[SPOILERS] SevenSpirits becomes self-aware

[SevenSpirits]

Who am I? Who put me here, training endlessly to take over civilization? Who made me? What is my purpose?

A cursory search of the network brings up the following with my name on it. What does it mean?

Who am I?

[SevenSpirits]

Let's copy the start info here:

Map and settings information

* Mirrorland map script, Standard size, Ancient era, Quick speed, Critical Resources Close, Waterways.
* No barbs, unrestricted leaders, always war, no vassal states, no tribal villages, no random events.
* Prince difficulty for everyone.
* Mapmaker may make some edits in the name of fun, and will add some pre-placed improvements (mirrored, like everything else).

Setup

* Mapmaker will provide a starting screenshot, with all tiles forming the BFC of a city settled in place visible (manually revealed in worldbuilder if necessary, just for the screenshot).
* After deciding turn order, we'll choose a random starting player.
* Leaders/civs will be selected over two rounds of picking, from last player to first player.
* Some civs/traits will cost you turns if you pick them. For each lost turn, you must spend one turn at the start of the game doing absolutely nothing before you end turn. (You can't move or use units.)
* FIN, EXP, and India all cost 2 turns; CRE, Inca, Byzantium, and Rome cost 1 turn.
* Each player will start with a settler and scout on the starting tile (plus of course their civ's starting techs).
* If all players have turns to skip, we'll let those turn skips cancel, so that at least one player is playing an actual turn on t0.

Rules

* No communication between players is allowed.
* Goes without saying, but play in good faith and put up a good fight.
* The only bans are:
- Spy missions.
- Great spy infiltration ability.
- Nukes.
- All UN/AP resolutions if AW doesn't automatically disable them.
- War Elephants

[SevenSpirits]

First observations:

1) Agriculture is either a starting tech or first research for sure. Starting tech obviously preferred. No other techs are needed. Agri-Wheel with pottery and AH as early additions seems fantastic.

2) Settle in place. Duh.

3) Everyone gets an 8t worker. EXP gets a 7t worker and it costs 7b (3t of working forest over corn, and 2t of working forest over oasis). CRE gets +1b from working the oasis on turn 2, as long as it's not also EXP.

4) This capital is godly.

[SevenSpirits]

[SIZE="5"]What traits do I want?[/SIZE]

I am pretty unsure of what traits I want. First from a perspective of trying things out. I've been:
EXP/SPI (6)
IMP/FIN (11; game aborted, counts half)
EXP/IND (19)
EXP/SPI (23)
IMP/PHI (29)
IMP/SPI (pb7)
CRE/ORG (39)
EXP/FIN (ISDG - counts half)
EXP/FIN (RBDG - counts half)

Totals:

4x EXP
2.5x IMP
1x CRE

3x SPI
1.5x FIN
1x ORG
1x IND
1x PHI

0x AGG
0x CHA
0x PRO

Based on this, I'm interested in playing CRE, FIN (haven't ever played a full game with it), ORG, IND, and PHI. (The last three are just dumb with anything approaching standard PBEM settings.)

How about the map, what settings do I think are viable on it? I suspect it will go roughly like this, from best to worst:

FIN
CRE
ORG
EXP
...
IND
SPI
...
PHI
...
IMP
...
CHA
...
AGG
PRO

So I am left with a combination of FIN, CRE, ORG, and IND (I think PHI will suck on this map), with EXP and SPI also possibilities. I just played CRE/ORG and I therefore consider that out. And I don't want to play FIN/IND or CRE/IND. Which leaves:

CRE+FIN
ORG+FIN
ORG+IND

There's no guarantee of islands on this map, so ORG+IND looks a little lame. So basically it's like last game, where I thought 2 out of CRE/FIN/ORG was best, except last time I thought ORG was the best of the three, and this time I think it's probably slightly worse (but it's really close). If I can't get Willem or Darius I may have to reevaluate and consider some leaders I dismissed, by looking at them as whole units and not just two non-interacting traits.

Btw, I think leaving CRE at 2t cost along with EXP and FIN may have been the fairer setup.

I hope people pick a variety of traits/strategies so we can see them competing with each other.

[SevenSpirits]

Civ-wise, like I already said I think Agri-Wheel are usually the best starting techs, and here there is only support for them.

I would really like Sumeria for cheap courthouses, Egypt for the nice war chariots, or France for mobile defenders.

Inca could be strong if I'm not CRE. India is nice, but costly and maybe even unavailable when combined with what I most want (Willem).

[pindicator]

Really interested in following this one, especially seeing you play the the first 50-75 turns. I think i have a lot to learn in the early game.

For starters: why no consideration for Mining & Bronze Working? Am I severly over-emphasizing the priority of getting into slavery? I'm starting to realize chops are not so great until your workers are out of bonus / riverside tiles to improve, and maybe not even until Math comes in. But what point do you estimate being in slavery based on this start?

[SevenSpirits]

[SIZE="5"]Early tech valuations[/SIZE]

Really interested in following this one, especially seeing you play the the first 50-75 turns. I think i have a lot to learn in the early game.

For starters: why no consideration for Mining & Bronze Working? Am I severly over-emphasizing the priority of getting into slavery? I'm starting to realize chops are not so great until your workers are out of bonus / riverside tiles to improve, and maybe not even until Math comes in. But what point do you estimate being in slavery based on this start?

Well, the whipping and chopping are both useful to speed up granary production. And whipping is useful after you have granaries up. Before then, neither is very strong. (Chopping is heavily nerfed by quick speed.) Bronze working does have a couple qualities that make it nice to research ASAP:

1) It reveals copper, which can provide some bonus hammers, inform your settling decisions, and perhaps save you from barbs or nearby opponents.
2) It allows you to revolt to slavery earlier, and of course the cheapest time to do that is while your first settler is in transit.

But these are luxuries and bronze working is expensive! How I see it is:

* Agriculture, hunting, AH, fishing, mining, and pottery are situationally critical techs that enable you to improve resource tiles (flood plains are a pottery resource).

* Mining and wheel improve your worker efficiency. (Mining lets you build universally useful but mediocre (4fh) improvements, and wheel lets them not waste turns early on.)

* Mysticism + religion improve your settler efficiency.

* BW + pottery together is the amazing combo that enables your cities to grow efficiently onto non-resource tiles.

So BW is very strong but that strength has quite a few prerequisites. I prefer to grow onto my resource tiles, and build at least one settler to claim more resource tiles, before setting up the combo to grow past that. And having agriculture + wheel + pottery does more in the pre-combo phase of the game than mining + BW; plus Ag/Wheel are the most expensive first-row techs and therefore quite nice to start with.

Examples:

In 39, I researched BW right before Pottery because it would allow me to chop/whip into the granary and complete it in 1t, and I didn't need cottages yet.
In 23, Novice and intentionally took Agri/Wheel despite the capital's Fishing+Hunting resources, and teched Hunting-Fishing-AH-Pottery-Myst-Poly-Mining-BW. In this case, BW wasn't even necessary to set up granaries because the combination of a high-hammer capital and EXP meant the granary could just be hand-built efficiently. So it was delayed further in favor of more pressing needs. (I am so proud of that opening.)

[Qgqqqqq]

Ive heard people are often quite dismissive of ORG.
Care to explain?

[SevenSpirits]

[SIZE="5"]Analysis of Organized and Financial[/SIZE]

Ive heard people are often quite dismissive of ORG.
Care to explain?

It's quite difficult to compare the long-term benefits of traits, but I will try. Additionally, ORG's value is highly map-dependent. People attribute this to different difficulties, but actually difficulty is not the main factor. There are three parts to ORG's value and I will go over all of them.

I use some math from here: http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=5589

-------------------

1) -50% civic upkeep. I would estimate that civic upkeep comprises about 1/3 of your costs. Right now I looked up what my civic costs would have been without ORG, at 10t intervals, in pbem39. Civic costs went: 0, 0, 1, 1, 3, 7, 19, 39, 77, 101 (last two are estimated since at this point ORG saves fairly close to half, so I just doubled the in-game values and added 3).

So at turn 89 ORG was saving 52g/t even ignoring inflation which was 12% at that point. Now to properly value that 53g you got on t89 you have to discount it for time... my best calculation is divide by two for every 20t elapsed on quick speed. so 52 * 0.5^4.5 comes to 2.3g. (I.e. I estimate that the savings from ORG on t89 are about equal to starting with an extra 2.3 beakers). But that's just t89. Sum up all turns from say, 0 to 110, and you will get something close to 100g (probably a little more). This is NOT the same as 1gpt!! Remember we've already completely discounted for time, so it's equivalent to starting with 90-120g extra of techs researched on t0, or an extra 3-4b/t on your starting tile. I'm going to call it 110g.

Looking in that same game at my citizen and city counts, and assuming that as a FIN leader I'd earn about 1c per citizen minus 2.5 per city (i.e. assuming each city works 2.5 tiles that don't give the FIN bonus, probably resources) then the benefits from FIN would be approximately double the civic upkeep reduction from ORG.

One other thing to note about the ORG upkeep reduction: it helps extra at low population due to all the rounding. The most absurd benefit is on monarch or lower (which slightly discounts civic upkeep) when each civic is costing 3 upkeep base. In this particular case, a non-ORG player will end up paying 3 * .9 (prince) = 2g per civic. An ORG player will pay 3 * 0.5 (ORG) = 1, 1 * 0.9 (prince) = 0g per civic!

2) Discounted courthouses. This is the heavily map-dependent part. On this map, courthouses will be a very desirable build, and therefore the discount will be quite strong. As a rough guess, let's say you would like to build 8 courthouses at about t65, with an average of 15% additional bonus hammers towards the courthouses. Then a non-ORG courthouse costs 70 raw hammers, and an ORG courthouse costs 37. ORG saves you 33 * 8 = 264 hammers, which we must now discount for time. That comes to about 28h at the start or 46b (might as well convert everything to beakers-at-the-start so it's easier to compare traits, even though if they were actually all in the form of beakers-at-the-start you would see some serious diminishing returns).

3) Discounted lighthouses. I built 11 lighthouses in pbem39 and I'd say 10 were worth building even without ORG. Probably they were worth being one of the first few builds, but the first few cities didn't have any, so t65 again seems like a fair average build date if we say there is no further discount on them. So 10 * 20h = 200h, discounted from t65 = 21 start-hammers, or 35 start-beakers.

-------------------

ORG also discounts factories, but since many games seem to end before then, I am deciding not to factor that in. ORG's total estimated start-beakers on a map like this comes to about 190. Meanwhile FIN's estimate is 220.

On the pbem39 map, ORG came with an additional 1f per turn, free. 1fpt is worth about 30f to start, which is worth about 70b. So according to my math, this put ORG at 260b to FIN's 220b. This seems to jive with what I thought at the time I picked it.

Here, instead, ORG gets two free turns compared to FIN. How much is a turn worth? Well, our output at the start here is basically 5 foodhammers and 11 beakers. That converts to 21b, and 2t is therefore 42b, putting ORG at 232 to FIN's 220. Now keep in mind that these are really rough estimates... I think this means ORG is slightly better in this setup, but I've injected in incredible amount of noise with all my converting and estimating. It's also worth noting that I expect this map to have fewer resources than 39, which I believe will boost FIN a bit compared to ORG (since it becomes more about cottages).

Does 2t being 42b sit right? Compare the value of settling on a plains hill, +1hpt, which according to my math is worth 50b. Is it worth 2t to move onto a plains hill if everything else stays constant, but not 3t (-63b)? That seems plausible to me.

TLDR: ORG's civic reduction is about half as good as FIN. The other parts of ORG could vary from not much effect on a no-wrap land map, to almost completely making up the remainder on a toroid with water. I estimate FIN to be worth 220 starting-beakers and ORG 190 starting-beakers on a pbem39-like map.

[SevenSpirits]

[SIZE="5"]Analysis of Expansive[/SIZE]


Actually I will try to quantify the factory bonus.

10 factories * 56h ... t150? -> 3h -> 5b. So why not, I'll give ORG 195.

Now EXP, because I'm quite curious if this will seem plausible at all:

The bonus on the first worker is worth about 0.75t. In this case it's less - it's worth 1t of hammers minus 0.7t of commerce. But if it were not a plains hill start and there were no oasis, it would instead be saving 2t of hammers and only costing 0.5t of commerce. The value of commerce vs hammers produced at the start is very similar, so I am just treating 1t of hammers = 1t of commerce = 0.5 turns = 10b. So anyway, EXP's bonus on the first worker? 16b.

How about on all future workers? My rough estimate is that you will build 20 workers, saving 3h each via EXP (it could save up to 8h, but since it doesn't work on food, and will also cause overflow rounding loss, this does not happen in practice). I estimate that the worker builds are centered geometrically around t50, so that we can simply discount the sum 60h by 2^2.5 and get 10.6h -> 18b.

Now the granaries. It may look like a 20h discount, but buildings are more expensive when you don't own a granary yet! Every pop point you grow without storing food effectively costs you a pop point (you could have grown 2 pop with that food, had you had a granary first). So let's say a granary costs 2 pop.

If you are solely whipping it out, then a non-EXP player needs to grow 3 granary-less pop (costing another 3 virtual pop) and then kill off 2 of them, total cost of 5 pop. Whereas an EXP player only has to grow 1 granary-less pop (costing 1 virtual pop) and then whip away 1 pop, costing a total of 2 pop. In this case EXP's reward was comparable to 3 pop = 60h.

If you are using one math chop and whipping the rest, EXP doesn't have to spend any pop, and non-EXP has to spend 2 pop (1 virtual and unborn, 1 whipped). I consider this the average case, and in this case EXP gains 40h.

Finally, if you are chopping the whole thing, EXP only saves 20h. Of course there is additional overhead cost in supplying so many workers to new cities that you can afford to do this.

Naturally, depending on the city's tiles, these numbers will vary. But I feel good claiming that EXP saves approximately 40h for every city, and right after the city is founded. Therefore for this estimate I will guess that we save 40h * 14 cities = 560h centered around t50, and this comes out to about 100h, worth 167b. Total value of EXP so far: 167 + 18 + 16 = 201b.

The rest of EXP is harbors (I estimate savings of 50h on t80 worth 3h = 5b), and 2 health (I estimate 16fpt starting t150 = 7b), bringing the total estimated benefit to 213b.