Quadruple Food
Slow Start
ಠ_ಠ
When do you get your third city down?
Slow Start
ಠ_ಠ
When do you get your third city down?
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[SPOILERS] William discovers a source of horse. FDR of Mongolia
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I haven't started thinking about plans for after the first settler. I still want to see more of the land and know where copper is and who my neighbors are. (Depending on who it is it changes dramatically the needs for military and being alert for ancient age rushes.) Though, with this turn's scouting it's hard to imagine I'm going to do better for a second city than the NE plains hill site. Unless grass gems or gold miraculously gets revealed or something.
I guess I mean "slow opening", in that a turn 16 worker is as slow as it gets and I'm consciously slowing down the first settler also for a (theoretically) stronger early mid game. I think a few players will run sub-30 settler starts and I'll be in the bottom quartile for planting a first city. But if I am able to rush and claim all the food I see right now with the first few cities, it could lead to a pretty strong early mid game.
I'm impressed there's enough interest in reporting this game to actually bump me off of the first page! Ah, the opening game when everyone is full of optimism and there is an illusion that nobody has made any moves yet which doom their Civilization to irrelevance.
Turn 6:  Animals should be appearing now up to the spawn limit that the game tries to maintain. This means, even being careful and ending on forests, moving next to a bear gives a very good chance of losing the scout. I'd love to see the scout bonus vs animals increased and/or bears nerfed to lower the random element of the opening (losing the first scout sucks) but I think I stand nearly alone on this. And I guess if people didn't want a lot of randomness we wouldn't play with huts either... I do like playing with barbarians though, turning them off doesn't just reduce randomness but it changes a large part of the character of the early game. I think the next scout move is S-SW, risking only having a hill defense bonus, because I care more about swinging around to see the other side of my capital than looking further afield. The south looks like it could actually have a coastline and not just scattered lake tiles and I want to know this. No contact or cultural borders visible is really good news here especially since this land is two tiles east of our natural "fair" start. Brick and Mardoc's team have popped two (2) techs from huts already. As Spain they may need it! (March 25th, 2014, 12:53)mackoti Wrote: Man your land is great, loads of riverside resources, grasland. Yeah, I can't complain about food! I think I can hope for a strong middle game if I get the chance to just claim all the resources I see in peace, cottage all the river tiles at the capital and get a library + academy in there. Happiness is a challenge but there's a nice pig/ivory site to the north. A gold / gem / silver tile or two would be nice for synergy with the forge but you can't win them all.
Turn 7:
 The coast is real. This is good, I think it's far more fun to play without a potentially hostile border on all sides! The fish means I can get some use out of the lighthouse bonus. I'm actually tempted to circle back around E->NE with the scout, to try and find my eastern neighbor. But, the hut is there, and also it's nice to scout the coast and always hard to find time to do that later in the game. I'm diverting research into Agri again, to reduce the worst case for a hut tech. I'm 30 beakers from mining, and putting in another 11, and only getting 19 beakers of tech from the hut would annoy me. It's even a little tempting to delay the pop until after mining and hope for Bronze which would be extremely powerful. But I think the chances of that are low enough that I don't want to. Getting any tech would feel good, even the 30 to finish mining. 
Civ from First Principles: Whip cycles?
On the surface, whipping seems like a no-brain deal. With a granary, a size 1 city at 11/22 makes 11 food, ends up at 11/24, whips back to 11/22, and I have 30 hammers for 11 food. But obviously this is an artificially good case: the opportunity cost of that is 160 hammers into a city plus granary that could be growing instead of this, plus the cost of maintaining the city. Another artificial way of looking at it, what about the steady state? Let's assume we're whipping from size 4 on a 10 turn cycle (all the current happy cap allows). Case 1: 1-pop whip cycle 4->3 pop. - Yield is 30 hammers in 10 turns. (But, we get it all up front, so if you model with a fluid interest rate it's worth more than 3 hammers per turn. I'm not sure if I feel good enough about that to actually put a number to this.) - It also costs 13 food I have to make back to get to size 4 again. - Having it all sync up is a timing challenge of course, the devil can be in the details and builds may need to be limited. Case 2: No whip cycle, steady state at 4. - I can work at 4 now since there is no unhappiness to carry. - So I get 10 turns of 1 extra pop point. - The city has to build either workers and settlers or work lower food tiles. (But this can be a benefit if food tiles can be offloaded to growing cities). So how much is the extra pop point worth? In the second city I'd likely be adding a river hill mine, so -1 food, +3 hammers, +1 commerce. The pop point can add maintenance, but in the early game I don't think it's at 1 gpt for a pop point. So on the surface of it, multiplying by 10 gives a yield of +30 hammers, -10 food, +10 commerce. And not whipping seems comparable or even a little better than whipping in this case. Case 3: 2-pop whip cycle 4->2 pop. - Yield is 50 hammers in 10 turns (RBMod), front loaded. - Cost is 11 food + 14 food = 25 food. (Supposing I whip at 13/28 at size 4, then I'm down to 13/24 at size 2, 11 more food puts me to 12/26, then 14 gets me back to 13/28). - Also there will be a number of turns at size 2, losing a tile yield from the size 3 baseline. (But the tile could be available for another city.) I'll assume this loss is only 2 turns for a city that can have +6 food or better at size 2. That's +2 food, -6 hammers, -2 commerce if we're taking away a river hill mine for those two turns. - So, the delta compared to the 1-pop whip cycle is +20 hammers, -12 food, - (2 turns of a worked tile). So in a world where we only care about food-hammers, Case 1 is +17, Case 2 is +20, Case 3 is +21. (Case 3 would be +31 in BtS). So, interesting to me, this cursory (and wrong) analysis shows the three situations to be more balanced than I thought, and 2-pop whipping from 4 to 2 isn't as easily dismissed as I thought it would be. If I'm talking about whipping a worker, and the growing empire is constrained by worker turns and not so much by beakers, I think it's not a bad deal even with nerfed Slavery since the worker gets a head start and extra turns from being whipped. Also settler turns have a very real (and probably measurable) value. Taking cottage turns into account would put another wrinkle in this. Also the analysis changes at higher population sizes. 
On phone, but I think the numbers that matters are:
1 labour:22 for 2h/t 1 settler:100 for 6f+1h=10.6h/t 10.6/100 > 2/22 I prefer a good city to labour. So I prefer to build settlers rather than work non-resource tiles. Granary/whipping is an investment to increase output and earn interest on incomplete builds. Once you have a granary, there's a cost to not using it. [edit: what I'm saying is RBMod reduces the return on a granary, it doesn't change the case for (eventually) whipping]
Interesting side discussion from the *first* RBmod Pitboss:
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid244266
If only you and me and dead people know hex, then only deaf people know hex.
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Turn 9:
 The second hut gave 34 gold. Give me MOAR river food, plx. Whales are actually a resource in this game variant, apparently! (Not this weird tile you hook up and watch it go obsolete 5 turns later.) Quote:1 labour:22 for 2h/t Interesting way of breaking it down. (Where does the 22 cost for the labour side come from? Is that food cost of growth multiplied by a conversion factor to equate with hammers?) It seems to also assume the new settler has a 6f tile to work, but there is a grass pig around. The commerce side of it does give me pause though since it's more of a bottleneck in the early game than in a typical PB. A tentative plan is that I should consider whipping a size 4 growth (or two) to speed the very initial city plants, where the small advantage in speed means the most and the commerce can be made up for later. Commodore Wrote:Interesting side discussion from the *first* RBmod Pitboss: You cared about your economy in that game?  Interesting. I guess looking at the changeset and concluding that multi-pop whipping is pointless is an oversimplification.
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