[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[antisocialmunky]

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"

Of course the map maker might take this into account and make the jungle slightly stronger to balance things out.

[chumchu]

Having played around a fair bit with Renaissance starts a bit I would play this a bit differently.

I would plan around a civic switch turn 5 when the religion kicks in. Pacifism is really strong in this setup, both because of mercantilism and the value of bulbs and with no upkeep and very few units in play. Hereditary rule is ofc really good as well. This enables you to go serfdom the first 5-10 turns to chop out workers faster which enables the fastest start and then witch into slavery once the cities are big enough for settlers to be whipped. Whipping workers is not worth it as they only cost one forest and main limit on expansion is how fast you can grow your cities so that you can start to whip settlers. You can do it with 4 pop without much problem. If you divide the settler cost by the amount of chops/whips you need you get a handy metric. It cost 248/(30*2,25)=3.67 in cap and 248/(30*1,75)=4,72 in other cities. With a bit of overflow and working some resources you can get it with 3 or 4 respectively.

It is of highest priority that the capital is forested to take advantage of bureaucracy chops. Another palace can be built later when you start to tech. The second city should preferable be wooded as well, settling it in a jungle is pure crazy. I would suggest to settle the capital N of pigs and second city in the starting position, this way you get the max amount of forest from the 7x7 with 5(2in the first ring) in the capital and 2(0) in your second (and holy) city. The capital gets pigs, iron, horses, hills +whatever is in the fog for max production leveraging bureaucracy while the second city gets whales, corn, oasis to grow to 6 pop quickly. So the plan is to use the 7 woods for 5 workers and 2 settlers with a double whip in the cap from pop 4 and a triple whip in the second city from pop 6.

Further, the race for Taj Mahal will not be decided by who gets the first engineer, it will be done way before someone gets the tech, but rather by who gets to the tech first while keeping an engineer. If a philosophical player can bulb Nationalism and use the engineer then he is ahead, but then it will be so early as to be weak. Do not give up yet.

[antisocialmunky]

Wow that's a lot of good advice. :D Thanks chumchu.

[scooter]

I definitely agree with Sullla's thoughts about ignoring the south completely for the start. That's pretty much what I've become convinced of - planting a city down there is just too slow. I also am thinking pretty much the same thing on the initial scouting moves.

Chumchu's comments are really interesting to me - particularly about reversing where the capital lands to take advantage of the forests. I should have some extra time tonight, so I'm definitely going to try that out and see how it feels. It does make a lot of sense to make sure those forests go through the maximum hammer modifiers. I also see the thinking on avoiding 1-pop whipping a worker. My rationale for a whip was simply to fill the foodbox at sz1 while saving a forest, but I'm definitely going to try out the alternative.

I need more convincing that burning 2 additional turns of anarchy are worth HR, Pacifism, and 5T of Serfdom. That seems like a bit of a stretch to me. I'm not dead set against it, though. I guess the real key is how important a couple early-ish GP are going to be. I certainly hadn't considered that doing it this way could net a "free" 5T in Serfdom, and that potentially narrows the gap enough that the idea sounds less crazy to me. Lots to think about.

[chumchu]

It's only 1 extra turn actually as both times you only switch 3 civics as you do not need hereditary rule and pacifism until a little later =)

T0 switch to serfdom, bureaucracy, mercantilism

T5(ish) switch to pacifism, hereditary rule and slavery.

You will need to get a state religion if you want the gpp bonus from pacifism though if that is what you mean by 2 extra turns of anarchy. As I see it these are unavoidable and better done before improvements are completed than later. It is also much better to have pacifism appear in the gold/food city which might actually build a library or a monastery somewhat early.

[Sullla]

Chumchu is correct, chopping is the way to jump-start these late era starts. The problem is that there just aren't that many forests here; I'll post the starting screenshot again since we're on a new page:



Only two forests at the starting tile, and another five up in the north by the pigs. I agree that we'll need to give serious consideration to making the northern city become the capital, just so that we can turn each forest into a worker. I am unsure if that would allow us to skip an immediate worker whip. My gut feeling is that whipping out an initial worker at each city comes out faster, but it's one of those things that requires simming to test. And simming is mostly a waste of time until we can do some exploring and see what's up there in the north.

Are we mostly agreed on moving the explorer NW-NW and one of the settlers N-N to start? We can then post the resulting screenshot and discuss where to go from there.

Regarding chumchu's point about doing multiple civic swaps - this is something else that we should try to sim out to see how it works in practice. My gut feeling is against this, but that's not based on trying it. For me, the problem is that we need to go through 2 additional turns of Anarchy to make it worthwhile, as Pacifism will be useless without adopting religion, and Hereditary Rule + 5 turns of Serfdom don't feel worth an extra turn of Anarchy on their own. Perhaps I'm wrong though, I don't know. Maybe with enough forests to chop (and Serfdom cutting a turn off each chop) it becomes worthwhile. Maybe.

My theorycrafting for this game is that we won't need Pacifism at the start. I was envisioning our team using the first Great Person for a Golden Age, allowing us to adopt religion and swap civics, using that Golden Age to pick up Caste System/Pacifism and churn out a Great Merchant + 2 Great Scientists, which would be used to lightbulb half of Constitution tech and then Education / Printing Press. We would swap back to Slavery civic and Representation (and probably Organized Religion?) on the last turn of the Golden Age. I feel like that would be the best use of early Great People, and we could then use our National Epic city to start accumulating GPP towards the future 2-person Golden Age.

But if we like that idea, it doesn't matter what type of Great Person comes out first. We also would want to trigger the Golden Age when we have Nationalism research finished and can lightbulb roughly half of Constitution. I figure it will take us roughly 20-25 turns to reach that point... and if we do absolutely nothing with specialists, Mercantilism will give us a Great Person in 30 turns. To me, that says we don't really need Pacifism in the early game, as triggering a faster Great Person isn't going to help us. We only need a fast Great Person if we want to go for a Nationalism lightbulb (which we discussed before is probably a bad idea since it's a double prerequisite tech) or we want to compete for Taj Mahal / Liberalism. I don't think we should go for either, as there are just too many Spiritual or Philosophical or Spi/Phi teams that have a natural advantage over us.

Feel free to throw out other plans though. This is all speculation while we're waiting for the map to be finished up.

[chumchu]

The best speed I could do for the initial settlers with my plan was turns 198, 202, 205. It can me microed slightly more. This relies heavily on chopping so you won't have any chops left but otoh you will have religion, pacifism and hereditary rule so you will not have to burn a golden age for it.



https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2511...dSwordSave

[scooter]

Are we mostly agreed on moving the explorer NW-NW and one of the settlers N-N to start? We can then post the resulting screenshot and discuss where to go from there.

Yes, definitely. This is the only thing I'm 100% certain on at this point.

I was going to do some more simming last night, and I ended up deciding I'm just not going to burn anymore energy on that until after I've moved an explorer + settler. There's just too many unknowns.

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Chumchu - your sim is very interesting. Once we see what's in the fog, that plan will likely be the first thing I try. At the very least, planting the capital north is very much growing on me.

On the anarchy/revolt issue. Sullla pretty much described what was Plan A in my head. Revolt into the big 3 civics, and just expand away while waiting for the first great person to pop. From there, we'd fire a golden age at the appropriate time and use it to churn out a few great people, while also doing the necessary revolts (Pacifism, religion, etc.).

So the tradeoff is 2 turns of revolt early vs going 25ish turns without Pacifism, HR, or religion. It's close.

[Cheater Hater]

Micro plans aren't my strength, but do we need to decide on one turn vs three turns of revolt until T1 (or whatever T1 is on a Ren start)? Three turns of revolt makes wandering with the second settler much more appealing, so after two turns of explorer movement we could try to move to something far away (say, the spot 1NW of the rice) and then go for the extra revolts.

[Sullla]

Getting three settlers produced in the first 20 turns is indeed impressive, and it makes me glad that we have an Imperialistic leader for this game. However, it feels a bit like an academic exercise to produce settlers ASAP, rather than a real strategy we would play out in practice. In that screenshot chumchu posted, I only see 4 workers, and we definitely need a lot more than that. Four workers for five cities wouldn't be enough; I think we need five or six workers just for the first two cities in the opening turns.

Let me try to demonstrate with some screenshots from the old Fastmoves blog. These are from the Medieval start article, which is pretty similar to what we have here in this Renaissance game: 2 starting settlers and 1 starting worker. Jobe is even playing an Imperialistic leader here, making the comparison that much more similar.




This is Turn 2 of the game (Medieval/Quick starts on T82). Both cities founded, growing on warriors while working 3 food tiles. Worker chops forest over improving a food resource.




T3: Chop completes into worker. A medieval game doesn't start with Bureaucracy civic, which is why this chop is taking place at the second city and not the capital.




T5: Chopping another forest with the worker.




T7: Chop completes into worker at the capital, which has grown to size 2.




T8: Capital slaves out worker. Second city, which has grown to size 2, also slaves out worker. Note that jobe was willing to slave both his cities back down to size 1 to get more workers out faster. We have the option to slave out workers immediately instead of having to do 7 turns of setup, which is why I think that comes out ahead of trying to stay at size 2. Will have to test with simming.




T9: With three workers out, now food resources are connected. Two workers go to the cows at the capital, one over to the pigs at the second city.




T11: Now connecting the corn resource, setting up for another worker slaving at the capital.




T13: Corn and pigs connected at the capital. The second city has just slaved out yet another worker, taking the total to five. That's two worker whips at each city. Keep in mind that cities grow really fast in these lategame starts, with the free granaries. We're going to need a lot of workers, then we can get settlers after that.




T14: Wealth builds to save worker whip overflow into settlers. Workers move into more forests for additional chopping.




T17: Quintuple forest chops complete. Settler done in capital, another settler almost done in second city. Now obviously we can't do this here because there just aren't that many forests. Still, I think it's a useful way of thinking about these late era starts.




T20: The final picture from 20 turns into the game, with 4 cities planted and growing upwards. Workers still can't keep up with the needed rate of tile improvements because population just grows too quickly (not a bad problem to have, heh).

Now we just need the game to get underway to explore the rest of our start and prepare some sandboxes.