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

[WilliamLP]

Turn 34, a bunch of things to talk about:




The southwest scouting warrior found a lot of seafood! Holy crap.

Darrellabod founded their second city last turn for the copper. It's an imperfect settlement because it shares no resource but it grabs grass pig for fast growth, and has an immediate trade connection. I should have moved the scout to the grass hill 1N but I didn't notice the cultural borders until I was done the scout move (can I get a reload please?). Incidentally, with the long rivers, trade routes between us should be easy to enable.

Our now healthy scout found stone 8 tiles from the capital! It's equidistant between us and Darrell, and who knows about mystery dead-scout-guy at the other corner of the triangle.

Darrell's scout is at the north border of our capital. I deliberately left him an entry into the capital BFC safe from the warrior for a marker of how this game is going to go:

1. He peacefully continues scouting. Awesome! I would genuinely try to have a completely peaceful relationship for the rest of the game, and with this implied contract we could gang up on the third guy and both be in great positions. (And I would even make a good-faith effort to avoid fair city plants that are fair for mostly us.)

2. He declares war to see our capital, doesn't try to choke pig. He devalues trade routes between us for net negative sum play. I don't like it. Borders will be tense for the rest of the game. Chariot probes will happen. Workers will cower.

3. He declares war and chokes the pig. You want to get dirty in the mud and deny our precious swine their slop? It's game on. He's going to have to deal with axes on the border very soon, and deliberately aggressive settlements, eventually horsies with bad intent. We both finish in the bottom half of the game.

We need to decide on a third city site, because the micro could start to diverge next turn now that all the capital food is improved. This is a really hard decision because a lot of spots have advantages. But it would take a lot to not settle to share more food with the capital because the savings on worker labor, the immediate growth curve for the new city, and the ability to offload the capital onto cottages are all large advantages.

Red: This is a gently aggressive plant that shares wheat. It puts the wines in a bit of an awkward spot. It would allow Darrell to chose if he wants to passively fight for the pig, which is equal distance now but slightly on his side in the original locations. But... he doesn't know our original starting location, does he?

Orange: Shares pig, grabs immediate cow, strong river site. It's even more awkward about isolating the wine.

Yellow: Plains hill site, shares sheep, lots of forests. Gets irrigated wheat eventually. A crazy Pyramids dive might try for it here.

Green Dot: Shares two food (great!) and grabs one more wet wheat. It could go 1E to free up the super Moai site or 1W to save a forest.

Blue Dot: Shares a cow as stands, has fish and rice as soon as the capital pops borders on T51. We want this city, but it should probably wait until we have time for Fishing and maybe Myst to pop the borders.

Purple Dot: Shares cow with city #2 and picks up some nice stuff. It might be aggressive toward some mystery player, but he has no scout so how could he know.

Pink Dot: This is a really tame shade of pink, but as far as I'm willing to think about for city #3. It's not a good economic plant because it's far from the capital. Note the "fair" borders shown are even more tilted to our side because we moved 2E with the settler. (Novice's tool surely would have flagged the stone as his.) It needs the slow flood plains to grow. It says "We're IND, we need that stone. Rawr." 1W of this site is also worth considering since expanding borders does double duty and provides corn for both cities.

I'm not sure what I want here... My first inclination is the 1E of green dot (then blue dot eventually moves over 1E too). This is a city that can grow like crazy for the here-and-now, and the worker investment needed is only that to make capital cottages to replace it working the food, which is what we want anyway. And that also says we're going to leave open an awesome Moai site.

General thoughts about this map and game:

1. The control of that sea channel will be massive! The theme of this map is that the usual logic that you settle away from coast and backfill it later because it's easy can be turned on its head. All of these coastal resources could be contested by another player who's counting on owning them like we are. The whales are a very key resource in particular.

Is it even worth considering Fishing before AH to get a presence here ASAP? Sailing before AH also seems nuts with a Civ focused on horse, but we also have the cheap lighthouses to enable.

2. I really hope Darrell wants to play nice as badly as I do and we leave each other alone to pick on the third guy. What could play into it is I have no idea if Ichabod respects or hates me since I can't read his PB13 spoilers. What kind of neighbor you get and how you respond to each other determines the results, perhaps much more so than the starting resources. (E.g. imagine how different our continent in PB13 would have played out if Retep and Ichabod and I were bots, and we all mentally drew out our Voronoi Diagram and tried to only play within it during the land grab phase).

As should be no surprise, this turn with the growth to onto the fourth food resource is a zenith of our food stat:




This is awfully good, considering we're effectively 4 turns behind many others.

For micro, I see no reason not to put a chop into the settler. It only speeds it by 1 turn, but that's an acceleration of the entire empire. I'd like to get a couple of warriors out before copper is improved so it may have to be delayed for a bit. Meaning, the next improvement is the grass hill 2E1N of Mr. Ed.

[Commodore]

Thanks for the thoughts! How are you going to pop borders?

[WilliamLP]

Thanks for the thoughts! How are you going to pop borders?

Lol, hope religion spontaneously spreads from someone else to all our cities at once?

I'm trying to limit the first few cities to sites that can be useful for the first phase of the game (say, after expanding to 6-8 cities or so) without the border pop. This, so that the hammers can be used for workers and settlers instead. A couple of exceptions are obvious, like I think it's worth trying to culturally control the whale asap.

Monuments are always so sad to build. A city that has good production and wants a rax anyway ideally would want to build that instead, but the 60 hammer vs 30 hammer cost is also a big deal. Writing is going to take forever to get on these settings, since I can't imagine prioritizing it over AH and Sailing here. It feels like this is a position for rapid growth into a sea presence, helped by Organized lighthouses (and use IND and Stone to get a fast Moai site), rather than one for immediate libraries and a fast academy in the capital.

So uh, I don't know? It needs more thought.

[WilliamLP]

Turn 35:




There went the expected lightning 'Henge. Ruff built it as Augustus (IND / IMP) for possibly the best two trait combo to get it without sacrificing the first settler. For 80 (unmodified) hammers and a leader that can spam cities anyway, it sounds like a fantastic deal!




The best news is that Darrell didn't declare war with his scout. I would be thrilled to be BFFs with him in this game. Ideally he'd end a turn next to our warrior and we could show that we don't want to attack. It might not be a very effective signal though because attacking a W1 scout in a forest with a warrior is foolish anyway.

As usual, all micro plans I try are imperfect and tend to run into 1-off problems somewhere.

Worker 1 will help chop the settler. Worker 2 is looking for something to do before improving the cow immediately on the turn 40 settle. He'll start mining the hill tile he's on and road it to be able to move-work the cow. It's also a nice tile to have a road on for transport later. I'm also leaning to forget my earlier plan to delay the copper to build more warriors first - the tile itself is just too good for building settlers and workers. So after the settler the capital grows to 5 onto the copper in 2 turns.

In this game, I'm going to try leaning toward having worker availability very slightly outpace city growth to enable more flexibility with roads and chops. In particular this will mean a third worker before the next settler. This leads to slower cities and a slower early horizontal growth curve that could get steeper later to make up. I suspect (but could be extremely wrong) that the overall RB metagame gets too hung up on thinking like "strive for X cities by turn Y".

I'm considering the marked site as city #3 right now. The reason is that happiness is a huge bottleneck, and getting a border pop in this city early along with sailing would provide the whales. And I also think those whales will be in cultural (if not military) contention with the south. The city could chop to a barracks pretty quickly for the border pop and has the rice automatically when the capital pops borders on T51.

Also, in this game with no map trading, contacts will be huge, and it would be great to get a scouting WB or galley moving very soon. It would also be nice to have enough economic strength to get Alphabet, in order to be the ones whose whims decide who gets Open Borders and IC routes rather than the one at the whims of others. Many overseas contacts will enhance the value of Currency and Alphabet very much (along with later Economics). (Unless this map has a weird topology that we haven't discovered yet.)

For tech, this position feels like it's about the peaceful econ techs if we can afford to got light on military for a while. (Like our more mobile version of the Scout unit that is unlocked with HBR. ) Calendar is big - we have 3 possible calendar resources and a duplicate silk that can surely be traded for something else. I'm thinking of just ignoring the Myst techs for a while and eventually getting CoL down the Currency path.

[WilliamLP]

On wonders. I'm really not in the mood for high variance win/lose plays in a game like this so all wonders are quickly. And they'll go to people like Ruff above whose traits and circumstances are exactly aligned to get them. I'm excluding Marble wonders since we don't have any.

Stonehenge: Gone, and never even a glimmer of an option facing the slowest worker start in Civ delayed by a turn.

Pyramids: Hmm. It would be great. The Rep happiness would be a blessing and we have a crap-ton of food for potential specialists. Even +100% boosted fail gold could be a pretty sweet deal. The problem is that with this many players someone is going to go for it very early and sacrifice much growth to get it. The timing that would be realistic in an 8 player game with 1 or 2 IND leaders won't work here. We have stone, but someone will have a better stone position. Settling for stone on the SW island with will probably be too slow which means we'd need to try and grab the central one immediately, which means an audacious settlement and we'd have military defense issues. To have a chance to land it we'd need a micro plan for it, like, now. Even then there would be a good chance to miss. And, there's the problem of going 250 hammers further behind vs a crowded neighbour who has a leader inherently designed to run circles around us in early expansion anyway.

Maybe a genius like Mackoti could make it work here. But I feel like Pyramids is just a good and intriguing idea here, and we'd need the perfect storm of circumstances for it to be worth going for. (E.g. a faster opening, popping Masonry from a hut, closer Stone, traits that aren't the slowest possible for the first 75 turns of the game.)

G. Lighthouse: It's quite powerful even nerfed. It's another wonder where with this many players, someone is going to sacrifice a lot of early growth to get it, and again, we don't have the early growth to sacrifice.

G. Wall: Some noob may be already planning to rush this really soon. It's 75 (unadjusted) hammers for 2/3 of a specialist's GPP, without the support network that a specialist needs, i.e. pop and food. It's the worst possible GPP. Barb effects and GG emergence are nice but kind of meh. I'm pretty sure by the time enough is laid down that 75 hammers is no big deal, someone has grabbed it already.

Colossus: Good wonder, but there isn't that much water here. It's better for FIN when coast becomes good instead of just ok. Traditionally it goes to the one who builds Oracle, and I don't know if lowering the cost of MC will change that.

Hanging Gardens: Better for someone who already has fast horizontal expansion. It's also better for Expansive leaders because they reduce the cost of the nearly worthless aqueduct. However, engineer GPP are hard to come by and awesome.

Angkor Wat: Uh no.

Apostolic Palace, U of Sankore, Spiral Minaret: No religious game here.

Chichen Itza: Nope.

Notre Dame: To get the chance at it requires the right situation, especially to go for Engineering early. That probably only happens when someone is threatening to unleash a horde of knights on you.

So, kind of sadly, I think contended wonders aren't going to be the right play for this position in this game.

[Commodore]

Why the Chicken Pizza hate?

Also, the Wat is a shrine enabler; nothing more, nothing less.

[WilliamLP]

Turn 36:




Darrell is kindly scouting suboptimally in order to play nice. I love it!

The scout has covered a lot of space to the east to not be seeing even a corner of a third player's culture yet.

Getting a stake in the Stone / Incense area is going to be of great strategic importance. I'm not sure if it's important enough to settle a third city there though. That's quite a sacrifice since the site itself is expensive and not strong.

In isolation settling on the Incense is tempting (+1c city tile). 1W is less audacious and can share corn with a border pop in city #2. That tile is comfortably "ours", 6 from the capital and 9 from Darrellbods'. Thing is I don't care about that stone much except as an excellent production tile, since we have another one and I've talked myself out of a Pyramids attempt. A big issue for this city is needing to rely on middling FP farms for food which take a whopping 7 worker turns to get up. (Unless we can switch to Seven's mod and pick Agr...)

But that's a tentative city #4 site then, the plain hill 1W of incense. My guess (correct me if I'm wrong) is that it won't be ambitious enough for the tastes of my Mindy spirit animal, given we have a civ with a unique and powerful early military advantage. But, my strategic feeling is that we can be a little conservative and fair in land borders in order to make sure we get a stake in the sea because of "skillfully" moving the capital in precisely the correct strategic direction into an amazing site.

I'd love to see the tear ocean in private threads when Darrellbod and other teams deduce we have a 4-food copper capital.

[WilliamLP]

Figuring out how to sync stuff in a sandbox using the Python console, for the benefit of anyone who is wondering how to do this:




Gold is tied to the player, research is tied to the team even in a non-team game which makes sense for generalization.

To get the Python console, you put "CheatCode = chipotle" in the .ini file, and press the '~' key in game. Knowing basic Python introspection like "dir()" and knowing that "gc" is where all the goodies are can uncover a lot.

[MindyMcCready]

Sorry for the AWOL late response, took a bit of a vacation.

The southwest scouting warrior found a lot of seafood! Holy crap.

We need to decide on a third city site, because the micro could start to diverge next turn now that all the capital food is improved.

Green Dot: Shares two food (great!) and grabs one more wet wheat. It could go 1E to free up the super Moai site or 1W to save a forest.

I'm not sure what I want here... My first inclination is the 1E of green dot (then blue dot eventually moves over 1E too). This is a city that can grow like crazy for the here-and-now, and the worker investment needed is only that to make capital cottages to replace it working the food, which is what we want anyway. And that also says we're going to leave open an awesome Moai site.

I agree with moving green dot. Now that we're certain of copper, it's really hard not to want to plant right along the border and get those pigs in the first ring as city #3. Chop a barracks and let Darrabod come at us if he wants to. Ample forests to chop out an army of spear + axes and, with culture + defense advantage he can't do anything about it until catapults.

Pink Dot: This is a really tame shade of pink, but as far as I'm willing to think about for city #3. It's not a good economic plant because it's far from the capital. Note the "fair" borders shown are even more tilted to our side because we moved 2E with the settler. (Novice's tool surely would have flagged the stone as his.) It needs the slow flood plains to grow. It says "We're IND, we need that stone. Rawr." 1W of this site is also worth considering since expanding borders does double duty and provides corn for both cities.

Pink Dot.
-With the hill + river this is a strong defense location. Hills visiblity into Darrabod's copper city as well.
-We'd really be cutting off Darrabod with this plant forcing him to take those productive locations to his West.
-We'd also be exposing our underbelly to potential cit#3. With hill visibility just south of purple dot, this can be managed.

Purple Dot: Shares cow with city #2 and picks up some nice stuff. It might be aggressive toward some mystery player, but he has no scout so how could he know.

Purple Dot
-1E would be my preference.
-I'm basing this on the trade routes with pink + river defense. The shared cow with City#2 isn't a huge deal since it'd have its own cow 1st ring + 2 other foods in second ring. I have a perculiar preference for on-river plants. I just love levees and +2 fresh water really. This would be an extremly strong production city with workshops/watermills everywhere. Heroic Epic?

Red: This is a gently aggressive plant that shares wheat. It puts the wines in a bit of an awkward spot. It would allow Darrell to chose if he wants to passively fight for the pig, which is equal distance now but slightly on his side in the original locations. But... he doesn't know our original starting location, does he?

2N1W of red dot would be an excellent defensive location that gets us the wines. Fork defend 1E of the red site from behind a river. Also, pre-construction river crossing isn't an issue. That location is also safe from any northern navies for example.

Otherwise, if we're going to plant in that location, it seems like a mistake to not get the pigs in the first ring + along the river and/or another city on the north end of that channel.

Orange: Shares pig, grabs immediate cow, strong river site. It's even more awkward about isolating the wine.

See red. Orange would probably have to move 1E and share 2 capital foods.

Yellow: Plains hill site, shares sheep, lots of forests. Gets irrigated wheat eventually. A crazy Pyramids dive might try for it here.

I would love a run at pyramids, but only after getting stone hooked up. Unlikely to happen unless we sacrifice a lot, which I agree that we shouldn't be doing. Fail gold would be nice.

Blue Dot: Shares a cow as stands, has fish and rice as soon as the capital pops borders on T51. We want this city, but it should probably wait until we have time for Fishing and maybe Myst to pop the borders.

I'd like 1E as well.

General thoughts about this map and game:

1. The control of that sea channel will be massive! The theme of this map is that the usual logic that you settle away from coast and backfill it later because it's easy can be turned on its head. All of these coastal resources could be contested by another player who's counting on owning them like we are. The whales are a very key resource in particular.

Is it even worth considering Fishing before AH to get a presence here ASAP? Sailing before AH also seems nuts with a Civ focused on horse, but we also have the cheap lighthouses to enable.

I agree that control of the sea channel will be massive. However, I don't agree that it should be prioritized over land presence. We need to make a strong push onto the naval area when we're ready and not before. Those whales for example, it'll take a large investment in tech + fishing boat + galley navy + culture to get and maintain that location whereas the gems are far easier to acquire and hold. Most of those seafood resources are 1 tile from our coast and can easily be re-acquired by us unless we're very late and somebody's popped 3rd ring borders onto our landmass.

2. I really hope Darrell wants to play nice as badly as I do and we leave each other alone to pick on the third guy. What could play into it is I have no idea if Ichabod respects or hates me since I can't read his PB13 spoilers. What kind of neighbor you get and how you respond to each other determines the results, perhaps much more so than the starting resources. (E.g. imagine how different our continent in PB13 would have played out if Retep and Ichabod and I were bots, and we all mentally drew out our

Can't say too much on Ichabod's sentiment towards you since it's still spoiler (+he hasn't posted much since his Ozymandias thingy anyway).

What I can say from our mutual PB13 deliberations is that Ichabod is a rational player who will time war things (or attempt to anyway) to his advantage. It's significant that he let us take and keep those on-the-line locations of LaBoheme & Don Giovanni and only attacked when he stood to gain from it. To me, that's something that we could use to our advantage. It means that we can get away with aggressive plants. It also means that we need to be stronger than him mid-game to avoid an invasion. Having said that I've come to realize that the elephants are way too close to him than us and very threatening as well. Still, containment through some aggression is probably the best long-term play against him.

Along these lines of thought, the Red Dot really needs to get the pigs so that we can maintain a strong mid-game advantage over him. In my opinion, that move would do as much to avoid war with Darrabod as it would to invoke him/them.

[MindyMcCready]

Turn 36:

Darrell is kindly scouting suboptimally in order to play nice. I love it!

Of course, I look at this as a reluctance for war which we should exploit. Especially pre-construction. And then there's post-construction where he'll be scared getting flanked to death by our fast moving Keshiks.

Getting a stake in the Stone / Incense area is going to be of great strategic importance. I'm not sure if it's important enough to settle a third city there though. That's quite a sacrifice since the site itself is expensive and not strong.

In isolation settling on the Incense is tempting (+1c city tile). 1W is less audacious and can share corn with a border pop in city #2. That tile is comfortably "ours", 6 from the capital and 9 from Darrellbods'. Thing is I don't care about that stone much except as an excellent production tile, since we have another one and I've talked myself out of a Pyramids attempt. A big issue for this city is needing to rely on middling FP farms for food which take a whopping 7 worker turns to get up. (Unless we can switch to Seven's mod and pick Agr...)

I'd agree with the 1W plains hill site. That corn will make a huge difference in extracting hammers from that city site. If we move the purple 1E like I suggest, then city#2 would have the grass cow as exclusive food.

So I'd like to see city #3 as red dot 1NW then pink dot 1W then purple dot 1E for the riverside benefits.

But that's a tentative city #4 site then, the plain hill 1W of incense. My guess (correct me if I'm wrong) is that it won't be ambitious enough for the tastes of my Mindy spirit animal, given we have a civ with a unique and powerful early military advantage. But, my strategic feeling is that we can be a little conservative and fair in land borders in order to make sure we get a stake in the sea because of "skillfully" moving the capital in precisely the correct strategic direction into an amazing site.

I'd love to see the tear ocean in private threads when Darrellbod and other teams deduce we have a 4-food copper capital.

:LOL: Should have read further. Surprisingly, I approve of the 1W plant but that's mostly in conjunction with getting those red dot pigs.

We'll need to talk more about the advantages/disadvantages of getting to the coast early. I guess I believe more in power than in tech and land is better for that (unless you plan on using the tech to acquire land). Naval invasions might be a problem but diligence will greatly help in that regard (see Ichabod PB13). I guess that I'd want to have a strong land presense and then follow up with an empire-wide push to getting naval power.

Last point: If we run up to the border with the red-dot, Ichabod would probably see that as a similar play to PB13 where you planted Don & whatever city. He wouldn't necessarily take that as an indication of your future aggression but just your vision of what is fair.

Having said that I just noticed that I have some catching up to do on your PB13 thread.