[SPOILERS] WillPlunder as Mehmed of Arabia: Noobs meet world

[RefSteel]

Ha! Got it! The weird buglike bay-jumping behavior really was an indication that I was fundamentally wrong about the teleport mechanics for closing borders! A few more tests showed what was going on, and I think I've solved it!

So this...

So in the normal case, check the tiles where your unit can legally stand just outside the now-closed borders. Each of those tiles is a certain distance from (in a certain "city borders" ring for) your unit and for your nearest city (on that landmass). Add up those distances. I.e. third ring for your unit plus seventh ring for your city = 10. The tile or tiles for which this TOTAL is the lowest wins.

...is wrong! This is how it really works:

In all cases (for land units) find your nearest city (on the same landmass) to the teleporting unit's starting point. Then check the tiles near that unit and on its landmass that are in (still-)friendly or neutral territory (and not peaks). Each of those tiles is a certain distance from (i.e. in a certain "city borders" ring for) your unit and a certain distance from the "nearest city." Start with the distance from the tile in question to the unit's "nearest city," then add twice the distance between the possible-target tile and your unit - i.e. a tile at seventh ring from your city and third ring from your unit scores 7 + (3 X 2) = 13! The tile for which this score is the lowest is the one to which your unit will teleport. Ties are broken in favor of more southerly tiles, and further ties broken in favor of more westerly tiles. (Note that both tiebreakers work according to the map's coordinate system, which can cause surprising results alongside the line of world wrap.)

A couple other notes:

1) You can never teleport to a shrouded (unexplored) tile by closing borders; unlike in a border-pop teleport, the unit does not teleport one tile at a time, but jumps to its destination in a single bound. You can teleport over shrouded tiles, peaks, or water, so long as the destination tile is on the same landmass as the teleporting unit. If there's an enemy unit on the tile to which your unit would be teleported however, additional teleportations (of the declarer's unit or units) may occur, which possibly could carry those units onto what had previously been an unexplored tile.

2) Right, so this stuff about the nearest city ... what if you have several cities at nearly the same distance? Which one is the "nearest" city to a given teleporting unit?

Well, it's the city (on the same landmass) closest to the tile from which the teleporting unit starts - the city in whose smallest imaginary cultural ring the unit would be, regardless of the path between them. If there is a tie, it is broken in favor of the city that appears nearest the top of your city list - thus, among self-planted cities, the one you planted earliest among those at the same "city-ring distance" from the unit. Note that even if there is a "shorter route" to (or "lower score" target tile near) a different city at the same actual distance from the unit, the "nearest city" is the one that matters for teleportation purposes.


Okay, okay, sorry for spamming your thread on this. I actually had a whole lot of fun figuring this out; thanks for the curiosity (and for digging through ancient posts and for frankly terrific reporting throughout this thread)! If any of these mechanics are still looking opaque, I'll be happy to try to do better job of explaining (or finding out I'm still missing something of course!) - at this point, at least I'm confident that I do at least understand the thing myself!

[WilliamLP]

RefSteel, amazing work! And huge thanks for putting together the only complete description of the mechanic that I know of. I never thought there would be cutting edge Civ IV research done in this thread.

Am I to understand then that if I'd have declared war while on the corn here:




The axe would go to the tile 1NE? Because it's 11 from Alfredo (I think it would be 11th ring? It's 10 by the max(delta x, delta y) metric which I guess you're saying the game doesn't use?) and distance 1 to the unit, for a score of 13. The plains 2N2W of Harding would have a score of 5 (distance to city) + 2*5 (distance to axe), right?

This is in that weird blunt fat discrete metric space you seem to have described. Figuring out that the cultural tile inclusion rules are also a generic distance algorithm for the game was brilliant, if so.

[WilliamLP]

I have a hard time expressing how thrilled I am with how high bar has been raised for the nerd level of this thread.

Back to the game, our clump of workers brought sugar online after spice and will head for everything else nice (such as banana). My distant scout sees Azza improving the marble now, and I'd love to trade happiness to him for it. He has none. Putting doubled hammers on MoM is a no-brainer right now, even for fail gold. I could try to chop it in Harding, even, if I wanted to put a big bull's-eye on the city.

The mysterious game leader Sisu has Buddhism even more influential than Hinduism right now. But it's fairly close. Our capital will finally have its two citizens back after the Prophet finishes this turn. I'm looking forward to seeing how much gold the shrine brings in.




That's Oxy's wounded axe (2.9/5) scouting, presumably the same one that kindly helped us raise Avar. I think he's free XP when I can get a chariot up there.

I'm going to try and spec out Cannelloni as a GP farm. City specialization is not something I'm good at. I never plan single player games carefully to that level. Irrigated (eventually) corn plus the clam plus the lake ought to give it a nice food surplus.

In that shot is also all the crappy immature cottages I'm working. I figure the capital needs to grow a bunch of them to stay competitive even though non-river cottages kind of suck. Actually moving the capital wouldn't be the craziest play ever, both for (maybe) more commerce and also distance maintenance. I do have very long term dreams of expanding to the north though.




I'm in growth mode right now, hence second place in food and a terrible hammer number. GNP is heavily inflated with double prereqs for Masonry, with known tech bonus. Still we're at exactly 100 beakers for the first time. And these terrible cottages eventually will just be mediocre tiles.

For tech priorities after Mono, I'm giving it a lot of thought. My biggest concern is when siege stacks start showing up. Molach is the biggest concern, since his iron is hottest to strike right at this point in the game, so to speak. But again I really doubt we'd be his best target, with two weaker and closer neighbours right beside him.

Currency - This is a big-time economic boost. We're getting 2 value trade routes everywhere so this might be worth 22 commerce per turn alone right now. And then there's the market in Spaghetti for the shrine.

Construction - The only question is do we need this first, for defense? I don't think Oxy or Bandit are teching fast enough for me to be worried though... yet. But still... I suspect it's hard to be too safe, and having siege before my rivals is also a really nice thing.

Archery - I wonder if we should slip this in, for emergency defenders? Eventually we'll need it for camel archers.

HBR - Again we'll eventually need it. We may have a strong enough military right now to skip the age of horse archers though. I think I value this less than Construction right now.

Monarchy - This is the rare game where I don't care much about HR.

Code of Laws - This takes advantage of ORG. But it still needs hammer output to get the economic benefit. It's definitely a much lower priority than Currency.

Metal Casting - It's so expensive. We'd get double happiness from forges but we're quite a long way from needing it. I haven't seen anything to make me desperate for Triremes.

Then there are settling priorities. I'd like the stone site soon to start getting Moai up. We should be working on the Iron site in the east. We should have a filler city to claim dyes soon. And we definitely want to seal up the east by settling two more cities around Noodle Lake. I'm not sure how urgent I should be. To me, the decisions, whether to whip settlers soon or take more time to grow to the happy caps, are very tough.

[Plunder]

I would go for currency, I guess we really need to work on our economy.

[RefSteel]

Am I to understand then that if I'd have declared war while on the corn here:




The axe would go to the tile 1NE? Because it's 11 from Alfredo (I think it would be 11th ring? It's 10 by the max(delta x, delta y) metric which I guess you're saying the game doesn't use?) and distance 1 to the unit, for a score of 13.

Almost! Your math is exactly right, but the tile 1E of the corn is the "same" distance from both Alfredo ("11.5" gets rounded down) and the Axe. The 1E tile is more southerly, so it wins the tiebreaker.

The plains 2N2W of Harding would have a score of 5 (distance to city) + 2*5 (distance to axe), right?

Yes, exactly!

Figuring out that the cultural tile inclusion rules are also a generic distance algorithm for the game was brilliant, if so.

I can't take credit for that one; if memory serves (and it's been a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnng time, so I hope I'm crediting the right person) I first learned this from Ruff_Hi someplace in his thread for PBeM 1. (I was proud of suggesting the names for two of his cities in that one...). He actually also used tactical teleportation in that game to brilliant effect, although he simmed the specific situation rather than inferring the rules.

Also, thanks for the compliments! And I'm always glad to raise the nerd level in any thread!

[EDIT: Also, since I said "as the gunship files" somewhere above, you can tell I almost never play late-game warfare. It turns out that gunships can't fly over peaks or water tiles, so ... uh, make it as the crow flies. Or as the Jet-Fighter-with-a-Range-promotion for those 11th-ring distances....]

[WilliamLP]

So... to lower this thread back down to a newbie level of thought, we're finally resuming this game. And why not start with a blunder?




The prophet was good news. I had 93.6% odds to take out Oxy's scouting axe with my axe in Cannelloni. But I lost! This was a terrible move and I just made it hastily and miscalculated. I forgot that I wouldn't be able to emergency whip a defender next turn because I have the first half of the turn timer. I have no chariot in range to defend. And killing that scouting axe was worth almost nothing anyway. I was raging after this.

Either Oxy will take peace with me (fortunately he won't be able to scan the map before clicking yes / no), or he can laugh at me and I'm going to lose Cannelloni.

Things are a little interesting in the south:




Harding (now Primavera) is out of resistance and sees Animal Farm. It is well defended so I expect a standoff there for a long time. More concerning is that worker of Molach's building a road. I don't have a chariot that could steal it - Molach must have a lot of trust in that.

I'm trying to think why build that road if not a military campaign. I wouldn't be that surprised to see a stack move onto the tile N of the worker next turn, which would suck. Maybe he just wants a filler city there and he's using the road for settler micro? Wishful thinking...

[Plunder]

I can also see no other reason to road there than for military purposes :S

how do their graphs look like?

[WilliamLP]

We just dodged a bullet, since Oxy accepted peace! I guess he had no way of knowing that he'd just won a 6% battle, could have marched over and razed a city for free, and I wasn't just being a nice guy.




So Cannelloni is saved. I didn't deserve to keep the city but I'll take it.

Also interesting up here is that Kuro is now scouting us, just as we're about to go scout him.




The shrine was built, bringing in 14gpt. And the extra passive spread should be nice. Spaghetti just triple-whipped a settler with overflow into a chariot there. I'd like to let it grow some but there are a couple of city sites that would be better claimed early.




Wanting this game to move quickly, I like to play as soon as I see a turn roll. But tactically I should have waited until after Molach played here. Because then I may have had the option to steal his worker. We have a chariot in Alfredo with moves, but hitting the worker right now would be a double move.

Because of peace from Oxy I'm moving a couple of axes and a chariot over from Primavera.

I'm really hoping to not see a stack on the forest north of the worker this turn. 3 axes + 1 spear + 1 chariot are in Alfredo right now. 2 more axes can join the fight in 3 turns from the east, and I have the option of whipping 2 more next turn. Axes are the only thing I have that can scratch a Praet. If he comes with 3-4 I think I may be able to handle it. More than that is very dicey. The very worst case is he has Construction and a couple of catapults. That's probably gg wp in the south for us.




Considering Praets are worth 8k power each, Molach's graphs are pretty tame. Plus he has close borders with Wetbandit whose graphs are not as tame.

I realize now I probably should have been working on walls in Alfredo the moment I got Masonry for the possible whip, even without stone.

[WilliamLP]

I thought pretty hard about whether I should capture Molach's worker. There was also another scouting chariot of his I could have sniped with a spear for free. In the end I decided that out of what I need in this game, war with a pissed off aggressive Rome who can probably out tech me to construction is not high on the list.

So what I did is moved a chariot onto his worker, trying to send the message that I could have captured him, but really want to focus on the rest of the world in peace in this region instead.




He only had 1 Praet to the south which is an extreme relief! I couldn't resist logging on after his turn (no unit moves of course) to see what he was doing:




So the road really was peaceful settler micro!

I think I could totally take down that city right now, and presumably he knows it. I am perfectly happy to let him have it! It claims nothing very good, and is an extreme defensive liability, vulnerable to either me or Wetbandit. It's even great that it's a disincentive for Wetbandit to attack me as it fills its culture up. So this is extremely good news.

I will want to chop a Madrassa in Alfredo very soon to try and keep that second ring plain hill tile. Alfredo can really use a little production.

Azza now has marble hooked up.




And he accepted! This is many levels of win - we have so much calendar happiness to spare and I love propping up someone who is absolutely zero geographic threat, but a thorn in the side of two rivals.

I'm going to make a run for Mausoleum in Spaghetti the holy city. It's the only mature city I have with decent production. It also has 4 third ring forests to chop. The alternative would be to chop it in Primavera, the border city with Oxy, but I really don't want that kind of target for him! I wonder if it is contested at all? Certainly nobody else on this side of the world has the kind of extreme need for calendar that we did. Landing it would be an incredible benefit, larger than a golden age over the course of the game. Even the fail hammers would be fantastic.

Unfortunately I don't think we can afford to hit up the top part of the tech tree anytime soon. I need defenses to be rock solid, no pun intended.

[Plunder]

What a strange city location :S
only 2 resources that are shared, one foodplains, and mainly just plains. And culture crushed from the start.

I have no idea what Molach is thinking :S I guess they must be really short on land down there if he starts to settle cities like this.

I think we definitely got to work on our defence yes. And get a much more efficient road network up as well! We have a pretty elongated empire. Getting defences from the north to the south will take ages!