Our new players have granted us with an interesting game so far and in case of one player an option to compare an OCC game towards a normal play. So let's dive into this T50 report. As always all the data can be found here:
PB61 Tracking
Before we start some notable observations:
- As most already know JesseL played an OCC until T48
- Bing is watching rekenner's performance in Equestrian Dressage at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 PB61 Games 2021
- JackRB stepped on bellarch's toe (or deer) causing a bit of tension between them, but otherwise they developed peacefully
- Joshy isn't reporting that much, but at least by the numbers that I have he's doing very well.
I've once again added quite a bit more data for this and all the following PBs. Look forward to this new stuff, which you will find in the spreadsheet:
Actual gold/science: This works like the previous science and gold tracking, but this time the slider setting is included. Therefore we know exactly how much everybody produced in those areas.
Production and TotalProduction: I thought about how to better judge all the hammer bonuses for buildings, units and wonders and thought that tracking the actual production might be a good metric to track. Unfortuntely my implementation is flawed which is why the TotalProduction is basically useless (wrong consideration of overflow messing up everything) The production metric is somewhat useful though.
Tech Tracking: Similar to wonders and great persons I'm now also tracking when each player researched each tech. Small downside, I'm not tracking which tech the players choose from Oracle or Liberalism and tech tracking. The former should still be easy to guess in the context of other techs researched and the last is only used in diplo games in the past, so I didn't bother so far.
Tracking all the civics: I already tracked the labor civics in use. So why not track all of them.
General state of the game
First of all the city count
- bellarch (IMP) = 4
- JackRB (IMP) = 3
- rekenner (IMP) = 3
- joshybravo693 (IMP) = 3
- vanrober = 3
- JesseL = 2
- BING XI LAO = 2
And here are the current amount of pop across those empires at the T50 mark:
- bellarch (IMP) = 9
- JesseL = 9
- JackRB (IMP) = 8
- rekenner (IMP) = 7
- vanrober = 7
- joshybravo693 (IMP) = 6
- BING XI LAO = 4
Nobody will be surprised to see an IMP player on top of city count, but don't neglect the others. Vanrober for example is just as fast to cities as the other players and even was second to 3 cities. Also keep in mind for the other statistics that JesseL with his OCC is almost at the same pop count as the others.
Like I already said in the beginning I'm also tracking the actual gold and science output of the players. But some additional info is needed. Like in previous PBs the gold number does not include maintenance cost of any kind and the science output does not include KTB and prereq bonuses from other techs. Reason is that I want to compare these numbers to the commerce output to see the effect of modifier buildings and in case of science I want to be able to compare the science output between players and KTB and prereq bonus are a distraction in this case. Both numbers do include extra gold/science from specialists, modifier buildings and other stuff I haven't mentioned so far. These actual numbers are most interesting when we add up all the numbers of each turn. For the current turn and the players potential income the virtual numbers are still more useful. These virtual numbers were my previous tracking and they treated the slider as always being on 100% gold or science. At first I want to look at the current turn numbers of the virtual gold income (all players running 100% gold). Science is basically the same numbers + 1 beaker:
- vanrober (ORG) = 22
- bellarch (FIN) = 21
- JesseL (PRO) = 21
- JackRB (ORG) = 21
- joshybravo693 = 21
- rekenner = 18
- BING XI LAO (FIN) = 15
For the most part we see that all the players are fairly equal in numbers. We already can see that Bing is hurt by the chariot rush from rekenner, who in turn is also not doing quite as good as the others. This will become more apparent if take maintenance into account. FYI info this is the sum of all maintenance factors (city, unit, supply and civic).
- JesseL (PRO) = 2
- JackRB (ORG) = 4
- joshybravo693 = 4
- BING XI LAO (FIN) = 4
- vanrober (ORG) = 5
- rekenner = 8
- bellarch (FIN) = 8
It's no surprise that JesseL with only 2 cities pays less maintenance. Noteworthy in this category is that rekenner is paying the same maintenance as bellarch, who has 1 more city. Rekenner is paying 2 gold in unit maintenance and 2 additional gold in supply cost. Also keep in mind that the players are playing on monarch so ORG doesn't have a big effect in the first 50 turns. With the maintenance at hand we can now include that into the gold income to see how much gold everybody could make this turn:
- JesseL (PRO) = 19
- JackRB (ORG) = 17
- joshybravo693 = 17
- vanrober (ORG) = 17
- bellarch (FIN) = 13
- BING XI LAO (FIN) = 11
- rekenner = 10
We see that the war between Bing and rekenner is hurting both of them. All the others are fairly equal. Of course bellarch is lower in this category since he settled his 4th city in T43. Now let's see how good the player did across the whole span of 50 turns. For this we look at the accumulated science numbers, which I already have described above:
- JackRB (ORG) = 664
- joshybravo693 = 605
- JesseL (PRO) = 598
- BING XI LAO (FIN) = 572
- vanrober (ORG) = 558
- rekenner = 509
- bellarch (FIN) = 486
I was surprised to see bellarch so low in this category. My only explanation for this is that he was more focused on expansion (4th on T43) and he went for Stonehenge, which he got on T50. In other news we see that rekenner is also not doing that well most likely caused by the war preparations. Bing is doing fairly good, but is now stunted by the war. We should see the full extend of the war effect in the T100 report. All others are fairly equal in science even our OCC player JesseL. Reason for that is very simple. The main income for science in the early turns is the palace with it's 8 commerce and JesseL is at least equal in pop count.
But what exactly did the players do with all those beakers. Well fear not here it is:
It should be fairly self explantory. It's all the techs the players have researched so far. The number in front is the turn the players acquired the tech. rekenner has pottery so he should be able to recover from his war efforts unlike his victim Bing. Worth mentioning Bing got Buddhism in T48, but we already knew this from his screenshots. Will religion help him get even on the others? Other then that war the tech path of most players is fairly standard with one exception - JesseL. JesseL already told us his tech path already and he sticked to it. Yes, he hasn't researched bronze working so far and we know he's right now teching sailing. This of course means no slavery and with my new production tracking we can see the effect of this.
But before I turn that I have to explain in more detail how I collected this info for this PB. Keep in mind this will change in future PBs. With this tracking I iterated through every city and added up all the hammers being produced this turn including forest chops and whips. Most importantly this tracking does not handle overflow. So if you produce 4 hammers on a warrior with 14/15 the tool will track 4 hammers and the overflow is not applied to the next turn. Like I already said there are some issues with this and I will only include this statistic for this T50 report, because this early overflow and hammer modifiers isn't that big of a factor with the exception of IMP. This tracking does not include modifiers from stuff like IMP. So you have to imagine that the IMP players output is even higher. Here are the accumulated numbers across 50 turns:
- joshybravo693 (IMP) = 640
- rekenner (IMP) = 596
- bellarch (IMP) = 558
- JackRB (IMP) = 544
- vanrober = 536
- BING XI LAO = 511
- JesseL = 440
And this is why slavery is so important in the early game as are forest chops.
Protective Bonus
PRO is the only economic trait that did something in the early turns, which is why I skipped all the others. For our new players here I'm tracking the extra commerce you would get from the PRO trade bonus. This actually a bit tricky when foreign trade routes come into play later. Imagine this simple scenario you only have trade routes to only player and are PRO. Without foreign trade route your trade route makes 2 commerce. With a foreign trade route you would also get 2 commerce. In this scenario my tracking tool notes 0 extra commerce from PRO, because you would get the same commerce from foreign trade. Of course this gets a lot more complicated with bigger empires and for the most part the player can't know how much extra commerce they made. Therefore I calculate the players trade income two times. Once with the PRO bonus and once without. The delta is the actual benefit you get from the trait.
But like I said this if for later turns. For now it's simple and we look at the accumulated numbers:
- rekenner = 57
- vanrober (ORG) = 44
- JackRB (ORG) = 42
- bellarch (FIN) = 30
- joshybravo693 = 22
- BING XI LAO (FIN) = 12
- JesseL (PRO) = 6
And this is why the OCC strategy is a mistake especially if you are PRO and have that trade bonus. Your second city essentially pays for itself the moment you settle it (and have trade connections)
Misc
I'm tracking a lot more but there is not enough information there to justify an own paragraph. Therefore a little summary here:
- AGG actually did something if rekenner and Bing would have it. But then again the bonus is only 3 for rekenner and 2 for Bing.
- No great persons so far to know ones surprise.
- Stonehenge for bellarch on T50
I'm also tracking the labor civics and therefore can determine, when everybody switched to slavery. These are the times they did.
- vanrober (SPI) = T26
- JackRB = T29
- joshybravo693 = T30
- bellarch = T31
- BING XI LAO = T35
- rekenner = T37
- JesseL = Never
Comparing traits
The main goal of all this tracking of course is to compare the economic traits related around commerce income or maintenance reduction. So let's do this:
As you can see I changed the layout a little bit again in prepation for the new production tracking. I already color coded the 4 economic traits so that you easily see, who uses which trait. Except for FIN every trait has a hammer bonus so I included all of them. But I'm still disappointed in how this looks. I like how the 4 economics traits have light colors that are easy to distinguish. But with 7 more traits I'm running out of these numbers. If anybody has a better idea how to do this I'm all ears.
As for the actual comparison of traits I have to say this is the most boring T50 report so far.
Stay tuned for the T100 report.
