[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

On Dreylin - he's got 148g banked and is making 31gpt. He must be planning on doing more rush-buying. He is Gandhi, so perhaps he's planning to just pop out GP to do the heavy lifting via bulbs while rush buying several workers as opposed to the 1 that we did. I guess that makes sense.

I'm glad to hear that, because every instinct of mine tells me that this isn't going to make for a very effective opening strategy. We shall see!

[scooter]

Turn 257

I intended to leave the turn un-ended in case we changed our minds on micro tomorrow night, and then I accidentally pressed enter out of habit. Sorry about that . I don't think it'll matter, though. I looked through the updated plan you wrote up and played it out in my head ingame, and it looks good. I'll try it out in the sandbox. I think I'm still onboard with the drafting. I really have no idea what the right answer is on how long we can delay a settler. I'm guessing nobody does. I'm actually thinking about us trying to do one at size 10, then once that's out get up to 12 for the next one. A new city is more valuable than normal when it starts with 3 pop and plenty of infrastructure, so it's hard to justify waiting much longer. But yes, like you said, we don't need to decide yet. Just something to think about right now.



Looping back toward Donovan up here. Another nice pigs tile over here.



No sign of Dreylin's explorer when I logged in, so he must have gone north. Foreign adviser says he met Donovan. I also noticed from EPs that 1) Donovan has met someone other than us and Dreylin (he didn't spend 4 EPs on the two of us combined), and 2) Dreylin has met someone other than us and Donovan (same reason). So contacts are becoming pretty frequent right now it seems like. Who knows, maybe one of these guys will finally swap maps with us, and we'll get someone else's map essentially thrown in as a bonus for waiting.



Our capital getting a 1T worker courtesy of a chop. It'll do the same thing over again next turn for our 8th worker coming out EoT258. I think we can get away with 8 for awhile with Serfdom powering us.



Wheat farm finished, so our poor neglected Holy City is finally getting some boosts.

Not much else to note this turn. I'll take your updated plan for a spin very soon.

[scooter]

Forgot to include demos!

[picklepikkl]

It might be outside your naming scheme's time period as such, but given that you are officially Hindu, may I suggest Radio as a name for a future city? Jagadish Chandra Bose, an Indian scientist whose father was a leader in a Hindu reformist sect, made key innovations that later led to radio, and was a pretty awesome dude overall.

[Brian Shanahan]

On the map shape, could it be pairs of players together on four continents, with narrow isthmuses connecting each continent? That's what it looks like to me from the screenshots posted.

[Sullla]

Brian, the biggest issue with pairs of players on four continents would be the 7 teams playing in this game. The odds number makes it harder to do things in pairs. I wouldn't be surprised if it's something similar though.

I logged into the game to get a couple of screenshots. Here's a very provisional dotmap:



I love that red spot for our first city. That is a ridiculously strong spot: double food bonuses, on a river with 11 (!) potential tiles to benefit from a levee, on the coast for shipbuilding while minimizing water coverage, and in a strategically important location as well. The production potential is off the charts. The yellow spot is also excellent, but as a "safe" location it can be delayed until later. Green, hard to say until we get more map information. Something in that region would be nice to grab.



I think the blue spot is where we'll ultimately put a city in the west. It has some nice terrain once we remove all of the forests/jungle, and a lot of chopping potential. Then purple would logically be the next spot after that. I have no idea if these locations will be available for settling down the road, only thinking outloud at present. We'll also want to see what's down by the dyes at some point, and whether that's a separate landmass or part of the same very snaky continent.

I hope for their sake the other teams have built enough workers. Even with 8 of them + Serfdom, I felt like we don't have enough in my sandboxing.

[scooter]

Yeah, red is a great spot. It'll contribute very quickly. I need to remind myself that settling with levees in mind is far more important now than it is for ancient start. The other spots look good too. We should be a little more confident in the spots in about 3-4 turns when our northern and southeastern explorers have uncovered more fog.

In the meantime, I tried to mock up my guess at the map in paint. It came out... pretty bad . I have 0 artistic skills to begin with, and mocking out a Toroid in paint is hard! But I think this is a decent guess.



So the important thing to understand is that I'm guessing those thin green lines are in reality much wider in-game than they look on here. I just did threw those on quickly. For example, I'd include that stretch of land to the west that's between us and Donovan as one of the green lines. But staggering the 7 of us into one long diagonal (that in practice comes out looking like a couple diagonals) and sticking it on a Toroid is really the only way to balance a 7 player map other than a donut-style map. So I'm guessing it's something vaguely like this. The other positive of doing it like this is that you're effectively neighbors with like 2/3 of your opponents. I think that's pretty good.

The additional scouting on this most recent turn confirmed that there's a lot of repeated tiles by both of our explorers, but there's also a couple differences. And we've observed weird quirks in the demos too that suggest we aren't perfectly mirrorred. So I'm guessing each of our home "blobs" of land are about 80% mirrored - generally the same layout, but minor tile differences here and there. I'm also guessing there's going to be a couple islands in between the blobs. For example, I'd guess that the south dyes are on their own island rather than someone else's land, but that's purely based on the fact that we haven't seen an equivalent (yet) to our north. Plus having stand-alone islands between the blobs as an additional thing worth fighting over is always a nice thing on these types of maps.

Anyway... this isn't a super useful exercise because someone is bound to give us maps sooner or later, and then it'll be a lot more obvious how we're laid out. It was mostly just kind of fun, and I like to get a map guess in before too much is revealed. I don't think it impacts out strategy a whole lot just yet.

[scooter]

Played through the microplan. Here's one very minor tweak: We should keep science off on both T260 AND T261. The reason is that if we start a library in Steam Engine on T259 (the direction I'm generally leaning), we can wait an extra turn to turn science on and get extra benefit from the library boost. It'll be a small enough amount of gold that we'll still burn through it, but this nets us an extra 10b or so. I wasn't joking when I said it was minor.

So I took a look at settler production, and I think I've got a rough idea for our first settler. I wanted to see if building the first one at size 10 was viable, and the answer is yes.



T268 is the first turn that our capital is at size 10. I used a pair of workers to complete a workshop on the grassland tile on T267-268, which means with this configuration, we can get a settler in 9T (EoT 277). That said, we can still speed it up a couple more turns by chopping that tundra forest.



This speeds it up by 2 turns, giving us a settler at EoT275. I think 25T to grow our capital to size 10 AND build a settler is pretty good. That would result in us settling red dot on either T277 or T278, depending on if we can get an extra road up there or not (probably).

On this run, I also used the Engineer to bulb Steam Power, meaning Steam Power conveniently is lined up to finish on the exact turn the settler finishes, that way we can immediately start a Levee in Steam Engine while growing up to size 12, at which point we'd start building a string of settlers. Now, I see that the gold is about to run out (I didn't actually play the next 5 turns when I tested this), so it may require running a few scientists to squeak out those last 3 turns of tech, but I'm sure it's doable.

I did build a little bit of research to get us here, but I think that was fine given that by this point we've drafted 3 rifles and built a 4th, so we'd be in pretty good shape militarily. I only played this portion through once, so I didn't pay close attention to Cotton Gin. I'm sure we could tweak things there so that it doesn't grow into unhappiness, or maybe we decide we're fine with it and we just want the population.

So this is an option. If it sounds appealing, let me know and I'll write up the specifics. Or feel free to try it yourself. All I really did was follow your plan, and then:

* Build library in Steam Enginer (at <library or navy>).
* Build Research in Telegraph after finishing Rifle
* Build Research in Cotton Gin after finishing Library
* Build Research in Steam Engine after finishing Library and Barracks
* Do reasonably sensible things with workers (watermills on rivers, workshops on grasslands)

I think the research building is pretty reasonable and worth it at this stage given the large boost Steam Power affords us. The main downside of this plan is it requires going a very long time without any kind of navy. This is fine if our lake is otherwise uninhabited, which is my current guess. If it's shared, we may have to tweak our plans.

Finally, an alternate route to get to the same goal is that we could just skip the drafting plan, stick in Bureau, and then the research building won't be necessary to get Steam Power at around this date since Steam Engine will pull in far more beakers during those 5 turns. Steam Engine could just use the extra hammers on a unit of its own while growing. I'm not quite sure that's worth it, though. We're struggling to keep pace on tile improvements as-is, and that's with drafting away 3 pop. Drafting a little just seems like the most efficient way to use that population.

[Cyneheard]

Discovering Steam Power the turn you build Steam Engine is too perfect. Please find a way to make that happen.

[Sullla]

That's another very nice post scooter. I broadly agree with your plan as outlined. Let me dig into a couple of the more specific points:

* I'm not sure we actually do want to turn off science on both Turn 260 and Turn 261. Yes, the math normally would tell you to run max gold right before finishing a library... except that we'll be swapping out of Bureaucracy the next turn, and a turn of max science in Bureaucracy is worth a lot more than a turn of max science out of it, library or not. I can look at the exact numbers on this more closely later. But the Bureaucracy versus non-Bureaucracy case makes it a little more complicated.

* I agree that building a settler upon hitting size 10 works out really nicely from a micro perspective. We grow to size 10 just as we swap back from Nationhood to Bureaucracy, and with no excess food whatsoever, exactly 30/30 in the box. I didn't know that we were potentially looking at hitting a timing on finishing the settler right around when Steam Power research completes as well, so yeah, that makes perfect sense. Do the settler at size 10, then grow to size 12 while building the levee, then more settlers from there.

* There's some room to improve on your capital setup at size 10. Since Bureaucracy civic (and the forge) multiply production but not food, we ideally want the capital to have +0 food and maximum shields. We can do that by ditching the floodplains farm (allowing it to go over to Cotton Gin) and working another grassland workshop instead - or, more ideally, a plains hill mine:



So that's 43 production/turn, good enough for 8 turn settlers when building from scratch. With a chop on that tundra forest, we should be able to get that down to 7 turns without much issue. If we thought we were in a good position on worker labor, we could even swap out of Serfdom and into Caste System, which would give us potentially +3 production from three workshops (up to 28/turn base, and 49/turn after modifiers). That could also be useful for running more Scientist specialists in Cotton Gin, which might be helpful. Still, I think that Serfdom might be better overall nonetheless; let's see where we are when we're preparing to make the swap.

Of course, that pales in comparison to our capital at size 12 with a levee in place:



Yeah, it's pretty nice. That's just shy of 5 turn settlers there (320/332 production). We should be able to fill up our land pretty quickly once we have that rocking.

* While we're in the process of setting that all up, I think we can squeeze a settler out of Telegraph. It has three more forests available for chopping outside of the one used in the micro plan, and that's 112 shields right there. With some very nice native production of its own, we could probably do the settler in about 7 turns with those three forest chops, and I think that's worth it. So maybe the first settler from the capital at size 10, the second one chopped/built out of Telegraph, and then the following settlers out of the capital at size 12 with levee?

* After more thought, I still think the drafting thing with Nationhood lines up too well not to do it. Doubling the size of our military is too good to pass up, and it will let us settle more aggressively at a time when most teams will have little to no military. The build timings also line up really well, with the capital just growing and Cotton Gin sitting around working specialists, plus we're drafting off of unimproved tiles anyway. I think it's very worthwhile even at the loss of 5 turns of Bureaucracy commerce.

* I'm torn on whether to go library or a naval unit in the capital after the current workers end. On the one hand, the library is clearly better from a development perspective, and the timings line up really nicely with our civics swap. On the other hand, if there's an enemy right across that water, we kind of need to know about that ASAP. Hard call. At least we can delay it a few more turns. And, umm, I'm not playing the turns so I don't have to make it myself.

* I'm less worried about lining up an exact timing for Steam Power research to finish. We'll get it done when we get it done, and we can tweak Build Research or Build Wealth as needed when we get closer to the finishing date. We're also going to be slow out of the gate on our research, since we're going hard foodhammers at the expense of commerce, so we might be able to get some free beakers via known tech bonus if other teams get to Steam Power first.

I think that's all for the moment... Looking forward to the next turn, as always.