[LURKERS] Setting Up Tents for a Ren Faire

[Mardoc]

Looking over the map more and more, Mardoc, I gotta say, it looks beautiful. Can't praise the work you put into it enough.

Thanks! Of course a good deal of that praise belongs to GJ and Brick.

I'm...a little surprised to see they just got to the second turn now; hopefully they're over the hump.

Guess it's time to start working on another map. Might start the next game a lot faster if I just need to accommodate a snake pick instead of designing the whole thing.

[The Black Sword]

Man, I really don't like RMOG's second city. I'm not sure what the optimal city placement is, I'm not 100% sure of my setup but I haven't been convinced by anyone else's arguments either. But even if I don't know what is right, that spot has to be wrong. Picking up a single dry rice as a power resource? At the very least go 1S for the 2h plant.

Next question: where does the NE go? I had been thinking the double banana + wet rice spot would be a pretty ideal spot, as NE specialists mean you don't have to bother improving jungle and thus this useless spot turns out pretty good, but it looks like Texaco would be a better spot for it with this dotmap order.

I'm not sure. Do we want the NE city to have a levee? I don't think it's necessary, the NE should be setup before Steam Power. The city should have powerful food and be able to share it's BFC out to other cities once it starts working specs. Banana and rice would be good if it could be set up in time. Both resources being jungled made other spots look more tempting to me. Texcoco probably wants to give a bunch of tiles to the coastal city to build ships, so that could work. Another option would be the second city Teotihucan, lots of food, very safe, going to give tiles to the capital.

Mardoc, I second the praise on the map, I really like it.

[GermanJoey]

Man, I really don't like RMOG's second city. I'm not sure what the optimal city placement is, I'm not 100% sure of my setup but I haven't been convinced by anyone else's arguments either. But even if I don't know what is right, that spot has to be wrong. Picking up a single dry rice as a power resource? At the very least go 1S for the 2h plant.

Yeah, that one is pretty odd, especially considering they could have at least gotten the dry corn visible in the starting screenshot...

What do y'all think of Sulla/Scooter's settling decision? I haven't simmed it out, but I think the switcheroo is a pretty intriguing idea. They'll have what, 11fpt, with the 3 resource tiles? (once the rice is also irrigated) That's pretty good for Sac Altar whips, 1f better than the wetcorn/pig/oasis of the 1E of oasis spot. Funneling five forests into the capital's Bureaucracy bonus is also pretty good. It does give up a little in the short term, though, with the forested iron being unavailable until T6. The city will also be weaker at size 2, gaining only 8fpt instead of 9fpt, which will actually make a difference if they're whipping as much as they should be.

Gaining the SIP-capital-spot as their second city is also very nice, as that's a pretty strong spot.

I still hate seeing Sulla chop so much into workers, arghh...

[GermanJoey]

I'm not sure. Do we want the NE city to have a levee? I don't think it's necessary, the NE should be setup before Steam Power. The city should have powerful food and be able to share it's BFC out to other cities once it starts working specs. Banana and rice would be good if it could be set up in time. Both resources being jungled made other spots look more tempting to me. Texcoco probably wants to give a bunch of tiles to the coastal city to build ships, so that could work. Another option would be the second city Teotihucan, lots of food, very safe, going to give tiles to the capital.

Hmmmm... I hadn't even been thinking about a levee, just moreso that the Aztecs want to be in slavery and thus their NE would want to be in a city that could be very productive early in the game to get a lot of infrastructure up. Three more questions: 1.) how soon can one afford to get their NE up and running, 2.) how much will one expect to be in Caste later, and 3.) should the NE be planned to take advantage of National Park? If, for example, the answer to 1 is "ASAP", the answer to 2 is "not much much," and the answer to 3 is "yes, if we can," then I think that a very important consideration is to use a city that is online early, because the city will need to invest many hammers (e.g. whipped hard and early) to get buildings for specialist slots and the two national wonders. OTOH, if the answer to 3 is a resounding "yes!!!!" and the answer to 1 is "not necessarily ASAP" (for example, if the marble won't be improved for awhile) then somewhere in that high-food jungle-infested area would be awesome. If 2 will be "all the time by the end of the first GA", then the NE just needs 100 hammers for the NE and could thus pretty much go anywhere that there's food available.

I've gotta say, the way the jungle on this map is laid out is a really brilliant touch. It doesn't limit the players in the very early game nor does it affect the potential of their late game empires, but instead works to make the mid-game sooooo much trickier (i.e. interesting!) to plan around, which is just perfect for a late-era start like this!!

[The Black Sword]

What do y'all think of Sulla/Scooter's settling decision? I haven't simmed it out, but I think the switcheroo is a pretty intriguing idea

I'm not sure. I would likely go for the SIP capital because I really value the super cap. But 3 extra forests is pretty tempting. Still, the best thing to chop into is settlers and the extra 15h from the bureau chop has less relative value there for an Imp civ(a normal city only needs 8-9 base hammers to make it up). You can just run 50% culture to get the iron in 1 turn though, no need to give it up.

I still hate seeing Sulla chop so much into workers, arghh...

Yeah, I ran a quick sim with their strategy this morning and got the settler on T196 with 4 workers(cutting 3t from their date).

The National Park is a good point regarding the NE. I think that makes me favour your double banana, rice spot. Can even steal the deer to funnel more power through it. It should be fine to settle as the 6th city instead of Calix? It's probably more productive than Calix tbh. Could even go instead of Tlaxcala, which is a bit awkward to set up...

[Mardoc]

Yep, jungle is a much more viable tool for a mapmaker when they all start with Iron Working. It's much less binary. Ancient era jungle is a total disqualifier, you simply can't use the tile, but in a late start, it's just a delay/worker turn sink. Well, and an army delayer; should need advance worker support to hit anyone with knights/cataphracts early. I thought about using forests that way, but the side effect of the significant hammer boost skews things.

I definitely wanted to be sure that the jungle wouldn't spread somewhere important while they were still all on just a handful of workers, but once they're past that stage it seemed fair to include oodles of it. Same general philosophy as mapmaking in general, really: the most important factor should be the players and their decisions; the map needs to have less variance than the players so that the game is about them and not about me.

[GermanJoey]

The National Park is a good point regarding the NE. I think that makes me favour your double banana, rice spot. Can even steal the deer to funnel more power through it. It should be fine to settle as the 6th city instead of Calix? It's probably more productive than Calix tbh. Could even go instead of Tlaxcala, which is a bit awkward to set up...

Oh man, speaking of the deer, what about this: 4S of the iron. In BFC: 2 grass deer, 1 jungled deer (and camps don't remove jungle, unlike farms and plantations!), grass hill iron, 2 hills... and a total of NINE jungle tiles and a forest! The main appeal of this city is that it could be an adequate (if perhaps not the absolute best) NE city while still having the ability to transform into an utterly insane one at Biology. The main problem with this spot is that, by the time it is discovered, it'll likely that it'll be blocked by a city claiming one (or both) of the grass deer, and alternatives that aren't on this exact tile either have far less food or far less jungle in their BFCs.

1NE of the capital-area's wet corn is also an idea, as that spot will pick up 6 jungles and 3 forests and gain 11fpt at size 3 with a farm on the floodplain, and could allow you to put hammers into the NE early since it also grabs the marble-first ring. The big downside is that this spot has far worse natural production... although I guess maybe extra worker labor dedicated to building workshops only to bulldoze them later could make up for that.

Both spots are wastes of good levee cities, unfortunately... although I guess if you're getting Biology, you're probably getting Steam Power late?

[GermanJoey]

whoa, RMOG ate an extra turn of anarchy for HR and OR? that's not gonna be worth it...

[The Black Sword]

Getting into HR could be the right move, waiting 60t or throwing a premature golden age both have their negatives. But you might as well use that revolt turn when the first settler is moving and a couple of workers are out.

Regarding the NE, the thing I like about the banana spot is that it's not a levee site, only two of the jungle are riverside. I don't mind not working some grass tiles until Bio but ignoring riverside, probably levee-able ones? Not sure about delaying Steam Power so long too, there are a lot of rivers on this map. The exception of course being whoever chases Communism/Physics(Al?).

[OT4E]

If you can switch 3 civics in 1 turn, I'd try to start with:
-bureau
-slavery
-merc
Then whip workers and revolt again on T6 to:
-heredatory
-serfdorm
-org. rel

Not sure that Serfdorm worth it in normal speed though.