(April 30th, 2017, 05:41)RefSteel Wrote: I'm with you on that - and excited to see where this leads!
Looks like an interesting dot-map challenge, regardless of whatever Krill is doing! If I'm reading the screenshots correctly there's not (yet) a site that combines 1st ring food with sharing a grassland cottage with the cap. The inland seas could also make city siting complex. How much do you value ship-building and access to sea resources over the vulnerability to boating? Fun times . And it's only turn 3!
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
Well, there's 3E if it doesn't orphan any seafood; it could share three river cottages (including an FP) and the rice. And something like 3N-1W could likewise share cottages, clams, and the oasis. Hard to say if those are good this early though. The main problem is that we've discovered only three food sources total outside our BFC, all of them far away - and one of them's an ocean fish! (Jungled bananas don't count as food sources at this point in the game.) I think Mardoc and the lurkers were a little overzealous making sure nobody would move their cap - or rather that they went about it the wrong way.
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...as Krill has demonstrated. He finally founded his city this turn though at least!
JR4, will you have a chance to get a picture of the demographics screen this turn? If not, we can probably fill in the gaps next turn anyway, but it would be neat to see what they look like now. (I'll do my best to explain what we can see there when they're up; sorry about saying so little about them the previous couple of turns!)
Dotmaping this seems really hard right now. We need more information to decide. I like the site 5 SW of Borte, but it won`t be our second city. If I count correctly it has 12 coastal tiles which could make a case for placing an early moai there. I would rather have it up early rather than waiting on finding the perfect location.
(April 30th, 2017, 11:46)shallow_thought Wrote: How much do you value ship-building and access to sea resources over the vulnerability to boating? Fun times . And it's only turn 3!
To answer this: I like building lots of port cities, but as I have zero MP experience it might not be the smartest thing to do.. I think we should build the most vulnerable cities on hills if possible in order to make them harder to hit.
Brilliant, thanks! Now, let's see if I can do some analysis here.
First, the easy part: Rival worst production is now 1! This is good news, because it means Krill is almost definitely going Worker first! (The biggest threat has always been a pure high-speed Q-rush with high-hammer tiles.) Note MFG 1 is guaranteed to be Inca, because it's impossible to get less than two when settling in place. I'll try digging deeper, but this may take some time because I want to make sure I'm not missing something; at first glance it looks really, really bad for Inca. I mean, worse than losing three turns and a plains hill plant made it look already!
I think the next scout move will be 2N to that hill in order to get a view of that area NW of Borte.
Regarding Krill, I really don`t understand what has happened there. If he is just throwing away 3 turns without getting any benefit it must surely be a very bad strategy. I still don`t want him as a neighbour though, because he has most likely disturbed the estimated 14-15(?) tiles between the players, and that would mean less land to settle peacefully for us.
Thanks for the updated screen-shots! Your scouting plans sound good to me.
And as for what the demos are telling us ... okay, I think I've got it!
- All of us Exp civs are working our cows while building workers, obviously.
- Both of the Fishing civs (Greece and Carthage) are (and have been) working their clams. I was going to say this probably means they're building workers too, but it actually isn't terrible even for workboats.
- The other "normal" civs (China and Zulu) are naturally working their floodplains while building workers.
- Inca is probably working a 3f tile with an uninteresting city center, and building a Worker, due to finish ... at the same time we grow to size 2 onto our second improved tile, with 6-8 hammers already in our first warrior. This still might not be a terrible move, believe it or not! It's right on the edge, but it's possible Inca can play this into a strong position if they have (say) a first-ring river corn, another agri resource in their BFC, and some decent hills and forests around. A metal luxury with all of that might even make the move a good call if we completely ignore the whole "moving toward a neighbor" thing. The key here is this: If their move lets them skip Hunting and Fishing for a while, that's a lot more than 30 early beakers, and even the 15 foodhammers lost are more than paid back by not needing to build a workboat if their new capital gets similar quality without one. That's ignoring all the things that are wrong with this move of course, and there are several, but it's not completely terrible - not as terrible as I feared a few hours ago, even.
- Sury just popped borders this turn, as expected: He's of course the one with "19,000" land area. Some basic arithmetic with the rest of the land area demos, since we know the starts are all mirrored, indicates Inca's new capital is landlocked, without so much as a lake in the first ring. On this map, as far as we've seen so far, that must have taken some doing!
If you're interested in why the numbers add up to all of this, I'll be happy to show my work in more detail.
I didn't list what people are teching because that's sheer guesswork at this point, though I certainly do have guesses. We'll know more in a couple of turns; I'm looking forward in the meantime to seeing what our scout reveals and how/when the demos change!
I think we can be reasonably sure that we`re not about to be hit by a quechua rush, so that makes Agriculture next more appealing.
It takes some guts moving away from that plains hammer start. To me it still seems quite terrible, but the point of skipping some early techs is certainly valid. Time will tell if he will stay competitive.
As for the number crunching - the average land points of civs other than us and Krill is 8714 if my maths is correct and since the average number including Krill is higher, then Krill has to have a higher number of landlocked tiles in his first ring.
. And it's only turn 3!
