[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

thank youuuu yeah, that makes sense

ok i'm awake and gonna sim + roll the turn in some order. idk how seriously i should take the social obligation from other RB folks to not hold the turn until the deadline when "technically" the timer says i have 10 hours left. but if this is like civ6, there are those out there with whom relations will be worsened just by taking too long with the turns so i'm going to try not to be excessive.

thoughts after sleeping on this: well, this isn't an either/or question is it - we will need both the gold and western river valley to win this game, this is why we took AGG zulu and we should aim to take both in the first 5-6 cities. i think i will be sticking with southern copper/FP as the third city in particular, we shouldn't go aggressively pinkdotting without copper units and it is almost-acceptable as a food + whipping city while getting a fast hookup and claiming a crucial strategic location towards the gold and center of the map. slightly favoring sticking with gold before west valley because it will contribute its economy faster (gold gold gold) and i'm more worried about it getting poached by an unseen neighbor than the western site by GT, since it is closer to our capital and would be kind of a wild pinkdot by them. but this second city question is still bothering me.... sending it west and taking the capital wheat is way more cannibalistic than cow city and contributes much less in terms of useful tiles (cow city's one grass river cottage and the one it can take from the capital have surprisingly seemed like a major advantage in sims). but can we really reach all the way out to the west like that without SOME kind of city in between to secure it on defense?

[ljubljana]

3urn tZ - 2ululand

guys things are looking Different



where to even start? horse position in the east is picture perfect and enables williams' city SW of horse that grabs both food. corn in the NE means the river valley's fine without the wheat for food, or we can couple it with fish for a crazy city with two strong first-ring food resources. crazy NW horsecowwheat city is looking great for..... cottage spam yes but also Heroic Epic with 3 hills, double food, horse which is better than a hill, and perhaps we even save some trees for lumbermills? haven't hit end turn yet because williams' spot is looking gorgeous and sims may suggest swapping research to mysticism! although i maybe have backed us into a corner such that doing so will make our worker fleet run out of tasks.... ehehehehe

still no amazing site for a fast copper hookup but i am thinking our weirdo plant in the south is still good enough - it has a 4 food tile and copper in first ring, and while a weak long-term city it is great from a landgrab perspective, bringing an early road over the nightmare hill range and claiming land toward the center of the map towards the high-value gold site and very likely multiple opponents. but with horses at the second city (what a break, right?) perhaps it and the gold can wait until after the ridiculous NW city.... luckily our 4-worker opening can turn on a dime now and spam out 3 settlers PDQ while making a super fast road over to the NW valley. copper hookup at the 4th city would be sorta slow and irritating but probably not disastrous with chariots available

ughhh i dunno wtf we're supposed to do now.... but in a good way, so that's good! see yall on the other side of the sims i guess

[williams482]

So that's where all the good terrain was hiding! Very helpful spot for the horses to pop up, and definitely makes settling around here seem like a higher priority than going all in for the gold. I think continuing to prioritize the copper+floodplains site in the south makes sense for the resource hookup, but it's much less of a slam dunk than it was.

The western wheat/cow/horse spot looks absolutely monstrous, and is fairly urgent. There's even a case for making it the second city; we have no shortage of worker labor, and unlike the eastern horse site it will get food in the first ring immediately and can start growing onto cottages without waiting for mysticism.

As for Heroic Epic, I'm thinking the best spot is probably the sheep/copper spot in the north. It's pretty bad terrain overall, but it can be settled on a plains hill and work sheep + copper + plains hill + grass hill for 12 hammers at pop 3 and 15 at pop 4, which can eventually be bumped to the magic 16 at pop five with just a grass forest or plains farm. It's not pretty (one tile off the coast is definitely ick) but it will crank early game military no problem.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Do you know what happened to thrawn, ljubljana?

If he comes back again I will make a thrawn archive thread.

[ljubljana]

ok, mysticism before the wheel goes pretty much how you'd expect and is spectacularly sim-ruining lol:



but i think we can still chop into the monument here at a faaairly early date with wheel-first, and we ARE going to, like, need the road to the west. plus we have the option of chopping a chariot at the capital for fast defense against GT if we think it's necessary

[ljubljana]

behold, a sim in which i barely tried:


















@MJW thrawn is, i think, in "minimize my forum presence so i don't get too sucked in and dump another thousand hours into Realms Beyond" mode

@williams i am a littler nervous about making it the second city because, like, can we hold it? i fear that GT will show up with a literal warrior and take it from us if we try. but i'll sim that out too, the ridiculous excess of chops we get from doing that city second honestly sort of speaks for itself. and re HA yeah, my SP ass is like "11 hammers from levee!!!! :hearteyes:" but of course the best HE cities are the same as the best commerce cities (namely, riverside lol). this city probably gets founded too early to be HE, i don't think we can go without its floodplain and two grass river cottages in the early game... unless later we want to pave over those 3 towns to optimize it... and of course we can't save forests at our third city, that was a frankly ridiculous thing for me to say lmao

[ljubljana]

for reference, here's the situation when the second city settler comes out on turn 37:



all the workers are busy chopping so if we send it NW it will run significantly ahead of the worker labor we need. but just 3 turns later the third city settler comes out and not-coincidentally all 3 workers are free to road up there. i think first settler east to horses, where it has one good tile immediately and another at size 2, then second settler to the NW river is the most likely way to go unless we think GT is going to try to race us with their first city settler (and if that's the case we probably have already lost, although such a move would be extremely punishable by settling nearby and chopping an axe or chariot swarm)

[ljubljana]

something i missed earlier from the actual game:



i am reading this as confirmation that the borders we saw in the fog are indeed GT's capital. with 21 tiles we are at 0.78% land area, so if GT has a second city they would have at least 30 tiles = 0.78 * (30/21) = 1.14% land area. that is unless a significant number of their tiles are water but given their location relative to the coast (and choice of Ethiopia in the first place with hunting/mining starting tech) i find that very unlikely.

also, GT still has no techs that we don't have, so at this point it's almost certain we have the exact same set of hunting+mining+ag+AH+BW

[aetryn]

Yeah, gold has to take a backseat to claiming this land with food. It's still worth going for the gold eventually, but I see at least 4 cities I'd settle first (immediately east of capital, in NE river valley, something for copper, and the really nice double food+horses site to the west. It's possibly even behind a far northeastern city in the river mouth area. Some of that will depend on what we find. I still think your initial impression was right, and that we have neighbors close east and west and FAR south (we obviously have no neighbor north). We need to find the neighbor to the east and figure out what that contested land looks like - thankfully the scouts will be working on that soon I imagine.

[ljubljana]

well, we will see about the south... if the map is symmetricish, the desert starts just one city length below our capital, and someone could be about as far from the gold as we are. in fact i'd still kind of bet on that, it doesn't seem like the sort of area you'd drop as a mapmaker if it's not intended
to be contested....

re the north: is there a way to figure out the world wrap setting in game? in theory it could be toroidal and we could have someone across the water, right?