[no players] Warsighs of the Newb: An Experiment in Lurking.

[Sullla]

What were we supposed to do with Byzantium on this start?

You requested it, here are my thoughts.

First of all, I certainly agree that Byzantium is a rough civ to play because of those terrible starting techs (Mysticism/Wheel). It requires some luck in the starting terrain and a very careful path through the tech tree to avoid a terribly slow opening. Here's what your position looked like:




After thinking about this, I believe that founding in place was a mistake. I know, the plains hill is so tempting and all, but the problem with this spot is that it demands a whole bunch of different techs. You need Hunting for the deer, Animal Husbandry for the cows, Fishing and work boats for the clams, and then Bronze Working to do anything else, since virtually every tile is covered in forests. That's too many techs for a Byzantium start, which gives you nothing good off the bat.

I actually think that moving two tiles east, onto the forested grassland hill, would have lead to a better opening. That would allow this start to ignore Fishing tech completely, while still coming back to it later for the clams, and simply open worker first while researching Hunting -> Animal Husbandry -> Mining -> Bronze Working. You guys ended up doing this anyway, but with the crucial distinction of not having the grassland cows in the capital's radius, which would have helped significantly. (It also didn't help wasting the first two turns by researching Fishing and building a warrior, then swapping after thinking about what to do. ) Also note finally that the plains tile that you moved away from was the one non-forested hill, so that could have been an improved tile with a mine instead of building so many roads in the early game.

Again, I don't know how all of that would have played out, but at least you would have had four improved tiles (deer, grassland cow, plains cow, plains hill mine) rather than spending so much time working unimproved stuff. The fact that your civ miraculously landed horses at the capital isn't exactly the kind of break that you can count on getting.




Usually I'm not a big fan of early Stonehenge, but I agree that it was a good decision here. There's no better leader for the wonder than De Gaulle's IND/CHA combination, and you had a high production / low commerce starting position. Building a worker at size 1 in this second city though... not such a huge fan of that decision. As a side note, by moving the capital two tiles east to start, then the second city could have been placed one tile west of Mister Love's location, allowing you to share both clams and the plains cows between cities. You guys noted that you couldn't share food resources between the first two cities, and changing their locations around might have helped.



I hate this city location (Tyler). It doesn't matter that you built Stonehenge, you can't afford to have a city be totally useless for the first 10 turns until borders pop. I don't think I'd settle here even with a Creative civ, the 5 turn delay before it could do anything would be too much. This city needs to be a tile north, so that you can farm the dry rice tile immediately, plus by putting the city a tile further north, you'll automatically get an irrigation spread post-Civil Service instead of needing to chain a farm. I don't even understand the appeal of Tyler's location - why there and not a tile north? There's no resources it's grabbing that you wouldn't get a tile further north. This is simply a mistake.

I do feel sympathy for having to deal with so much jungle. Not the easiest start here at all.

You guys made some weird scouting decisions in this game, like in the very early portion when your initial scout was off down at the south pole, leaving fogged stuff 3-4 tiles away from your capital. Then you spotted stone offshore with a work boat, and instead of checking to see if there was food on the same island, went off far to the west, leaving the nearby seas uncovered. Hey, deep contacts are good, but knowing your immediate terrain is normally even better.




I liked your Stonehenge play, I don't think I like your Pyramids play though. You guys settled directly on stone, in this hideous spot with no food at all, in order to get the Pyramids. This was your fifth city; that means that your city order went capital, early second city, that terrible jungle city with no food resources in the first ring, a captured barb city that ALSO had no food resources in the first ring, and then this city. Everything after the initial two cities were weak, slow-starting locations that couldn't contribute to the civ's development for quite some time. Sure, this city landed you the Pyramids, but you were already a Charismatic civ with Stonehenge. I question the need for Representation civic happiness here. I mean, you guys wrote during the game that you had this massive happiness cap that you couldn't even use! You also had to burn all of the remaining forests at your capital to land this wonder; I personally would have preferred to turn them into settlers and workers, and concentrate on settling the jungle / developing it as quickly as possible. Then again, I am a well known Pyramids skeptic here, so take that for what it's worth. In any case, I would have played this significantly differently.




This is from Turn 90. (Why settle another offshore city at We Steal right now? The island spot was completely safe, you didn't have Currency and didn't need a second offshore city for trade routes yet, when you could have sent the settler to a contested spot on the southern border?) Anyway, I think you simply put too much focus on wonders, and then fell too far behind in the expansion game. Even with a captured barb city, you only had 7 cities on Turn 100, which isn't the best. Furthermore, your economy was really weak in this game, not even having Mathematics on Turn 100. Some of that was due to the terrain, there's no doubt that retep and Sisu had vastly superior land than your team did, but it's not fair to blame everything on terrain. There were a LOT of mistakes in the way this one was played during the first 100 turns.

That's all for now, I've got to go get some actual work done. I'll try to get to the rest of the game later.

[retep]

Eh Sulla do my start now please

[spacetyrantxenu]

What were we supposed to do with Byzantium on this start?

You requested it, here are my thoughts.

Thanks for taking the time to step through our opening (Lurker feedback FTW!-- for the uninitiated, Scooter did this after I asked at the end of PB8, too).

I don't remember how much or if we even considered moving off the plains hill plant. I'm sure that once we saw how good the capital was going to be we were locked in at that point. I'm probably not a very inventive player, which may be why I didn't spot the opportunity that was available on the first turn. I'm going to replay this start (because I'm apparently a masochist) and try out the alternate capital location. I agree that it has the potential for a faster start with two good early cities able to share food. Another benefit is that the second city will able to incubate more cottages in that alternate configuration, which is a big bonus as well.

I hated the location of Tyler just as much as you did. Boldly probably hated it more than I did, once he saw where I put it. Unfortunately it was the only hill tile in the entire area and I wanted to try and lock down the border with Sisu with that city, and in a way that was defensible (militarily, not in terms of dot map). I 100% put it there for the hill defense. Yeah, Tyler was an awful city and slowed our expansion, but I really wanted to settle the front on a hill because we already knew by that point we would be going to war with Sisu, given our close proximity. In addition to being far away from our first two cities and being a horrible city in its own right (at the time and for a long time afterward), Tyler kind of screwed a sane dotmap in the area and in fact we never did end up settling two decent filler cities in the area around it later on when we could have. A tighter grid of cities in that area that would have been more productive early on would certainly have been better, and probably just as sound from a military perspective later on. That said, the city being on the hill was absolutely to our advantage when Halvgud did...whatever the hell he called his forward march into our territory. I think we just did hold the city by packing it in with every unit we had, and the hill defense contributed to that narrow hold. Still, yeah, Tyler is probably one of the worst cities I've ever seen anyone plant here. It was unhealthy the turn it was founded!

As for the scouting, I agree, it turned out to have been a bad play. I always struggle with the "go local" or "go deep" scouting decision, and the shape of the coastline helped lead me into a bad decision. I kept scouting a bit further thinking that if I hit a dead end I'd turn back. But the coast kept veering east, then just a jog south, but now east again, maybe we can circumnav...but now south...wait why is it going west...oh hell now look how far we have to go back home. So I suckered myself there. It's funny, when I play SP I almost always "go local" and worry about circumnav later with either WBs or galleys. Then again, the AIs don't contest the "first to" bonuses like human players do, so maybe that thought pressed us forward when sanity should have sent us home.

I'd have to go back through the thread to see why we settled We Steal before moving further south. I think it had something to do with our military situation. At some point we had a horrible run of luck and lost three or four chariots in succession to barbs, and may have been undermanned when the settler was ready. So shuffling him off to the island may have been the only use for him at the time, other than holding on. If that's the scenario we probably could have whipped more units. The other thing about planting the "block west" city is that it was going to be really far from our capital, and basically first ring to Sisu's capital. We'd really need a significant defense force to keep him from trying to remove the blight and I don't think we had it at the time.

I agree that we made a lot of mistakes in this game and that we could have done better. The most egregious (micro) errors probably came from our handling of swapping turn player responsibilities. We left sooooo many hammers in build queues in partially completed buildings as a result of dueling visions for how to govern the cities. Boldly and I have never made good teammates, in Civ or any other team game/sport we've played together, so it wasn't really surprising to me that we didn't play well here. Still, it was inefficient and slowed us down more when we were already behind. But that's definitely not the main reason why we lost. We ran some decent micro at times when we were focused, I'm sure we lost for larger macro decisions, without entirely blaming it on the map....although the map...well I already posted the raw numbers from Novice's tool. It's really ugly.

I look forward to reading more of your autopsy report if you have the time or inclination to persist through our thread. Feel free to skip over any posts where I go on and on raving like a lunatic about one thing or another.

[SevenSpirits]

In a hurry, but FWIW I agree with settling on the plains hill to start, and agree that Tyler looks awful. I just would not settle in that area until later. It's not worth it and if it lets your neighbor steal the land from you, you should just be able to take it back with superior production.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Several comments reading through this thread, spoilered for length:

Really don't understand settling Tyler at that spot by the Boldly/Xenu team. I guess it's vaguely defensible since they have Henge, but that city is utterly worthless for around 15 turns, and that's pretty crippling when that's your second plant.

IIRC, I argued against that city and cursed its existence immediately. I could just be rewriting history in my own head, but that sounds about right to me. Xenu had his reasons and played the turn, so he won. Lesson learned for both of us, I hope. My lesson: never give in.

retep said t62.

Kuro said "next turn, either whip it or let it finish in 3t" alongside a screenshot from t62 of it finishing in 4t. Kuro is talking about whipping it t63 or finishing it naturally t65 (and he said he will whip it).

That is 1t behind retep.

That would have changed things, certainly. Retep ran laps around us in GNP. GLH was a decent part of that. Byzantium and having to tech so much out of the gate really was a tough pill. Other than growing the capital tall with HR and running cottages, I'm not sure what else we should have done for GNP. We tried to abuse fail gold as IND and squeezed commerce out that way. The happy cap was an issue in the capital until HR, even with Rep, while we lacked food elsewhere to do much of anything with Rep. The capital was basically our entire economy. We must have run the most food poor non-specialist SE in history. Need food to grow. Splitting the food resources at the capital would have helped in that regard, and with expansion, but ultimately that makes for a fairly weak (IMO) capital. Looking at other capitals on this map, that's a rough trade to be forced into, giving up the PH to share.

Anyway, I don't regret building Mids. We got a shitload of discounts on our phract whips.

I'm sorry but Kuro, this is retarded:

First off: Boldly Going Nowhere just got the Pyramids in addition to their Stonehenge. Strong combination, probably have Stone.

Boldly fucking settled on stone. Fuck me, that is bad.

I chuckled looking at this picture, but I have to say, it was a bit uncomfortable reading all of the piling on Kuro in this thread. "Fuck me, that is bad" should just as easily relate to me settling on stone if that isn't what was originally implied, but I think that was aimed elsewhere, not at me. My narcissism prevents accepting any criticism. :P

While I'm thinking, was there any competition for Mids? Or, heart-breaking to think of it, could we have delayed them ~6-8t and settled for some food and quarried the desert without losing a race? I still haven't read any player threads, so if someone could point this out to me I'd appreciate it. I knew this city would be terrible with no food resources, but I wanted Mids. I think my founding post with the stone city was something along the lines of "wanted stone, got stone. Nothing else to say here".

Someone will have to explain to me after this game is over why retep is so keen to pick a fight with the game's top military power. I don't doubt that he can take some cities, but it feels silly to invest that much effort when he could settle uninhabited islands instead, and now Xenu and Boldly will spend the rest of their game trying to make retep's life miserable. Furthermore, now that wetbandit has finally posted some images, he's not even that far behind:



I still think that retep wins, but isn't engaging in a bloody war against Xenu/Boldly pretty much the only possible scenario where he can lose this game?

How are Boldly and Xenu going to do anything to Retep when they can't even stay at breakeven at max tax?

Krill pretty much nailed it there. We couldn't do much of anything. We had no navy, and no prospects of ever getting to tech parity to build a navy that could match his. We had no way to contest control of the islands and the northern cities on the snaky continent. I was frustrated over and over by our inability to get our phracts across the channel to do some damage. At one point I had a plan for amphibious phracts, but our lack of a navy (and retep's invasion) cut that plan short. Also, the whole "in the middle of the map" thing really makes it tough to defend all fronts and break out simultaneously. We ended up with so many guns and so little butter, and still lacked enough guns to do what needed to be done. This was just a frustrating game all the way around for me. Trust me, if I had seen a path to making retep's life hell, I would have done so for no other reason than geographic jealousy. Settle islands into the rising sun with no competition? Pshaw! Make them build units!!

I had some more quotes selected but I guess there's a limit? Or they don't transfer between browsers on different platforms? Probably was just more complaining on my part.

Anyway, I'll be looking for another game soonish. Perhaps a bit more balanced on the map, though. (Death to Commodore).

Really, though, no fault of his. We got the map that we requested, and deserved. I'll never make that mistake again.

[Krill]

The problem with that start is not the capital tiles, but the fact there are a limited number of food resources that fit with useful tiles to work: there basically isn't a good second city no matter what you do. In that case, moving the settler to the grass hill just makes the second city even worse, or you are forced to settle the second city to overlap food resources with the capital and there is no real benefit to moving the capital because you gave up the plains hill.

FWIW I think I'd have settled on the plains hill and put second city 666 (1N of in game) and a third city 333 of capital (More likely to use this if going Henge for border pop to rice). Other than that, Hunting>AH>Mining>BW>Fishing>Pottery, Agri either before or after pottery, and Fishing potentially earlier depending on the timetable for the third settler. Aim would have been to try and get out 3 cities really quickly, or to get Henge (and most likely I'd have gone for Henge, I agree that for De Gaulle it's almost always the right choice, especially if starting with Myst). Getting Henge means tech is less tight and can get BW fourth.

[Sullla]

Let me clarify what I mean as we're discussing the capital location for Boldly and Xenu's team. I think that whether to found on the plains hill or move two tiles east is a fairly close decision, and it's the sort of thing that reasonable people can disagree upon. My main point is that by settling in place, the capital has exactly two tiles that can be improved prior to finishing Bronze Working research, the deer and the plains cow. That's it, nothing else is possible. (Of course it turned out that there was also an invisible horses tile there, and that may have tipped the scales on settling in place, but that's something that you can't count on.) I think some of the analysis is underestimating just how long it took to reach Bronze Working tech:



End of Turn 43 / start of Turn 44. Would you want to spend over 40 turns with the capital only able to work 2 improved tiles? That's why my gut feeling was to move to the east, to enable 4 improvable tiles (with the extra cow and the non-forest plains hill). Again, I think you have to pretend that the horses aren't there while doing the planning, and this start would have been significantly slower if the horses had popped up a couple tiles away. Feel free to disagree.




Moving on, I think that your team did do a great job of developing the capital and turning it into a powerhouse city. That was one of the strengths of your game here, and deserves recognition. Your land was far inferior to that of many neighbors, and some nice work at the capital helped make your team competitive.

The aggression against Kuro worked perfectly, it didn't cost you anything and gained your team a city while costing him three. I usually dislike small skirmishing wars, but this was one case where it seemed like a good decision. It did help that you won several combats in the 65-80% range without losing any of them, and that Kuro was still learning how to play and made some silly tactical mistakes.

The Sisub situation was just weird. I don't blame your team at all for being frustrated, I would have been furious as well. The fact that your southern neighbor had vastly superior civ traits (FIN/IND) along with incredibly lush land, and then did nothing with it, that would have been rage-inducing to anyone. If we've learned anything from this game, the whole idea of using wildly imbalanced random maps for games that will last 6-12 months is a very, very bad idea.




OK, this is minor stuff, but I couldn't understand these tactics. You've got a spear and warrior inside Tyler, and a Sisub chariot next to the city. The obvious play is to attack the chariot at 99% odds with the spear, then use the warrior or chariot to capture the Sisub workers. Instead, Boldly ignored the signs on the map to throw another chariot into the enemy chariot at 50/50 odds, lost that, cleaned up the redlined chariot with the warrior, and then used the spear to capture the workers. Seriously what the heck? If you're worried about the workers being recaptured, then just delete them. Throwing away units in a hot war feels like the wrong move.



This was very nicely done, and basically turned into free Metal Casting tech. Who needs the Oracle when you can have a bunch of half-completed Great Walls!




I think that this picture does a good job of explaining why your civ was always so poor. Because of the weak land around the starting position (lots of jungle and few food bonuses), everything other than the capital and second city were stuck at small sizes for a long time. Small sizes meant fewer cottages, and as a non-Financial team, they took longer to develop. The Financial team with riverside cottages (starting with 3 commerce) simply gets a massive lead compared to your team having to hack these little 1 commerce cottages out of the jungle, and then work them for 30 turns before they hit 3 commerce. It also didn't help that your team had a large, far-flung empire in land area that didn't reach Code of Laws until a relatively late date (Turn 142!), and of course you didn't have the benefit of being Organized either. (Would going Code of Laws before Metal Casting have been a good idea? I honestly don't know. Your team was Industrious for the cheap forges, but at the same time, you did have some high maintenance costs. I genuinely don't know.)




I'm also not sure it was worth it to settle marginal locations like Suck Magic and Magic Bullet when your civ was breaking even at about 10-20% research. These might have been a mistake, if only due to the economic distress that your civ was in. Anyway, you didn't help the economic woes of your civ by choosing to go after the bottom side of the tree and push for Guilds. Not faulting that decision per se, cataphracts were obviously very useful, just noting that this tech push could have gone after Education or Printing Press or something more economic focused instead.




You guys complained a lot about landing two Great Scientist specialists, preventing you from firing a Golden Age, and I agree that it was a bit unlucky on the dice rolls. That said, you had been running Scientist specialists in both cities for Representation purposes, so this wasn't a low-odds Artist from a wonder build or something. With a longer term plan, you could have had a pure Merchant pool in one of those cities. In other words, while this was a bit of bad fortune, it's something that was entirely within your control. I also have to point out that you chose to stay in Caste System when your Golden Age ran out, instead of swapping back to Slavery on the last turn as most teams usually choose to do. That was a very questionable decision, and it proved to be costly when the Great Person luck didn't go your way. Why not simply swap to whatever civics you wanted on the final turn of the Golden Age? It's not a good idea to rely on getting certain types of Great People when the pool is that mixed. (Plus even the one really bad dice roll was a Scientist at 28%, not likely, but not a 2% absurdity either.)




I don't think there's much more to analyze at this point. You guys popped out another Great Person, revolted into wartime civics, and whipped your civ into the ground for a massive army of cataphracts. That gained you more territory and crippled the economy further, to the point where you were losing money at 0% science. And then it was a long, slow death from that point as other teams out-teched you and eventually rendered the cataphract horde of doom obsolete. I'm sure that you knew as well that this wasn't a winning strategy, more of a way to have some fun and settle old grudges.

Overall it's a pretty mixed game, some very nice moves and some questionable ones. The land was VERY bad, not even close to fair, one of the weakest locations in the game. The starting techs and leader traits weren't particularly helpful either. I think that having two players probably hurt more than it helped - it seemed like things would have run better if either Boldly or Xenu were playing solo. Too many conflicts and cities/workers constantly getting pulled in different directions. I hope that despite everything, you did have some fun in this game. Thanks for reporting in such detail over so many turns.

[scooter]

Good comments from all. The only quibble I'll make with some of the criticisms is the idea that it was a surprise there was a hidden resource 1SW of the capital. A random unforested tile surrounded by forests generally always means it's a resource. I guess it could have been iron which would have been unlucky, but copper or horse both seemed like very likely guesses as to what was in that tile. That probably would have influenced me if I was making a decision (it has before actually) on whether to move or not. Pretty minor point, though, since you don't actually know what it is on that tile - counting chickens and whatnot.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Thanks for putting your thoughts down. It serves as a nice review for me without me having to slog through that long thread again. In retrospect, we should have settled some closer cities, even though they would have been foodless, and just worked cottages/wealth in them. That would have been better than crashing the economy further in the tundra north, especially when it was obvious to us that retep would be able to tech much better and would at some point be able to take them from us with little for us to do about it.

The 50/50 shot with the chariot: I did obviously consider taking the high odds spear attack, but my focus was on keeping the workers. Losing a 30h chariot to keep two 60h workers was a definite 50/50 risk I was willing to take. It just didn't work out for the chariot, but IIRC, we ended up with both workers anyway. I may be wrong on that, I didn't go back to look.

The biggest self-inflicted gameplay mistake was poor GP management. You rightly point out that we rolled the dice and lost. Better planning would have probably saved us the extra 20 turns or so until the second golden age finally arrived. Had this worked out better, we would have fought Sisub sooner and probably benefited more than we did. As it turns out, suttree just razed the cities before we could capture them and that led to a blood feud with him.

When I have time to look through his thread, I'm going to be interested to see if taking five cities in our peace deal was the right call (we had originally rejected his offer of four cities but we insisted on the one that had been culture bombed earlier in the game). On its face, getting five fully intact cities with buildings and population is awesome, and spared our army. But I don't know how gassed he was and whether we would have been able to completely cripple him by pressing on. Probably it was best to just take the deal, ignoring the real reason we weren't eager to slog further; retep in the north.

Anyway, thanks again for the critique.

[retep]

When I have time to look through his thread, I'm going to be interested to see if taking five cities in our peace deal was the right call (we had originally rejected his offer of four cities but we insisted on the one that had been culture bombed earlier in the game). On its face, getting five fully intact cities with buildings and population is awesome, and spared our army. But I don't know how gassed he was and whether we would have been able to completely cripple him by pressing on. Probably it was best to just take the deal, ignoring the real reason we weren't eager to slog further; retep in the north.

Anyway, thanks again for the critique.

Are you talking about suttree here? If you haven't make peace and retreat your knights the turn you did I would have razed your coastals cities (capital). I was hoping/praying that you would press on suttree lands or at least that suttree don't make peace with you I only need it one more turn