[SPOILER] Cornflakes brings the popcorn

[spacetyrantxenu]

Maybe what you're thinking of is how you can settle cities with only one tile separation when the cities are on different landmasses?

PB18 spoiler:

Like I have in the southeast of my PB18 territory with the dyes city being across the one tile waterway from the rice city.

[Cornflakes]

No, I googled Civ III minimum city distance, and according to Wikipedia it was 2 tiles.

Cities must be built a minimum of two tiles away from each other (no two cities can be touching)

^ that is what I was remembering. Other than PB9 I haven't played much civ IV in the last three or four years, and I've played hundreds of SP games in the various civ versions so the details are running together now in my memory.

[Cornflakes]

Some musings on tech path. These are very preliminary in nature




GREEN I have, currently researching Pottery with BW to follow for sure. I'm thinking ignore the bottom half completely. I can head to the top of the tree to pick up the Marble-boosted wonders since I have marble within reach to the East. Might pick up CoL first depending on Maintenance costs and desire for self-founded religion. I can pick up Construction for catapults if I one of my neighbors is threatening.

[Cornflakes]

retep built 2 workers (Worker > Warrior > Worker, I think) so he should be a couple turns behind me to 2nd city. The land between us is much less inviting for 2nd/3rd than his land in other direction so I don't expect him to settle aggressively towards me. I also don't plan to expand aggressively towards him either. I'll probably settle for Marble around City_5/6




Came 1 hammer short of finishing the Settler this turn. That won't slow down the 2nd city plant though because that extra turn will give me time to complete a road connection and speed up the movement by 1 turn.

[Cornflakes]

No turn today, so this is basically a spamming post I was debating whether to scout more with the warrior since I'd really only have 1-turn of worker exposed outside my borders (I'm pretty sure barb warriors aren't spawning yet). In PB9 I tested and discovered that even if a city is settled adjacent to an animal, so that the animal is inside the culture, it will not attack any city. It will move to an adjacent tile that is outside my culture, or if completely surrounded by my culture will remain in place.

In other news, I am now completely hooked on a new leisure activity ... Swing Dancing! I learned the basics a couple years ago, and even a couple advanced things, while out of state for a couple months. But I couldn't find any place locally that did east coast swing. Finally last week I heard of a place that had a guest teacher for September/October and convinced a couple friends to join. SO MUCH FUN!

^ I suffer with no turn, you suffer with my off-topic chatter

[Cornflakes]

I had some time this evening to update the sandbox and do some simming. I can get 2nd city T29 (just played T28 so will found next time the save gets to me). 3rd city founded T44, with both workers in place to immediately pasture sheep. 4th settler out EOT49, and roads in place to get the city up my Marble. Tech works out such that Polytheism land EOT51, same turn that I found the 4th city. If nobody else founds Hinduism earlier then I have a chance of that landing in the brand new city.

Question: is there a way to calculate the odds of the religion falling in that new 4th city vs. the Capital, 2nd, or 3rd cities?




It would be amazing if I could land Hinduism in that Yellow dot City_4. The plan would then be to connect Marble ASAP and chop in Oracle. That gives me a free tech, and pretty much guarantees cultural control of the area between me and retep. That does space my cities out very wide though and could make defense in another 20 turns difficult when retep decides to remove my Yellow-dot-eyesore/thorn-in-the-side.

[Cornflakes]

I'm rather confused as to the value of the Vulture UU. Planting a city at Yellow all but guarantees war with retep so I wanted to do some military sims and see how his scary Sumerian Vultures work in practice. I was incredibly surprised to find that they are MUCH weaker vs. axe than the plain ol' axe.

Axe vs. Axe on flat land - 50% (duh)
Axe vs. Vulture on flat land - 65%




What then is the value of the Vulture UU if is fails miserably against its base unit

Given these combat odds, couldn't I axe rush him and get odds on anything he can build until Horse Archers?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Someone else can give a better explanation, but although they're weaker against axes they're better against everything else and you can still use chariots to kill axes.

[AdrienIer]

It's pretty strange, normally 5+50% is 5+2.5=7.5 and 6+25% is 6+1.5=7.5 as well. But the game makes strange calculations when determining combat strength of the respective units in battle, in this case I'm struggling to find its logic : the interface seems to show it as if the axe stayed at 5 and all the multipliers were applied to the vulture (in general the defending unit). But if it does that then 6-25% is 4.5 not 4.8. Maybe it scales it all then, so the attacking unit always has its base strength after a normalization. But then I found out that when a Vulture attacks an axeman the odds are NOT THE SAME !

After doing some research, this is what I found on the official wikia on http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Vulture :
"This means that it actually performs equally well against melee units before promotions (since 5 * 1.5 = 6 * 1.25 = 7.5), but it gains more from promotions and does better against non-melee units. "
So they too were wrong about the battle engine. They're not fully official though (as in not written by the game developers), and the civilopedia only says that "it's as powerful as a swordsman but retains a bonus against melee units".

I'm going to try to decipher the battle engine and how it calculates the relative powers of each units, I can't promise you I'll get any results.

As for your actual questions, religions are more likely to pop on low population cities, and the capital has a big malus for it so you shouldn't get it there unless it's your only city. As for axe rushing, it could definitely work but he might be able to get big defense bonuses which would counter your +50% bonus.

PS : I found it, if you have a +x% attacker against a +y% defender you multiply or divide(depending on which of x and y is bigger) the defender strength by (Max(x,y)-Min(x,y)) which means that the 5 strength axe will fight a 6/(1+(sum of modifiers)/100)=6/1.25=4.8 strength vulture.
On the contrary the 6 strength vulture on the attack will fight a 5*1.25=6.25 axeman. If this is not clear I can try to make it clearer.

[Commodore]

Vultures also gain more from promotions, typically, like AI said. They're pretty okay units...it's not often you fight flatland vs. flatland...fortified in a city, you'll be fine. Sumer is all about the cheap early courthouse, though.