[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[Brian Shanahan]

I was typing a message earlier, and lost it in a browser crash. Then it happened again. Hmpf. Anyway, here's the short version of those points:

* Did we offer a map trade to Nicolae? I think we want to do so, right? Nicolae is in the same civics as mackoti (HR, Bur, Ser, Mer, Pac) and also saving gold. Possibly also going for the early Academy in the capital?

* We're still missing too much map information to make any big conclusions about the overall map. I'm pretty sure there are more ways for teams to access each other than just those single desert peninsulas. There's also a good chance that there's more land where no one started (islands? small subcontinents?) We'll see with time. There's also likely at least one more team we can reach easily, not just Nicolae and mackoti. I would definitely check the northern edge of the map to make sure it's a dead end. There's a good chance that there's a landbridge up in the far north.

* We should be thinking about where our fourth city will go, since it's not all that far off with the current turn pace. Two ideas for suggestion:



Here's a good northern spot. It has bananas, floodplains, spices (for combined +7 food), brings in another luxury to raise the happy cap, adds iron and horses for great production, still on the river, and has 3 forests to chop. Great terrain although located in the "back lines" and less important from a strategic perspective.



Still good land here although lower quality. The grassland wheat is +6 food (post-Civil Service gets free irrigation spread) and the plains cows takes it to +7 food, still has 3 forests for chopping. However, there are no other resources to boost this city further. We would settle here because it pushes out control towards that area where we met mackoti, and it gives us a port city to get a galleon out on the water and start poking around there. This is the strategic location, less of a strong city in and of itself.

There's probably other potential sites to the south too. What does everyone think?

I like 1N of the corn; 1SE of the Iron too as a site.

[Cheater Hater]

To be fair on those bad starts, we're seeing how they were improved when Nicolae saw them, and not how they are now, right?

[Fluffball]

I'm 98% sure the map in the fog updates in real time. The resources I'm sure can be moused over, I'm sure cities update, and I think you can see improvements as they update as well.

[scooter]

I'm not sure what to think of dotmapping here. The spots I like best aren't on rivers, and I'm not sure how to weight that as a drawback. For example:



I kinda like this blue variant to red here. It basically swaps floodplains and spices for access to the almost-wet corn. The corn getting improved here opens the door to make it easy to add another city east of here that piggy-backs off the corn. The problem of course is that it's not riverside. With that in mind, red is probably still better.



The other thing is I think we really want to make sure we lock down the area circled in red here. I plopped down a couple potential cities that could get us there. Unfortunately, everything down here is very worker intensive. I don't think it comes out ahead of red for our second settler.



Here's Sullla's suggested yellow dot. As he mentioned, it's okay by itself, and most of its value is strategic. I think it's probably too soon for this one.

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So this is a roundabout way of saying yeah, red dot is probably best. I think there's good alternatives, but nothing is really blowing me away right now other than our first city choice.

[scooter]

Turn 197-198

Played back-to-back turns this afternoon as about 10 hours is all it takes to be last to play in this game. I split that dotmap stuff out into a separate post, so this will be brief.

I neglected to mention it on the previous turn report, but the suggestion to send the home explorer south to the RMoG land bridge area was already what I had in mind. So he's headed that way now.



We should meet Plako across this land bridge.



We're up to 5 population which is pretty middling, but parking that 5 pop on 5 high quality tiles is helping a lot. Next turn we dump three chops into a 1T settler at size 4 in Pilot.



Nicolae and Mackoti are growing their cities hard right now, which makes sense as they're both using Serfdom. I expect revolt + whips coming up for them soon.

[Sullla]

Great reporting as always scooter. Thanks for letting the rest of us know what's going on.

About the city position in the north... That potential non-riverside location on the blue dot is eventually a stronger city. However, it takes much longer to get up and running as a useful city, in part because it's almost laughably pathetic before it expands borders. We also need to spread irrigation to the corn tile and deal with all that jungle everywhere, plus the city is not on a river for eventually levee purposes... I still think we do better by grabbing the red spot by the bananas. That allows a future city on the coast by the crabs, another city on the tile north of the corn to grab the dyes, and the yellow dot spot further east we already identified. I think the spacing is better with that setup.

Totally agree that we want to beeline for that resource cluster in the southwest ASAP. The third city is already pushing in that direction, and having a more southern capital than all the other teams also helps a bit. I think it's too soon to move their with our fourth city, as we'll still be getting the third city going at that point, and our workers are mostly clustered elsewhere. However, the fifth city should definitely go in that direction; that settler should be coming out around T210. So I think our third city goes down in the south, then our fourth city up north to claim some of the stronger resources there, and then the fifth city pushes out further into the disputed zone in the southwest.

If no one has any objections, I'm going to pencil in that red dot location in the north as our fourth city spot and proceed with that assumption. We're actually only about 7 turns away from founding it as our FOURTH city, which could be as early as Tuesday or Wednesday at our current lightning turn pace. I'll fiddle a bit with our micro stuff in the sandbox and see what comes out. I'm happy with how things are looking so far - we are equal or ahead of everyone but Nicolae/mackoti right now, and we should be able to get the third city founded before they do. So far, so good.

[chumchu]

Regarding the northern city. Is it not better to claim the good spots now and plant the fillers later. Why not plant 4 tiles directly NE of pocket beetle? It is so much stronger than red or yellow dot. It has irrigated corn and plains cow in first ring and iron, grass wheat and 2 dyes in second ring for an insane worker/settler pump. 5 hills and 11 food surplus. In the late game it has 11 river tiles for a levee. Even better the corn is on the likely road towards that city and the workers can easily move to the cow next. It also fits in well with the red dot and leaves room for a coastal city.

[Epoxy]

THE DAILY ROLL

TURN 197–198: NEW PLANS

The circumnavigation coin flip unfortunately has fallen to an unseen sixth nation: Plako's England. Thankfully, this loss is overwritten by the fact that the Aztecs' cities are more efficiently managed then those of the Dutch and Khmer, whose city starts are in varying degrees of struggle to make ends meet. Further analysis by the C&D of maps drawn of the continents' interiors and connections show that their central junctions are fertile and rich with resources. This discovery has completely changed the Aztecs' settling plans, and their first organically-produced settler will beeline south to plant the Aztec standard within sight of this landscape. These lands will certainly become sites of tension down the road, as their potential is too great to afford to miss: shortened frontlines, easy canals, and new luxuries to placate the Aztecs' desires. As this is written envoys are en route to England via a landbridge, what fanfare will they witness on the other side?

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Thanks for your support, ASM and Sullla

[Sullla]

Chumchu, that is indeed a very strong location. There are three reasons why I don't favor it for the fourth city:

1) It's an awkward place to reach with worker labor this early. That mass of jungle northeast of Pocketbeetle make that spot further away than it looks on the map at first glance. We either have to run a road around through the ivory patch and then north from there, or else run it through the jungle, which necessitates a lot of wasted worker labor. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly doable, I happen to like the western spot more.

2) It creates an awkward fit with future cities on the eastern coast. That yellow dot can't be planted at all if we settle NE of the corn. I favor a city N of the corn for that very reason, to avoid wasting tiles and squeeze in another quality city on the eastern coast.

3) It has fewer forest chops than the red dot location. I keep emphasizing this because it's really important to take advantage of them as an Imperialistic civ in the early game. I'm still working on the micro for the red spot, but the basic idea is to improve the bananas (currently done on the second turn of the city's founding) and cottage the floodplains, then split off the 4 workers up in that part of the map to the 4 forest tiles in red's city radius. They do their choppity chop thing, and those 4 forest turn into another settler for free, with only a single turn spent not growing. Then we use that settler to plant another city north of the corn, while the capital is busy turning out yet another settler for the southwest resource corner in the contested zone.

Now I could be totally wrong here. I'm mostly trying to avoid settling spots that require a lot of worker roading, except in the southeast corner which looks to be strategically crucial. Even with us emphasizing workers heavily, we are going to be short on them like you can't believe. I think the red spot is a better fit for the fourth settler, since we can get it up and running faster and chop out a settler very quickly for that corn region anyway. Everyone, feel free to tell me why this is a bad idea.

[scooter]

Sullla, yes I'm in agreement on red dot as city #4.

I really like the spot chumchu mentioned too. I couldn't get past the worker labor issue though. It's just so awkward getting up there with the jungle strip in the way. Perhaps we can turn the forest chops from red dot into the settler for this area. That might be a lot more feasible.

One thing to keep in mind is that IMP + lush map means a tighter grid of cities is best, especially if SoL is our longterm target. The difference in how we spaced our cities versus how REM spaced his in 33 is pretty illustrative in the difference between SPI and IMP. He actually didn't have that much more land than us, but IMP + SoL meant it was more cost effective for him to squeeze more cities in.