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

[Ceiliazul]

But our start and second city were so ridiculous in that game that I doubt there's much to criticize in the early opening. Settling for shared wet corn + river gold + 9 forests to chop + commerce from settling on a silk on turn 32 with the capital still at size 4 with an early religion.

you're absolutely right about that, you seem to have a gift for superfertile capitals. you did well in the first 40 turns of that game. Here i agree with commodore, your new city 3 is miles better. 2nd ring fish, with no culture or workboat assist, was a terrible third city. if i was a dedlurk, i would have said as much.

as for vertical-first, your new city 3 will not only do a *much* better job of pumping workers to gain tile improvements, it can also incubate cottages, so that when your capital hits bur at size ten it is working 2/0/4 tiles instead of 2/0/2 tiles (and that difference is bigger than it seems after you subtract maintenance)

in other words this is the better vertical-first opening, and if you plant with fish in the 1st ring it will honestly get you whales sooner too with 2 stronger proximal cities!

[WilliamLP]

You know, I don't just have a minority opinion but absolutely everyone thinks I'm wrong maybe I should stop and consider... ah nah, forget it, this is internet gaming.
Come on guys, you've played more civ than me, I get it. And maybe your intuition wins, but words like "terrible" aren't called for here at all.

The alternate city grows to 2 on T58 (6 turns after settlement) with a full granary:

Dry rice is not good, but it does claim an unused food resource without a border pop and it's now growing at +6.

Good enough to get to size three 2 turns later.

And then double-whips a library 3 turns later.

And here's what we get 6 turns after that.

+ The city is a monster grower after Calendar, with potential 6,5,4,4,3 food tiles. It gets to build a 30 hammer lighthouse.
+ It claims a bunch of tiles that would otherwise take 2 cities to claim.
+ The library itself is nice both for the research bonus (sharing 2 cottages with the capital), the culture, and doubling up to get a really early Academy, in a great spot to have enough food to work 2 specialists while still doing other things.

And most importantly, this border pop immediately adds growth room for adding 5 tiles to the empire, _with no maintenance costs for number of cities or distance_. So aside from the productivity of the city itself, just the happiness this early adds more than a free settler and city would, with none of the expenses of the same.

We'd immediately have 5 cities at this point in the game to put this extra pop to work in, plus an extra pop in every city we plant between here and when we get Calendar stuff hooked up.

If you don't think these positives are at least _interesting_, and worth weighing out over the positives of the other side, maybe this is where I can get a bit of an advantage by analyzing from first principles and not jerking my knees at veteran intuition that is inflexible to a way of playing that isn't the one you've always done and seen.

I go quite the other way, and would guess that our demos would be at quite a high water mark right when this is realized, i.e. when we get to use that additional pop point in every city. Again, I'm sad I don't get to test this thinking out empirically.

[WilliamLP]

Heh, my ongoing article series in PB13 can basically be titled "the old metagame is wrong".

But I'm no authority, Mindy's odd honorifics aside. Don't let his baffling admiration for my questionable game record bias you.

I've seen enough references to your thread elsewhere to want to read it for sure!

I'd just be honored, Mindy didn't give you The Title for nothing.

Mindy, I'm not sure if you're going to be able to stand both the style I want to play and my extreme stubbornness in this game. But I do hope you stick around because you came up with a lot of important things to consider in PB13 that led to me learning a lot of things.

[WilliamLP]

I was bracing for a scout death, and it happened.




Note 3.00 vs 2.90 is the difference between 19 and 20 damage, and so it's a break point that makes the combat nearly 2 to 1 odds for a measly 3% difference in base strength!

The bear is at 5HP, food for MYKI's heroic epic quest, perhaps.

Was the scout move a mistake? I'm not sure. I very consciously reasoned it was about a 90% chance of the scout surviving and made the move (only 1 of 6 tiles the bear could move was a problem, then it needed to win.) An extremely conservative scouting strategy might have been to conclude that because of the bear and the axe I couldn't proceed that way, and turned to (slowly) scout around MYKI over the south coast.

Other than that, not much is happening.




It's a high indicator that MYKI has 2 axes now. I'm not worried... yet. It helps that his capital isn't 7 tiles away from ours! Still a vision unit on some hill to the east would eventually be a good idea.

Darrellbod got a 12 point jump and my first thought was "holy crap, do they really have Math already"? But they settled on turn 33, so the score includes the 9 land tiles they got with that. A tile on this map is worth about 0.425 points (2000/4706) so grabbing 9 is worth 3 or 4 points, depending on rounding. So it's a tech, and land, and a pop growth or two.

[MindyMcCready]

Heh, my ongoing article series in PB13 can basically be titled "the old metagame is wrong".

But I'm no authority, Mindy's odd honorifics aside. Don't let his baffling admiration for my questionable game record bias you.

Master Commodore, you earned 'The Title' when you archer rushed impi-holding, copper carrying, MP veteran Scooter. Never seen that before and it was awesome!

Strategy + Initiative + focus + player analysis are all categories in addition to winning (which I think is over-rated). In other words, local winning is just as important at global winning which I'll admit really helped your chances in getting the Award!:LOL:

Mindy, I'm not sure if you're going to be able to stand both the style I want to play and my extreme stubbornness in this game. But I do hope you stick around because you came up with a lot of important things to consider in PB13 that led to me learning a lot of things.

Well we're going to have to do something about the stubborness. I really feel like I'm hollaring at the wind here.

I ran your city plant through my spreadsheet and it's just not even close. Happiness permitting the current set up could be at size 8 including the double-whip by the same T69. Or translate that into 2-double whips for extra 100H and the same city size. So yeah, it's relatively terrible. Also,
-The Library gets you 1bpt at 100% maybe 1/2 to 3/4 bpt at break-even. Other than for culture this library could be delayed for a very long time.
-You spent worker turns improving a +4F dry rice rather than a 5/1/1 wet wheat
-You spent worker turns improving a 1/3/0 grass hill mine rather than a 2/0/2 riverside cottage.

Yes, it has the benefit of faster whales but those extra 100H means we'd have an extra city to push that culture. And that extra city would have rice + deer + fish + 4 hills meaning it's a natural Heroic Epic city and will want barracks culture anyway.

Anyway, that boat has sailed and the decision was made for us - but I think that you can see that it was completely pointless for me to argue the point given the mentioned stubborness. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I do get the feeling that you're not always arguing the merits of things. You mention the huge benefit of getting to a key tech a few turns earlier while not overexpanding and simultaneously talk about a preference for 2/0/2 tiles over 0/0/8? I honestly can't tell if that's a legitimate or facetious argument.

Hopefully this doesn't come across as too harsh,...I'm writing it in a hurry.

[WilliamLP]

Well we're going to have to do something about the stubborness. I really feel like I'm hollaring at the wind here.

I ran your city plant through my spreadsheet and it's just not even close. Happiness permitting the current set up could be at size 8 including the double-whip by the same T69.

It can be size 4, or size 3 if it ever whips. This is the whole point of what I'm saying! Weigh the value of the earlier happy cap increase across the whole empire, vs the increased short term growth of a single city. I'm saying from the very beginning that there's a negative term and a positive term in the equation.

If you just say it's terrible without addressing the actual fundamental point that makes me think it's the best decision, then no, that doesn't resonate.

-The Library gets you 1bpt at 100% maybe 1/2 to 3/4 bpt at break-even. Other than for culture this library could be delayed for a very long time.

At a cost, where a good-faith analysis needs to weigh the research bonus, the ability to generate an earlier great scientist, and yes, the culture. (Assuming we ever wanted the whales, some city would have to invest in culture sometime.)

-You spent worker turns improving a +4F dry rice rather than a 5/1/1 wet wheat

True. This is worse. We're going to spend worker turns improving both eventually, but this is a negative term.

-You spent worker turns improving a 1/3/0 grass hill mine rather than a 2/0/2 riverside cottage.

Mine vs cottage isn't that clear. Grass mines aren't bad tiles, and yeah, we're going to improve both anyway. But, we do have a couple 1/3/1 hills to improve as well. This is another negative term.

Yes, it has the benefit of faster whales but those extra 100H means we'd have an extra city to push that culture. And that extra city would have rice + deer + fish + 4 hills meaning it's a natural Heroic Epic city and will want barracks culture anyway.

Overall dotmap considerations factor in, yes. There are positives and negatives there too. One positive is being able to eventually settle another city that immediate has pre-netted fish to start with. Another positive is, with only one city there soon, being able to focus future cities on more critical borders by capturing more key resources with the first plant.

I'm really interested in the genuine quantitative comparisons. I.e. 100H isn't a very good estimate of the cost of settling a new city. There's, at least, the ongoing maintenance, the worker turns to get it up including roads, and the garrison and defense needs. Obviously, cities are good or we'd run 1-city empires. But there's also a force that pulls to do more with less if you can.

Anyway, that boat has sailed and the decision was made for us - but I think that you can see that it was completely pointless for me to argue the point given the mentioned stubborness. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I do get the feeling that you're not always arguing the merits of things. You mention the huge benefit of getting to a key tech a few turns earlier while not overexpanding and simultaneously talk about a preference for 2/0/2 tiles over 0/0/8? I honestly can't tell if that's a legitimate or facetious argument.

I can't tell if you're not apprehending what I'm saying or being disingenuous.

A cottage is a 2/0/2 tile that grows to 2/0/5, and gets additional buffs in the late game.

A hill mine producing fail gold with a resource is producing 0/0/8 for a limited time until the wonder fails, and then it becomes a 0/4/0 tile again.

(And note, even in the false case where the 2/0/2 tile is static forever and so is the 0/0/8 value, the 2/0/2 - Seven's 8/5/3 heuristic puts the relative values at 22 vs 24. It's even still pretty close if you subscribe to that!)

So I love the idea of analysis. I believe in the really harsh kind. Challenge everything aggressively, question everything. What's left may be closer to the truth, this is science. I'm harsh too, it's the kind of way I make decisions. It's not for everyone. Sometimes it seems like I get stressed out more than I do, sometimes I actually do get stressed out.

On the point of it being pointless to argue with me, I do change my mind, and you can find lots of examples of this - places where I start with a strong opinion and then a line of reasoning forces me to say "hmm... I hadn't considered that" or "ok, I underestimated the value of {insert something}". Here what I'm seeing is, I'm saying I think X is bad with a plan but Y is good. And what I'm getting is "your plan is terrible, look how much worse X is" without starting with the fact that I know, and I still think Y is larger.

A couple of things I'm not or never will be are: easy to work with , and interested in some kind of passive student / mentor relationship where I humbly observe and accept things uncritically. What's most interesting is developing my own stylistic points, failing fantastically on a few but finding where the successes are and building on that.

[WilliamLP]

Turn 54:




Trigger gets its granary at the end of the turn, and will fill it to +10 when it grows to 2. The three workers will improve the wheat in 2 turns with a road trick - the SE one roads the cow next turn which allows the one on the cow to go S-SW-Pasture.

The fourth worker going to build a river mine by Silver, which 2-whipped a barracks. The barracks is for culture to capture the corn and also for just being a barracks.

In a sandbox, building archers would be the better option, but in reality prudence probably prefers a promotable axe or two, particularly since we've seen one wandering to our east.

Tech is back on Writing. We probably go right to Math afterwards for the chopping bonus.

Food graph:




Joao is supposed to be pulling clearly ahead by this point in the game. The fact that he's not is probably because of our high output capital. By this limited measure, MYKI is lagging just a little. All three of us have basically the same hammer output.

[MindyMcCready]

It can be size 4, or size 3 if it ever whips. This is the whole point of what I'm saying! Weigh the value of the earlier happy cap increase across the whole empire, vs the increased short term growth of a single city. I'm saying from the very beginning that there's a negative term and a positive term in the equation.

I have understood your point. I always just felt that City #3 in its current location would mean that my Heroic Epic city wouldn't be materially behind in generating culture and/or getting the whales. At the point that the Heroic Epic city landed the whales, we'd have the same happy plus an extra (hugely productive) city but be somewhat behind in tech. The trade-off seemed worth it to me.

Of course, that's extremely difficulty to prove. The burden of proof is overly high on my end which makes the conversations difficult and one-sided. There has to be some chance of success before I'm willing to spend my time writing this stuff up.

Anyway, that boat has sailed and the decision was made for us - but I think that you can see that it was completely pointless for me to argue the point given the mentioned stubborness. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I do get the feeling that you're not always arguing the merits of things. You mention the huge benefit of getting to a key tech a few turns earlier while not overexpanding and simultaneously talk about a preference for 2/0/2 tiles over 0/0/8? I honestly can't tell if that's a legitimate or facetious argument.

I can't tell if you're not apprehending what I'm saying or being disingenuous.

A cottage is a 2/0/2 tile that grows to 2/0/5, and gets additional buffs in the late game.

A hill mine producing fail gold with a resource is producing 0/0/8 for a limited time until the wonder fails, and then it becomes a 0/4/0 tile again.

So I love the idea of analysis.

Here what I'm seeing is, I'm saying I think X is bad with a plan but Y is good. And what I'm getting is "your plan is terrible, look how much worse X is" without starting with the fact that I know, and I still think Y is larger.

Well I'm happy to hear that it's not arguments for the sake of it. I have a co-worker who'll take opposite sides of any argument just for kicks. Of course, it's maddening when you look at someone and know that they can't possible believe what they're saying.

With text, it's more difficult to interpret. Sorry, I wasn't sure.

So to the issue at hand. The city placement was decided for us. Back to the Pyramids.

1. Happiness is a massive constraint.
2. You have a declared preference for tech advantage over land advantage.
3. You've said, and I agree, that to survive we'll need to 'own a continent'.
4. You're not in a rush to use our UU.

Mindy's conclusion: We need to rush to tech and convert that tech advantage into A. More tech advantage B. Land Advantage. Like duh, right.

So the 0/0/8 tile is going to power us to the key techs like Calendar, Currency, Alphabet, Monarchy way ahead of a 2/0/2 tile even with growth. With this much food, until we get happiness sorted out, short-term considerations tech benefits are very high compared to most games. In other words:
-We need happiness tech badly.
-I could pretty much care less if I find another food resource on this map. Overly dramatic of course, but we're looking at huge stacked whip unhappiness if we don't acheive our goal of happiness tech in decent time.

So as I see it there's no downside for an industrious civ with stone to take a run at the Pyramids. We have a non-zero chance of success combined with a "just-as-good" outcome if we fail.

[WilliamLP]

Of course, that's extremely difficulty to prove. The burden of proof is overly high on my end which makes the conversations difficult and one-sided. There has to be some chance of success before I'm willing to spend my time writing this stuff up.

It's a difficult game where it takes a lot of time and attention to detail and specifics to try and find better strategies. But obviously, regardless of the burden of rigor needed to make a correct decision, an analysis needs to focus on evaluating the key strengths and weaknesses of options, and with any analysis of anything, if it doesn't address those it's not going to be very useful in arriving at the truth.

There certainly are ways to prove that are beyond question. In this example, I think the advantage of the city site I wanted begins at about turn 70, and lasts for about 50 turns. It's weaker at turn 70. So actually playing it out to turn 100 each way from both sides may start to show that either, yes, the snowball effect from A is strong enough that the happy cap effect from B never quite makes up for it, or vice versa. But yeah, this is a ton of work.

Well I'm happy to hear that it's not arguments for the sake of it. I have a co-worker who'll take opposite sides of any argument just for kicks.

I do that too. But I try to be self-aware enough to realize that this is what I'm doing, heh.

So to the issue at hand. The city placement was decided for us. Back to the Pyramids.

1. Happiness is a massive constraint.
2. You have a declared preference for tech advantage over land advantage.
3. You've said, and I agree, that to survive we'll need to 'own a continent'.
4. You're not in a rush to use our UU.

Mindy's conclusion: We need to rush to tech and convert that tech advantage into A. More tech advantage B. Land Advantage. Like duh, right.

You know, I agree with all of that. Except it leads me to want to just beeline Calendar. And then use the vertical growth onto cottages from the extra +4 happy in all cities to power through Alphabet -> Currency -> Col -> MC, get courthouses and forges everywhere, profit.

So the 0/0/8 tile is going to power us to the key techs like Calendar, Currency, Alphabet, Monarchy way ahead of a 2/0/2 tile even with growth. With this much food, until we get happiness sorted out, short-term considerations tech benefits are very high compared to most games. In other words:
-We need happiness tech badly.
-I could pretty much care less if I find another food resource on this map. Overly dramatic of course, but we're looking at huge stacked whip unhappiness if we don't acheive our goal of happiness tech in decent time.

So as I see it there's no downside for an industrious civ with stone to take a run at the Pyramids. We have a non-zero chance of success combined with a "just-as-good" outcome if we fail.

I treat the chance of actually landing the wonder as zero for practical analysis here. So the kind of analysis that would be really compelling would be to show that Calendar comes in faster this way. My feeling (without proof) is it actually doesn't.

Some costs are: we have to settle for, and prioritize improving stone with Masonry early - a site that gets it in the first ring is much slower to get going and more defensively liable. We have to invest in a city that doesn't build anything except research for a while, and is a negative growth city for commerce (because the 0/0/8 goes away, where as the 2/0/2 grows.) If Stone were really natural to hook up, yeah, we'd just do it and sure, spend some time working mines on it.

I'll point out one thing in your thinking that seems way out of whack to me vs the game mechanics: that you like this kind of short term tech play, but you don't value an early library highly for the scientist, either for an academy or a tech.

Let's say we're using a Scientist for alphabet. (Not saying we should, but as a comparison). Then, a library city can work 2 scientists (0/0/2 tiles). And in 16 turns we get the GP and Alphabet. It would normally cost 359 beakers (the cost is 430 before the prereq). So the beaker yield for the two scientists is 359/16 = 22.4 beakers per turn, or 11 per scientist. So in effect the scientist is a 0/0/13 tile for those turns!

If you want to go out of your way to work at 0/0/8, why not take 0/0/13?

And we probably wouldn't actually bulb Alphabet. Why not? Because we can do even better! Either with the academy for the amortized yield to the capital beakers, forever, or hold out for a more expensive tech. So the 0/0/13 figure is a lower bound.

(But, actually, this may even be a perfect storm map for Alphabet, since it could be a map where we can saturate every city with foreign overseas trade routes.)

[Ceiliazul]

I treat the chance of actually landing the wonder as zero for practical analysis here. So the kind of analysis that would be really compelling would be to show that Calendar comes in faster this way. My feeling (without proof) is it actually doesn't.

I think you just said you dont want to try pyramids because it will slow down calendar tech? um.