RMOG: Renaissance Men of Genius

[WarriorKnight]

While we are waiting for the map to finish up, I've thought of a few questions we should be asking ourselves when coming up with the micro-plan for the initial 20-30t or so. We can't finalize any of this until we start of course, but when deciding micro we should keep these points in mind:

How many settlers do we build in the capital?
This is important because whipping is by far the easiest way to produce settlers early, yet if we want a mega research bureau capital we want to minimize whips. I think we definitely want one and maybe two, but any more after that is not worth it (remember the earlier we can work cottages, the faster they grow. Snowball effect!). Also depends on quality spots out there that are worth settling immediately, although if the screenshot is any indication of the lushness of the map that probably won't be a concern.

When do we switch to other cities building settlers?
Closely tied to the first question, but this focuses on how fast we can get other cities up to size quickly enough to contribute to expansion. The capital only requires 48 FoodHammers in a settler before being able to 3pop whip, while other cities require 91 FH to do a 3pop whip (they can 4pop whip at 39FH, but that's a bit too much pop)*. City 2 is the obvious candidate, but there isn't a huge amount of food there that we can see at the moment. Hopefully the time between halting settler production in the capital and start settler production in other cities isn't too high. Ideally we can get our 2nd city to be high in food, that way we can whip settlers early and can easily transition to GP production once the opening is done. We don't have enough info to confirm that though (rice + multiple ivory is more of a slow build production city, great once it gets going but hard to get there).

* Numbers could easily be wrong, since they are the result of me playing around with a calculator and not confirmed in-game. Should be close though.

When do we mine the Iron?
This is important because warriors are by far the cheapest way to build HR units at 13 hammers each. Once we mine the Iron it is automatically connected to the capital by the river (we almost certainly will be settling on the river) and at that point the cheapest HR units are Longbows at 45 hammers each. OTOH the Iron is a delicious tile to work at 1/5 (despite forested iron being pretty good unimproved at 1/3). My guess is that we want maybe 4-6 HR units, but it really depends on how much happiness is in demand at the capital.

How many workers do we need?
Obviously workers are in huge demand, and will probably be the primary bottleneck in our expansion. The capital wants as many tiles improved ASAP, while settling new cities obviously requires substantial worker turns before becoming productive. The general rule of thumb is 1.5-2 per city in normal games, but I think we probably want something more like 2.5-3. I'm thinking we can get the capital to slow build workers when it hits the health/happy caps, and we may want to 1 pop whip workers initially in all new cities as well.

How high do we grow the capital (to start with)?
This is mainly geared towards the short term (as the answer in the long term is "As high as possible" ). The 2 main factors here are quality tiles to work and the happy/health caps. Since the former is probably not going to be a huge problem with the huge river stretch and multiple resources, it is all about the happy/health caps. Assuming our initial city builds of 1W & 2NW:

Happy:

4 Default
1 Palace
2 Resources (Fur + Ivory)
1 HR Longbow
unlimited additional HR

Thanks to HR, happy is essentially limited by how many warriors we want to build. We need to get more creative once we connect the iron but even then there are options (religion happy, market doubler, whale city, happy resources in fog maybe etc.) so there's no immediate issue. Health is more interesting:

Health:

2 Default
2 River
3 Resources (Corn, Rice, Pig)
2 Granary - grain resource doubler
1 from buildings (2 from Aqueduct - 1 from Forge)
10 in total

With this in mind we should be aiming for at least size 10. If we work all resource tiles (minus the marble since it's crappy and the whale since we won't settle near the lake probably), as well as all riverside grassland with cottages that is 11 tiles, but even then we still have great tiles to expand on and growing into unhealthiness isn't nearly as bad as unhappiness. Finding and connecting new health resources should be a priority.

[WarriorKnight]

Woah, just as I post that Mardoc does this:

Map is nearly done; posted in the lurker thread and sent to Brick for final feedback. Brick kindly volunteered to do a final polish run before he hosts it.

Have fun!

Seriously though, thanks a lot Mardoc for the time and effort you put into this for us. Now sit back and make sure you do plenty of this during the game:

[oledavy]

Looks like we're going up tonight.

Just wanted to drop a line to lurkers to let them know I will be finishing the RMOG ads for each opposing team sometime later next week.

WK, I am reading along and will respond to your post when I have a little more time. This week is just crazy for me. Thankfully, things should settle down after this weekend. I should have some time tonight around 11-12 your time to look at the immediate land and play with you if you can log into the game around then (shit, I still need to install the mod). If not, no worries, we'll just log in separately and communicate via Gchat.

With this extra long first turn though, I'm in no rush to settle. Let's look at things, and then take the weekend/early next week to run some sims based on what our explorer uncovers.

[oledavy]

WK! What do your Aussie eyes see? If you're still up, move the explorer and
post a picture. I'll be at work for a few hours yet.

[oledavy]

Got ten minutes.

Realms Beyond Presents, Real Men of Genius.
(Real Men of Genius)

Today we salute you, Mr. Band Members on a Reunion Tour.
(Mr. Band Members on a Reunion Tour)

Like most groups past your prime, you decided you couldn't end on a high note.
(We're still hip, right?)

Coming out of retirement minus 1/3 of the trio, you decided to take a risk.
(Lol, UU is a boat)

Don't worry though, I'm sure with your civ skills, that Dutch pick will pay off.
(How many hammers are in a whip?)

So go looking for that coastline Mr. Band Members on a Reunion Tour, because I'm sure coast beats working workshops.
(Mr. Band Members on a Reunion Tour)


Real Thoughts

Victoria of Holland (Financial, Imperialistic, East Indiamen, Dike)

We've talked about our pick a lot in this thread, so I won't repeat much of it here.

I think Victoria was hands down the best leader available at our point in the pick, and possibly in the game (I think I slightly prefer Julius, but its a tough call). FIN/IMP sets us up to have an explosive start while still keeping our early economy going as a brisk pace.

We decided to go risky on our second pick, because we weren't really feeling any of the civs left (I think we also both kinda fell in love with the synergistic elements). Financial coast is really terrific to grow on in a game like this. The emphasis will be on getting workshops (why would you ever work anything else if you can work a 2/4 grassland workshop?) this game, and I doubt more than a couple of cities for each team will be cottaged. So, since we'd already like to target coastal areas as FIN, the Dutch make that an even stronger choice. Ideally, we end up placing our 4th or so cities onward on coasts, taking advantage of the extra commerce early using the large pop of these cities later to work 2-1-3 coasts. These cities will be especially productive in golden ages. EI's were not the main selling point of the Dutch, but are very nice and will provide a utility unit that is useful for a long time.

The viability of the Dutch is ultimately going to come down to

A)How much water there is.
B)How close the water is to our start.

If this map does have 20-30% water, and we can easily get to it with a 4th/5th city, I think we'll be solid. If not, well, we'll basically be playing without a Civ. Ideally, however, the dikes will give us a slight production edge once the biggest benefits from FIN wear off. Now, if there's not much water, or if we never get much pop into our cities, this will have been a misstep. Again, I would prefer working 2-4 workshops to 2-1-3 coasts. However, we have a window earlier on where FIN coast and later coasts buffed by dikes will be better than contemporary workshops BY the time we've workshopped everything and have SP, we hopefully will have the pop in our cities to both work a lot of coast AND grassland workshops.

Anyway, the pick was a risk, but one we were both comfortable taking. I look forward to seeing how it pans out. We'd both really like to find coast really close, but if not, eh, you win some, you lost some. We're going to have a good time either way.

The important thing is our Civ is orange, and orange is my favorite color.

[WarriorKnight]

After a brief round of technical difficulty (including moving the mod back to the civ4 directory, where it works now for some reason) we are in:



I think we agreed to move the scout 2N2E right? It was so long ago that I don't really remember where it was, and since this turn has to last us 4 days we can take it slowly. Plus since we now have the benefit of fog-gazing, we may want to change it.

(Plus look at those promotions! Already dealing with it in the tech thread)

The viability of the Dutch is ultimately going to come down to

A)How much water there is.
B)How close the water is to our start.

The good news is that we can find out the answer to A right now. There are 1370 land tiles on the map (see the screenshot for land points). Additionally I played around with how far units can move before reaching the edge of the map and:

We are only 7 tiles from the bottom of the map! And 29 tiles from the top. Likewise we can move 28 tiles either east or west before our unit decides to go around the other way. Therefore I think the map dimensions are 36x56 right? (confirm my math/logic plz)

36x56 = 2016 tiles
2016 - 1370 = 646 water tiles
646 / 2016 = 32% water

I'll admit my figuring out the map dimensions could easily be wrong, since it's been forever since I last did this. But 32% water is a lot. Plus the water in the fog to the W looks delicious. Looking good so far on that front.

The important thing is our Civ is orange, and orange is my favorite color.

Me too. Orange Rocks!

[WarriorKnight]

We are only 7 tiles from the bottom of the map! And 29 tiles from the top. Likewise we can move 28 tiles either east or west before our unit decides to go around the other way. Therefore I think the map dimensions are 36x56 right? (confirm my math/logic plz)

36x56 = 2016 tiles
2016 - 1370 = 646 water tiles
646 / 2016 = 32% water

I'll admit my figuring out the map dimensions could easily be wrong, since it's been forever since I last did this. But 32% water is a lot. Plus the water in the fog to the W looks delicious. Looking good so far on that front.

Actually, I don't think I took into account the starting tile so the map dimensions are actually 37x57:

37x57 = 2109 tiles
2109 - 1370 = 739 water tiles
739 / 2109 = 35% water

Works out even better for us. Also I think that's enough water for circumnavigation? Since map trades are available T0 it will come down to mostly luck in meeting other teams/where everyone sends explorers but if it works out we can bump the odds of landing circumnavigation to 50%.

[WarriorKnight]

Alright, time to move our explorer! (Well actually dave did it already...)



Looks good, although nothing has really changed as far as initial simming goes. Got to think about what to do next...

[WarriorKnight]

Played around with some sims up to T200 over the weekend for 1W & 2NE city configuration. I'm not so great at figuring out optimal micro, but here is what I got regardless. Couple of thoughts I took away from the experience:

• Worker micro is indeed in very high demand, almost stupidly so. I only have 4 by the end of the sandbox and we could easily use more, although it's difficult to find a way to build them without stalling growth extensively. Probably easier after t200 since we can camp the growth of one of our cities to binge worker build.
  
• I finish a settler t201, although it's hard to say if that's the best move. The main reason I put it in the build queue was to take advantage of the forest chop on the iron, from there it's an easy 2 pop whip in the capital thanks to IMP. Given the lack of workers we have for our starting two cities (never mind additional ones) should we put the chop into a worker instead? More cities only means more worker demand and we are already struggling with just the 2 we have. OTOH Bureau forest chops are rare, we don't sacrifice a lot to get a settler out this early and the new city can start by whipping it's own worker. Guess we have to see what 3rd city spots are out there...
  
• We can build 6 warriors or so before the iron is connected, which I highly recommend to eventually take advantage of HR. The other option is an explorer, but that is almost 3 times the cost of a warrior and doesn't obsolete with iron so I recommend changing the sim since I do build an explorer there. Since we don't need units for HR immediately we can use warriors for nearby scouting as well. On a somewhat related note, should we send a Longbow W from the start to aim for circum? (assuming explorer keeps moving E)
  
• Haven't built any cottages yet, although all resources aside from the last ivory and both fur are improved. I imagine that after these initial turns we can start laying the groundwork for the cottage cheese capital.
  
• It's difficult to grow city 2, since we can't exactly spare worker labor to mass irrigate the place right now. Should we camp it at size 4 and spit out workers? There is another forest chop at the capital that makes the settler for city 4 easy and hopefully by then (t210-215?) we can have city 2 in a position to build settlers for us.
  

Finally, a minor point but IMO we should select a tech to start researching before T200. I know there's no logic behind this argument, but having 300 gold in the bank when expenses are only 1gpt seems . How long will it take to burn through all that? I favor Astro or Edu (since we can't tell how many beakers we need for the gunpowder bulb).

What do you think dave?

[oledavy]

Played around with some sims up to T200 over the weekend for 1W & 2NE city configuration. I'm not so great at figuring out optimal micro, but here is what I got regardless. Couple of thoughts I took away from the experience:

• Worker micro is indeed in very high demand, almost stupidly so. I only have 4 by the end of the sandbox and we could easily use more, although it's difficult to find a way to build them without stalling growth extensively. Probably easier after t200 since we can camp the growth of one of our cities to binge worker build.
  
• I finish a settler t201, although it's hard to say if that's the best move. The main reason I put it in the build queue was to take advantage of the forest chop on the iron, from there it's an easy 2 pop whip in the capital thanks to IMP. Given the lack of workers we have for our starting two cities (never mind additional ones) should we put the chop into a worker instead? More cities only means more worker demand and we are already struggling with just the 2 we have. OTOH Bureau forest chops are rare, we don't sacrifice a lot to get a settler out this early and the new city can start by whipping it's own worker. Guess we have to see what 3rd city spots are out there...
  
• We can build 6 warriors or so before the iron is connected, which I highly recommend to eventually take advantage of HR. The other option is an explorer, but that is almost 3 times the cost of a warrior and doesn't obsolete with iron so I recommend changing the sim since I do build an explorer there. Since we don't need units for HR immediately we can use warriors for nearby scouting as well. On a somewhat related note, should we send a Longbow W from the start to aim for circum? (assuming explorer keeps moving E)
  
• Haven't built any cottages yet, although all resources aside from the last ivory and both fur are improved. I imagine that after these initial turns we can start laying the groundwork for the cottage cheese capital.
  
• It's difficult to grow city 2, since we can't exactly spare worker labor to mass irrigate the place right now. Should we camp it at size 4 and spit out workers? There is another forest chop at the capital that makes the settler for city 4 easy and hopefully by then (t210-215?) we can have city 2 in a position to build settlers for us.
  

Finally, a minor point but IMO we should select a tech to start researching before T200. I know there's no logic behind this argument, but having 300 gold in the bank when expenses are only 1gpt seems . How long will it take to burn through all that? I favor Astro or Edu (since we can't tell how many beakers we need for the gunpowder bulb).

What do you think dave?

Celebrating a friend's birthday this afternoon. I'll run through some sims tonight when I get home.

Agree with banging out a lot of early warriors.

Still a little hesitant to settle 1W and risk orphaning some seafood. Granted, either of the good capital options will have us risk orphaning some. I think here it's about picking the best capital/least chance of orphaning combo.

Favoring astro over edu at the moment, but want to think on it a little more.