[SPOILERS] Barteq and his small, poor and sad little world

[Barteq]

I will only make a short notice about turn 0 now.
I must do next turn ASAP and don't have a much time, cause I lost 2,5h on learning how to put a screenshot in a post without using attachment files (I was looking a wrong way first and have some problems with using a dropbox later).

Screen after moving my scout north and setting-up my first city as planned:

Not even a single new resource at sight .

[Darkringer]

There's still a few unrevealed tiles yet mate, there may still be something worthwhile up north to make that site appealing. If not, it may not have priority, but maybe settling there with all those lake tiles may be a decent idea anyway... I'm jumping ahead of myself, forgive me.

Those lions, while revealing a couple of interesting things, may have potentially just shown us potential spots for the other civs to take. As you said, you're relatively far away from both spots, so ultimately there's a very strong chance that someone else is closer to those spots than you are. My suggestion is to ignore those spots and focus more on your immediate area to start with.

I can't tell from the screenshot, but I do have a few minor questions to pose to you:

- Is the Capital working the Deer tile? I think that's the best option for a Worker start. Worker should come out a little quicker than normal since you settled on the Sugar.
- How long is it until the Worker finishes? My calculations say 10 turns from now, though I may have got that wrong...
- Do you have a plan of where to move the Scout turn 1? If not, I'd be tempted to try and move onto a hill next turn: More revealed tiles and shows more of the immediate area.
- Are Barbarians on? Might make a Warrior after this Worker tempting.

I recall you mentioning that people had various starting techs that intrigued you. Do you think you could post up the Demographics screen next chance you get? I want to check something to see if what you said was true. Nothing major, but at the very least, it would allow me to see if everyone does have varying starts.

Not seeing anything wrong here so far mate, keep it up!



EDIT: I have a spare five minutes, I thought I'd try my hand at seeing what's going on with the rest of the players with the screenshot you posted so far and what CivStats is showing. There's not really a whole lot to say, but oh well...

I was able to find the CivStats for Pitboss 21, which everyone can find here if you want to see it for yourself.

From what I can tell, everyone settled on turn 0. This means that everyone either settled in place, or moved one tile onto a non-Hill/Forest/Jungle tile before settling. It is certainly a possibility that can't be ruled out entirely. Beyond that however, there's been no significant changes for anyone. No-one increase their score or has done anything that's worrying so far as far as CivStats suggests. That'll likely change at about Turn #6 when the first round of techs, if any, will come in.

As per this edit, it's currently at turn #2 and Azza, GermanJojo, Retep and Ataturk have played and finished their turn, with suttree currently in the process of playing it.

I have one question however that I've just considered. Having a Jungle Sugar on the tile the Settler is initially standing on seems more like a map edit more than something that's naturally there, considering there's no immediate jungle near your start. So I'm wondering, do you think everyone got a Jungle Sugar tile at their start, regardless of their position on the map? It'll make for a strong opening for those who settled on it, no doubts about that... But the question from that is, did everyone settle on it? Naturally you did, Barteq, and I think it might be safe to say that those who also didn't find alternative starting locations also did so. Hmm...

Well, maybe the Crop Yield under Demographics might tell us the answer to that.

[Barteq]

Draft - part 2

Second choice - nation.
First thing that determined my choice was starting techs. Here is my short review on them, accordingly to my starting position:
1) Hunting - cheap but most important for me, when looking on the available recources. Deer, furs and on the path to animal husbandry - it's all that my capital will need for a quick start. Scout bonus is a very good addition too.
2) Mining - always very importent tech on start, cause is needed to bronz working (which is definitivly the most importent early technology in most of the games).
3) The Wheel - I was assuming, that my capital want be near river, so I need this tech quickly to attasch it to the trade network. Expensive.
4) Mysticism - expensive and could give me one of the early religions and additionally, my leader isn't creative.
5) Agriculture - cheap and unneeded to my capital. Two small pluses - additional bonus to animal with hunting and quite strong probability to finding some corn or wheat nearby (I spotted only one potential water tile on my starting screen - end of the river on southeast).
6) Fishing - two short notes - only one potential river tile as mention and I was planning to my my scout north. Completely expendable for me on the start.

I made two assumptions then (after tests).
1) Having at least one of two best techs (hunting or mining) on the start is essential for me (quick expantion, copper, etc.).
2) No fishing on the start - it should be useless to me for a long time.

Best set for me would be of course hunting/mining, but my tests shows, that I can do quite good with others, fullfilling my assumptions (hunting/wheel, hunting/mistycism, hunting/agriculture, mining/wheel, mining/mistycism, mining/agriculture).
So I decided to find the best in both of my groups, compare them (giving a small bonus to the first group) and choose one.

In first group all choices was available and in second only China was taken.
A) Ethiopia, Germany, Khmer, Russia
B) Aztec, Celts, HRE, India, Korea, Mali, Maya, Mongolia, Persia, Zulu

In group A my best picks are 1 Russia 2 Khmer 3 Germany 4 Ethiopia (short notice about Germany - I prefer other technology tree - draft of rifles over building grenadiers manually; Ethiopia is on a very similar level for me).
In group B it's much harder to make a rank. Zulu is my numer one and with second I would have a big headache if I would be forced to make a one choice. India is great, but rather needs a worker production bonus now. Aztecs have very good UB on a rich maps, but I completly don't see any synergy with my leader (rather incompatibility), Celts are good for fun, Mali nerfed a little bit, HRE has great UB, but organized leader would be a better pick for tchem, Korea, Maya, Mongolia, Persia are okay, but nothing special (I wrote Persia as my 3 choice, but I'm not so sure about it - maybe Mali, maybe HRE, maybe Khmer - I'm glad, that I'm mustn't took this choice ).

So I was left with a two possibilities - Russia and Zulu.

Russia
starting techs - best match for me.
UU - very good, but late; bonus against another mounted unit is really good in many situation (especially, when you are attacking weaker player with knights or elephants and lot of catapults, cause is much harderer to fihish off wounded units.
UB - boosted really nicely, but still coming quite late.

Zulu
starting techs - good, but nothing more.
UU - unuseful change, if you are attacking early, than you are normally do it with chariots or axes, not spears (spear is really rarely used to attacking and mostly against chariots, where this promotion isn't normally needed. Maybe it could be usefull against horse archers attach, but you wane see it often.
UB - one of the best buildings on the larger maps and on the maps with higher level of costs - both condition are fulfilled. Very quick, quite cheap and usefull during entire game.

Why I choose Zulu after all - answer is simple - only for UB and one factor was decisive - emperor level of costs. On higher levels of game, costs can eat you alive (if you expand to quickly). Financial trait likes bigger cities and charismatic should help with that, so that will generate a lot amount of costs on this level. And here I will get help from ithanda - this building should allow me to build one or two cities more at early stages. With Russia I will get quicker start, but with Zulu, I should easly make up for it, thanks to the Zulu's UB.

[Barteq]

Quick review about turn 1.

Better, much better. 2 new sources of food .
I will move my scout around to find a good place for a second city.

[Darkringer]

Dat Wheat tile! If only we saw it before settling, with Agriculture, that would make a cracking food start 2 North from the Sugar tile... Deer, Sheep, Sugar and WheatGranted, you'd be sacrificing some other solid tiles in the process, which would be the trade-off. Forests for example.

Regardless of that, having Food available like this is a very good thing. Plenty of options available. Like you said however, more needs to be uncovered before a second city site can be planned. But as things stand now, it's looking good on that front.

Reading your Draft post, I agree with most of what you said there, especially with Fishing. But I do have one minor issue that I'm not quite so sure about, and that is the Zulu's Unique Barracks building. I think you may be putting a bit more credit to this building than may be warranted. I won't deny that maintenance costs will spike up in time, and the 20% reduction to it would be most beneficial. I won't deny it and I agree that it's strong in that regard. But I'm not quite so convinced that it's such a strong option when it comes to early on while you're expanding to about 4-5 cities, when maintenance for each city is only about 2-3 Gold. After all, taking 20% off the maintenance of 2-3 Gold, is still 2-3 Gold when you round up for that city. I'll admit that I've not played as the Zulu's, and thus have not witnessed the Ikhanda in action, so I'm probably just spewing hot air about it. That and I've been told that the first tech to go for to recover somewhat from crippling maintenance costs is Currency. Once the turns rack up and the maintenance starts spiking up to about 10 Gold per turn, then the maintenance reduction will play a much bigger role and I agree that building all the Ikhanda's is the way to do it. Early on though... Well, I dunno. I don't think it impacts it that much. So long as the starting cities are compact and mostly around the Capital, maintenance won't hurt that badly. I don't know the precise formula for how maintenance costs is calculated, but I do know distance from the Capital is one factor. The further away from the Capital you plant, the bigger the costs.

Well, as I say, there's only one true way to find out if the Ikhanda will make an impact in this game! Roll on the later turns!

CivStats has shown nothing different from what I said yesterday. Baby steps!

[SevenSpirits]

Darkringer, do you know that you get a +1f bonus from settling on the sugar? It's really strong.

[Darkringer]

I am indeed aware of that, and I did mention that at one point... I think... If I didn't, I should've done. But, you DO miss out on being able to improve it later on after Calender for +1 Commerce along with the +1 Food. Is that worth moving off the Sugar tile? ... Well, it depends on if you're planning for a short or long game, in my opinion. I wager quite a few people are probably shaking their heads and calling me a newb at the point of me saying that. Then again, I'm not the one playing this game, so what do I know? Barteq settled on it, and I trust his judgement. That said, I still think it's a missed opportunity in a way. Will it cost Barteq not being near that Wheat resource from the start? I somewhat doubt it, but it's still a shame nonetheless consider he has Agriculture as a starting tech. Regardless, that doesn't mean he can't settle near it later with his upcoming Settler(s). Just means he doesn't have to take some time to research it to improve it.

The one thing I positively don't know however, is whether you get the +1 Happy pre/post-Calender by settling on it... I know you get Bronze/Iron resource by settling directly on them without improvements, does the same thing apply to health/happy resources? ... I'll have to try that sometime.

In an attempt to not hijack this thread, the turn has still yet to roll over to turn #3 yet, and there's been no changes to score. Everything is proceeding uneventfully so far, which sounds good to me. I do wonder though, Barteq, do you ever think about what the other players may be doing while waiting to play the next turn?

[Commodore]

All resources settled by a city/fort are hooked up once the enabling tech comes.

The way I look at settling on a sugar is it is replacing a 4/0/1 tile much later with a 3/1/1 tile now. Basically, always worth it at first and *can* be worthwhile even after Calendar/IW. Got to always take city tile yield into account; it's why settling on desert is nice. 4-food sugar ain't all that impressive.

Unless you're playing 7mod's newly invented farming trait, I guess.

[Barteq]

But I'm not quite so convinced that it's such a strong option when it comes to early on while you're expanding to about 4-5 cities, when maintenance for each city is only about 2-3 Gold. After all, taking 20% off the maintenance of 2-3 Gold, is still 2-3 Gold when you round up for that city.

I show you on simple example, how rounding in civ4 works. Let's say:
City without ithanda costs 3,5 - so you're paying 3/pt
Same city with ithanda costs 3,5-3,5*0,2=2,8 - you're paying 2/pt now

So, when city costs are lower than 5, than Zulu UB sometimes will save you 1 gold and sometimes nothing.

Early on though... Well, I dunno. I don't think it impacts it that much. So long as the starting cities are compact and mostly around the Capital, maintenance won't hurt that badly.

I make a quick test. I start with 5 cities and without UB costs are 31/pt to 27/pt with.
Now I show you two pictures:

7 cities without UB:


47/pt with.

8 cities with UB:


Every city on start always give at least 1 gold, so I can easly say it's even. Additionally, all cities are near capital.
If you will expand without any major problems, than having 10 cities before currency isn't a big problem .

Small spoiler on PB20:

As you can see in Lord Parkin threat, in turn 75 two players have 9 cities and one has 8 - everyone should be before currency - on math level.

So quite early you can get one city for free thanks to ithanda .

PS I was thinking about Zulu UU and I think it's nerfed too much. Impi should get more practical bonus - maybe one promotion to combat (10% or 25% against one unit) or maybe flanking .

[Barteq]

Current situation:

Next 2 food resources shows up and very interesting location for my second city .
It isn't only possibility (e.g. I could use 2 others spots to have 2 food resources in first city ring), so I will move my scout there, to check a surroundings.

PS I will write about my capital, when I make a screen from inside first.