[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[aetryn]

Think I'd like to see that new river valley so I'd probably go north for now. Plus nearby map info is more important than far away map info. We'll want to go back south at some point but we can probably afford to do that later.

[ljubljana]

turn 21 - zululand

surprise



we have silver in addition to gold! man, with this + marble, industrious could have been a great pick here.... not that we really had any way of knowing that, of course. also, does plains hill silver generate naturally? on the river, it's a comparable tile to desert hill gold, so there's a good chance we find a higher-priority site in this area...

also, it seems to me slightly suspicious that of the 4 happiness resources that don't require significant tech investment, we have 3 here at second-ring sites in immediate range of the capital. for balance reasons, that makes me suspect that these are quite widely distributed..... also note, with 14 tile distance between capitals, both gold AND silver are almost exactly half that distance away from our cap... maybe we can guess that the central desert belt is full of gold, silver/gems are halfway between player capitals, and everyone has either fur or ivory?



at takakeisho, we finish the deer camp - next up for the worker, we will start the ivory while finishing worker 2



we are first in something! i am increasingly surprised that someone is still out there chilling with a size 1 city and 7 crop yield... what on earth kind of opening could that represent? work boat -> fish followed by worker at size 1? is that ever worth doing over growing to size 2 on the fish ASAP?

i'm supposed to move the worker SW-SW outside our borders next turn to defog an extra tile, yes? somewhere in my lizard hindbrain that feels VERY scary to do but of course with a no-barbs game, under the presumption that nobody is scouting with warriors this early, it is probably safe and correct

[aetryn]

Forges looking like a likely building we will need. And yes, that would be a typical mapmaker luxury balance - put a couple early luxuries within range of everyone, possibly competitive but also possibly not, and then also throw some resources in the center for everyone to fight over.

[ljubljana]

i guess that's one thing i didn't really consider when evaluating IND - with only 5 early-game luxes (does that strike anyone else as being significantly fewer than there should be? in civ6 most luxes can be improved with a tier-2 tech at worst), the mapmaker pretty much has to distribute metals much more widely than the map generator tends to, so an IND civ can probably safely assume they'll get access to at least one or two by MC time...

aren't forges, like.... quite bad buildings in most circumstances other than for the happy? 120 hammers that needs 480 hammers of subsequent base production to pay for itself, which equals 16 whipped pop.... i'm guessing for most cities that's at least an 80 turn payback horizon assuming a double-whip every 10 turns. seems slow even by civ6 standards... and in this game workers pay back in as little as 12 turns if you just chop three times with them, and our worker has already generated i think 17 foodhammers towards payback in 5 turns of wheat farm and 1 of deer camp, plus whatever extra we got from hitting size 2 many turns sooner than we would have working an unimproved cow

[Tarkeel]

i guess that's one thing i didn't really consider when evaluating IND - with only 5 early-game luxes (does that strike anyone else as being significantly fewer than there should be? in civ6 most luxes can be improved with a tier-2 tech at worst), the mapmaker pretty much has to distribute metals much more widely than the map generator tends to, so an IND civ can probably safely assume they'll get access to at least one or two by MC time...

Every map-maker has their own way of balancing the luxuries, but it's pretty common to get one hunting and one mining lux. The bigger issue is that even inside those groups they aren't very balanced, with gold being a much better til to work than silver (or furs). There's also the issue of gems sometimes being jungled, delaying their hookup unless you settle on them.

aren't forges, like.... quite bad buildings in most circumstances other than for the happy? 120 hammers that needs 480 hammers of subsequent base production to pay for itself, which equals 16 whipped pop.... i'm guessing for most cities that's at least an 80 turn payback horizon assuming a double-whip every 10 turns. seems slow even by civ6 standards... and in this game workers pay back in as little as 12 turns if you just chop three times with them, and our worker has already generated i think 17 foodhammers towards payback in 5 turns of wheat farm and 1 of deer camp, plus whatever extra we got from hitting size 2 many turns sooner than we would have working an unimproved cow

More or less correct. Forges are not something you should build everywhere, but focused in the larger (for happy) or production-oriented (for the bonus) cities. This is the main reason why INDustrious is a better trait than it seems, as all of your cities can afford to build one, and soon. Don't underestimate the engineer specialist slot either. Comparing them to workers isn't really fair, as those are the best investment you can do, until you hit the soft-cap (run out of work for them) at which point they are much less usefull. Finding the right balance of workers to cities is one of those hard things.

[ljubljana]

Turn 22 - Zululand



silver area is looking exceedingly crappy at this point... enough so that i may skip (for now) defogging the line of what looks like desert 2S of the eastern scout. i do not think even an oasis there would make the spot 1E of the western scout viable unless there are actual food resources to the north. the scouts look close together now (uh, as indeed they are) but we have not defogged any wasted tiles as of yet, and i plan to separate them next turn by sending the western scout 2NW onto that nice-looking (from a scouting perspective) hill, then turning either west or south

takakeisho:



i got over myself and daringly sent our worker into the unknown, revealing....pretty much exactly the blank forest that i expected lol. someone beat us to bronze working by one turn (judging by soldier count), so we will not be first there > in retrospect, i may have mismoved the worker - copper might appear on the grass river 1S of the capital next turn, in which case i will kick myself for not being in position to improve it. i don't really think that's going to happen as it would remove a lot of the strategic depth behind the whole settle-for-copper question, but it could and then my greed for defogging here will be heavily punished

unrelated thought: it's actually entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. in his death all things

[aetryn]

For forges it depends on how long the game runs, and yes, how big the cities are. If the game goes long eventually those hammers will get paid back and then some. If the happy allows you to work 2 extra commerce tiles for a long time, it's worth it. In poor land and in games that seem likely to be decisive early, they're quite poor. I built them everywhere in PB72, but then I had a UB for them (Mali), 2 and sometimes 3 of the relevant resources, and we predicted that game was likely to go very long (as it did, only wrapping up when I got to bombers). In that game I built Forges (well, Mints, really) in just about every city right after the Granary, because if I was going to build them, it was best to build them early.

I think this game is also quite likely to go quite long. There's more space, so it's more likely that someone will end up with a crushing lead in land, but a lot of that land looks pretty bad so far, so I think there's room for a smaller but better empire to do okay. It's also big and spread out - we still haven't even met anyone! - so it wouldn't surprise me if we got to factories before a concession. I think it's less likely to go long than PB72, where the terrain was very unfavorable to conquest - this doesn't look nearly so bad. Forges definitely aren't an auto-build for us, but if we end up with gold and silver both, we probably end up building them in any sizeable city - it's just a question of when and how - so lush looking cities we might still build them quite early.. you know, assuming we find any lush city sites out there in this very bleak landscape. One thing to keep in mind is that Forges are buildings, and one common early civic gives bonus hammers for buildings, so it's a BIT less bad than it looks - they're only 96 hammers if you're building them in Organized Religion. 

I agree with ignoring the area between the peaks for now and turning north. South looks like a barren waste with some decent flood plains and a few luxuries sprinkled in. Maybe north will be better for food though?

I also agree that one thing Civ 5 and 6 did right was opening more luxuries to be exploited more early (and just having more of them generally). It does generate an interesting tension in Civ 4 sometimes when all of Construction, Code of Laws, Currency, and Calendar look needed to stabilize your empire in one way or another, but it just feels a bit contrived and it ends up with all the luxuries on maps feeling a bit samey (and as Tarkeel says, the widely divergent yield also contribute to that). It's interesting that Old World (made by the lead dev of Civ 4) also has some luxuries that unlock very late (even later, in terms of that game's tech tree), but in general luxuries just don't matter the same way in Old World as they do in the Civ series, since in Old World population happiness isn't (generally) tied directly to city yield in the same way. I wish the Old World game that was run on this site had gotten more attention, as I think it's a very intriguing game.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Brudda, I was in that game and I didn't pay it the slightest bit of attention. <_<

[ljubljana]

t22 zulu

well, time to think.... (but not tonight i'm sleeeeepy)



GT of Boudica of Ethiopia. This seems like a pretty favorable draw for us, after conditioning on our picks; they are one of the civs whose path to win seemingly almost must run through eating a weaker neighbor, and funneling them elsewhere seems quite nice for us. Especially if the plan is to attack at Oromos, surely they're not thrilled that one of their options for that will be the one civ on the map with equally annoyingly buffed gunpowder units. And long-term, we have good odds to outscale them in my opinion with both PRO and half-cost ikhanda over them in terms of economic edge, and if we can hit a military breakpoint before them or can jump on them when they are busy with a neighbor (which again seems likely to be the plan given the picks) they could still end up edible. I don't know much, if anything, about GT's style; if I had infinite time I'd probably binge-read their threads, but I'm not sure I will have that...

You can see one copper in the screenshot - the known world's supply is as follows:



Zooming in on the ones within firstish-ring of Takakeisho:



It's looking pretty bleak, folks.... from what we can see now, settling "for copper" with one of our first few cities means settling without food, at least until we slow-build a monument, and we will not end up with it magically passing into our borders at the capital just by waiting until turn 50. I'm beginning to grasp just how seriously I underrated Creative and friends in my trait analysis..... on a random map I find that this kind of foodless copper situation is not super common, but of course human-generated maps will be systemically different from that in a way that extracts tough strategic choices from players, which is a fact that inherently advantages CRE.

Well, it's nice to be meeting GT this early as they are pretty likely to be more of a threat to rush us than our eastern neighbor (statistically unlikely to be Egypt or SDRome), or than anyone on the other side of the trackless desert expanse in the south (probably too far away to pose a credible threat). I am hoping that we will not have to make a major growth curve sacrifice for a fast copper hookup, but we'd probably better do the thought experiment of figuring out what that would look like in theory if we DID have to defend from GT early. I am guessing based on current info we'd just have to prioritize mysticism, settle the NE copper first-ring without food, and slow-build a monument working just the copper tile to grab the wheat. But wow, would that ever be a setback to the growth curve. I am hoping that their hookup will be delayed too by similar circumstances on their end (though with CHA it won't be nearly as slow as ours) and that therefore they won't feel confident about managing to hit a rush timing against AGG BW-knowing Zulu. But we'll see... I'm definitely planning to semi-permanently allocate the western scout towards skulking around their likely second city sites to see what they go for.

And, yeah, AGG/CHA to our west does on balance support the cow city over something to the west, all else being equal - if we're going to settle towards these guys, it's probably smart to do so with copper units in tow.

edit: well, i guess there is one spot that technically settles first-ring copper with food, SW of the copper south of Takakeisho, on a bare desert 1NE of a floodplain. But that city is on the other side of the hill range and will be tough to connect, and a single floodplain (2 after border pops) in otherwise pretty mediocre land (well, awful land objectively but mediocre by this map's standards ) honestly barely counts as a food resource....

there aren't really ways to derive info about ethiopia specifically until we have graphs on them, right? they're not in slavery civic is all i could think of, but neither are we so that hardly tells us if they rushed BW...

[aetryn]

You can check the tech screen and see if any techs show a Known Tech Bonus - if so, you'll know Ethiopia has them since they're the only ones we've met.

Beyond that, not a whole lot that can be deduced, especially without score mode on.