[SPOILERS] William discovers a source of horse. FDR of Mongolia

[mackoti]

bout setling 1 E is the best.

[WilliamLP]

I went with the reasoning that the Plains Hill is probably a bad city, so the scout move that gives us the most info is onto the pig:




The wheat is fresh water! I'm now thinking of taking the turn to settle NE-E. It's not a fast start but a 3 food capital is great, and not everyone will have one if the starts were balanced, because that scout move wasn't completely obvious.

[WilliamLP]

I'm sure it's worth the extra turn to pick up an additional wet wheat tile in the capital, so I went ahead and moved the settler. I know this turn will be replayed but I wanted map info earlier for sandboxing:




So this will be a really nice capital! +11 food working the three resources, 3 grass river hills, and potentially a commerce monster at size 20.

This start will be slow, with no worker for 16 turns. Even without 32 opponents, this rules out anything that requires a very fast micro plan, like Henge, Oracle, or GLH. Anyone Expansive will be way out in front of us. This start probably demands working the 3 resources as quickly as possible.

If we find stone around, I'd happily micro around trying to land pyramids, since the 'mids-master himself appears to be attending this thread. But we don't see anything like that so far.

Anyone want to give me a naming scheme? Otherwise I'll go with something generic and nerdy like reliving my childhood with 8 bit computer RPGs.

More info:

The map is 124 * 60, cylindrical, for 7440 tiles. There are 4706 land tiles for 63% land. So that's a lot of water! Every land tile is eligible to be in a city radius. Per person it works out to 138 tiles, which is fairly cramped! That's probably 7-9 cities, only. So this isn't going to be any sort of sprawling farmer's gambit. If only we had some kind of unique unit good for asserting map dominance in the early mid game, right?

The transition in the tree styles to the boreal forest suggests we're toward the north side of it, but not far enough to see tundra.

I'm going to want to make a wide and efficient circle with the scout, both to maximize the chance of finding huts and to get information about the larger geography.

The single biggest factor that is going to create the tone for this game will be who (and how many) our neighbours are.

[Ceiliazul]

If we find stone around, I'd happily micro around trying to land pyramids, since the 'mids-master himself appears to be attending this thread.

Midskoti is also attending the lurker thread, so his advice opportunities will be limited

Naming schemes:

• Hair bands: Kiss, AC-DC, etc.
  
• ancient civs not represented in this game: minoan, moari, etc.
  
• Spices: Thyme, Basil... Hmm. Forget this one.
  
• Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat characters
  
• childhood board games: Capital = Risk. Moai city = Battleship, etc.
  
• Chess champions
  
• Boxing champs
  
• some obscure small group of athletes (like ultramarathoners)
  
• Great lakes of the world: Baikal, Victoria, Michigan
  
• Predators
  
• Planetoids with phonetic names
  

[WilliamLP]

Naming schemes:

Thanks, those are really good!

[*]Hair bands: Kiss, AC-DC, etc.
[*]ancient civs not represented in this game: minoan, moari, etc.

Neither are really something I know much about. My history knowledge is terrible and what little I know probably comes from Civ itself, heh.

[*]Spices: Thyme, Basil... Hmm. Forget this one.

Sporty, Baby, Scary... yeah forget this one.

[*]Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat characters

Or moves or things characters say when they perform the moves... Hmm...

[*]Chess champions

I can name a lot of them! I think there are at least 20 people on this site who could easily beat me in chess but still.

[*]Predators

I like the irony of that one. If it bleeds I can kill it. Or animals you don't want to attack (skunk, porcupine, hornet).

[*]Planetoids with phonetic names

You probably don't mean phonetic like "Uranus".

Today I learned:

"Minor-planet naming is not always a free-for-all: there are some populations for which rules have developed about the sources of names. For instance, centaurs (orbiting between Saturn and Neptune) are all named after mythological centaurs; Jupiter trojans after heroes from the Trojan War; resonant trans-Neptunian objects after underworld spirits; and non-resonant TNOs after creation deities."

[WilliamLP]

Before the game was reset, I couldn't resist settling and seeing what BFC I'd have to work with:




Wow. If I knew the cow was there I would have considered 1E of the original location, to save a turn and a forest. But this works too. In BtS this would be amazing since I could configure the city to grow and triple-whip settlers. In RBMod I don't think the fourth food resource is as dramatic but it does still allow great flexibility with sharing cities.

Do I go Bronze first here, with 3 hunting resources? Maybe, but I'm not sure if I'd actually want to chop or whip that early. The tech pace in this game will be slow. Bronze first would take until EOT 25. Improving all four resources as quickly as the worker can may require agriculture before this. Also the wheat is, with the pig, the best tile here.

There will be a lot of time to sim this out, since there will only be scout moves to make for about a month!

Because the tech pace will be slow, huts could change balance very much. Popping Bronze or Pottery would be a massive benefit.

I haven't decided where the second scout move will be. NE-N is obvious, but I might want to cover move ground and reveal fewer tiles next turn with NE-NE, looking to sweep out a large arc. Because of the initial move, east is the most likely direction to find the closest contact, and who that is is perhaps the most important piece of information there is right now.

[WilliamLP]

Turn 1:

Since I'm Mongolia, I'm going with a fictitious horse theme. Don't let the whimsical nature of this choice mislead you into thinking I don't take this game extremely seriously.




The first turn has passed and thus decisions have already been made which could tragically affect Civ's paths with ramifications throughout the rest of the game.

Out of 33 players, only Jowy and I spent the first turn on a settler walk. That is some distinguished company! I'm assuming we are adjacent and we each moved toward each other.

I didn't know about the SE cows when moving, and I think if we only had two food, it would be worth a turn for a third food resource. I'm not as sure if it's worth it to go from three to four, at least not in RBMod. But what's done is done.

This is not a fast start. But on huge map multipliers, starting with Byzantium's Fishing and Myst would suck here! So I have no regrets about passing that up.

The scout saw cows to the north. As of now, the second city could share food in literally every direction! An obvious concern is happiness resources. A happy cap of 5 in the capital (before whips) and 4 in other cities is extremely limiting.

I'm going to reveal a project of mine. Similar to Furungy's city simulator in the AlaePB game, I have a web app I'm working on that attempts to be a convenient interactive city simulation spreadsheet with Civ logic built in.

Here's a micro plan, the way my gut tells me to do it with this start:

This is for a settler at EOT38 at size 4 with 2 workers and 2 warriors. Not fast but not terrible with a strong capital size. Sadly going Mining->Bronze->Agri actually gets Agriculture 1 turn too late to start farming in this plan, so I'll probably get Agri before Bronze.

If anyone is interested in playing with this app, I put it up here. The interface should be pretty intuitive, click on things and popups come up to change them. It's very incomplete but does support tracking different tile yields for the same tile across different turns, so if you set the tile assignment it will know about the changing yield of the tile. (The interface for that may be non-intuitive, you have to select the row by clicking somewhere and then changing the tile yields at the top of the page.) Granaries, cottage growths, chopping, and slavery are programmed in. It also supports saving and loading its state, and uses the local browser storage - there is no server. There are sure bugs and mechanics where it goes out of sync with the real game. (Let me know if you find them.)

I don't know if anyone is interested in this but me; it's more of a fun project to learn about backbone.js than something that is supposed to actually be useful. But it does allow me to more easily look at different plans side by side.

E.g. the above is with the improvement order Pig -> Cow -> Sheep -> Wheat. I also tried Wheat -> Pig -> Cow -> Sheep, costing a turn to get the two best food resources (Pig and Wheat) online first with a more efficient worker route:

The settler is one turn later in this one, it is 8 commerce points behind as of turn 39, and I have a horrible turn 34 at 25/26 food, one short of growth.

[suttree]

Cool tool, Will.

[WilliamLP]

Some ramblings about strategy. There's a lot about Civ I don't know. Many I don't know I don't know. And it doesn't help that other people who do know probably aren't allowed to tell me, in the context of a non-greens game.

Civ from First Principles 1:

I'm going to divide Civ into three sub-games.

1. Growth. Spawning more cities and growing them in size. Supporting this with workers and managing happiness and health.

2. Commerce and research, including buildings that affect it.

3. Units and war including buildings that boost military production and quality.

What makes the game hard is that all three feed off each other, and also work at cross purposes. 2 detracts from 1 in many ways. In 1's eyes, a river grassland cottage tile might as well be a bare grassland, and gold and gems are mediocre tiles. 2 boosts 1 only as far as it allows more mechanisms for growth, notably worker options and granaries. (And many other ways but those are perhaps the big ones.) In an empty world with no barbarians what would you do? You'd build enough tech for the important growth improvements, and then maybe it would be optimal to shut it off after Calendar or so and manage commerce only far enough to avoid strike. You'd want 1 unit per city, and then perhaps evaluate the effectiveness of HR and build additional cheap units if the happiness speeds up your growth curve.

3 mostly detracts from both 1 and 2. Exceptions are if you can grow through warfare or get significant returns in commerce through pillaging. You don't see many players consciously planning to use military as an explicit means to grow, with the possible exception of Mackoti. Maybe the most important thing 3 does is allows you to not die when you're doing more of 1. 1 is what decides the game, in the long run. Beyond not dying the deterrent effect is crucial. You don't have to fight anyone if they don't believe that fighting you is a good idea. (You may have to fight them even if attacking you is a bad idea, especially if you're a noob. There's a lot of luck and chaos in this, which I enjoy but not everyone does.)

With commerce and tech, one way to look at it is you want as much as possible. But beyond that you want as much as specifically helps you out in some way, and perhaps not more. With growth, it seems that the techs that really help end at around Calendar + Monarchy + Metal Casting (for faster settlers and workers).

So where's the balance? I think this is part of the unsolved nature of the game. I've seen some excellent attempts to create heuristics to trade these off. E.g. I've read Seven give values of food=8, hammers=5, commerce=3. But obviously it depends on the situation. People always put some food into workers and settlers (where it is equal to hammers or possibly inferior). And wealth builds happen sometimes, where even worse, hammers go into unboosted commerce (and commerce is more easily boosted than hammers).

So there's some foundational rambling that contributes absolutely nothing to what I should actually do in this game, because that's my style.

[WilliamLP]

Civ from First Principles 2:

When do you chop? When do you whip? How many workers do you build and when? How much should you prioritize the first settler?

People have heuristics for these, and the decisions really hard to quantify. (If they weren't the game probably wouldn't be very fun.)

A worker that has infinite forests to chop pre-math produces 20 hammers in 4 turns, so 5 hammers every turn. Thus (non-Exp) he takes 12 turns (and costs 3 forests) to pay for himself. I've seen a claim that the global interest rate is about 5%. So something that pays for itself every 20 turns is par, so I may do better than that by building as many chopping workers as possible right away. Obviously I don't have infinite forests though.

The opportunity costs are, then, the forests, the worker turns, or building something else instead of the worker.

How much are worker turns worth? An improvement is worth a certain amount if there is a pop point to work it, and perhaps nothing if not (other than resource connection). Pop points are worth a certain amount if there an an improvement to work, and perhaps little if not. So this seems to lead to the heuristic that you're doing it right when you have just enough worker turns to improve while cities grow, and just enough cities to use tiles as they are improved, and no more of either.

So chopping again. It does give the ability to focus hammers at a specific time. Not all hammers are equal, e.g. a fast granary would seem to be very valuable since it comes close to doubling the effect of food in a new city that has its bar half full.

I'm going to try to quantify (to myself) how many worker turns are needed for various new cities to grow at maximal rates, which is part of what my above tool is for. (I'm going to play some fun suboptimal Civ in the mean time. ) A difficulty seems to be that chopping a granary seems very valuable, but the start of a city's life is also when it is growing the fastest and needs improvements as quickly as well. But if you clump 4 workers around a new city to get this done as fast as possible, they may lose turns running around to and from other places.

We all know whipping is really good in BtS. In RBMod though, if you're going to do it most efficiently in a sustainable way, you only get 30 hammers every 10 turns for 1 pop. And your happy cap is reduced by 1, and you trade the hammers for food. You get the thing you're whipping a little earlier. In this specific start, it feels like the extra pop point is going to be worth nearly 3 hammers a turn anyway, and so pre-granary whipping seems like a bad idea. (At the start, a river grass hill mine yields -1 food, +3 hammers, +1 commerce... pop points don't cost maintenance in the opening game).

How much is the first settler worth? This is one issue I'm really unclear about. Do you try to get it really fast (using even chops or a whip) or produce it out of a stronger capital with more worker support? The first city is worth something, even without improvements to work. If I can plant it on a connected river, it immediately yields, per turn, 2 food, 1 hammer, 3 commerce, minus 1 maintenance gold (if it's close enough... and the maintenance will go up with pop sizes). There is also whatever bonus it gets from settlement (plains hill?) and the amount above par for what it's working vs a bare grassland. This isn't that small an amount! Plus the food in a size 1 city is perhaps worth more.

I've been lately favoring builds with 2 workers before a settler, but I'm not sure if I should consider more worker -> settler -> worker builds instead. There are also options of building a settler at size 3 (instead of 4) or even size 2.

I'm going to try and analyze this with alternative builds once more tiles are revealed for a likely second city site.