Micromanagement Sims/Planning

[luddite]

Don't forget SIP claims 2 more FP tiles which with financial cottages are of comparable strength to wet rice.

Yeah, but wouldn't we split those off to another city anyway? Until bureaucracy there's no difference, and it's not like the capital will need any extra food.

[SevenSpirits]

Yeah, but wouldn't we split those off to another city anyway? Until bureaucracy there's no difference, and it's not like the capital will need any extra food.

It's a short-term benefit.

[sunrise089]

[checks in while traveling]

I think I vote SIP. I have no hope in out-microing the work done in this thread so far, and it's all very convincing. I think SIP vs SOP are still pretty close though and for me having two cities on hills with no forest hills in the first ring and able to be covered in 1t by one-movers along a road is a nice bonus.

I'll still be very happy with the awesome 1N city, the metagame here just makes me lean towards a bit more security.

[luddite]

It's a short-term benefit.

Ok SIP has these advantages:

Short/medium term: 2 extra food from the flood plains.

Short/medium term: a possible extra hammer and better defense in our next two cities.

Medium-long term: extra food from the banana plantation. On the other hand, we might actually prefer the extra hammers from a plains hill mine.

Long term: 2 extra riverside cottages for a bureaucracy capital.

I don't think those are enough to outweigh getting lakeside corn farmed 3 turns sooner.

[luddite]

Oh, and just to throw a wrench into this discussion... What about going for an early religion? If we don't see any luxuries, it might be a long time before we can get HR or a later religion. On the other hand, that's very risky in a 9 player game, especially with some inexperienced teams who often way overvalue the early religions.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

It's a short-term benefit.

But we're not going to be working those two extra FP cottages anyway, not when all we know is that our happy cap is 5. I'd rather have the means to split off those 2 cottages to a second city, and that means getting a way to have settlers and workers out asap.

[kjn]

OK, just simmed out SIP, going Pottery -> Mining -> BW.

The good news, tech is absolutely astounding. BW comes in turn 32, and total beakers is 450+ (lots of overflow from BW, probably 15-18 beakers). We are size 5, with 3 warriors (4H into a fourth). However, we still have two turns to go on our second worker (36/60), and haven't even started the settler yet. We didn't reach size 5 until T29, and have no more than a single forest to chop (compared to 3 for SOB).

OTOH, this start might call for building the settler before the second worker, but we are still talking about a T37-38 settler.

[luddite]

Since the best benefit of SIP is getting the plains hills for our expansion cities, I think there's not much point in doing SIP if were not going to get an early settler.

[Lord Parkin]

Don't forget SIP claims 2 more FP tiles which with financial cottages are of comparable strength to wet rice.

Right, but there are still plenty of riverside tiles available when settling on the Banana, not to mention we're limited to size 5 regardless. And given that SOB can give +8 food at size 4 (+10 once the Deer is improved), I really don't think missing out on another 1-2 food per turn makes a difference. Not when we can gain the use of the Deer tile, AND get the free food from the Banana.

Oh, and just to throw a wrench into this discussion... What about going for an early religion? If we don't see any luxuries, it might be a long time before we can get HR or a later religion. On the other hand, that's very risky in a 9 player game, especially with some inexperienced teams who often way overvalue the early religions.

A religion? In a game where we don't start with Mysticism, and no fewer than five of our rivals do? Um, probably not...

Not to mention we have so many competing priorities already (Pottery / Mining -> BW / Hunting -> AH) that adding more techs into the mix wouldn't make sense anyway, even if we did start with Mysticism.

Let's play to the strengths of our starting techs, not to the relative weakness of someone else's.

[kjn]

Given Lewwyn's et als concerns about defence, I tried out another option: a dash directly for BW from SOB.

Tech path went Mining -> BW (T29 IIRC) -> Pottery (80/144 on T32). Total 386 beakers.

The corn and the two flood plains got farms, one riverside plains hill mine, and two forests chopped on T32. This meant the start got a lot of production: 3 warriors, 2 workers, and the settler due on T33 (88/100). Total 193 hammers.

I haven't done the revolt yet - planned for that to go once the settler was en route. One big drawback with this start is that the two flood plains got farms that probably will have to be replaced with cottages, meaning lots of lost worker turns. There were quite a time between the completion of the mine and when BW came in with relatively little to do for the worker.

I think I'd prefer AH first over BW first, for the following reasons:

The deer. I don't agree that the marginal benefit of the camped deer is small. It's a 5F1H tile, net 3F1H - it's almost as good as two farmed flood plains (which give net 4F2C) for a fraction of the worker turn investment.

The WC is one of the best scouting units of the game, especially on high difficulty. It's cheap (compared to Impis), mobile, can get Sentry, and can look after itself.

With early Hunting, we have a backup plan for defence if we can't get horses easily, by teching Archery. If we go Mining -> BW, there is no such backup plan - we would be quite far from both WCs and archers if we can't find copper.

Whether to go Pottery -> Hunting or Hunting -> Pottery is another question, both are quite solid, I think.

Last, another thing to consider when considering our defence is how early we can expect an early rush. Assuming a map size of 90 x 50 tiles (4500 tiles), that means circa 500 tiles per team. Remove, say, 1/3 as water, and it comes to 350. That would give about 18 tiles or so distance between each team - quite a bit for an early rush (for comparison: M7 had 10 tiles distance to Azza in PB7).

So who can give an early military threat?

WPC? Dog soldiers are resource-less. Need to tech Mining -> BW. Estimate turn 25-27 for BW, and then they have to build Dog Soldiers and move them.

Civforum.de? This would have to be a quechua rush. Assuming a start similar to the mining -> BW one above, I think they can get 8-10 quechuas by turn 30. Could be nasty, but they're slow.

Apolyton? Less dangerous than WPC, since they will have to hook up copper or horses.

Spanish? Will have to tech Mining and BW, for circa turn 25-27 at the earliest, connect copper (ie tech Wheel), and build Impis.

CFC: Can get BW quickly, circa T18 or so, but will then require Wheel too (another 5-8 turns). However, there aren't many forests to chop and they're widely spaced, and they need Agri or Hunting for efficient whipping. Ie, I doubt they can get the production needed for a real rush.

CivPlayers: If they go to war, they will wait until Jaguars. Worst starting techs for rushing.

UniversCiv: Worst techs for rushing, late UU.

CivFr: Will need BW and Hunting for their UU, with no connection needed. They can probably start building Holkans T25 or so.

Frankly speaking, given the distances involved, I don't see any early military action before T50 or so. The only ones that might do so in the T40 timeframe are the Holkans (which are weaker than normal Spearmen vs WCs) or Quechuas (who have no chance against WCs).

And for comparison, ourselves: we can get AH on turn 20-21 going Hunting -> AH, opening up a strong food tile. We can get a settler out on T26 (working from size 3), and can road towards the horse tile. Even going Pottery before AH, we will still get our key military tech only a little later than those beelining BW (and thus cripple their economy or growth or both).

Verdict: I'm not worried about rushes at all.