Micromanagement Sims/Planning

[uberfish]

Instinct says 1NE here.

- The plains hill 1S2W looks like a useful potential city site to leave open
- 1N gives up 4 river tiles compared to settle-in-place and 1NE
- 2N loses all FP and has only 4 river tiles to work with

If we're thinking about pottery, then settling in place and dropping 4 FP cottages deserves some consideration. That might not be much slower to BW than a direct beeline.

[Lord Parkin]

Here's a working sandbox with all the correct tech costs.

Working Sandbox: T0 Save File

[darrelljs]

Don't let "wasting" EXP lead to a bad decision...we'll get plenty of use out of the trait beyond the first Worker. Settling the Banana gets +1F, correct? That means after the Worker comes out fast, we are also at +4F with 2H to boot.

Darrell

[Lord Parkin]

Let's make a game out of this! Beat the previous person... if you can!

Here's my first go. Save at T32 as well as T0 attached below.

I suggest we all standardize our reports to make it easier to compare them. Feel free to use my format below. Play to exactly T32 (no more, no less) if you want to compare with my results here.

Option 1 - "Striking the Motherlode"

Simmed: To T32

Settle: Banana

Tech: Pottery (T12) -> Mining (T21) -> Bronze Working (T33)

Build: Worker (T10) -> Warrior (T18) -> Warrior (T24) -> Worker (T29) -> Settler (T36)

Worker 1: Corn (T14) -> flood plain cottage (T20) -> flood plain cottage (T25) -> plains river cottage (T29) -> road/prebuild cottage (T31) -> move to grass-forest (T32)
Worker 2: plains hill river mine (T33)

Citizen 1: plains-forest-hill (T0-T9) -> deer (T10-13) -> Corn (T14-)
Citizen 2: deer (T15-32) -> plains hill river mine (T33-)
Citizen 3: flood plain (T18-19) -> flood plain cottage (T20-)
Citizen 4: flood plain (T21-22) -> plains-forest-hill (T23-28) -> plains river cottage (T29-)
Citizen 5: flood plain (T24) -> flood plain cottage (T25-)

Comments:
- Don't need a second Worker for a little while with this start due to delayed Bronze Working.
- Triple Financial cottages extremely early on = VERY yummy! Seems a good move with tech costs so high as well... we don't want to be dragging along with nothing new to build for ages. Remember tech costs are ALMOST TWICE normal.
- Seems best to grow ASAP to size 5 (reaching on T24) and build Workers/Settlers after that. Could build Worker/Settler starting at size 3 (T18), but seems suboptimal for this option when 6 more turns = size 5 (and more cottages worked).
- Can get Bronze Working a turn earlier if work a 1 commerce river tile for 1 turn (instead of plains-hill-forest or deer), though doesn't speed up Settler with this particular build order.
- With 2-3 Warriors at home we shouldn't be too vulnerable to potential pillagers.
- Should be hooking up Copper around or before T40, assuming it's nearby.

Picture:

T32 Save File

T0 Save File

[waterbat]

Not surprisingly, I couldnt do any better.

That extra food in the cap really speeds things along in the beginning.

Double worker start doesnt work.

Also tried Hunting to get the Deer improved earlier, but at 8T to research, its hard to make up for that delay with anything meaningful - not when we could be working 3f2c plains for all 8 of those turns. I guess 1 scout (instead of one of the warriors you built) to explore / meet other civs faster isnt worth it either.

i havent played a serious game on Normal or without Fast Workers for that matter - its hard to remember that the workers can't move 3 squares - i did a lot of reloading.

[Lord Parkin]

EDIT: Attached image above.

How do we want to go about images? I'm not sure I want to use my usual Photobucket account, which a large number of people (including those on other teams) know about and could easily navigate to if they wished.

[Ruff_Hi]

someone suggested dropbox. I think that would enable auto-sharing with everyone, won't it. If we go that route, we should set up explicit folders for screenshots (ie stats, F1, F4, etc).

[Sullla]

You can always create a new account that people don't know about. For my Dropbox account, I can simply create a new subfolder, where guessing the URL will be nearly impossible to pull off.

That's a very interesting starting approach from Parkin. Normally going Pottery before Mining/Bronze Working would be an extremely poor decision, but it feels decently strong here. I also believe that the bananas start is the best initial tile; I'll try to experiment with some alternate builds and research paths and see if I can do better.

[Lord Parkin]

Okay, a little confused on the dropbox thing. Is the folder with the files supposed to go in the default directory, or inside the folder marked "public"? I got the following link, but it doesn't seem to convert to an image when I use [ img ] tags... suggestions?

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I don't like BW first, there are barely any forests to chop if settled in place or 1N, and whips convert 22-28F into 30h. And then there is the opportunity cost that whipped citizens no longer contribute yield to our empire.

The more I look at it, the more my instincts tell me to settle on the bananas. Farmed, they're +2F, but it's going to take a long time before we work it over other tiles like floodplain cottages. 1N gives +1F forever, and gives us a +7F surplus the moment the corn is farmed. And while building the worker, we get the EXP bonus for the first 5 turns, and can switch to the deer for no change in foodhammer yield.

Let me try simming us growing to size before starting a settler, working 6/0/0 corn, 3/1/0 deer, and two 3/0/3 cottages. I don't like the idea of growing to size 5, as that last citizen doesn't contribute bonus yield to our settler bonus, but who knows, maybe the timing works out well.

Finally, a city situated between the deer and the plains cows would be a nice worker pump, making 15 foodhammers/turn, letting us 4-turn workers.