to trade for copper at the end for the SS parts, so was happy to have taken another gold instead.
Iron -- Significant military value, plus IW. (And Eiffel, I suppose.) Maces and knights crushed Shaka the first time he declared on me, and the IW hammers were great, so I was very glad to have this.
Stone -- Pyramids, Oxford, quite a few other wonders, plus walls and castle for power rating, defense, and the extra trade route (for a short time, anyway). Worthwhile.
Marble -- I put this under the city center and used stone as a stronger hammer tile. I built a bunch of marble wonders as well, so I think it was worth it. Traded it late for another health resource (banana, I think). But if you were willing to skip some of the marble wonders (or pay more for them), maybe not needed.

Anyway, very impressive game, timmy827.