[SPOILERS] Panzersmackdown with Justinian (Mack/Seven)

[SevenSpirits]

Go away, let us cry about our start in peace.



















...



















Oh, it's always war? Damn.

[mackoti]

yay.Good leader in my book,about civ its like not having one.Lets see the start now.

Lets do some bets who will build stonehenge?

[SevenSpirits]

Yes, a fine leader.

SPI is great, IMP is pretty good. I miss being EXP but such is life.

Germany not only is a blank civ but they have bad starting techs, hunting/mining. I meant it when I said in the tech thread they are the worst civ.

Now we just need to see our start! (And hopefully pop some techs from huts; obviously that's a big randomizer here.)

[SevenSpirits]

OK I chatted with Mackoti and we already decided everything we're going to do this game.

Now just to see the start.

Edit: My theory is that if we ask for the start enough times it will arrive more quickly.

[Mist]

Your start

Let the crying commence

[mackoti]

Let the crying commence

[mackoti]

To be honest its the worst start we could get,i think we have one of the worst draw on civ leader, but cheer up folks we can prevail.Bw looks like first option here.

[novice]

Yeah, plenty of forests at least.

BW-Fishing-Sailing-Masonry-GLH.

The Great Lighthouse, the universal "our start sucks" remedy.

[Gaspar]

I can't decide if I really want you guys to win, really want you guys to lose or really want you guys to get in a fight in the lurker thread.

Regardless, I'm sure it'll be entertaining.

[SevenSpirits]

Well this will be a good challenge.

It's time to break out my expert knowledge of the starting position generator. Back when BTS came out I fished around in the code and found some bugs (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=252429), which they've fixed now. Now,

* It doesn't add a forest to every possible tile: it always adds one forest, but the second one only with 50% odds, third with 33% odds, etc. So it doesn't totally preclude leaving spots open for resources.
* It still tries to get you up to 4 resources in your BFC with seafood counting as 2/3 of a resource, if it still considers your start to be bad. Of course this counts e.g. Uranium on a forest as a resource.
* It still tries to get you to 3 hills.

We can only see 1 land resource and 2 sea resources, so there are two possibilities.
1) There are two more resources we can't see yet, because of fog and/or because they are hidden strat resources.
2) The starting position normalizer didn't finish adding those resources; it thought our start was "good enough".

In the typical case the start either gets maximally improved by the normalizer, or not at all. This is because the start quality metrics are dominated by how much land the normalizer thinks will be "yours", something it does very poorly of course. Adding resources has a very small impact on how good it thinks your start is so it's unlikely to cause your start to cross the "it's good enough now" threshold.

I think the 2 adjacent clams are an indication we got our start improved, and therefore our BFC more likely than not has 2 more resources in it. Probably one 2S of the settler and I guess some random forest resource somewhere.

There is one more piece of information we can use: if we have fewer than three hills, we know the normalizer did not finish, and therefore probably we DON'T have 5 resources; we are in case 2).