[SPOILERS] scooter's PB53

[superdeath]

[scooter]

Starting techs for reference.

Vikings: Fishing/Hunting
Ethiopia: Hunting/Mining
China: Agri/Mining
Mongolia: Hunting/Wheel
America: Agri/Fishing

Quick react: this feels like Wang Kon or Pacal of China. Ethiopia is on the table here too thanks to the reduced Agriculture costs, and the fact that Hunting is an important tech for me here too. Virtually every single land tile is green… Not a single plains tile except for the obligatory starting plains hill tile. I just don’t see how I can not take Financial with this juicy river, all this cottage cheese land, and the visible coast in both directions. It looks like we’ve got a fairly custom map that’s super lush. I also just learned yesterday (!) that in CTH, Slavery is not nerfed. For some reason I thought Slavery was 30/20/20 style just like RtR. It looks like that was discussed in the CTH thread, so maybe that’s where I got that idea from.


That means I’m more than a little bit tempted to start with a Mining civ, bite the bullet and buy Bronze Working, and be in Slavery on T1. Due to the ability to buy a worker, I can have wet corn farmed in a few turns and immediately start a whip cycle. I’ll test it and see if it’s viable. I’m also more than a bit tempted to just…. Use all 500 of my points placing 5 cities at 100 points/pop and see what happens. That would require risking some poor city placements by placing cities in partially fogged land, but I’m curious how effective it would be. The other tempting thought in my head is taking Pacal, purchasing Pottery, and getting a super fast Granary to whip like crazy. The very weak pre-Calendar happy situation is a bit of a Slavery limitation.

[Charriu]

Yes it's slavery as you know it. I still might introduce the slavery nerf in a later version, but not here.

[sunrise089]

Question: how does the AdvStart cost of a worker compare to a bought food improvement?

Quibble: maybe RB pitboss consensus has been lots of pre-calendar happy, but I can't get on board with one happy being 'very weak' since by association that suggests 'normal' happy is three resources. I could get behind the ele being vanilla 'weak' though

[scooter]

Question: how does the AdvStart cost of a worker compare to a bought food improvement?

Buying the improvement is justifiable on water because a work boat is a one-time use thing. On land though, improvements seemingly suck. A farm is 30 gold, while a worker is 60 gold. The worker can build the farm along with countless other things indefinitely. Granted, the farm is in this case online immediately versus a worker that takes, say, a turn to move into place and then a few more turns to build the farm, plus the opportunity cost of 30 gold. Still, I don't imagine that little bit of early snowball works because you're just going to use that slightly earlier snowball to... build the worker you don't have. Roads are 12 gold, but that's more like something you might do if you have some spare change at the end and can't afford anything else.

Quibble: maybe RB pitboss consensus has been lots of pre-calendar happy, but I can't get on board with one happy being 'very weak' since by association that suggests 'normal' happy is three resources. I could get behind the ele being vanilla 'weak' though

Well, I'm referring more to the happy cap in relation to the land. This land is incredibly high in food, which implies growing taller, but the start won't be able to afford to do so (or whip frequently) pre-Calendar. Ivory is a pretty weak happy too, because Camping it still doesn't make it uber, and it's worth only 1 happy until Markets. A silver even would be miles better because it greatly boosts your tech rate, and it doubles at forges and is more quickly accessible than Calendar. Also, I'm not talking about 1 happy in the capital's BFC (which is all starting screenshots usually show), I'm talking 1 happy in my first 4 cities.


Now, I will note that I didn't say horrible. I only point this out because I will claim my PB5 start as being the worst start of all time relative to happiness because there were 0 within 25+ tiles of my start thanks to a bug in the Big & Small map script. Careful what you wish for when you ask for a randomly rolled unedited map.

[scooter]

Are we cool if I start doing some map complaining already?


So, Superdeath confirmed a lot more of the map settings than I expected in the main thread, which is fine. Namely, he confirmed we're playing on a Wheel map script. Default wrap for that is flat, and I think that's what we're playing, but I'm not certain. Anyway, Wheel map is roughly like this:





With 6 players, it'll do one in each corner, and one in top mid and bottom mid. Of course, we can assume this is probably pretty edited, but the important thing here is I already know I'm in the top middle position. That's because you can see the top edge of the map in my starting screenshot.





Normally I would have visibility of 3 additional tiles in the north, but I can't, because they don't exist. The reason this sucks? I more or less have to place a city on the plains hill because passing it up is bad, but this orphans a minimum of 5 coast tiles, which are really valuable early for a FIN player, which I'll likely be taking. SIP means the only north coast spot that is a valid settling location is the hill 1S of the crabs. Everything else is too close to the capital, and of course there are peaks east, invalidating even more.



On a different note, I thought I'd do a check to ask the question, why not just spend all 500 points on settling 5 cities?






Oh. 30% break-even tech for a cool 5 beakers per turn. Let's not.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Idk how much workers cost, but remove Xian and Nanjing and you can be off to a roaring start?

[scooter]

Idk how much workers cost, but remove Xian and Nanjing and you can be off to a roaring start?

Ironically enough, that was my very next test. Surprisingly, on expansion the two do fairly similarly. The 5 cities may even be slightly faster. The 3 city start definitely gets more beakers though.


I think I'll have my leader and civ locked down tomorrow. Just need to experiment a little more, and I'm there.

[superdeath]

[scooter]

I choose Wang Kong of China.