[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

So far this looks like a great map for Spiritual leaders

yes it does.... yes it does, yes it does. FIN would have helped a significant number of these windmills too in serfdom as they're mostly riverside.... but it wouldn't be helping at all right now in what is turning out to be a pretty tech-gated opening. We'll see... as of now I don't have major regrets about our picks. I might have tried Saladin of Celts had we seen this much of the land in advance, but in an opening where we really need every beaker we can get our hands on to not get gated, I just don't see how we could have made the tech situation work even if all we needed was the one extra research, let alone if we had tried for a religion...

is.....is it normal when picking a mysticism civ to have to delay BW or AH for so long that your snowball is impacted? or is this start unusual in requiring 3 different techs to get the capital food up?

[aetryn]

So far this looks like a great map for Spiritual leaders

yes it does.... yes it does, yes it does. FIN would have helped a significant number of these windmills too in serfdom as they're mostly riverside.... but it wouldn't be helping at all right now in what is turning out to be a pretty tech-gated opening. We'll see... as of now I don't have major regrets about our picks. I might have tried Saladin of Celts had we seen this much of the land in advance, but in an opening where we really need every beaker we can get our hands on to not get gated, I just don't see how we could have made the tech situation work even if all we needed was the one extra research, let alone if we had tried for a religion...

is.....is it normal when picking a mysticism civ to have to delay BW or AH for so long that your snowball is impacted? or is this start unusual in requiring 3 different techs to get the capital food up?

It's a bit unusual - or at least not always something that happens - to need this many food techs, just for the capital. My last opening all I needed was Fishing and Agriculture, though my first expansion wanted Animal Husbandry.

I'd also say that most people feel okay defending if they have either horse or copper connected and don't feel they absolutely have to have both immediately. And in fact some maps/mapmakers will not actually give you both immediately anyway - you might have to settle moderately far for one of those two resources.  If you take a Mysticism civ you pretty much accept that you're not going to have both for a bit just for tech reasons.

There's no guarantee even on this map that we'll have a rational settlement pattern that gets us both horses and copper in our first three cities.

[ljubljana]

right.... i do not feel that we need fast horses and probably won't prioritize it as much as copper. WC rush seems significantly more plausible given the distances involved than axes, plus axes should be sufficient to defend against axes anyways, plus impi is the unit we'd want to enforce some notion of power projection towards winning border settlement races. horsies would be nice to have too but more just because it's a strong tile and we don't have too many of those....

here's a more settler-optimized version of the earlier t60 micro plan



what do you think, does 7 cities on turn 65 cross the line into "impede our ability to get to currency by so much that it's counterproductive"? you can see i've rushed there as quickly as possible, skipping even mysticism for now - in SP i'd probably pop bulawayo's borders with chop into double-whipped library at some point, or just not bother until after currency (it has 4 fine tiles with the plains river cottage and that's the happy cap). with PRO trade routes, AGG ikhandas up everywhere already, and every city on 2-3 riverside cottages it doesn't seem too too bad? but at this rate ETA on currency is still like turn 92....

[aetryn]

right.... i do not feel that we need fast horses and probably won't prioritize it as much as copper. WC rush seems significantly more plausible given the distances involved than axes, plus axes should be sufficient to defend against axes anyways, plus impi is the unit we'd want to enforce some notion of power projection towards winning border settlement races. horsies would be nice to have too but more just because it's a strong tile and we don't have too many of those....

here's a more settler-optimized version of the earlier t60 micro plan



what do you think, does 7 cities on turn 65 cross the line into "impede our ability to get to currency by so much that it's counterproductive"? you can see i've rushed there as quickly as possible, skipping even mysticism for now - in SP i'd probably pop bulawayo's borders with chop into double-whipped library at some point, or just not bother until after currency (it has 4 fine tiles with the plains river cottage and that's the happy cap). with PRO trade routes, AGG ikhandas up everywhere already, and every city on 2-3 riverside cottages it doesn't seem too too bad? but at this rate ETA on currency is still like turn 92....

How many workers is that at that point? I don't know what the consensus is, but for the first 7 or so cities I like to have at least one / city. So I'd like to have at least 4-5 workers by that point, and I can only see 3 in your screenshot. Also don't really like the capital at size 2 at this stage of the game and building a settler at that size - especially as you have unworked cottages.

As for expansion speed, it has to be a balance. It's fairly normal to somewhat crash your economy on the way to Currency, but what % of science are you running here? Obviously some of these cities will actually be better because they will have bonus tiles we can't see yet, so it's hard to get a real good sense. For sure grab any city that is a) contested, or b) going to be a fast turnaround to aiding and not draining the empire.  Backline borderline cities are probably not worth settling in the initial push if they take a long time to pay off - there will be plenty of time to settle those later. It's normal to continue to settle cities after Currency, after Code of Laws, after Civil Service allows irrigation, and heck, even after Biology since some city sites are just bad until you can irrigate freely.

[ljubljana]

it's hard to see but yeah there are indeed 4 - the last one is under the interface 1N of Bulawayo. the capital's at that size because it just whipped the settler..... it definitely might be better to just not have whipped it or to have slow-built a worker at size 3 instead also third city in this sim stole the capital's wheat full-time, hopefully there's other food in the fog to make that not necessary in the real game. science is 70% at breakeven with just these 5 but i didn't play far enough to see how abysmally crashed it gets with the other two new cities

my theory on not having more workers is that most of the cities can only work 4 tiles due to happy while still maintaining an active whip clock.... cities 2 and 3 already have that, bulawayo doesn't but will before it gets to size 4, and the capital is indeed a few cottages short still. maybe another worker at the capital but otherwise i think 6 cities + 5 workers seems reasonable, the workers would mostly fan out to follow the new settlers at this point i think

here's a contrasting turn 50 with the plains hill second city and BW - AH - Wheel tech path:



it's a bit behind cow city, but not so much as to be unviable. one turn slow on the first two granaries and 3 turns slow on the third, the former bc pottery didn't land until t49 and the latter for lack of a first-ring forest. but there were way more wasted worker turns in this one, you can see multiple useless roads at the second city because pottery tech didn't arrive in time for cottages. one advantage of this plan is the eastern cities are much more defensible, but i don't really expect these to be our border cities w the listed inter-player distances

starting to wonder about the feasibility of a REALLY early academy to push our way up to currency

[aetryn]

it's hard to see but yeah there are indeed 4 - the last one is under the interface 1N of Bulawayo. the capital's at that size because it just whipped the settler..... it definitely might be better to just not have whipped it or to have slow-built a worker at size 3 instead also third city in this sim stole the capital's wheat full-time, hopefully there's other food in the fog to make that not necessary in the real game. science is 70% at breakeven with just these 5 but i didn't play far enough to see how abysmally crashed it gets with the other two new cities

my theory on not having more workers is that most of the cities can only work 4 tiles due to happy while still maintaining an active whip clock.... cities 2 and 3 already have that, bulawayo doesn't but will before it gets to size 4, and the capital is indeed a few cottages short still. maybe another worker at the capital but otherwise i think 6 cities + 5 workers seems reasonable, the workers would mostly fan out to follow the new settlers at this point i think

here's a contrasting turn 50 with the plains hill second city and BW - AH - Wheel tech path:



it's a bit behind cow city, but not so much as to be unviable. one turn slow on the first two granaries and 3 turns slow on the third, the former bc pottery didn't land until t49 and the latter for lack of a first-ring forest. but there were way more wasted worker turns in this one, you can see multiple useless roads at the second city because pottery tech didn't arrive in time for cottages. one advantage of this plan is the eastern cities are much more defensible, but i don't really expect these to be our border cities w the listed inter-player distances

starting to wonder about the feasibility of a REALLY early academy to push our way up to currency

Well, hopefully we'll be claiming some happy resources in the first 6 cities that will push our happy cap up to 5 or 6. It's going to be a long slog all game if our cities don't go over size 4.

[ljubljana]

yeah. unless my "whip everything every 10 turns, otherwise stay at the largest size you can without unhappy" approach is incorrect

how bad in your estimation would the happy situation have to be to justify getting monarchy before currency as a PRO civilization? does there exist such a level of badness?

[aetryn]

yeah. unless my "whip everything every 10 turns, otherwise stay at the largest size you can without unhappy" approach is incorrect

how bad in your estimation would the happy situation have to be to justify getting monarchy before currency as a PRO civilization? does there exist such a level of badness?

I think it depends on the quality of the tiles. If you're skimping out on working gold or silver tiles because your happy isn't high enough, that's going to clobber the PRO bonus. But of course gold and silver are both happy resources!

We just have far too incomplete scouting to really know though. We could have a bunch of extra happy resources just to the north or out of sight in the NE river valley.

[ljubljana]

yeah, part of the reason i want to open bronze first so badly is so that all these chops that the sims show as going into "settlers and workers" could also hypothetically go into a capital ikhanda and then a fuckton of impis it soooounds like the distances are set up to make it hard to pull that off, and um, it is pretty much foiled by putting one single axeman in their city (could bring chariots too but then we need to settle for both horses and copper...). but let's see who we neighbor - if other capitals are like ours, it might take anyone who started with mysticism in particular a long time to get going. if that's the case we might have a shot

@aetryn how long does it usually take for opponents to get graphs on us? if the answer is "not long" we'd like to meet opponents in the sweet spot such that by the time they can see such a power spike, it's too late. which is one reason to scout somewhat tightly, to delay contact so nobody is tempted to adapt their build orders based on our presence. i am also a bit worries that turning SE now will elongate the scout's path when i have him turn back east south of the SW mountain range (the current plan), again possibly leading to contact earlier than i'd like if we have to make a big loop south to go around where we already explored. but i may take that suggestion on this particular move, going straight west does seem like it'll get the scout stuck. let me think on it for a minute.....

[aetryn]

yeah, part of the reason i want to open bronze first so badly is so that all these chops that the sims show as going into "settlers and workers" could also hypothetically go into a capital ikhanda and then a fuckton of impis it soooounds like the distances are set up to make it hard to pull that off, and um, it is pretty much foiled by putting one single axeman in their city (could bring chariots too but then we need to settle for both horses and copper...). but let's see who we neighbor - if other capitals are like ours, it might take anyone who started with mysticism in particular a long time to get going. if that's the case we might have a shot

@aetryn how long does it usually take for opponents to get graphs on us? if the answer is "not long" we'd like to meet opponents in the sweet spot such that by the time they can see such a power spike, it's too late. which is one reason to scout somewhat tightly, to delay contact so nobody is tempted to adapt their build orders based on our presence. i am also a bit worries that turning SE now will elongate the scout's path when i have him turn back east south of the SW mountain range (the current plan), again possibly leading to contact earlier than i'd like if we have to make a big loop south to go around where we already explored. but i may take that suggestion on this particular move, going straight west does seem like it'll get the scout stuck. let me think on it for a minute.....

Meeting the neighbors is very important unless you are absolutely determined to surprise rush whoever it is, for Known Tech Bonus, so we can figure out what land is important to settle (suppose the continent comes to an end just to the east out of sight? better not waste a ton of energy settling east when it's not contested) and most importantly so we can adapt our strategy. I'd guess graphs are typically 15t of espionage points away but it's one person at a time, so if we meet someone who's working on someone else's graphs, they may not go for ours first (though if I was next to Zulu I'd probably swap to them, unless my other neighbor was Egypt here).

I'm still pretty sure an early rush under these map conditions is going to be hard to pull off and hard to translate into a good game position even if won. All we really do is cede the border region with our other neighbor to them and the far border of whoever we conquer to their other neighbor, and those players don't have to fight to get the land, just build settlers and claim the land we aren't settling and the person we kill isn't either. We'd almost certainly have to move our capital to a midpoint to avoid ridiculous maintenance penalties. The capital sites would have to be significantly better for that to be worth it - as in like the only place on the entire map with luxuries. I don't expect the game to be that tight - nobody asked for a resource poor map, so I'm pretty sure they will be out there. Sometimes you just strike out on your initial scouting - we've found some decent terrain but not a lot of good bonus tiles yet. If they were a threat to rush us, or a pure econ civ playing an extreme farmer's gambit, sending some Impi to choke but not conquer (basically pillage them and prevent them from improving tiles) might make sense, but we have no way of knowing and remember we pay every turn units aren't in our borders. That's money that could be spent on research instead.


Regarding the scout, we have a decision to make on whether we think the desert continues southwest. If it does, we don't want to waste turns scouting it now and we'd be better off going east and then back around counter-clockwise (which will probably turn up our eastern neighbor, assuming we have one). If the desert ends, we'd like to know what's on those river tiles. Honestly, this is kind of a bad situation either way - turns out counter-clockwise rotation would have been better, but no idea how we were supposed to know that. I lean slightly toward continuing west but if the desert continues keep it tight so we can go north of the line of 3 peaks if it doesn't look like there's anything good south of it - the last thing we want is the scout stuck taking a long way around in a barren land we don't care about.