[SPOILERS] scooter Expands the Empire Across the Sea

[scooter]

Out of interest, other than the path you have taken, were there any other tech/worker paths you considered?

Yes, in fact I was supposed to go Agri-AH-BW rather than Agri-BW-AH. Before the game started I tested both quite a bit and felt like AH before BW came out ahead. Well, I wavered a few times as I tested a bunch of variants. For awhile I liked delaying AH massively and farming the Sheep. It actually did pretty well early on - especially since you can slot a turn into it on the way to the corn. The problem was the edge was not big enough to make up for the lost worker turns fixing it later - it just gets really awkward after the settler. So basically in my testing I started with Agri-AH-BW, then had a period of time where I liked Agri-BW-AH, and then I circled back to liking Agri-AH-BW the best.


The problem was then this game more or less died in failure to launch and then finding a sub, so the game sat in stasis for a full month. When it relaunched, I mixed them up and selected BW second . So I've been making do since.


Some other civs could probably do this start a bit more cleanly. For example, an Agri civ has a real edge here due to ability to go straight onto AH and make use of a worker turn that way. That would have been nice, but I really wanted to try Exp/Pro Cothons on a water map, and I deemed this start Good Enough for those purposes. I think the growth curve snowball effect will be milder here than in a normal land-based game which helps.

[Krill]

Oh, the old "I fucked up" excuse. I always liked that one

[scooter]

Oh, the old "I fucked up" excuse. I always liked that one

Honestly how it happened is pretty funny. If you want to see it tragically/hilariously unfold...


April 21:

Carthage is Fishing/Mining which is neither great nor terrible, especially with Agriculture being cheaper in CtH. I haven’t simmed this extensively, but I did test this briefly today. Agri-BW is more or less mandatory, as Agri-AH is simply too slow and leaves the worker with little to do. So the open question is when to slot AH in.


There’s basically two options that I can see. Door number 1 is the obvious Agri-BW-AH. Unfortunately, this does idle the worker 2ish turns, and AH comes in late enough that the worker more or less needs to go Farm-Chop-Chop. Door number 2 is delaying AH much longer and doing something like Agri-BW-Wheel-Pottery-AH. This makes the worker(s) useful faster as well as opening up an earlier Granary. This is doable because the Lake makes it possible to farm the Sheep, which also solves the Worker idles. It’s a little ugly, but I think it’s going to come out ahead. Of course, it does mean having to re-improve the Sheep at some point. The main thing is the Farm can complete long before the Pasture, so while it’s -1F less than a Pasture, it’s +1F more than nothing. It’s weird, though.

This was my first pass. My initial hangup with Agri-AH-BW was that after the farm/pasture, the worker had nothing to do for quite awhile, which was really awkward. (I eventually realized I could build a Mine with the downtime assuming I did not get an unlucky forest spread, which made it better.)


April 22:

Here's the two main variants I see.

I won't quote the whole thing, but click if you're curious. I considered a couple scenarios here including the Sheep Farm. Humorously, I titled one section "Agri-BW-AH" but proceeded to demonstrate a decent first sim of Agri-AH-BW. An ominous sign of what's to come.


May 15:

In case we get a restart that Commodore and/or others are able to replay, instructions are as follows:

T0: worker first on default tiles (max yield), agriculture


Scout movements are really not important if you don't get them perfectly, but here's the moves I made.

T0: 1W
T1: SW-SW onto plains forest
T2-4: straight north hugging west coast onto Wine
T5: 1E onto hill next to Wine
T6: Will be a move onto Spices, unclear if this will be played by the time of a restart or not

First, note that I'm not really exaggerating when I say an entire month went by. And we still had replacement drama AFTER this post. It's noteworthy here that I did not specify which tech to queue after. Commodore selected AH which was a reasonable guess. However:


May 21:

Thanks! We're moving.

Tarkeel, don't have a heart attack, I did swap the tech to BW, and no beakers actually went into AH. (I did not give a Next Tech instruction.)

Now, after recalling this back, I can see the root of the problem. See, I had a text file on my desktop with the various runs I did. The final one was the one I was happiest with, but that was the one that was entitled "Agri-BW-AH" even though it was clearly an Agri-AH-BW sim. This appears to have been a holdover from the original typo a month prior. It was based around the run above that mixed this up. So after several weeks of my brain not being on this game, I assumed that it was all correct and went with the title, and by the time I noticed it did not match, I was committed. Ultimately I just repurposed the rough Agri-BW-AH plan I had initially considered and then later discarded.

[Amicalola]

That's a very nice second city.

[Zed-F]

With copper being where it is, would it still have been better to get AH first rather than BW? I guess the difference isn't huge to start with because both plans were in contention, but did the copper location tip any scales?

[scooter]

That's a very nice second city.

Yes it really is, in fact...

With copper being where it is, would it still have been better to get AH first rather than BW? I guess the difference isn't huge to start with because both plans were in contention, but did the copper location tip any scales?

Actually yes, this is an interesting point. I was planning to settle north to share corn and improve Cow because Grass Cow and a share of Wet Corn was better than anything at blue dot. Blue Dot was going to pull ahead at border pop thanks to the Fish, but that wasn't going to happen until the capital got to third ring. The Copper changed the equation entirely and made it the much better city. So yeah, Agri-BW-AH being a turn or two slower is probably an acceptable tradeoff to making a better city plant. Especially given that our island has Copper but not Horse.


So, thank you for making me feel better about this.

[scooter]

Pasture got a turn in, and the worker is continuing towards the Cow as discussed. The city is settled next turn, and the worker completes right after, so everything is on track. I definitely am leaning towards planting City3 quite quickly given that the Corn share is still an option if I go with the desert plant before the Ivory plant. Something like grow to sz4 then straight onto another settler. I will test this, though. Another option would be grow to 5 on WB, swap to settler at 5, double whip it to 3, overflow into WB and regrow on Sheep/Crab/Crab (giving Corn to desert city) and then pump out a worker or two at size 4 while waiting for happy cap to increase somehow (slavery wear off, ivory, or warrior). I'll look at this in some more detail tonight and see what feels right. I'm having to play games to dance around the happy cap when I need to just suck it up and build a Warrior at some point.


If I stick with Plan A and plant Ivory first, I maybe need a bit better worker support before reaching up that far.






Nobody else has planted a second city yet. Looks like one other player went with sz3 settler, the rest all grew. Size 6 looks like a Chm player doing a triple whip.

[Zed-F]

Agreed that this needs some actual testing before we decide on planting the desert before or after the ivory. The latter sounds very slow to get started, especially if we need Sailing before Mysticism. Understood that we need happy cap to be able to do more than 2-pop whips, but right now when we're just starting out it seems like having more queues and more food is probably better overall. Still, testing is what will determine that.

[scooter]

Yesterday I settled Pale. I sort of had it in my head that I should simply pick other cities on Quon Tali for this island, but in reality the cities I'm most familiar with in the series are not really on that continent. So I simply bounced to the very beginning of the series and named it Pale, which is where the books kick off. This city will be slightly awkward initially only because it's a bit of a slog to get it to size 3. There will be a non-trivial amount of time where Cow, Crab, and Copper are all improved but the city is still at size 2.


Specifically, the timings are:

T38: Pasture online, +1f
T42: Pickup a second tile (Crabs for growth)
T43: Crabs netted and Copper mined
T48: Can work 3 tiles assuming max-growth config (aka not working Copper)


This is fairly awkward, but it can be mitigated a bit if I simply add some roads prior to improving Copper. Ultimately, I'm not sure how much it matters, but it is the one awkward bit about this otherwise amazing city. However, upon hitting size 3 it's a 4F surplus and 9H base, and that's before picking up the Fish. In fact, the Fish will be in borders just a few turns later.





Bumping forward to today's turn, I've decided to grow Unta to size 4 (3T) and then go straight onto a slow-built settler which will take 7T. Growing to 5 just to double-whip was clearly much worse. No chops as I would like to conserve them. With this timing I can settle either Yellow on T45 or White on T47. In both cases I can have the primary tile (Ivory or Cows) begin improving immediately with my second worker, which is great. I do think White is probably best first, mostly because Yellow-White makes for a LONG wait for Ivory to be online. Mostly it limits options in Unta which has the food to support more growth.





Trade routes between Unta and Pale netted a nice +4 commerce which helps on tech quite a bit. I have not seen anyone else settle another city on PBSpy, so I think I'm the only one to do so. Being second in land area makes me not 100% sure as it's possible someone disguised it by doing it and immediately ending turn. The land area could be a creative player though.

[Zed-F]

If we get a settler for white out first, how soon after that do we build one for yellow? Immediately, and catch up workers / work boats after? White has so few tiles available before popping borders it might make the most sense to open up that cow for improvement asap.