Ranamar and Lewwyn, ministers for Bismarck of Mali

[Lewwyn]

BTW I don't think you really touched on the other half of Bismark that much, the EXP side.

We should really attempt to use our worker build bonus and get out extra workers early when the make the most difference. Be prepared to go worker build first, then use that worker to chop a second worker, as you get bonus hammers from the EXP bonus when you chop into a worker. Depending on who's around you may be best served going Worker>Worker>Warrior for your first 3 builds. Those two workers chopping away will speed your first settler and a 3rd worker.

Tech of course depends on what we see, but I think going BW first for the early chop and faster 2nd worker is nearly the best move in all situations. After that, depends on the food resources that are around. You don't have to worry too much about getting the tech to improve multiple food resources right away if you go worker worker as you'll only be working one tile. It gives you time to tech the worker techs you need for resources.

We should get pottery early too. Cheap granaries will be huge for whipping. We'll want to cycle whips every 6 turns and the earlier you get granaries the better the whips are.

Plenty of time to fiddle with exact micro once the map comes in.

[Ranamar]

I missed a lot of stuff, actually.

workers: As I said before, it always sounds excessive to me, but I know people can find a use for that many workers.

When I actually sit down to think about it, it occurs to me that the right thing to do is almost certainly bronzeworking first (with revolution into slavery), probably pretty quickly followed by pottery for a cheap granary to effectively use the whip. Incidentally, I'm usually a bit squeamish about whipping (sacrificing population! OMGZ!) so you'll want to encourage me, although I might be doing that pretty well right now...

Besides, aside from hunting and animal husbandry, BW and Pottery get you pretty much all the worker techs.

Other things I forgot:
The Colossus becomes available with metalcasting. If we have coast, that's another way to close the gap with financial civs, along with denying them access to it themselves, at the same time. I don't know how I forgot this... maybe it's because I rarely actually end up building it in SP and too often forget the bottom half of the tech tree altogether for awhile.

[Gaspar]

Here is your starting position. Have fun!

[SevenSpirits]

That's a really nice start. Nice enough that improving tiles is very likely to be better than chopping.

Agriculture first is probably best (and build 1-2 workers immediately). We're still missing a bit of information though, which is how expensive techs are. I would recommend looking up the beaker costs of Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, and Bronze Working in-game. It will be important to know how fast we can get two of them (and thus provide enough for our worker(s) to do).

[Lewwyn]

Yeah I'd say agr first in this situation if the tech doesn't take too many turns. If we work the forest plains we're looking at a 7 turn worker with the EXP bonus.

If we go Worker>Worker we can get the first out in 7 turns, farm the corn and get the second worker in 6 turns. (3T at 6hpt, 3T at 8hpt).

Then warrior maybe. Actually...

Can we rush Stonehenge here? 3 chops will give 78 of the 80 hammers. If we go agr>BW we should get BW in time for the worker to start chopping the turn after it finishes the farm. And if we have him mine the forest hill at 5 turns, that'll give us an early mine for the second pop to work. When the second worker moves onto a forest and chops, it will finish the same turn as the mine. T17. Cap will have 20 hammers naturally, 26 from each chop, 72 hammers at the end of turn 17. Cap will be at 2 pop, working corn and mine for 5x2 hammers= 10. 82. Stonehenge complete turn 18.

Of course there's the risk of not building another warrior, but if we circle with our warrior and keep him near home we should be able to avoid having to switch to a warrior build until after Stonehenge.

[Lewwyn]

Yeah ignore the whole Stonehenge part. We don't start with Myst , thats Maya. And its 50% for IND civs not 100% LOL AT ME.

Still 2 workers by turn 13 will be awesome.

[Ranamar]

First thought: wow, we even get a floodplain! (Although, we don't get the 5+ floodplains some of my SP starts have rolled... probably just as well.)

Fortunately, if the first player is playing it late at night, I might not see the save until tomorrow, so we have plenty of time to discuss initial moves.

Now, in no particular order, my thoughts, for you to pick at:

Warrior movement:
move NE first or SE first? Both are hills. I'm thinking NE, because, while it might be in the middle of hills, tile bleed SE shows forests which mean we won't get the extra vision from the hill anyway. Besides, it occurs to me, as I write some of the rest of this post, borders from the first city will reveal anything you can see there immediately, and I can't imagine a reason we'd want to move the settler.

Techs/citybuild/workers:
I don't know tech costs off the top of my head, but I'm pretty certain that we will get our first worker before our first tech, just because I feel like that's generally been the case. Maybe mine one of the hills? The one E of our start can get the worker over to the wheat in one turn, so we could abort and farm the wheat immediately as agriculture comes in. I'll make sure to report on tech cost when I get the save, but that seems like a plan to work from.

Longer term, what do we want to do about the floodplain? It's an obvious next tile to work while we wait for AH (for example) to come in. I'm kind of tempted to farm it now and pave it over later after we've grown. (Part of me wants to put a watermill there eventually, but those rather suck until far later in the game than we'll get.) This city will have lots of food even without it, in the long run once we get the two AH resources online, after all.

So, the plan for the first turn, thus far:
- Move warrior NE.
- Settle in place.
- Set city to build worker and work a 2H tile.
- Look at tech plan costs and report them here. (Agriculture, AH, and BW are important; I'd find Pottery and Mysticism enlightening as well, and total beakers to Archery could be interesting but is not important yet. Might as well write them down.)
- Take screenshots; post them online.

Two Civ usage questions, incidentally:
1) I haven't figure out how, in single-player games, to put those signposts down. How do I do that, and are there any settings I need to turn on?
2) I get the impression there's an in-game way to get screenshots. Should I bother with them, or should I just use print screen?

[SevenSpirits]

Now, in no particular order, my thoughts, for you to pick at:

Warrior movement:
move NE first or SE first? Both are hills. I'm thinking NE, because, while it might be in the middle of hills, tile bleed SE shows forests which mean we won't get the extra vision from the hill anyway. Besides, it occurs to me, as I write some of the rest of this post, borders from the first city will reveal anything you can see there immediately, and I can't imagine a reason we'd want to move the settler.

Yeah, I'd go NE. that reveals a lot.

Techs/citybuild/workers:
I don't know tech costs off the top of my head, but I'm pretty certain that we will get our first worker before our first tech, just because I feel like that's generally been the case. Maybe mine one of the hills? The one E of our start can get the worker over to the wheat in one turn, so we could abort and farm the wheat immediately as agriculture comes in. I'll make sure to report on tech cost when I get the save, but that seems like a plan to work from.

Bronze working would take longer than the worker, but Agriculture doesn't. It's only going to take 5-6 turns. So definitely settle in place, just leave the governor on (it will work the 1/2/0 forest for the expansive bonus), tech agriculture to start off.

Longer term, what do we want to do about the floodplain? It's an obvious next tile to work while we wait for AH (for example) to come in. I'm kind of tempted to farm it now and pave it over later after we've grown. (Part of me wants to put a watermill there eventually, but those rather suck until far later in the game than we'll get.) This city will have lots of food even without it, in the long run once we get the two AH resources online, after all.

Hopefully Animal Husbandry is cheap enough that we can start making pastures right after the corn farm. In this case, we can just leave the FP unimproved for now. (It's much less efficient to improve it compared to the AH resources. It takes 5 worker turns to farm compared to 3 for a pasture, and only has 4/0/1 yield compared to 4/1/2 or 3/3/0.)

So, the plan for the first turn, thus far:
- Move warrior NE.
- Settle in place.
- Set city to build worker and work a 2H tile.
- Look at tech plan costs and report them here. (Agriculture, AH, and BW are important; I'd find Pottery and Mysticism enlightening as well, and total beakers to Archery could be interesting but is not important yet. Might as well write them down.)
- Take screenshots; post them online.

Sounds good!

Two Civ usage questions, incidentally:
1) I haven't figure out how, in single-player games, to put those signposts down. How do I do that, and are there any settings I need to turn on?
2) I get the impression there's an in-game way to get screenshots. Should I bother with them, or should I just use print screen?

1) Alt-S
(if you're on a mac, I don't know)

2) The print screen key takes in-game screenshots, at least for me (windows, full screen mode). These are saved to a folder called "ScreenShots" which is in the same "beyond the sword" folder that your save games are stored in.

[SevenSpirits]

Guess what's fun to micro?

Expansive worker bonus! :2dance:

So here's the deal: +25% hammers is only usually good. When you are overflowing, it is slightly bad. Example:

Our worker is almost complete, 39/40. We produce 6 food and 2 hammers. (The 2 gets multiplied by 1.25 but that doesn't help at all - it rounds down. Then the 6 food gets added.) So now we are done with the worker and have 7 overflow. That 7 gets divided by 1.25 on the way out! Result: 5.6, which gets rounded down to 5. So on that particular turn, the +25% hammers to workers netted us a total of -2 hammers. Doh.

Another example, pertaining to this game: We produce 1f 4h, which is worth 6 towards the worker. In 7 turns we will have produced 42. 2 of it overflows and is divided by 1.25... so we only get 1 overflow. One thing we may wish to do is work a 3/0/1 tile for two of the first 7 turns. This would mean we reach 40 hammers exactly to get 0 overflow instead of 1, but we'd also get 2 commerce. Depending on the tech costs, that commerce might be more important than the hammer. (Allowing us to build a pasture one turn sooner is worth >1 hammer.) We'll see.

[Ranamar]

Moved warrior and settled as described. After that, we got this:



You were right; agriculture is in 6 turns and the worker is in 7. I'm not sure why that doesn't happen in my Quick SP games... maybe it's because I don't necessarily settle on a river, with a random map? *shrug*
As far as overflow management goes, if we decide to do it, we can do it later, and I thought overflow doesn't get the new tech's bonus, which could be an argument for doing it at the end instead of the beginning anyway, so I just threw the citizen on the 1F2H tile.

Anyway, the screenshots I took of the tech screen require some major editing to get stacked together, so you'll see that later. To keep you entertainied in the meantime, here's the demographics for player 3 on turn 0:


I wonder how someone got 21 GNP. We have 16, and I'll have to think harder about how we got that, too.