[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[scooter]

I have to agree that the turns are flying almost too quickly, but I do think we're at the absolute peak and things will settle down shortly. These turns have been fun, and I just can't resist popping in game when the turn rolls. That said, I'll probably start slowing down on my own anyway as it's actually been challenging for me as some thoughts I have feel outdated by the time I'm able to write them out due to the lightning pace. I'm sure I'm not the only one. In the meantime, let's look at tonight's turn.

Turn 201



Met Plako as expected. I'll probably dance around the outskirts, but I should be careful that he doesn't kill the Explorer.



Looks like his strategy is similar to ours taking just Bureau/Slavery/Merc and nothing else. The only difference between us is that he hasn't hooked iron yet. I'm wondering if that's an intentional decision to allow the building of warriors for cheap HR later? I'm not sure. I kinda doubt it. It's too good of a tile.

I really hope he accepts the map swap. I'm really curious to see what kind of opening he's gone with.



Nicolae got the Civstats oddity I learned about last game where two whips got combined into one, but it looks like he triple whipped the capital while simultaneously double whipping the northern city. The capital is virtually guaranteed to be a settler, but I'm not quite sure about the other whip. Here's the odd thing - that city sat at size 4 for a few turns before the whip. It would be a little weird to get to size 4 and then several turns later double whip a worker. As Sullla pointed out, you can't sink several turns of production into a worker and still double whip it. I also don't see any point of growing almost to sz5, THEN swapping to the worker and whipping it - you'd rather have it sooner. Basically, there's a lot of reason to think that double whip was NOT a worker.

This is making me wonder if they've whipped two settlers. That would certainly be a bold move, but these guys are both excellent players, and I'm sure they wouldn't do that if they couldn't make it work. Unless they can get a city settled this turn via roading, we will have beaten them to 3 cities, but if that's a settler, they're going to beat us to 4. If so, it's an impressive start by these two, especially because their land looks well-developed too. I'll be eagerly watching Civstats to see what they do.



I guess we should look at our new city. The deer camp completes next turn. The capital will grow on two consecutive turns to hit sz6 at which point it'll start another settler which will be triple whipped. While it's at 6, Lurker Killer will get the capital deer for a couple turns for some extra growth before handing it back when its second deer comes online. Sacrificial Altar will be the first build, and once that's in this city can sit and whip whatever it wants for awhile.



Something to think about - there's a chance we might consider trying to pilfer some of this land from RMoG if they really do fall behind. Here's the defogged version of what this area looks like:



(Use the two luxuries next to the desert tile to orient yourself)

The main problem with the idea is two-fold: 1) there's no seafood along the desert bridge making linking up cities near impossible and 2) the diplomatic fallout that could happen. So I don't think we ought to make plans to do this anytime soon, but it's something to stuff away in the back of our heads in case the opportunity presents itself.



These look really nice, so I hereby proclaim them super meaningful. Nevermind that it's right after everyone whipped and before anyone else played this turn. The numbers and scoreboard say we are winning therefore we are winning. I'll start drafting up the victory speech. Should I thank my mother in it?

More seriously, we also got full charts on Mackoti. Here those are in spoilers:

Nothing too exciting or surprising in there. He seems to be running an opening similar to Nicolae/REM.

[Nekira Sudacne]

I will ask an honest question: I Do understand the logic of chopping out the first settler, as that was one of the main ideas behind playing Imp in the first place, but if you are going to make a play for the Statue of Liberty, a Very expensive wonder for this era, is getting out the fifth city a few turns sooner worth chopping your Core clear? if you have a long term plan involving a Wonder, it's rarely a bad idea to save a few Core forests for chopping it out. those few turns shaved make all the difference in a wonder race!

I thought part of the plan was setting up a 5 turn settler whip cycle somewhere. if we're going to do that, then we should probably save a few forests for emergency chops later on. 4 forests is 300 hammers twords Statue of Liberty with Copper+Forge+Organized Religion. that's a full fifth of the cost.

That said, I am not a Civ Expert, and I could easialy be convinced otherwise by some good counteraguments.

[Sullla]

Another great turn report. I'll think about this more tomorrow, but in the meantime, one thought about Nicolae. I will be seriously impressed if they somehow managed to get two settlers out already. Their team is non-Imperialistic, which means a double whip only produces 75 foodhammers outside their capital. Settlers cost 237 foodhammers. That leaves them quite a bit short, and I don't think they froze growth for THAT long at their second city. Perhaps though, since they do look to have chopped some forests there. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Who are we targeting next for graphs with our EP? Nicolae looks like the best choice, right? It shouldn't take too long with us getting 8 EP/turn after the next turn roll.

EDIT for Nekira: the earlier in the game you use them, the more useful forest chops tend to be. Civ is the classic snowball game and all that. I'll take a free settler on T215 over 300 production into Statue of Liberty on T250 any day.

[Dp101]

Nicolae got the Civstats oddity I learned about last game where two whips got combined into one, but it looks like he triple whipped the capital while simultaneously double whipping the northern city. The capital is virtually guaranteed to be a settler, but I'm not quite sure about the other whip. Here's the odd thing - that city sat at size 4 for a few turns before the whip. It would be a little weird to get to size 4 and then several turns later double whip a worker. As Sullla pointed out, you can't sink several turns of production into a worker and still double whip it. I also don't see any point of growing almost to sz5, THEN swapping to the worker and whipping it - you'd rather have it sooner. Basically, there's a lot of reason to think that double whip was NOT a worker.

This is making me wonder if they've whipped two settlers. That would certainly be a bold move, but these guys are both excellent players, and I'm sure they wouldn't do that if they couldn't make it work. Unless they can get a city settled this turn via roading, we will have beaten them to 3 cities, but if that's a settler, they're going to beat us to 4. If so, it's an impressive start by these two, especially because their land looks well-developed too. I'll be eagerly watching Civstats to see what they do..

Any buildings they could have whipped?

[scooter]

So Nekira made me wonder something. I realized I haven't seen any copper yet. I logged into the game just now to check, and so far the map appears to be copperless. There's definitely some areas of the map that have yet to be defogged in any of the mirrored sections, but that's going to make SoL slightly more costly, particularly if we don't get an Engineer to cover most of the cost. That said, omitting copper entirely from the map would seem to be an oversight given how many important late-game things it doubles, so maybe it's still out there somewhere. Perhaps along the poles or on an island.

Any buildings they could have whipped?

I did zoom in and look, and I didn't see any new buildings. I'm pretty bad at picking them out, though. It would just be a strange decision. No buildings are important enough to divert precious population into this soon (our only buildings are literally just growth placeholders that happen to be worthwhile). With that in mind, I think we can rule a building out.

Who are we targeting next for graphs with our EP? Nicolae looks like the best choice, right? It shouldn't take too long with us getting 8 EP/turn after the next turn roll.

I put 3EP into Mackoti to get us to the 43 number and the rest into Nicolae as he seemed best to me too. Next turn we can swap fully onto them.

I did notice something else while poking around in-game and thinking about dotmapping.



I think I see why Mackoti is camping out on that jungle hill tile blocking us from getting into this area. Look at that insane banana, fish, clam, and lake clam area. It looks like he scouted this area first, and he wanted to keep us from knowing about it. It appears a bridge similar to this connects each horizontally adjacent land mass, so we've got one of these on each side of us.

(Yes, the game is moving so quickly that somehow I missed this up until now. I sort of saw it, but I didn't catch quite how clustered those foods were.)

[Epoxy]

THE DAILY ROLL

TURN 201: IN THE LOOP

The borders of England have been sighted by advance scouts, and thus the Aztecs' make an offer for a map trade to their leader. To have intelligence of Plako's starts would be a boon to the C&D, leaving only a capricious Byzantium concealed from their knowledge. But wait! Continuous espionage efforts have revealed that Byzantium's starting play has been entirely similar to that of the Khmer, neither side being so far ahead nor so far behind the Aztecs. The game is still too young for demographics to reliably reflect each nation's position, so the judgement of best start will well and truly take place in hindsight. Speaking of which, careful review of explored land has resulted in Byzantium's facade being discovered for what it is: a plot to conceal the beneficent riches of seafood that mingle about the continental bridges, environs for an assertive frontier.

[scooter]

I never thought I'd say this, but could we maybe have a slightly slower turn pace in this game?

WISH GRANTED.

In a stunning upset, we haven't gotten a new turn since Sullla wrote this post. The current turn has "dragged" on for an unfathomable 19 hours. If suddenly we slip into a terrible turn pace after this, you know who to blame.

So this gave me some time to jump back in game and think about some things. I logged into the game for the purpose of dotmapping, and then I got distracted by a ton of things.



I was greeted by this, first. I confirmed via minimap that Plako accepted our map trade. Considering we're right outside his land, I saw no reason not to accept this.



It looks like Plako has done little to no chopping. He hasn't whipped out a settler yet either as far as I know. I prefer our start to his, but he does have his forests, so he may be about to dump those into settlers.



He has met Mackoti, and he hasn't gotten quite the same harsh welcome that we did.



Here's one other thing that I realized I missed. The first engineer was born on this turn. I assume it was Alhazard due to Gandhi, but I don't actually know. It's actually possible it was Plako because by my math a PHI great person would pop out either this turn or next turn for him. (We are exactly halfway to a great person ourselves IIRC.)

This raises an obvious question: what in the world is Alhazard doing? If this is him, he should have actually gotten this great person a few turns ago. Maybe he isn't running Pacifism? I honestly have no idea. Strange things happening from the southeastern civs.

Finally, one last oddity.



That's a jungled fish. I assume this was a mapmaker misclick because it's not obvious. Anyway, I don't actually know if the work boat will clear the jungle. Maybe? I'll have to test it.

Finally, we've got red dot nailed down, so let's take a look at options for our fifth city.



There's a fun dilemma on this map where you have to choose between settling the best cities and claiming possibly-contested land. I actually didn't like Sullla's yellow dot all that much when I first saw it (the far right x), but now I'm realizing that is likely an island (or islands) to the east rather than Mackoti's mainland. That makes getting a city on the coast going a lot more potentially valuable. (It was also easy for me to forget that the wheat here is functionally a wet corn which is the best land food.) I could definitely see either of these spots next.



The exact position of the southwest "x" I'm not sold on, but I put it down as an idea. I think it's still a tad too soon for that one.

The double banana "x" is interesting to me. The downsides are obvious. We have to chop two jungles, and it's got no forests to kick-start it. That said, double bananas is a pretty great upside as is opening up access to that contested landbridge that's brimming with seafood.

I suppose I should mention there is one last option - we build a real military unit to kill that Mackoti Explorer and settle our eastern landbridge. Reminder of what we're assuming that looks like if you've forgotten:

Overall I'm leaning towards one of the northern spots for the 5th city. Any thoughts on these spots or variations of them?

ninja-edit: and just like that, we have a new turn

[scooter]

Turn 202



Signs there denote things I saw before moving the Explorer. Plako is definitely deforesting this city for a settler or two now.



So we met RMoG here. They apparently built a warrior before hooking iron to get some cheap scouting/MP. I offered them a map trade because why not. Maybe they've learned more since we got their map. Our map is out there already, so I see no reason to withhold trades.



Here's our capital which will be pretty powerful in the early going. Next turn it starts a settler and triple whips it the following turn. The nice thing is the regrowth from size 3 to size 6 takes just 4 turns, which means we can triple whip out a settler roughly once every 6 turns. Thanks to the Altar, we'll have no happiness problems in doing so.



These obviously look amazing, but plenty of caveats apply. It's still better than seeing the opposite.



Pocketbeetle will get a worker double whip next turn to get us off that grass forest tile. We're also now at 43 EPs on Mackoti which means our full 8 EP/turn is now on Nicolae.

[Sullla]

Those Demographics are amazing. I agree that we aren't actually that far ahead of the other teams, as a lot of them just whipped their settlers while we chopped ours. Still, I don't think there's any question that we're in a good position here. We'll be putting out two more workers and a settler whip in the next three turns, and the incredibly cheap Organized Altars are already kicking in. So far, so good.

I'm glad that we were able to get the map trade and Open Borders with plako. With mackoti doing his typical aggressive thing, hopefully we can have a more peaceful relationship with our western neighbor. The map reveal show that plako... is not doing very well. We both have a pair of size 5 cities in our core, but we also have a third city already out on the map. Plako has chopped zero forests compared to the 6 forests that we've already cleared off the map. And sure, he'll be able to cash them in for something later, but that doesn't change the fact that he's very far behind us from a developmental perspective. Based on the non-updates in his spoiler thread, I think plako is trying to play this game without much planning, and that just doesn't work very well for a late era start. Too many variables to consider. Anyway, maybe plako founds his third city next turn and this is all extremely premature. Maybe. It's not looking great for him at the moment though.

Some thoughts about city planning:



I like this spot for our fifth city. I've been writing the micro plan under the assumption that we will want to push our settler off somewhere in this region, and I agree with scooter's "X" spot as the best spot that isn't some crazy Pink Dot. We have the worker labor to clear the jungle from the western rice tile before we even settle, and that will allow that food resource to be up and running pretty quickly. It's still going to be a little bit slow since we have to chop out both rices from the jungle, but both are on river tiles and we have a gazillion riverside grassland tiles to cottage.

Even better, a city there pushes our borders into the key contested zone in our part of the map, the "red circle" that scooter identified a couple of days ago. Controlling that area will be the key to getting the edge on our neighbors later on. I like the idea of following the rivers for our early settlers, then pushing out later settlers for secondary locations to the east and west further down the road. Keep locking down as much high-quality land as we can get in the disputed zones right now, and go from there.

Longer term thoughts... It looks like we probably want to delay our Golden Age slightly to make sure we have enough beakers to grab Constitution before it runs out. The Great Person pops on T217, and I think we trigger the Golden Age sometime between T220 and T225. That gives us time for a few more whip cycles before we lock ourselves into Caste System for 7 turns. Here's how the settler timings line up:

T205: settler out of the capital, founds the northern "red" spot T206
T211: settler out of the capital, can found southwestern spot T212
T215: settler chopped out of red spot. I like taking the nextdoor corn spot in the north with this, which we can do T216:



T217: settler out of the capital on its 6 turn cycle. I would send this further southwest to the double rice/cows cluster down there. The capital will then grow to run specialists during the Golden Age.

There's also room to get a settler out of Pocketbeetle with a chop of its one remaining forest + triple whip at size 6. I think this hits sometime around T214-T215. I would send this settler to the wheat/cows spot in the northeast, our old "yellow" dot location. Meanwhile, Lurker Killer is whipping out 3 workers every 6 turns, and the northern "red" spot also does a double whip involving some combination of workers and units after its quadra-chopped "free" settler finishes. Every new city starts by popping borders and then whipping out a (ridiculously cheap) Sacrificial Altar, keeping our costs under control as we keep expanding.

If this all works as planned, we have 8 cities established before T220. That's only 18 turns from now, as crazy as it might sound. I think we can do it though. How does that sound for a general plan? Let's discuss this now and agree on what we want to do before diving into the minutiae of sandboxing and micro planning.

[Tohron]

So how would your micro plan shift around if makoti's military power suddenly started spiking? Seems like you should have plans to smoothly integrate several different levels of necessary military buildup.