[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Alright, used Brick's blank sandbox and filled in the tiles. Here it is in case you're really bored this weekend.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5826...wordWBSave

Little hard to do lot with this since more scouting is needed for a third city. I may just take a guess at what might be nearby and test a couple things based off that.

Here's some actual beaker counts in-game after modifiers.

Steam Power: 2745b
Scientific Method: 2059b
Communism: 2402b
Steel: 2402b
Railroad: 3861b
Assembly Line: 4290b
Combustion: 3088b

[scooter]

I did a little test run of Montezuma of Germany vs Peter of India. I just played 10T of each, and I added in an extra cow on the left side just so we had 3 cities to compare. I played these very casually and pretty quickly - just tried to work improved tiles and get myself a bunch of workers while I wait for tiles to improve. There's almost certainly a lot of room for improvement. Ignore the culture color - the civs and leaders are correct here. There's also a spattering of half-finished roads that I didn't bother marking with signs.



This is 10T of Monty. That's 7 workers. I did rush-buy a worker to speed it up at one point before swapping to Rep. Demos in the spoiler.

Here's Peter of India. That's 9 fast workers to Monty's 7, but 1) Expansive helps a bit with that and 2) you really need more workers to counter-act Serfdom. I went with Slavery here rather than Serfdom. I whipped two workers out of the two western cities rather than rush-buying - I just went straight into Rep here and didn't bother with UniSuffrage. Maybe Peter/India/Serfdom is really the way to go, but I'm not going to run a million sims. I also chopped 2 extra forests to get to this point. Demos in spoiler.

Anyway, I did press enter a little to check on the Engineer bulbing Steam Power, and Philosophical wouldn't be able to finish Steam Power any quicker because the Engineer can't finish it (puts in about 1k beakers which is only slightly more than 1/3) by himself.

So all that to say - yeah, let's do Montezuma. At worst it's no slower than Peter/India, and I think it can probably be better. I did try a variant with running additional specs with Peter/India to push out great people sooner, but it really badly hampered my ability to get workers out and improve stuff. It sounded nicer in theory than it did in practice. We've got a lot of smart players in this game, so maybe somebody will make an early great person stunt work, but I don't know that it'll be me.

[Sullla]

That's some very nice work there! I'll see if I have some time to play around in the sandbox, but it might take until Monday or Tuesday. This is my favorite part of these lategame starts, thinking through how things will play out.

[Sullla]

More thoughts after playing around with the Sandbox a little today...

I don't want to do anything too serious until we know which leader/civ pairing we're going to have. Still, I've been thinking about how to play out the starting move under the assumption that we'll have some kind of a Spiritual leader. That raises the question of what we'd want to do with the civics swaps; the game is a lot less complicated if we're not Spiritual (in a bad way, heh). The real question for me is whether to start in Serfdom and then pop into Slavery 5 turns later, or to do the reverse by starting in Slavery and then heading into Serfdom.

The real issue is that we need worker labor. As many workers as we can get, as fast as possible. My tentative feeling is that we do best to start in Slavery civic, use then opening 5 turns to whip out a few, and then swap into Serfdom civic so that all of the workers that have come out are boosted to work faster. That's not a scientific analysis though, more of a gut feeling of what would work better. This is something that really does need some simming and planning to test what comes out ahead, and I don't want to do that until we know who we're playing.

For the other civics, I think Bureaucracy and Mercantilism are no brainers out of the gate. In the religious column, Free Religion for the first 5 turns seems obvious, and then followed by Organized Religion (to spread the faith or use for the building bonus) or Pacifism for Great Person production. I'm not sure which will be better at this point. The government column is a little bit trickier; I think my preference is for Representation, since the beakers combine very well with the free specialists available from Mercantilism. On the other hand, UniSuffrage does open up cash-rushing, so that could be an option too. On the third hand, I feel like we'd probably do better to use our small starting treasury (100g) to push research at 100% for as long as possible. Is it really worth giving up 9 beakers/turn (minimum) from the Representation specialists so that we can do a one-time cash-rush of a part of a worker? I'm not sure. If we do want to cash-rush a worker, then the proper time is immediately, on the second turn of the game, and that means the very first civics swap needs to be into UniSuffrage. That might be a good idea, cash-rushing a worker and immediately slaving out one thereafter. It's fun to think about the different options, at the very least.

One other thing: the test cases you did seem to have a grassland cow between cities #2 and #3 that doesn't appear to be present in Brick's screenshot. I was wondering why my informal sims couldn't match your production after 10 turns, and I think that may be why.

[Sullla]

Oh, one other thing I remembered that I meant to put in the other post: the Montezuma sim is a full turn ahead of the Peter sim, since Peter still hasn't revolted into his religion yet. That skews the numbers further in favor of the Spiritual leader, and we haven't even taken advantage of all the crazy civic swapping as yet. I think Spiritual comes out way ahead, even with this back of the hand comparison.

[scooter]

One other thing: the test cases you did seem to have a grassland cow between cities #2 and #3 that doesn't appear to be present in Brick's screenshot. I was wondering why my informal sims couldn't match your production after 10 turns, and I think that may be why.

I should have been more explicit that I added that on the fly as an if-the-fog-is-generous guess since we lack an obvious 3rd site. I figured it helped for comparison purposes.

I don't want to do anything too serious until we know which leader/civ pairing we're going to have. Still, I've been thinking about how to play out the starting move under the assumption that we'll have some kind of a Spiritual leader. That raises the question of what we'd want to do with the civics swaps; the game is a lot less complicated if we're not Spiritual (in a bad way, heh). The real question for me is whether to start in Serfdom and then pop into Slavery 5 turns later, or to do the reverse by starting in Slavery and then heading into Serfdom.

<snip>

The government column is a little bit trickier; I think my preference is for Representation, since the beakers combine very well with the free specialists available from Mercantilism. On the other hand, UniSuffrage does open up cash-rushing, so that could be an option too. On the third hand, I feel like we'd probably do better to use our small starting treasury (100g) to push research at 100% for as long as possible. Is it really worth giving up 9 beakers/turn (minimum) from the Representation specialists so that we can do a one-time cash-rush of a part of a worker? I'm not sure. If we do want to cash-rush a worker, then the proper time is immediately, on the second turn of the game, and that means the very first civics swap needs to be into UniSuffrage. That might be a good idea, cash-rushing a worker and immediately slaving out one thereafter. It's fun to think about the different options, at the very least.

Obviously agreed on Bureau/Merc, and religion column isn't too complicated either.

I waffled a lot on my test run on if/when cash-rushing made sense vs whipping vs natural-builds. I'll do a lot more experimenting once I've got a leader locked in, but like you I'm hesitant to do a bunch of Monty runs only to find out we don't get him. That said, these tests have sold me on Spiritual's early pace (and I already knew its staying power), so it helps inform my rankings.

I'm also thinking I'm sold enough to bump Asoka/Aztecs up in the rankings and just make darn sure we get Spiritual. Sacrifical Altar will probably not be very helpful because I think we'll be pursuing vertical growth pretty quickly, but ORG is not totally worthless with the factory boost and Toroidal maintenance. May be decent enough to make it still better than losing out on spiritual.

It all comes down to guesswork. Here's another stab at a top-5:

1) Montezuma of Germany
2) Brennus of Vikings
3) Peter of India
4) Genghis of America
5) Asoka of Aztecs

The problem is if I suspect Peter to go before 3rd round or Genghis before 4th, I should drop them entirely like I did Gandhi and rank Asoka 3rd, which I think would be a guaranteed get if it went that far. How would you rank this top-5 in a world where we're assuming Gandhi is someone's first choice and should therefore be off our board? I'm considering dropping Peter but leaving Genghis and bumping the other 2 up 1 each.

[Sullla]

So in putting together a leader/civ list, I'm operating under two assumptions here, which you might or might not agree with:

1) Spiritual trait is the most desirable thing to grab.

2) At least one other team is going to see that Fast Worker and put Peter/India first on their list.

Under these possibly-incorrect assumptions, I wouldn't put Peter/India on my list at all. I just value Spiritual too much, and someone else is certainly going to grab that combination before the fourth round of picking. I really think that Spiritual is roughly as fast in the opening moves, and then comes out gigantically ahead the longer the game goes on. I would probably list Montezuma, then Brennus, then Asoka, and if we would happen to get down to our fourth pick, well, we're probably not off to a great start. I'd say it's your call after that, whatever you like best. I would put Asoka over Genghis Khan though; I like Imperialistic, but I like Spiritual more.

[scooter]

Yeah, I agree with both of those. I really don't want to play this without Spiritual if I can avoid it. Okay, final list here.


1) Montezuma of Germany
2) Brennus of Vikings
3) Asoka of Aztecs
4) Peter of India
5) Genghis of America
6) Gandhi of Khmer
7) Julius of Japan


I realized there is literally no downside to including Gandhi/Peter on the list. I'm highly confident Gandhi will be gone fast, but adding it up... Missing all 3 AND Gandhi being gone means there's only 2 players left + me. At that point the odds of Peter still being available are higher. I slightly prefer Peter over Genghis in any case, so whatever, those guys are 4-5. Gandhi 6 is in case everyone's lost their minds. Julius at 7th is because logically there's no difference between placing him 6th vs 7th if he's really my last choice.

Probably none of this matters because I figure the chances of getting one of my top-3 is at least 90%. If all this backfires and results in me losing Genghis and getting stuck with my 7th pick, well that would be so spectacularly unlucky that I'd instantly be the lurker favorite, so there's always that.

[Sullla]

Sounds like a good list. Let's hope that the rest of the field sees things slightly differently - or if they do, that we get some friendly dice luck. Looking forward to seeing how the picks shake out.

[scooter]

Someone had a question about the process in their post, so for complete clarity here is the exact process I will be using for the picks.

To clarify... Let's say in the first round I have a popular top choice and don't get it. Unluckily, someone else ranked my second choice as first so that's gone too. Then you go to evaluate round two. My top choice is now my third choice, but someone else has it as their second. There is a coin flip still, correct? In other words, the numerical ranking does not actually matter, only the top available choice. Is that right?

Correct.

Looks like I slightly misunderstood the pick process. I was under the impression that there was an advantage to having your pick higher up the chain, but the above exchange says I got it wrong. In that case, there's less harm in putting Gandhi up in the area he belongs because if he's just chosen 1st, my later picks are not punished for being one spot lower as a result. With that in mind, I'll revise the order ever so slightly.


1) Montezuma of Germany
2) Brennus of Vikings
3) Gandhi of Khmer
4) Asoka of Aztecs
5) Peter of India
6) Genghis of America
7) Julius of Japan


This almost certainly will make no difference, but in case Monty-Brennus is everyone's 1-2, this gives me a shot at Gandhi. But if he goes first, it's functionally equivalent to the first submitted list. I'll still stick with Monty-Brennus 1-2 even though I'd prefer Gandhi second, and that's still an attempt to thin out the likelihood of a coin flip deciding my pick.