[SPOILERS - El Grillo & Charriu PB51] One step at a time

[El Grillo]

I logged in to check demographics now that six of us have settled, and there's already evidence to show that we've been given non-mirrored starts.




Someone is presumably building a FPH Work Boat (possible candidates are superdeath's Rome or Plemo's Dutch; it could've been Amicalola building a EXP Worker with a PFH since demographics don't show conditional bonus production, but he hasn't played the turn yet), and the slightly uneven Land Area confirms that some players have water tiles inside their BFC, but I can't distinguish between 2 players being coastal starts, vs a bunch of players with freshwater lakes. The 21 top GNP is vanrober (AGG/CRE of Zulu) researching a 1-prereq tech, which I would tentatively guess is Mining. I haven't done detailed C&D for a Pitboss game with this many players before, so I don't expect to be able to produce much info over the long run, but I figure every bit helps.

EDIT: Apparently the starts were different enough that Mjmd (Elizabeth of Korea) decided not to settle in place turn 0. Can't comment without seeing what he saw, but if nothing else it shows that he's a lot more risk-tolerant than I would be. I trust my mapmaker to have my best interests at heart

[El Grillo]

T1:

Our Scout move reveals a 5f tile that could plausibly be settled to share the capital's rice, but all that jungle makes it less appealing. On the other hand, a city on the Scout's current plains hill could be a strong site once we have more techs. We could chop in most of an Obelisk, grow fat on cottages, and only need one road for a trade route. However, that would require all of the early-game techs and by then we should have a lot more map info to dotmap with. The next move is either SW-W or SW-SW, the latter reveals more total tiles but SW-W gives vision on the north riverside tiles.



Demos continue to highlight how varied our starts are. Looking at Life Expectancy, I'd guess that Amicalola (EXP/PRO Inca) or superdeath (AGG/EXP Rome) has nearly as many BFC forests as we do, on top of the EXP health bonus. On the other hand, the Rival Average at 77 lets us do a bit of math. We have 91, top has 92, and we know Mjmd has 0, so we can solve for the average of the remaining 7 players and put it around 84, since I'm a little fuzzy on how exactly the rounding is calculated. 84 is surprisingly low on Monarch, as a freshwater start with 0 forests gives a score of 80, and it only takes 4 forests (+2 health) to bring that up to 85. Considering one of the average scores is also EXP (again, +2 health), and that I highly doubt that Commodore would give someone a start with fewer forests than the starting location normalization, the possibilities that stand out are multiples of non-freshwater or floodplains starts, along with some freshwater starts with 4-5 forests (maybe coastal?).

[Charriu]

I would go SW-W. It looks like 2S of that is another hill we could move to next.

[El Grillo]

We were able to roll the turn before all the Europeans went to bed. Good work everyone, let's keep up the pace  

T2:

Taking Charriu's guidance, our Scout found the headwaters of the southern river and uncovered our first luxuries and another pigs, albeit under jungle. Time to swing south and see if we're lucky enough to have a strong food tile to settle that gold with, as a third city perhaps. There seem to be more hills to the southwest so I think the next scout move will be SE-SE.



Now that we have Mjmd's city numbers, specifically that lowest land area is 7000, it seems likely that 6 of us have inland starts and 4 coastal, maybe 3 and a couple of the inland starts have a lake. 75 as lowest life expectancy is possibly Mjmd moving to a non-freshwater tile with 2-3 net forests vs floodplains? In any case that's a city that'll be unhealthy at size 4 until resources are hooked.

[El Grillo]

That forest SE of the capital is inconvenient for the first Worker. I've sandboxed the BFC and tried a few alternatives, but the best I can do is:


  PB51 Sandbox.zip (Size: 16.68 KB / Downloads: 1)

T12: SE onto forest (1 unproductive turn)
T13: S onto pigs, pasture
T14: pasture
T15: pasture
T16: pasture
T17: N onto forest (2 unproductive turns total)
T18: NW into capital (3 unproductive turns total)
T19: NW onto rice, farm
T20: farm
T21: farm
T22: farm
T23: farm
T24: SE into capital (4 unproductive turns total)
T25: SE onto forest (5 unproductive turns total)
T26: road
T27: road

That lines up neatly enough with the capital going Worker, grow to 2, spend one turn working pigs + forest to finish the Warrior, Settler, with the Settler finishing at eot28 in position to settle on the plains hill on t30 with a trade route finished just in time on t29. Alternatively, we could prioritize the Settler's completion date by 1t and let the Warrior sit in the queue, but that would be giving up a dozen turns of scouting and that seems enormously greedy.




I tried a couple of variations. Improving the rice first wastes one fewer Worker turn but delays the Settler by a turn. Improving the pigs first, but stopping on the forest SE of the capital to build a road before the rice farm also delays the Settler by a turn, and doesn't speed up the city founding either.

Thankfully we don't have to commit to this until AH finishes and we hopefully have visibility on our horses. Wouldn't it be lovely if they, somewhat implausibly, were on one of those grassland tiles 1S or 2W of the pigs?

[El Grillo]

Couldn't fall asleep, was notified that a new turn had rolled, you know the rest.

T3:

Lots more floodplains to be had, with the foggy promises of more to the southwest. I don't want to miss any tiles around the pigs/plains hills area, so SE-E into E-?E.



At least one of the CRE players, vanrober or Lazteuq, is fully inland with 21000 land area. 

[Charriu]

I would suggest moving SE-SE. 3E of the scout is a hill or a mountain, which you will see from SE-SE as well as SE-E. NE of the Silk is flatland for quick movement. Because of those things SE-SE is better or equal to SE-E.

[El Grillo]

T4:

The Scout revealed no additional food on our side of the gold, but I continue to be impressed by the length of this river, especially with it splitting further east as well as south. Let's see if I'm learning from Charriu's guidance: SE-NE -> NE-?E should be the next Scout moves, since the three tiles E-NE/E/SE are all flatland, and E-E-NE of the current position should be flatland as well, though it's not as clear to me.

Our capital expands borders at the end of this turn, and the combination of the plains hill and lake tile 2E&3E should give us a fair bit of vision, so the Scout won't have to move too far north to get a full view of possible pig city sites. I would really like for this site to pick up more food or other strong tiles, after all.



No change in the demographics, as expected.

[Charriu]

Well thanks to the border pop you get the hill 2S of the capital and because of that you get vision on the forest 2S of the pigs. I'm not exactly sure if you will get vision on the forest 1S-1SE of the pig. You are right about the flatlands E of the scout and SE-NE looks like a good move. But next turn we most likely won't need to go NE from the because of the border pop. Also don't forget that soon animals will spawn.

By the way the micro plan you posted earlier looks solid. To bad the forests are in our way.

[El Grillo]

Good reminder about barbarian animal spawning rules, I had to look those up again. This thread over on CivFanatics was useful.

For reference:
- barb animals will begin to spawn after turn 5 until turn 25
- on Monarch difficulty we don't get any free wins, but animals attack player units with a hidden -20% penalty; human barbs have no such penalty

In effect, our Scout will want to start finding defensive terrain to end its turn in, and perhaps may want to follow a coastline to reduce directions from which it could be caught by surprise.

Speaking of coastline, I'm kind of surprised we haven't seen any sign of it, or more lakes in general. Surely if we keep heading east, we'll run into the inner or outer coastline eventually (from the initial camera flying, I'd guess that the outer coast is to our east, but no guarantees). I had assumed that if the Scout followed the outer coast in both directions we'd find our neighbors roughly a dozen tiles away. Considering my pre-game planning involved deploying early War Chariots against roughly half of the possible opponents, it would be a terrible shame if we somehow stumbled past our neighbors