[PB63] Lurking the night away

[civac2]

I did some back of the envelope caluclations when I read about people 2-whipping granaries. If you have the happiness 2whipping the granary, regrowing and then 2whipping the settler is better than 2whipping the settler with a lot of overflow (enough overflow to finish the granary with a chop and some normal hammers) . Some players don't have the happiness though.

Could also have made a mistake or used bad assumptions. Always a possibility.

[Tarkeel]

i should be at 8-10 cities by t95. Which is going to be behind these other folks, but i should have a nice tech advantage especially vs JackRB. I will have all 3 metals by then, and will be going for the Hanging Gardens after i get currency. Using the extra pop to whip my swarm of HA's and go and liberate the viking savages of their land and resources.

I see one big flaw in that plan (which I didn't want to point out in his thread): Jack is currently challenging both sources of horse. He should be able to "his" horses with a city 3N of the capital, but it might be dicey on the timing.

[Amicalola]

I'm general lurking this because all of my civ energy has been occupied by PB59 and I haven't been able to really help Fabled at all, or even keep track of what's happening. With JR4 still lurking I felt comfortable stepping back, and I've offered to play in a different game with Fabled, another time.

It looks like this is a really interesting game! Multiple contenders and wars galore.

[Miguelito]

I don't understand Ginger's obsession with MoM. Shouldn't Gandhi really try to get to drafting asap? So he'll maybe extend 2 GAs, and one of those would possibly need to be triggered too early in order to get the Mom effect before it goes obsolete. He could get the same8 additional GA turns from Taj. Feels like he's trying to find a use for his engineer more than anything.

And then that half inspired praetorian strike, if he follows through, is also not going to lead anywhere. Generally I see a tendency to not really treat the other players as humans with an agency, like the frustration with Bing not readily subscribing to his attack schedule, or the expectation that Mjmd will happily make peace after one city taken (cue Commodore's small injury).

Shame because the engagement is high and the building is good. Or am I reading selectively?

[Charriu]

It's T100 and I no longer know how to open these reports in some original way . So let's dive into the report. As always all the data can be found here: PB63 Tracking

Before we start some notable observations:

• With one exception this game remained peaceful so far. That exception of course is the war between Mjmd and Mr. Cairo, who razed 3 cities from Mjmd.
  
• Cornflakes is still running a no-slavery game so far, which is very interesting.
  
• The first badge of wonders were constructed with Superdeath on Stonehenge (very important for his widespread empire) Ginger on Pyramids (important for him because of PHI) Mjmd on Oracle and Colossus and Bing with the Good Lighthouse and the Great Invisible Wall
  
• We also saw Superdeath and Cornflakes start golden ages, which are still active as T100 and therefore their current turn numbers are higher. Keep that in mind.
  
• Other then that we generally see tensions rising as players are stepping on each others toes.
  

Now there is no new data compared to PB61, but I was able to fix the production trackings. Here a brief explanation of the new stuff:

Actual gold/science: This works like the previous science and gold tracking, but this time the slider setting is included. Therefore we know exactly how much everybody produced in those areas.
Production and TotalProduction: I thought about how to better judge all the hammer bonuses for buildings, units and wonders and thought that tracking the actual production might be a good metric to track. The production metric is somewhat useful though.
Tech Tracking: Similar to wonders and great persons I'm now also tracking when each player researched each tech. Small downside, I'm not tracking which tech the players choose from Oracle or Liberalism and tech tracking. The former should still be easy to guess in the context of other techs researched and the last is only used in diplo games in the past, so I didn't bother so far.
Tracking all the civics: I already tracked the labor civics in use. So why not track all of them.

General state of the game

First of all the city count

1. Ginger = 12
   
2. JackRB (IMP) = 12
   
3. Mjmd = 11
   
4. Fabled = 10
   
5. Superdeath (IMP) = 9
   
6. Bing = 9
   
7. Mr Cairo = 8
   
8. Cornflakes = 8
   
9. pindicator = 0
   

And here are the current amount of pop across those empires at the T100 mark:

1. Ginger = 62
   
2. Superdeath (IMP) = 50
   
3. Bing = 50
   
4. Cornflakes = 48
   
5. Mjmd = 47
   
6. JackRB (IMP) = 42
   
7. Mr Cairo = 38
   
8. Fabled = 37
   
9. pindicator = 0
   

We see that one IMP leader is on top of city count and the other (Superdeath) in the middle. Of course that is mainly because he didn't have the financial means to expand. What these numbers don't show is when the players reached these limits. For example JackRB only increased his city count from 8 to 12 in the last 6 turns and stayed on the same level or lower compared to other players. On a similar note Cornflakes and to a lesser degree Mr. Cairo stayed low on cities for the most time. For example Cornflakes only increased from 5 to 8 in the last 8 turns (Mr. Cairo in the last 21 turns). Keep that in mind for the other statistics.

Like I already said in the beginning I'm also tracking the actual gold and science output of the players. But some additional info is needed. Like in previous PBs the gold number does not include maintenance cost of any kind and the science output does not include KTB and prereq bonuses from other techs. Reason is that I want to compare these numbers to the commerce output to see the effect of modifier buildings and in case of science I want to be able to compare the science output between players and KTB and prereq bonus are a distraction in this case. Both numbers do include extra gold/science from specialists, modifier buildings and other stuff I haven't mentioned so far. These actual numbers are most interesting when we add up all the numbers of each turn. For the current turn and the players potential income the virtual numbers are still more useful. These virtual numbers were my previous tracking and they treated the slider as always being on 100% gold or science. At first I want to look at the current turn numbers of the virtual gold income (all players running 100% gold):

1. Superdeath = 268
   
2. Cornflakes (AGG) = 198
   
3. Ginger = 184
   
4. Mjmd (ORG) = 169
   
5. Bing (ORG) = 151
   
6. JackRB (FIN) = 145
   
7. Fabled (ORG) = 126
   
8. Mr Cairo = 117
   
9. pindicator = 0
   

Now remember that I told you that Cornflakes and Superdeath are currently in a golden age, which explains why their numbers are higher. Without that I expect Cornflakes to fall back into the midfield and Superdeath potential somewhere on the top. For reference their pre-golden age numbers were 129 (Cornflakes good 3rd place back then) and 100 (Superdeath, lower midfield back then)
Of course things get more interesting if we take maintenance into account. FYI info this is the sum of all maintenance factors (city, unit, supply and civic).

1. Bing (ORG) = 72
   
2. Cornflakes (AGG) = 74
   
3. Mr Cairo = 75
   
4. Fabled (ORG) = 79
   
5. Mjmd (ORG) = 85
   
6. Superdeath = 91
   
7. JackRB (FIN) = 115
   
8. Ginger = 131
   
9. pindicator = 0
   

It's no wonder that Ginger and JackRB both pay the most on maintenance considering that they have the most cities with 12, higher pop numbers and are not ORG. We also see that Superdeath is still paying his fair share from his early conquest. Then again we see the power of ORG as both Mjmd and Fabled have more cities then Superdeath and in case of Mjmd only on city less then JackRB and Ginger. From my previous numbers we could already guess that Mr. Cairo and Cornflakes are performing good here because of lower city numbers. But even then Bing is still doing better then both with one more city thanks to ORG. By the way Bing and Superdeath both have exactly 9 cities and 50 pop which makes for a nice comparison between the two.
With the maintenance at hand we can now include that into the gold income to see how much gold everybody could make this turn:

1. Superdeath = 177
   
2. Cornflakes (AGG) = 124
   
3. Mjmd (ORG) = 84
   
4. Bing (ORG) = 79
   
5. Ginger = 53
   
6. Fabled (ORG) = 47
   
7. Mr Cairo = 42
   
8. JackRB (FIN) = 30
   
9. pindicator = 0
   

Remember once again that both Superdeath and Cornflakes are in a golden age. I'm a bit worried about JackRB and Mr. Cairo falling behind. Keep in mind that Mr. Cairo razed 3 cities from Mjmd, but still Mjmd is doing better then him placing overall 3rd behind the golden agers. In addition to that JackRB has no Currency yet as does Fabled, who is doing a bit better.
Now let's see how good the player did across the whole span of 100 turns. For this we look at the accumulated actual science numbers, which I already have described above:

1. Cornflakes (AGG) = 4056
   
2. Bing (ORG) = 2438
   
3. Superdeath = 2084
   
4. Ginger = 2017
   
5. Mjmd (ORG) = 1850
   
6. Fabled (ORG) = 1678
   
7. Mr Cairo = 1565
   
8. JackRB (FIN) = 1225
   
9. pindicator = 485
   

Yes, you read right. Cornflakes did almost double the amount of science then the next player (who has an economic advantage in ORG). This is the first huge difference we see between his no-slavery play and remember until T92 he only had 5 cities. Bing and Superdeath both had 9 at that time. Very impressive. We also once again see why I'm worried for Mr. Cairo and especially JackRB.
But what exactly did the players do with all those beakers. Well fear not here it is:




As you can see Cornflakes turned the science numbers into an impressive tech lead especially considering that he just picked up Civil Service, which will in no doubt further his tech advantage. I think one factor leading to this is that Cornflakes was able to pick up Currency 10 turns earlier then the next player. I'm in no doubt that he can turn this tech advantage into a military advantage especially considering that he plays AGG/CHA. I think we can expect big things from him in the upcoming turns.

Production

Now next I want to turn to my new production tracking, but before that I have to explain in more detail how I collected this info for this PB. With this tracking I iterated through every city and added up all the hammers being produced this turn including forest chops and whips. It does include extra hammers from whipping, chopping and of course overflow. The only thing it is missing right now is hammers put into building wealth or science directly, but we are far away from that yet. I've also split the tracking into two categories Production and TotalProduction. Both work the same way but the important difference is that TotalProduction includes modifiers from buildings (forge, factory) and traits (All traits who have production bonuses). Now it's a bit sad that I can't divide it into more detail, but you can imagine that it will be very difficult for example to differentiate which extra hammer came from a forge and which from EXP granaries. Here are the accumulated total production numbers across 100 turns with the non-modified production numbers in parenthesis:

1. Mjmd (CHA, ORG, Copper/Colossus, Stone/Moai and Hanging Gardens) = 5566 (4913)
   
2. Ginger (Stone) = 4604 (4322)
   
3. Bing (CRE, ORG)= 4052 (3585)
   
4. JackRB (IMP) = 3423 (3206)
   
5. Fabled (EXP, ORG) = 3269 (2901)
   
6. Mr Cairo (EXP, CRE) = 3141 (2745)
   
7. Superdeath (IMP, IND) = 3065 (2886)
   
8. Cornflakes (AGG, CHA, Copper/Colossus, Forge) = 2875 (2661)
   
9. pindicator = 324 (324)
   

As you can see I also added the relevant traits in there based on what buildings are available by their tech. This for example is the reason why I did not mention CHA for Mjmd. Keep in mind that it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate the individual hammer modifiers by now. This is probably the last time I can make an (accurate) differentiation of these. With this in mind we can say that the traits produced the following amounts of extra hammers:

ORG (Bing) = 172 guess
ORG (Fabled) = 150 this is a guess, can't determine due to lack of reporting
ORG (Mjmd) = 285 don't forget early Ziggurats
EXP (Fabled) = 218 this is a guess, can't determine due to lack of reporting
EXP (Mr Cairo) = 212 this is a guess, can't determine due to lack of reporting
CRE (Mr Cairo) = 184 this is a guess, can't determine due to lack of reporting
CRE (Bing) = 245 guess
IMP (JackRB) = 217
IMP (Superdeath) = 129
IND Wonder (Superdeath) = 50
CHA (Mjmd) = 90
CHA (Cornflakes) = 75
AGG (Cornflakes) = 50
Forge modifier (Cornflakes) = 52
Forge modifier (Mjmd) = 51
Colossus copper modifier (Cornflakes) = 37
Colossus copper modifier (Mjmd) = 71
Great Wall stone modifier (Bing) = 50
Moai stone modifier (Mjmd) = 71
Hanging Gardens stone modifier (Mjmd) = 85
Pyramid stone modifier and maybe other wonders (Ginger) = 282

You can see why this is a heck of a lot of work to do and it's absolutely impossible to do that for a T150 empire. It's really sad that there is no easy way to do that in code because of the way the code is structured.
Some worthwhile notes that I made for myself
- EXP and IMP are pretty equal in their hammer bonuses.
- Forges provide a lot of extra hammers over the course of the game. That's why I think this is the really important bonus with IND. Forget the world wonder, get to Metal Casting fast and drop those forges 20+ turns earlier then everybody else. It generates way more hammers then the world wonders (Don't forget the resource bonus is the same as IND, so we have a lot of reference there.
- Even CRE and ORG is on a very similar hammer level then EXP and IMP.
- The CHA and AGG hammer bonus is fairly small compared to others, but then again you gain a lot of other stuff with those.

Financial Bonus

Last time this statistic was boring, but no more. But first I have to explain how this works for the new players.

Here I collected all the extra commerce a player (would) have gained if he was working Financial tiles. For example if you worked a river hamlet tile you normally gain 3 commerce and 4 commerce with FIN. In this case my tool notes down 1 extra commerce. You will also find that I am tracking the CtH implemenation of Financial as well as the normal BtS implementation for comparison. Keep in mind that we are playing with the newest FIN nerf, which was that water tiles only give extra commerce with a lighthouse present.
Looking at the current turn numbers first:

1. Ginger = 41
   
2. Mjmd (ORG) = 36
   
3. Fabled (ORG) = 30
   
4. Superdeath = 23
   
5. Bing (ORG) = 22
   
6. Cornflakes (AGG) = 20
   
7. JackRB (FIN) = 18
   
8. Mr Cairo = 15
   

We usually expect FIN players to do better in this category, because they have the real incentive to work 3 commerce tiles. Sadly JackRB is lacking behind in this important category.

Here are the accumulated numbers:

1. Ginger = 659
   
2. Cornflakes (AGG) = 655
   
3. Mjmd (ORG) = 551
   
4. Fabled (ORG) = 551
   
5. Bing (ORG) = 468
   
6. Superdeath = 261
   
7. JackRB (FIN) = 233
   
8. Mr Cairo = 208
   

The current turn numbers aren't giving a whole picture since Cornflakes is running specialists during his golden age. But from the accumulated numbers we see a clear divide in two groups. Three players aren't doing well, while the rest is in a healthy territory.

Some players may ask themself, how much would the players have made without the lighthouse-FIN-nerf. For this it is worth looking at the numbers from the previous FIN version, which did apply extra commerce for land tiles at 3 and water tiles at 2. Here the accumulated numbers with the lighthouse variant in parenthesis for comparison:

1. Ginger = 956 (659)
   
2. Cornflakes (AGG) = 850 (655)
   
3. Mjmd (ORG) = 720 (551)
   
4. Fabled (ORG) = 669 (551)
   
5. Bing (ORG) = 630 (468)
   
6. JackRB (FIN) = 405 (233)
   
7. Superdeath = 396 (261)
   
8. Mr Cairo = 366 (208)
   

Even though this is a map with less focus on water the players managed to run some more water tiles.

Lastly how sever is the recent nerf at the moment. Here the comparison for this lighthouse implementation compared to BtS (delta, reduction in percent):

1. Ginger = 640 (-49.27%)
   
2. Cornflakes (AGG) = 485 (42.54%)
   
3. Mjmd (ORG) = 467 (-45.87%)
   
4. Fabled (ORG) = 356 (-39.25%)
   
5. Bing (ORG) = 290 (-38.26%)
   
6. JackRB (FIN) = 378 (-61.87%)
   
7. Superdeath = 367 (-58.44%)
   
8. Mr Cairo = 424 (-67.09%)
   

Those are big numbers, but what I've learned from the lighthouse-nerf so far is that these numbers are to be expect at the T100 mark. This is normally a point in the game in which you already have run a lot of water tiles in the past 100 turns, but the economy was not yet ready to support lighthouses in all coastal cities. We usually see these numbers drop to more reasonable levels at the T150 mark.

Protective Bonus

This is somewhat interesting even though nobody is PRO, so let's look into the accumulated numbers

1. Ginger = 345
   
2. Mjmd (ORG) = 317
   
3. Fabled (ORG) = 296
   
4. JackRB (FIN) = 224
   
5. Cornflakes (AGG) = 217
   
6. Bing (ORG) = 162
   
7. Mr Cairo = 94
   
8. Superdeath = 90
   
9. pindicator = 0
   

Last time we saw that two players were late to connecting their cities (Superdeath and JackRB). Well one of them made sure to connect their cities by now and one didn't. But Superdeath is not alone as Mr. Cairo and Bing joined him in this category.

Misc

I'm tracking a lot more but there is not enough information there to justify an own paragraph. Therefore a little summary here:

• AGG is present but hasn't done that much yet except for one player.
  
• Only great persons so far are 1 prophet for both Superdeath and Cornflakes and 1 engineer for Ginger, what will he do with that?
  
• In terms of civic nobody has run Organized Religion yet. Of course Ginger swapped into Representation, but not only that. He also switched from Slavery back to Tribalism for 5 turns to save some maintenance. Nice little use of SPI.
  

Comparing traits

The main goal of all this tracking of course is to compare the economic traits related around commerce income or maintenance reduction. So let's do this:




As you can see I changed the layout a little bit again in preparation for the new production tracking. I already color coded the 4 economic traits so that you easily see, who uses which trait. Except for FIN every trait has a hammer bonus so I included all of them. But I'm still disappointed in how this looks. I like how the 4 economics traits have light colors that are easy to distinguish. But with 7 more traits I'm running out of these colors. If anybody has a better idea how to do this I'm all ears.

For the most part this is a standard summary of T100. ORG and FIN fairly equal, but FIN is getting better. PRO is 3rd and AGG a distant 4th except if your name is Mr. Cairo.

Stay tuned for the T150 report.

[civac2]

I don't understand  Ginger's obsession with MoM.  Shouldn't Gandhi really try to get to drafting asap? So he'll maybe extend 2 GAs, and one of those would possibly need to be triggered too early in order to get the Mom effect before it goes obsolete. He could get the same8  additional  GA turns from Taj. Feels like he's trying to find a use for his engineer more than anything.

And then that half inspired praetorian strike, if he follows through, is also not going to lead anywhere. Generally I see a tendency to not really treat the other players as humans with an agency,  like the frustration with Bing not readily subscribing to his attack schedule,  or the expectation that Mjmd will happily make peace after one city taken (cue Commodore's small injury).

Shame because the engagement is high and the building is good.  Or am I reading selectively?

Does he know the MoM obsoletes?

[Amicalola]

I don't understand  Ginger's obsession with MoM.  Shouldn't Gandhi really try to get to drafting asap? So he'll maybe extend 2 GAs, and one of those would possibly need to be triggered too early in order to get the Mom effect before it goes obsolete. He could get the same8  additional  GA turns from Taj. Feels like he's trying to find a use for his engineer more than anything.

And then that half inspired praetorian strike, if he follows through, is also not going to lead anywhere. Generally I see a tendency to not really treat the other players as humans with an agency,  like the frustration with Bing not readily subscribing to his attack schedule,  or the expectation that Mjmd will happily make peace after one city taken (cue Commodore's small injury).

Shame because the engagement is high and the building is good.  Or am I reading selectively?

Well said, I agree with you. So far I think Ginger looks like a pretty typical (sharp) Deity player - great building, but not as good at the 'people' part of MP. Mausoleum might be overvalued because they're not used to it obsoleting, even if they're aware of it. Although I think Ginger is the best green we've had in ages and they'll be a great player in no time, which is kind of exciting.

I don't understand the thinking behind the little Mjmd attack at all, but 'small injuries' is probably a lesson everyone needs in MP. I definitely did.

Edit: Thanks for the stats also, Charriu. I'm really curious to see if Cornflakes can turn high GNP and low Food into a conquest. My gut is 'no.'

[El Grillo]

Yeah, it seems a bit optimistic to think that Mjmd would fail to react to the settling of those cities. Catapults are still a while off, it seems, so I don't think Mjmd will be willing to give up Renzo without stuffing it full of defenders.

[Amicalola]

My gut is that mjmds reload request should not be granted. I don't really understand why he felt the need to send that pm in the first place, and I don't think he can call a turnsplit just to do Diplo. Mjmd should have declared war if he wanted a split this turn. But I might be missing something, anyone else have any thoughts?

[Tarkeel]

I really don't see how Mjmd can expect this turn split to stand. They aren't in a settling race, and they aren't in enforced peace. There also aren't any big force movements to keep track of (like in PB58 before AT declared on me).

I vote for denying the reload request, it sets a bad example.

Relevant info from their threads:

Please do not log in again this turn.

Is this some subtle way of announcing a war dec or are you trying to establish a peace time split?
If it makes you feel better I won’t be moving units or changing build queues, but I have planned (Before this PM)  to log in in the morning before Fabled rolls to adjust my tile micro.

I like how you just assume Fable will roll the turn (insert smiley here). Turn split.

Here is the string. Notice my extremely careful wording when he asked about "peace time split" that I replied back with just "Turn split". I really struggled with how to respond to this without engaging in diplo. I doubt he spent 20 minutes redoing just tile micro and again I very much considered us in a turn split.

I think this is clear cut reload request to after Cairo's turn. Jack will have to replay.

Second Edit:
As promised I logged in this morning to adjust my city micro, moved no units, changed no production. If Mjmd has a problem with me changing my tiles before production/tech is rolled he can stuff it*. When possible outside of war, a pitboss should mirror the mechanics of a sequentially processing game. That includes reactions to OB and resource trade cancellation.
*I’ll be honest I can’t find where in the rules you’re allowed to just declare a peace split by PM. If he’s not happy with the very reasonable compromise I offered him in my message and I’m getting punished for playing quickly, I can always play slower in the future.