[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[Cheater Hater]

Isn't that helping avoid what happened at Cotton Gin? That's why I liked the spot 1SE of the whales--it can get more fog help.

[antisocialmunky]

Are you sure you aren't being too focused on Cotton Gin? That was a combination of bad map RNG, not enough scouting, and focusing too much on the starting tiles. It seems like an apple/oranges invocation.

[shallow_thought]

And there I was wondering what I was going to read over my morning coffee now that PB 33 was over... .

I'll be lurking quietly (but unspoiled) over here in the noob corner. I don't have much to contribute beyond moral support until the game gets quiet and you need inane questions to keep the post count up. With 10 pages before I even knew this game was on you don't need that yet...

Looking forward to this - have fun!

[scooter]

Isn't that helping avoid what happened at Cotton Gin? That's why I liked the spot 1SE of the whales--it can get more fog help.

Maybe. The problem with 1SE is if it has nothing in the fog and the corn is dry, that's a pretty underwhelming city given the logistical issues (distance between the cities) that make worker turns tougher. The hope is still that we find something in the fog to make this decision easier. When I login the first time, the first thing I'll be doing is checking to see if the corn and rice are irrigated.

Now, if we find nothing of consequence, it gets difficult because there's obvious drawbacks to each of our ideas... but my feeling is that we would end up placing our second city 1N of the pigs if we find nothing else. Hopefully we'll find something good, because in a perfect world placing our capital 1NW would be great. I'm just struggling to see a way to do it without having a useless second city.

Are you sure you aren't being too focused on Cotton Gin? That was a combination of bad map RNG, not enough scouting, and focusing too much on the starting tiles. It seems like an apple/oranges invocation.

It's not even really about that. The ideal way to play this particular opening as an IMP leader is to try to get the first few settlers out extremely quickly. The best way to do that is to get 2 from capital and 1 from second city. It's going to be easy to get settlers out of the capital with 125% hammer boost AND settling the best location, but it's much more challenging to get one out of the second city unless 1) it can grow to sz4 and 2) there are at least 2 forests to chop.

Basically, we need to drastically out-expand the non-IMP players early on because they will definitely have better tools than us in the mid-game. Having a second city that doesn't contribute anything of note for the first 30T or so will hurt that quite a bit.

----

FWIW - this dilemma is a symptom of a well-designed start. So kudos to Mardoc and anyone who gave input.

[Cheater Hater]

Isn't that helping avoid what happened at Cotton Gin? That's why I liked the spot 1SE of the whales--it can get more fog help.

Maybe. The problem with 1SE is if it has nothing in the fog and the corn is dry, that's a pretty underwhelming city given the logistical issues (distance between the cities) that make worker turns tougher. The hope is still that we find something in the fog to make this decision easier. When I login the first time, the first thing I'll be doing is checking to see if the corn and rice are irrigated.

Now, if we find nothing of consequence, it gets difficult because there's obvious drawbacks to each of our ideas... but my feeling is that we would end up placing our second city 1N of the pigs if we find nothing else. Hopefully we'll find something good, because in a perfect world placing our capital 1NW would be great. I'm just struggling to see a way to do it without having a useless second city.

That corn will be wet because the city provides the irrigation from the whales lake, right? The logistical issues are something I didn't think of though--maybe we should focus our explorer on seeing if a city by the rice (1SE of the rice is my guess) is better for the second city, as it has three forests to chop to get the settler out and isn't choked by jungle.

[scooter]

That corn will be wet because the city provides the irrigation from the whales lake, right?

Oof, yeah I totally missed that. Good catch. I'm still concerned by the lousy jungle/forest ratio in that area, but it does make that region more useful as an early target.

[Sullla]

I've been staring at that starting screenshot for the longest time, thinking about how to do the initial moves. A sign of a well-designed puzzle indeed…

I think scooter is correct in that the second city starts too slowly with the 1NW/2S setup. The terrain is just too difficult to move through down in the south where all those jungle tiles are located. Everything is different if we find another food resource down there of course, but for right now, that second city is way too slow. Rather than trying to do city micro, mostly I’ve been thinking about how to scout most efficiently on our first turn when we’re in Anarchy. We have the one “free” turn to figure things out while revolting to Bureaucracy/Slavery/Mercantilism. I don’t think we want to burn the second turn of Anarchy for more civic swaps, as we don’t need Hereditary Rule right away, and Pacifism requires a third turn of Anarchy to get our religion in play. So let’s assume that we just spend the one turn in Anarchy for now. Where can we move our units on the first turn to scout most efficiently?

Well, one reason why I liked the 1NW location was due to the fact that it let us move a worker NW-NW onto the iron hill, where it’s both in position to start chopping and can also scout a valuable tile. However, that locks us into the 1NW location for the capital, and then that forces the second city down to the south, which we’ve already seen causes it to get out to a really slow opening. What we’d like to do is be able to scout both the north and the south just beyond what we can currently see, spying out if there are more food resources just beyond our sight. The north is pretty easy to scout, with hill tiles located NW-NW (iron), N-N, and NE-NE from the starting tile. The south though, ugh. It’s almost all jungle, which means that the explorer would absolutely have to go south to have any chance of seeing something useful. And even if there is a food resource there, it’s going to be a pain to maneuver non-Fast Workers around all those jungle tiles. There aren’t even many forests in that area, just a whole bunch of jungle. Great for the environment in real life, terrible for building cities in Civilization.

I don’t think we can scout both the north and the south efficiently in the first two turns of the game, which is what we need to do to make an informed decision about where to put our cities. Here’s what I’m thinking as a result: ignore scouting the south right away. Maybe there’s something there, maybe there isn’t, but the terrain is strictly weaker than what we can see in the north. The north has forests, the south has jungles. Therefore we might as well direct our efforts to scouting and then settling that terrain first.

If we agree with this analysis, it makes the scouting moves on the first two turns much easier. The explorer goes NW-NW onto the iron hill, in preparation for moving NE-N (or something similar) on the following turn to see exactly what is up there by the pigs tile. One of the two settlers moves N-N on the first turn onto the pigs tile for a little more vision. We move one of the longbows NE, then NE again on the second turn to see if there’s anything over by the rice (and if it’s an irrigated rice tile). If we see something useful, we can shift the location of the settler up there on the pigs tile. If we don’t see anything, then we plant 1N of the pigs (3N of the start) and we get a nice riverside city with pigs, rice, iron, and horses. We can work with that, and if there’s something theoretically better down in the south, then oh well. But if there is something just out of sight in the south, there’s probably something just out of sight to the north too. And again if not, we still get a nice city.

I would also suggest moving the other settler a tile south on the opening turn while we’re in Anarchy. I like that spot better than the starting tile if we end up settling 1N of the pigs, as it grants us 2 food resources at each city, rather than 1 at each and a shared pigs tile. I will have to test this a bit but I think it comes out ahead in the long run over 3N and the starting tile. It also allows us to move the starting worker SW-SE onto the forest tile and start chopping immediately. My one disagreement with scooter’s preliminary micro is that I think we want to chop first before trying to improve a food resource, especially since 1 chop = 1 worker at the capital. In fact, there’s a serious case to be made for turning the northern city into the capital and the southern city into the second city, if only because there are clearly a LOT more forests up there. Obviously this depends on what we find up there. Assuming that the southern city remains the capital, we send the starting worker to the forest tile (in the first ring) on T0, start chopping T1, whip a worker T2, chop completes another worker T3, and from there, two workers move to improve the corn while a third worker heads E-E to chop the other forest into a fourth worker. At the second city, we whip out the initial worker, then move it to chop into another worker. The fact that we aren’t improving a food resource immediately doesn’t matter because we’re going worker -> worker at the second city. (And we will have spare worker labor from the capital by the time the second city is ready to grow.) I think that plan gets 6 workers out in the first 7 turns, which is what we need here. There’s no point in rushing to get a third settler out as fast as scooter does in some of these proposed plans if we don’t have enough workers to support them. Our cities are going to grow very fast, and with sacrificial altars in play, we’ll be able to whip settlers soon enough, even if the first one is a turn or two slower. (I will play around with this in detail once we know where the two cities are actually going to end up.)

Does this make any sense, or I am whistling in the dark again? Obviously this is not compatible with a city SE of the lake.

[Nekira Sudacne]

I think I understand it. it seems to mostly be a case of "Don't settle near the jungle, we are better off focusing north in hopes of landing a strong first and second city than accepting a very strong capitol and mediocre second city, and scouting north of jungle maximizes the odds of that"

[Tohron]

Random thought - wouldn't it be darkly funny if the Byzantines prompt every neighbor to blindly mass a bunch of pikes when everyone sees their military power spiking, then show up with a stack of maces instead? Not sure if it's possible to hide something like that if you avoid signing OB with any of your potential targets.

[Cheater Hater]

Random thought - wouldn't it be darkly funny if the Byzantines prompt every neighbor to blindly mass a bunch of pikes when everyone sees their military power spiking, then show up with a stack of maces instead? Not sure if it's possible to hide something like that if you avoid signing OB with any of your potential targets.

Don't forget spies exist--they can only do recon, but that's a powerful effect.