[SPOILER] Dark Savant graduates from blatant n00b to plain n00b

[Dark Savant]

It doesn't look like it will pay to open building a scout.  If I do that, for quite some time I'll only have two warriors to cover two cities and two workers, which is asking for RNG trouble.

I do want to push scouting, but not that early.

[Dark Savant]

Turn 0 - 4000 BC

The game has started!  Let's check out the start position:



That mountain is no longer present.  Fabric of lies and all that, I suppose.

I settle in place.  As planned, I'm using a placeholder name for the first ten turns.  n00b Cave is dug into the hills.

I move the scout two tiles to the southeast, as planned.  Now, the starting fat cross is a little light on food by RB MP standards, but check this out:



That's a lot of forest and jungle, and a conspicuous absence of food.  Hmm.

I didn't even notice that incense before, but it's absolutely not worth moving with my game plan anyway.

I'm not going to name scouts, warriors, etc. until inspiration strikes.  My scout remains nameless for now.

Research set to Meditation due in 10, and production set to a warrior due in 5, both as planned.

[Dark Savant]

Okay, preliminary guessing on the mapmakers' motives:

There's not much food visible right now, because like PB37, the normal strategy of building the first few cities close to the capital (or at least the first one) is being discouraged.  I should find food farther out.

And there's a lot of forest and jungle partly to discourage moving the settler like Krill did last game.

[Dark Savant]

Okay, so it's known the mapmakers plonked down forests in mountains and water (and maybe other unreachable places) to try to combat global warming.

It'd probably have been better to mod RtR to just get rid of it -- Civ 4 global warming is just obnoxious in a way the model in the first three games and Alpha Centauri are not.

Interesting facts about Civ 3 global warming: When lumberjacking tundra in all but the very earliest versions, people would often railroad and mine tundra tiles to mark them as lumberjacked.  I don't think this is a great idea in that game, because I'd rather just lumberjack and re-forest all the tundra there.  More tiles to be hit by global warming, and it's easy to replant with your gigantic worker force by that time.

In the very earliest versions of Civ 3, you could just lumberjack endlessly (chop forest for shields, replant, repeat), Alpha Centauri-style.  Except terraformer turns are far too precious to spend lumberjacking most of the time in Alpha Centauri; you can hit the unit limit of 2048 terraformers and still not have enough that you can spare some for lumberjacking!  That's not true in Civ 3, so it was patched so lumberjacking was limited to once per tile.

(Actually, that's another thing Alpha Centauri and Civ 3, but no other Civ games, have in common: you should build ALL the terraformers/workers!  Okay, in Civ 3, you don't need more workers by the time you have both railroads and hospitals everywhere, but that takes a long time to happen.)

When Civ 1 came out, real-life global warming hadn't yet been proven beyond reasonable doubt.  When that actually happens depends on exactly how you define it, but it happened circa 1995 by my reckoning, about the time Civ 2 came out.

Few younger people know, and even most older people do not, but you don't have to go back much further to reach a time when most environmental activists were primarily concerned about global cooling, before about 1980.  That's partly but not entirely because of concerns about nuclear winter.  The 1977 Hugo Award for Best Novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is one example.

(And look at that -- people still take the 1976 winner The Forever War and the 1978 winner Gateway seriously -- I'd recommend reading both of those, actually!)

There genuinely wasn't good evidence that long ago (far from the only example of 1970s environmentalists being laughably terrible).  There must be some older people who know that and don't trust modern environmental scientists -- which would have been understandable 40 years ago, but not now.

This has been a Dark Savant Blog / postcount++ post.

[Dark Savant]

I'm one of only three people left to play Turn 1, already!  I think I'd better get moving and leave work and start errands, at least.

[Dark Savant]

Turn 1 - 3960 BC

Phew, I'm only the second-to-last to play the turn. 

The scout continues to truck southeast:



Where are the resources all hiding? 

That water my scout is approaching is fresh, incidentally.

Let's see what scraps we can learn from demographics.

• Everyone planted on turn 0, and no one is producing fewer than 2 hammers/turn, so it's very unlikely anyone pulled a Krill and moved their starting settler.
  
• Someone is producing only 3 food for, uh, reasons?
  
• I actually have the highest GNP, uncontested.
  

Wait, that last one is NOT minor.  I'm guaranteed to get Buddhism, unless maybe someone is playing Stupid GNP Tricks.

I'm considering bailing and going worker-first after all knowing this.  But I don't think that's a good idea; someone else could easily be heading for Meditation working a flood plain tile.  That doesn't strike me as a great idea, but religion is valuable enough on a map this large that someone might do it anyway.  I'm also likely much more likely to get competition if someone else researches a tech and sees that Buddhism is still unclaimed.  Nah, I don't think I can do it.

[Dark Savant]

I'm still not actually guaranteed to get Buddhism -- if either Aretas or Donovan Zoi has an oasis in second-ring, they can produce just enough commerce swapping to that tile to reach Meditation on turn 10.  (No one's getting turn 9 Buddhism.)

If either wants a religion out the gate, it'd be better to go for Hinduism, because that leverages Financial oases better, but who knows.

[Dark Savant]

Turn 2 - 3920 BC

Oh good, the turn pace isn't being slow in the opening phases.

The scout continues to bust fog to the southeast, and I discover my first non-capital food resource.



That's a little distant.

Maybe it's time to threaten an Anne McCaffrey-inspired civ naming scheme.  (Civ only, not cities.)  People do know what the "rn" in Pern stands for, right?

[Dark Savant]

Oh, I should also note that at least 20 people have nothing but land in their territory.  I'm one of at most 5 who do not.

I still haven't sighted coast even though my scout has moved in close to a straight line for three turns.  It's also possible someone else's scout will show up as soon as this turn (I'm early this turn).

[RefSteel]

Obviously I can't comment on most of what you're posting, but at leas there are a couple of things:

It'd probably have been better to mod RtR to just get rid of it -- Civ 4 global warming is just obnoxious

100% agreed. The problem is that nobody volunteered to make and test changes like that, and the mapmakers were too busy ... you know ... making the map.

Oh good, the turn pace isn't being slow in the opening phases.

Yeah, I'm pretty impressed, given the number of players. I feel like this many days into PB37, we were still waiting for a reload to T0 - and for somebody to let dtay know the game had started. There's even a mac guy who couldn't connect to the game, but instead of playing through an underinformed friend, he managed to solve the problem in less than 24 hours! Here's hoping all of this presages a really great game!