[LURKERS] Setting Up Tents for a Ren Faire

[Azoth]

Is that a jungle Fish I spy north of planned city A? (The tile yield is 1 food, not 2.)
Not a big deal, so long as it can be netted.

[The Black Sword]

Looks like it is, checking the map file it's the same for everyone though. Intentional Mardoc?

One other tidbit I spotted: one of the teams has expanded borders already. They actually popped borders last turn (T188) judging by the Demographics that scooter has been posting. That means a turn of using Build Culture, which is not the end of the world but certainly somewhat inefficient this early on. I guess one of the teams either wanted to improve a second ring resource or chop a second ring forest. We were lucky that we didn't have to worry about that at the capital; when I tried using Build Culture at the second city to chop the forest there a turn faster, it came out behind letting the borders pop naturally, since it messed up the complete work boat -> chopped worker plan. Maybe it's the best option for another team with their different settling pattern though, I have no idea.

Actually, this is something I've been surprised about, nobody building culture or running the slider. I did this in a lot of my sims, including the ones following Sulla's settling pattern. For instance, I would run the culture slider on the first turn to pop the capital's borders. This 'wastes' about 10 commerce, but you won't see any rewards from commerce until 40t down the line so I put little value on that. In return I get to work the iron forest for a turn getting an extra 4h overflow from the worker and I get to improve and work the deer sooner, probably speeding up growth by 2t. Even in the second city, I built culture to pop the borders first rather than build a workboat. Again we improve and work the corn quicker(2t IIRC), we delay the whales improvement of course but that's only +1h, +4c. The hammer is not that important compared to growing IMO and as previously mentioned the commerce won't do anything for ages.

[GermanJoey]

I used it regularly in my sims too, including early on in the capital to get culture onto the corn 1T faster so that my first newly whipped worker could improve it immediately. Just gotta be careful not to use the culture bug with it. I don't think I ever built culture in my second city though, as you only have 1 worker to start with and the second city will pop borders by T7 because it becomes the holy city.

edit: or did I, when I used the corn/wheat spot as the second city? I can't remember now...

[Mardoc]

Looks like it is, checking the map file it's the same for everyone though. Intentional Mardoc?

No, of course not. It's just that I must have made the error before the six-way copy.

[The Black Sword]

I ran another sim:




I realised some serious in the planning for my second city, and I also wanted to use the suggested NE location(which works really well IMO). It doesn't look that much better in the picture and there's a similar amount of stuff built compared to the previous sim. I think over the next few turns this would pull ahead though. We have 2 settlers coming out, in both Texcoco and Tlaxcaca, and 3 workers in the northern cities, compared to just the 1 settler last time. Maybe the third city could still be optimised further, it just builds the GS and workers currently.

[Fluffball]

Oh, one other request for those involved in the map making process: could we get the map dimensions for the purpose of creating a sandbox with the correct maintenance costs? If that's a spoiler piece of information that you don't want to give out, that's fine too. Just thought I would ask before doing any more work on our current rough sandbox.

57x37

I could give you a sandbox worldbuilder file, if you'd like.

Is this kosher? I assume it doesn't break any lurker rules, but it seems like playing favorites (which I'm sure it isn't since I know Joey is reading all the threads.) I would be a bit peeved if I saw that while on another team though. RMoG figured out the size on their own and presumably made their own sandbox. They didn't ask for someone to do it for them, but...

[Krill]

It's information which is often made publicly available for that purpose, just have to make sure that all teams have it.

[Fluffball]

If I were running the show I'd post that sandbox in the tech thread. It's super minor, but it's time the teams have to spend figuring things out and making them rather than planning.

[GermanJoey]

I usually offer to give sandboxes to every team in every game we have here (I have a tool that does it), except that, according to WarriorKnight, I am apparently "banned" from posting in the tech thread, so to hell with the rest of them. They all know they can PM me if they wanted one.

[GermanJoey]

I ran another sim:




I realised some serious in the planning for my second city, and I also wanted to use the suggested NE location(which works really well IMO). It doesn't look that much better in the picture and there's a similar amount of stuff built compared to the previous sim. I think over the next few turns this would pull ahead though. We have 2 settlers coming out, in both Texcoco and Tlaxcaca, and 3 workers in the northern cities, compared to just the 1 settler last time. Maybe the third city could still be optimised further, it just builds the GS and workers currently.

This is still with the Academy? Wow, this is fantastic, IMHO it looks a lot better to me. The Tlaxcaca spot being so well developed is really impressive considering that spot's chief drawback was the pain of wading through all that jungle early... and yet you have all three of those tiles resources improved, and is that even an additional farm I see 1SW of the city? Nice! Earlier, you had me convinced that early Serfdom vs early Slavery was a micro improvement but now it's a strategic benefit as well.

If this were a real game, I'd say the next thing to do would be to figure out how to get that marble improved ASAP so that both the library whip and the settler whip can overflow into the NE... hell, its easy to imagine that city being size 8 and running 4 NE specialists by like T230, for a GA T238... then switch into caste/pacifism and go nuts with it, mmm... gonna be generating more GP than Gandhi!

edit: actually, maybe it's smarter to squeeze out an engineer (maybe via a 90% diceroll or something) before the random GP from the NE, as that would only delay the NE's GP by 4 turns. That wouldn't even be so bad, as it'd be nice to have the NE even bigger for the GA so you can run even more scientists. Generate the 4th GP, a scientist, within 3-4 turns, bulb Edu, start Unis; switch back to slavery on the last turn of the GA, whip universities the next turn, GE Oxford the turn after that. Oxford + Academy Bureaucap on T252! You'd also have Nat + Const + Edu, a big stack of gold, and a spare GP about to pop from your NE, possibly a scientist for an Astro or PP bulb. As far as research goes, both done and future potential, that seems really hard to top.