[SPOILERS - PBEM29] spacetyrantxenu - Mao of Babylon

[spacetyrantxenu]

Since everyone spams it up in the first post, I'll just repost the game settings for my own convenience.

GREENS:

Catwalk is: Suleiman (Phi/Imp) of Korea
Kuro is: Justinian (Spi/Imp) of Persia
Spacetyrantxenu is: Mao (Exp/Pro) of Babylon
Sian is: FDR (Ind/Org) of Sumeria

Rules:

No war elephants,
no corporations,
no nukes,
no spies,
no great spy scouting,
no great spy infiltrations,
no blockades,
no barbarians.

Also, I need to waste space to prevent spoiling due to an accidental player click. This is a family photo from the Xenu family:



Good luck to the players and apologies in advance for my bad behavior in this game!

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Ded-lurker reporting for duty. I'm pretty sure that's not what our family looks like.

Thoughts:

Protective: ewwww.

That will be all for now.

[Commodore]

In soviet China, start sees you!



Caveats of "might change stuff" still apply. Settler has mobility, sentry, and is on a road (just the one tile). World size small, difficulty Prince.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I spy a scout and warrior. Given that we don't start with hunting does that mean we're getting a free unit or is this part of the WIP status?

[Commodore]

I spy a scout and warrior. Given that we don't start with hunting does that mean we're getting a free unit or is this part of the WIP status?

Yup, everyone is getting a scout and warrior, you do of course still need hunting to make more scouts.

[spacetyrantxenu]

OK, thanks.

Looks like for best information on T0 we'll move the scout 79 (keyboard pad -- NW, NE) and move the warrior 3 (SE). That should be good enough to let us know whether the body of water at the south of the map is fresh or salt. The scout's movement I think would find a body of water as well, since I think I see some blue behind the hill that is 78 to his current position. Also the north flowing river is emptying into something in the NE part of the picture, so I believe there are at least a few tiles of water up there. With 5 (or is it 6?) hills in the BFC if we SIP this capital would be a very good production site. Commerce seems limited, though. Of course, if we SIP we're wasting our expansive bonus at the start -- I'm assuming Commodore put those PHs there to tempt players into a move. We'll have a better idea when we start moving our pieces around the board.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

OK, thanks.

Looks like for best information on T0 we'll move the scout 79 (keyboard pad -- NW, NE) and move the warrior 3 (SE). That should be good enough to let us know whether the body of water at the south of the map is fresh or salt. The scout's movement I think would find a body of water as well, since I think I see some blue behind the hill that is 78 to his current position. Also the north flowing river is emptying into something in the NE part of the picture, so I believe there are at least a few tiles of water up there. With 5 (or is it 6?) hills in the BFC if we SIP this capital would be a very good production site. Commerce seems limited, though. Of course, if we SIP we're wasting our expansive bonus at the start -- I'm assuming Commodore put those PHs there to tempt players into a move. We'll have a better idea when we start moving our pieces around the board.

78 of the scout looks like a hill to me. Also, agree on the PH move. Floodplains won't hurt since you've got EXP + 1 Garden for health. Is it me, or is that the worst UB in the game?

Since PRO sucks so badly, I would like to leverage EXP to the max. PH will help with that a bit. If you settle PH 8 you likely lose 1-2 commerce from the southern river spaces, but (perhaps) get 1 additional floodplain. Won't know that unless you can move scout 78 onto a hill w/o obstruction, which it does not appear there will be.

All else on placement seems moot until you can actually move.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I moved the scout and warrior as previously planned to get a decent view. Then Boldly pointed out the settler was mobility (nice one) so we could settle the PH without penalty. Hopefully that isn't a trap later on (did we just settle on iron?) We discussed a few settling options, including the GFH NW of the settlers starting position. That would have added sheep to the corn and cows. We thought that would weaken our possible second city location (for now anyway) on the PH grabbing sheep and fish. Settling where we did gave us a few more river tiles, plenty of hills for production, and enough food to work them.



We decided to research AH from the start so that we could get a quick worker, farm the corn, and then pasture the cow. The general plan for now is to go worker, build (something) while growing to size 2, then worker settler. The plan will change as necessary. I did a micro plan without a sandbox so this is probably all wrong:

Worker in 8 turns from turn 0 working unfarmed corn:
T0 - 0/40
T1 - 5/40
T2 - 10/40
T3 - borders pop, 5 to go. Now working GFH with 4 hammers + 1 food + 1 bonus hammer (EXP) = 6hpt 16/40
T4 - 22/40
T5 - 28/40
T6 - 34/40
T7 - 40/40
T8 - build something else and grow to size 2. Farm corn, finish T11. From T11 we're growing much faster, grow city size to 2 on T13? Then another worker would be maybe 5 more turns, so T18? (I didn't have the micro done for a second settler before passing on the save..maybe it would have been 1 turn faster to grow to size 2, then build out 2 workers? I never said I had done micro plans before!)

Our other choice was to delay worker start, grow to size 2 then build worker (5 turns working corn):

warrior/barracks/placeholder
T0 - hammers: 0/10 | city: 0/14
T1 - 2/10 | 3/14
T2 - 4/10 | 6/14
T3 - 6/10 | 9/14 (borders pop)
T4 - 8/10 | 12/14
T5 - 10/10| 1/16 (grew to size 2 - warrior is done if that's our build)

Start worker - size 2 working a 1/2 GFH and a 2/1 tile (pick one): 5 hammers + 1 surplus + 1 exp hammer = 7hpt
T6 - 7/40
T7 - 14/40
T8 - 21/40
T9 - 28/40
T10 - 35/40
T11 - 40/40 overflow 2 Worker 1 finishes T11, city size 2.

Build another worker - city size 2 working a 1/2 GFH and a 2/1 tile: 5 hammers + 1 surplus + 1 exp hammer = 7hpt
T12 - 2/40
T13 - 9/40
T14 - 16/40 (corn farm finishes) now 5h + 3 surplus + 1 exp hammer = 9hpt
T15 - 25/40
T16 - 34/40
T17 - 40/40 overflow 3. Worker 2 finishes T17 city size 2.

Also, next time I should get a spreadsheet, maybe Notepad isn't the right program for this. We went with plan 1, slow building the worker from the start. Hopefully that wasn't the wrong choice. Also, if I've done the math incorrectly I hope someone will point it out to me.

Since we have a starting warrior and will be able to scout as well, I'm not afraid of being rushed at the start. Hopefully people assume that we'll spam a lot of bowmen and will leave us alone for a while. And it's party true that we'll spam bowmen - if a warrior costs 10 hammers and a bowman is 16, I don't see a lot of reasons to build many warriors. I'd rather just build bows and be safe until someone rolls a stack of HAs at me.

Speaking of that, since this is a small map we may not have to wait long to make contact with other civs. With 843 land tiles that's roughly 211 for each civ. Without much overlap that wouldn't be much more than 12 cities per civ, but we'd of course pack them together a bit for border defense and that is also leaving out what Commodore may have in store for us off the main continent (if this is a main continent, kinda hard to say on T0!) We'll have to explore and see what we can figure out in terms of map layout and dimensions. F8 shows small size and medium sea level, so unless there were some WB file shenanigans this should be a cozy map. So far everyone has 9 tiles in their BFC, but I have no guess about a mirrored start or anything like that.

Tech path: Starting AH, then after that we may go Pottery to get some early cottages cooking. With two early workers we can get the corn farmed, cow pastured, and the FP cottaged before we need to backtrack for hunting to get a camp on the ivory. Throw in a few mines once we research Mining, then BW for chops and whips. I'll try to remember to revolt to slavery until we finish the settler and have it moving. Boldly, who I'll refer to as Number One since he thinks he is actually Picard, is going to remind me of these things. After BW, we'll see.

I posted the question in our tech thread, but how do most people pass the save to the next person? I tried to use the in game method and it crashed on me. I just attached the file in Gmail and sent it to Kuro...er...Mao sent a messenger to tell the strange foreign "Persian" folks (whatever those are) that their barbarian tribe could...um...play.

[SIZE="1"]We're #1! Here comes the dogpile![/SIZE]

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Did you hit on a naming scheme yet?

[spacetyrantxenu]

No, work has been busy today, haven't had time to think about it.