Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Zargon]

I figured I'd delurk briefly to add a bit about the number of cities maintenance.

It appears Civ4HandicapInfo.xml tells me the max for this is 7, not 6. This meshes with what I found in CvCity.cpp

I believe the full formula is

floor( floor( floor(100 * (pop + 17) / 18) * 90 / 100) * 20 / 100) * number of cities / 100

The 90 is the difficulty modifier, the 20 is the world size modifier.

This produces the correct answer for all 8 cities posted above. If it doesn't produce the correct answer for anything (I'm a little worried about my assumptions about rounding since all the test cases are with 20 cities), let me know and I'll take another look.

However, I notice I'm confused about the implications of this. Everything I've read about this refers to a conqueror's plateau. It's more of a conquerer's... slowly leveling off slope, unless my understanding of this is mistaken. For example, for Adventure One to hit the max of 7 maintenance given a size of 14, we would need 24 cities. Okay, so the 25th city doesn't add maintenance to Adventure One. Great. But it still adds maintenance to all the cities of size less than 14. If we add 10 cities in the war, the 30th city will add maintenance to all cities of size 8 or less. The nice thing is that it does drop off pretty quickly, but it's not a cliff like most reference materials seem to indicate.

Here's the number of cities that maxes number of city maintenance for different size cities

Population	Number of Cities to max maintenance (7)
16	22
15	23
14	24
13	25
12	25
11	26
10	26
9	28
8	30
7	31
6	32
5	34
4	35
3	37
2	39
1	39

The important takeaway is that there isn't a magic number of cities, abusing this mechanic is a product of having an empire both wide and tall, and the dozen or so cities we're going to pick up in the next 15-20 turns is going to be really expensive as it pushes our entire core to the cap of 7, and the new cities will quickly reach the cap as well, but after that, it's all gravy.

The hilarious takeaway is that for these particular settings, due to rounding, size 10 and size 11 cities in the same empire will always have identical number of cities maintenance.

Fake edit:
I didn't see the part about City Rank in the code, if true, it looks like it would add 1 to approximately half the cities randomly, skewed toward the cities with higher City Rank. That makes sense because otherwise the rounding is in favor of the player, and we can't have that, but on the other hand, it didn't appear in any of the 8 examples, and some of those have a quite high City Rank...

Real Edit:
I still don't see anything in the code for the Maintenance that references City Rank. It also occurs to me that the City Rank adjustment would be a wild overcompensation for the rounding errors in the player's favor - the rounding errors save around .02 .2 gold per city on average, the City Rank thing would cost .5 per city on average. It further occurs to me that the City Rank adjustment entirely makes sense in the non-BTS days, when city maintenance was rounded off to whole numbers rather than hundredths, and that rounding really would have saved a full .5 gold per city. Unless an example city is found with 1 gold too much number of city maintenance, I'm thinking the City Rank adjustment is gone in BTS.

[Sullla]

Finished up with the turn. Offered the ivory for dyes deal to the Spanish:



I moved our unmoved military units into the capital; they can still make it to the front line in time from there, although they will have to move out next turn. Not sure how much the Germans are buying that, but they haven't gone into a mass whipping spree as of yet.



Swapped Horse Feathers to a horse archer (knight auto upgrade) as requested. We discussed the mechanics of a forge whip a little while ago, and I'm pretty sure we concluded that it was better to minimize overflow as much as possible. We will 2 pop whip the forge in Cutting Edge next turn for that reason.

Our chariot in German territory found a lot fewer German units on their border with WPC. We'll see where they moved next turn, but it looks like they are shifting south towards us. More info next turn.

[Bigger]

we could, you know, actually build courthouses. its not like courthouses get destroyed when we research communism.

[kjn]

The turn has rolled, and the Spanish accepted our ivory-for-dyes trade. Now lets see how CFC reacts.

Some micro proposals:

Kale (on the capital deer) should move 1NW-N this turn and road Tree Huggers's cow. That makes it possible for the capital stack to move either to the western staging tile (1NE of rice) or to Cutting Edge and be there T149. Ie, more tactical flexibility.

I think Eastern Dealers should hire a priest. This will finish the forge this turn instead of next turn (we're at 104/120 with 12 base production, 15 adjusted). Then we start on the market, with 2 scientists and an engineer.

2-pop whip the forge in Cutting Edge (to size 5), immediate grow back to 6 as the turn rolls, and we can draft the city next turn.

[Sullla]

Turn 147 - 740AD

We're getting very close to the invasion date now, and tactical moves are starting to come into play. I've got some ideas on that, let me run them by everyone.



I moved the scouting chariot in search of the German army, and found them in the center of their territory. This main force has 7 axes, 4 chariots, 4 catapults, and 1 spear. Like most inexperienced MP teams, they have failed to build enough spears and will be extremely easy prey for knights. The Germans are shifting their forces south, but I still think that this group is just not that scary. If we can't defeat an army full of axes and chariots with maces and knights, I'll resign my position in shame.

I would crop out the margins of that screenshot and send it over to WPC. Let them know that the main German army has moved south and away from their border. If their team can somehow capture the German cities that they asked for, I'm actually OK with giving them over to WPC. We shall see, they appear to be pretty confident. I still plan to move this particular chariot over to WPC to shadow their army next turn, that info will be highly useful to us.



Now let's start talking tactics. Here is the northwest front, where the Germans have placed a second axe (Woodsman II) inside their border city of Wolfratshausen. We currently have a mace, a war elephant, and a war chariot assigned to this area. We will be drafting Ditchdigger and Brick this turn, and we'll get a knight out of Brick as well in time to fight, which means the total force for this area will be 3 maces, 1 knight, 1 elephant, and 1 chariot. That feels like enough to me - do we want to shift any more units over here? This is the last turn to do so. Let me know if you want another mace over here. My thought was that we had about what we need with the upcoming drafts.

I plan to double-move the war chariot at the end of this current turn and the beginning of the next turn (T147/148) to get visibility on the missing German city to the north. We can then move the chariot back into staging position on T149, ready to go on T150. And that is not the last turn roll shenanigans I have planned here...



Here is the stack posted to the south of Frozen Jungle. We've got 5 maces, 3 elephants, and 3 catapults hanging out together. The Germans have never directly seen these units; Apolyton has though, and I wonder if they communicated them to the Germans (?) Hard to say. We'll keep these guys out of view of the German chariot, in any case.

This is where we get reinforcements for the Ditchdigger front, if you guys want to shift another unit or two over there. (Again, don't think that will likely be necessary.) I plan to move these units a tile southwest this turn, where they will be out of vision of pretty much everything. Then we move them at the very end of T148 and the very beginning of T149 onto the staging tile indicated, where they'll be able to hit Wasserburg and move on Worms at the start of the conflict. It's a scumbag move for sure, but there's nothing in the rules preventing it, and it will help keep these units hidden until it's too late to do anything about them.



This is the main stack sitting in the capital right now, where we do something very similar. Here we have 9 maces, 4 cats, and an elephant and some war chariots (more coming up from the south). I plan to keep them in place right now, and at the very end of the turn move them along the white arrows, to the tile two north of the capital. At the start of T148, the German chariot sees them and says, "hey, they moved north. I'm going to stay here and watch where they move." Then we scumbag the Germans again by double moving at the end of T149 and the beginning of T149 along the yellow path. This links us up with the western group and we're ready to go on the staging tile as planned. The German chariot will have no idea where we've gone, and if it's still sitting on the unroaded plains hill tile, it cannot get vision on our stack on T149. If it moves N-NW-NW, for example, that tile does not grant vision on the stack. Of course they could see it on T150, but by then it's too late to matter. Basically, we play some games with the clock and see if we can fool them for a turn or two. Even one turn of stalling could help us out a lot.



Minor city micro note: We have a perfect 3 pop whip of Tree Huggers this turn. I'm assuming that we will take this. Let me know if this is not OK.



This is the northeastern front, where the Germans have moved a Sentry chariot up to the border. I'm assuming that they will try to spot anything incoming from this direction... which is fine because we don't really have anything attacking this way. I actually hope that they pull their army over here, where they have a terrible road network, in the thought that they might be able to capture something from us. That's unlikely, but possible.

Anyway, we have one axe in Simple Life and one mace in The Covenant, and that's basically it. (I wanted to swap their positions, but that would make both cities unhappy from lack of military police. We can do it once we have Engineering and the extra road movement.) It looks like we're pretty wide open here. However, that's where the fun of Nationhood civic comes in. The first round of drafting is over, and the second round is underway. We will draft Forbidden Fruit and Eastern Dealers this turn (both having been drafted exactly 10t ago), and then we'll draft Simple Life next turn (ditto). Cutting Edge also has another draft incoming any turn now. I plan to move these maces up to Simple Life and hold position there, just in case any attack would be incoming. I also plan to move the two maces southeast of Tree Huggers into Cutting Edge, where they will play defense for the moment. That gives us 7 maces available for this region, and if we see that the Germans are not attacking or desperately defending elsewhere, then of course we'll shift most of these units over to the main attack group. In the meantime though, better safe than sorry, and the ~20 maces we have with the main group should be plenty for the initial attack.



Another micro note: we're planning to whip Cutting Edge's forge this turn. It has almost no overflow at all, which I believe we agreed was optimal for forge whips. We'll also be drafting as soon as it hits size 6 again, probably in one or two more turns.



Down in the south, I have French Riviera on a settler, which we can triple whip to completion next turn. The idea is to go grab one of the silver locations:



As I said previously, the first settler should go directly on top of the westernmost silver resource. Although we do want to plant at the crabs/marble spot in the east, that has silver in the third ring, and it will take a long time to get going. I'm pretty sure that we're going to need the extra silver happiness during the German war, and that means planting immediately on top of a silver resource. It's a really crummy city, yeah, but we do have Great Lighthouse, and it's worthwhile for a critical resource.

Since every single silver has been carefully placed to avoid having a food bonus in range, I will eat my hat if one shows up on the few unrevealed tiles down here.

Overview:

Engineering tech should take us 6 turns in total, after running 3t of 100% gold and then 3t of 100% science. I looked to see if we could squeeze it out in 5t with some odd slider math, and that does not seem possible. Six turns it is. Our currently science rate is fairly average, largely due to our massive size and army costs. Of course, every other stat in the Demos looks like this:



I'll take an average-ish GNP in exchange for kicking some ass at everything else. One thing we've seen in these games is that you can always improve your economy over time. Land >>> high midgame GNP. That was one of the major lessons I tried to learn from the Pitboss #6 game, where oledavy's team outperformed my team in the post-Communism era for precisely that reason.



I showed the Power graph last turn, here's the GNP version of the same chart. This is noteworthy for the decimation of CFC's science rate when they swapped into Police State from Representation. It also shows a big spike upwards on the German graphs earlier when they were researching; they have turned research back on again and gotten a similar spike, very likely for Monarchy tech. (They do not have that tech yet; they are not in Hereditary Rule and they do not have their wines connected.) We have to hope that it takes them a while longer to reach Feudalism tech. If it takes them 10t, then we're in pretty good shape. If it takes them 5t, then we're in for some trouble. We definitely must attack on Turn 150, we can't wait any longer. Just keep your fingers crossed for a delayed Feudalism and delayed longbows.

Fire away with thoughts and questions.

[sooooo]

Looking good, I support the division of forces.

At Tree Huggers I want to reiterate my opposition to whipping this city at the moment. Look at the tiles it has to grow into: 2 grass mines (we dug these for a reason!) and 2 mature cottages to take over from Cutting Edge. It might be a Perfect whip, but in this case I'd rather just keep on growing into the good tiles.

[kjn]

I think I agree with sooooo about Tree Huggers. We will whip Cutting Edge for 2 pop this turn, and likely draft it next turn too, so there are villages to pick up for Tree Huggers. Better to hold off a few turns, when it's a 2-pop whip and Cutting Edge has recovered a bit.

Also, what is the planned next build in Tree Huggers? Missionaries?

[zakalwe]

Then we move them at the very end of T148 and the very beginning of T149

I thought we needed to play after the Germans on T149 if we want to declare and get the second half of the turn on T150.

Edit: I guess it would only be a problem the other way around? We're giving them a double move on us and that's presumably allowed.

[Fintourist]

Then we move them at the very end of T148 and the very beginning of T149

I thought we needed to play after the Germans on T149 if we want to declare and get the second half of the turn on T150.

Edit: I guess it would only be a problem the other way around? We're giving them a double move on us and that's presumably allowed.

Aaand I guess we are not planning on ending our turn early.

[sunrise089]

Great stuff, I was thinking as I was reading "hmm, I wonder if we know the German ETA for Feudalism..."