[PB65 LURKERS] We lurk in single-file to hide our numbers

[Ginger()]

I’m skeptical about Pindicator’s worker micro. Yeah camping first hits a discrete benchmark with an extra worker and growth turn, but the cost of delaying the road to camp is 16 commerce while the cost to delay the camp to road is only 4 food. Seems like a big value loss imo.

[Ginger()]

Quiet thread for what looks to be an interesting game.
Looks like the cost of early gambits is catching up with SD and Bing. The other players are already mentally categorizing them as food. Can't tell what's up with SaC bc low reporting. He also said goodbye and left the civ discord I met him on, so not a good sign

I think we're seeing part of why IMP is overrated in this game, which is that priority settling spots are decided by Axemen or by sacrifices to get there first. And as a raw economic early growth bonus, it's worse than EXP or in some extreme cases of awkwardly placed resources, even CRE. CRE certainly is doing work for Mjmd and CF in the contested Magic-Christmaslands.

It appears Mr. Flakes will have Axes ready by the time his peace with Mjmd expires, so I expect Mjmd to either stomp around, pillage a couple roads and go home, or redirect his investment into pressuring Bing or SaC.

[Charriu]

T50
This is the first time I am tracking an sequential PB and I am happy to say that the tracking still works. Once again we are at the T50 mark. So let's dive into the report. As always all the data can be found here: PB65 Tracking

Before we start some notable observations:

• This game has been rather peaceful so far with the occasional border disputes.
  
• Only Stonehenge has been built so far by Superdeath (T38)
  

Since this is the first PB running CtH 3.0 you will also see some new data points. Those are:

Food kept: Here I collect all the food that is kept by granaries (and the Babylong UB) on growth.
Food towards growth: Here I collected all the food from tiles that went towards the next pop growth. That means if a 2 pop city works a 6 food tile and the 2 food city tile itself, I note down 4 food in this category. Working a worker or settler makes this value 0. So why collect this data in that strange way. Basically I want to be able to compare this value to the food kept from granaries, which is not included here. That way I hope to better evaluate the EXP and IMP traits. IMP trait because in theory IMP allows you to put less turns into settlers and more turns into growth.
Total specialist: How many specialists and super specialist are working in all cities. This serves to evaluate how good a player uses PHI, but more importantly it helps me to evaluate the labor civics better.
Current city production: Here I collect all production as well as modified production for every single city each together with what this city produced. Now there are some small bugs here. For one. I collect this data after the city has finished production and therefore always report that last turn with the wrong object in the cue. The other bug is with the chops. As you may have noticed I asked Mjmd about that and it looks like my tool is collecting the chops and whips at the wrong turn. But this only happens on a PB. Still curious why that happens. I try to fix that data as best as I can do.
Civic tile production: Here I collect all the extra hammers gained from working civics like Caste System. Like the last data point this serves to better evaluate the labor civics.
Total unmodified whip hammers: Just the unmodified hammers produced by whipping across the empire
Total unmodified chop hammers: Just the unmodified hammers produced by chopping across the empire. The extra hammers from mathematics are included.
Gold from Commerce: Similar to my past virtual gold tracking aka gold at 100%. But his only collects gold produced by commerce into gold. That way I can calculate the gold modifier exactly, which is needed for the exact FIN and PRO tracking.


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. 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
City count

1. Pindicator (IMP) = 4
   
2. Mjmd = 4
   
3. sucksatciv = 4
   
4. Cornflakes = 4
   
5. Bing = 3
   
6. Superdeath = 2
   

Population

1. Mjmd = 9
   
2. Pindicator (IMP) = 8
   
3. sucksatciv = 7
   
4. Cornflakes = 7
   
5. Bing = 7
   
6. Superdeath = 5
   

We can see that Bing and Superdeath are behind in development due to their gambits (stonehenge and early religion). What you can't see is that Bing just settled his 3rd city in the last 2 turns. You also can't see that Pindicator as IMP player settled his 2nd city first in T28 closely followed by Cornflakes in T30.

Current turn Gold at 100%

1. Mjmd (PRO) = 26
   
2. Pindicator (PRO) = 25
   
3. Cornflakes = 20
   
4. Bing (FIN, PRO) = 19
   
5. sucksatciv (ORG) = 16
   
6. Superdeath (FIN, ORG) = 15
   

Overall everybody is fairly close together. Still this early in the game these numbers can change a lot as slavery has a much bigger impact on them.

Current turn total maintenance

1. Pindicator (PRO) = 19
   
2. Cornflakes = 16
   
3. Mjmd (PRO) = 14
   
4. sucksatciv (ORG) = 11
   
5. Bing (FIN, PRO) = 8
   
6. Superdeath (FIN, ORG) = 3
   

It's not unexpecting to see these 3 people at the bottom low maintenance rank. We know that Bing and Superdeath have fewer cities and sucksatciv is ORG. What is a bit surprising to see is pindicator being on the top. That's because he is paying already 4 in unit maintenance and 2 in unit supply. Everybody except Cornflakes is only paying 1 in unit maintenance.

Current turn maintenance-gold delta

1. Mjmd (PRO) = 12
   
2. Superdeath (FIN, ORG) = 12
   
3. Bing (FIN, PRO) = 11
   
4. Pindicator (PRO) = 6
   
5. Cornflakes = 4
   
6. sucksatciv (ORG) = 4
   

Of course Superdeath and Bing are high in this list, but that's because the have a smaller empire in this crucial early stage. Nice to see Mjmd on top while the others are dragged down by maintenance. Can he make something out of that?

Accumulated actual science

1. Bing (FIN, PRO) = 556
   
2. Mjmd (PRO) = 515
   
3. Superdeath (FIN, ORG) = 531
   
4. Pindicator (PRO) = 472
   
5. sucksatciv (ORG) = 461
   
6. Cornflakes = 451
   

Mjmd is building up a small advantage in tech. Sucksatciv is very low in these rankings which is a bit shocking since he doesn't pay that much in maintenance, but I already know why (Spoiler alert, he did not connect his cities for trade routes.
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. Overall nothing to surprising that we didn't know of already.

Food

Accumulated food towards growth

1. Mjmd = 188
   
2. Cornflakes = 162
   
3. Pindicator (IMP) = 161
   
4. sucksatciv (EXP) = 104
   
5. Superdeath = 67
   
6. Bing = 89
   

We can see two distinct groups. Those who put a lot of food into growth and those who don't. You might suspect this already, but those three putting a lot into growth are also the ones who whipped the most.

Production
Accumulated total production
You will find the unmodified production in parenthesis if it differs. I only show relevant traits here.

1. Cornflakes = 590
   
2. Pindicator (IMP) = 515 (427)
   
3. Mjmd = 513
   
4. Superdeath = 482
   
5. sucksatciv (EXP) = 441 (423)
   
6. Bing = 397
   

Total whip production

1. Pindicator (IMP) = 120
   
2. Cornflakes = 90
   
3. Mjmd = 90
   
4. sucksatciv (EXP) = 30
   
5. Superdeath = 0
   
6. Bing = 0
   

Total chop production

1. Superdeath = 160
   
2. Mjmd = 140
   
3. Cornflakes = 100
   
4. sucksatciv (EXP) = 100
   
5. Bing = 40
   
6. Pindicator (IMP) = 20
   

With the above data in mind we can say for sure that the traits produced the following amounts of extra hammers:
IMP (pindicator) = 88
EXP (sucksatciv) = 18

I would say Pindicator used IMP well in this game so far. Compare him to Cornflakes. Yes, they are fairly equal in city count, when they settled, food and production. But crucially Pindicator did save a lot of forests for other stuff and here lies his advantage right now. Will be interesting to see how the food category develops up to T100. We also see that sucksatciv is already working his EXP trait with granaries.

Financial Bonus

This will be rather short since nobody is benefiting from FIN so far. Now the one thing worth mentioning is that the lighthouse-nerf is hurting some players in this game specifically.

1. Bing (FIN, PRO) = 39
   
2. Pindicator (PRO) = 24
   
3. Superdeath (FIN, ORG) = 8
   
4. Cornflakes = 4
   
5. Mjmd (PRO) = 1
   
6. sucksatciv (ORG) = 0
   

All numbers compared to the previous version of CtH. From these numbers we can also estimate how many people worked water tiles.

Protective Bonus

Everybody is fairly equal in the current numbers so let's look into the accumulated numbers

1. Mjmd (PRO) = 53
   
2. Cornflakes = 52
   
3. Pindicator (PRO) = 43
   
4. Superdeath (FIN, ORG) = 36
   
5. Bing (FIN, PRO) = 24
   
6. sucksatciv (ORG) = 0
   

And here we see why sucksatciv is a bit lower in science. He just didn't connect his cities.

Misc

I'm tracking a lot more but there is not enough information there to justify an own paragraph. Therefore a little summary here:

• No great persons so far to no ones surprise.
  

I'm also tracking the labor civics and therefore can determine, when everybody switched to slavery. These are the times they did.

1. Mjmd = T30
   
2. Superdeath = T32
   
3. Pindicator = T36
   
4. sucksatciv = T39
   
5. Cornflakes = T42
   
6. Bing = Not yet
   

Comparing traits

The main goal of all this tracking of course is to compare the economic traits related around commerce income or maintenance reduction.




As you can see PRO is fairly safe in 1st position followed by emperor ORG.

Stay tuned for the T100 report.

[Tarkeel]

I'm really struck by the difference in planning going into the Mjmd-Cornflakes conflict.

[Krill]

Congratulations Cornflakes, play has now devolved to the point of axe and impi battled without pottery being researched and going bankrupt.

In other words Cornflakes, you may have won the battle but you lost the war. Thise impi should just run over the wheat and take a run at your capital. Everything should hold but upu will lose 20 turns just trying to hold cities, chopping forests for axes and whipping without granaries. You need to work that improved gold tile to get to Pottery and if you do not hook it immediately after those impi run SW you will not get the chance.

[Charriu]

And some people complain that civforum players always default to early axe wars.

[Krill]

Hey Refsteel, when did it happen in PB1?

Ruff_Hi's early Praet attack on Imhotep. (Agg Rome attacking Agg Zulu!) I think this happened before you met either one of them ... and ... now that I think about it ... this was one of the earliest wardecs in RBPB history, but it's possible your W2 Quechua acing Sunrise's Worker was the very first!

Posting here because it feels wrong to post in a player thread.

I double checked, and even though PBEM1 started 6 weeks before the PB1, you are right, that was the first war declaration in RB MP history outside the Apolyton DG.

Where did the time go? That was 13 years ago to the week. And the maps, wow, the PB1 map really was something else.

[Charriu]

Would you say posting this to SucksAtCiv is too much intereference from a lurker?

Hi SucksAtCiv. If you need help with just connecting cities for trade. Building a road on every yellow star would connect all your cities for trade routes the fastest. You would also need a border pop from Dehli or Agra or more roads towards Agra, because you don't have Sailing yet.

[naufragar]

After Mig and Amica prompted, I'd hope he'd ask about trade, in which case I'd think you're free to post the guide. But if he doesn't ask, I think 3 people all pushing him to a better path is maybe too much. Just my opinion.

[civac2]

I thought he was a strong SP player. But this doesn't look too good. It's not just the roads. He does not appear to have enough workers.