The Dark arts - C&D Master Thread

[kjn]

Yes, but I'm already aware of the steal hammer and treasury equations. The trouble with those costs are that they require city visibility first.

[kjn]

T68 - 1280BC

Cliff's Notes: WPC, CivFr, and CFC each gain a pop point. WPC builds another axe, now up to 5. A great scientist was born, in all likelihood by Apolyton.

Demos:

Team	Score change	Pop	Tech	Land	Wonders
RB	12		1 classical
WPC	2	+1 (total 11)
CivFr	6	+1 (total 19)		3
CivPlayers	6			6
CFC	3	+1 (total 10)

CivPlayers and CivFr both received their land points for land claimed T48.

Total population rose with 84000, with increases in both rival best and rival worst, divided over 3 pop points. This means growth of cities of size 4, 3, and 2. Candidates are WPC, CivFr, and CFC (rival worst). CivFr is the only among the candidates that can reach the new rival best, by growing a size 4 city to size 5. CFC gets the growth to 3 since that fits with the new rival worst. That leaves WPC with a city growing to 4.

Total power rose with 17000, of which 1000 came from pop (to CFC), which fits with the increase in rival worst in power. Rival best increased with 6000, likely another dog soldier (up to 5 now), leaving 10000
for other unit. We'll have to see the graphs for the Germans and CFC next turn if they had a spike.

This also saw the first great person of the game: a Great Scientiest. This pretty much confirms that Apolyton teched Writing on T49: 10t to build the library at circa 9hpt, and then 9t to generate a PHI scientiest. I expect them to build an Academy now.

[kjn]

CFC was the third team to five cities on T68. Their new city claimed 9 new land tiles, but caused hardly any changes to the demographics.

[waterbat]

Oops, was absent for the pop_solver discussions. I didn't approach it from a turn by turn delta. I just tried to brute force solve it each time. I never got around to providing a mechanism for masking data we had from city visibility or the top 5 screen.

Inputs: rival pop_points total, rival min # of cities, rival max number of cities, rival total population score.
Output: solution set of all rival city sizes

Note: no regard for the rival_min or rival_max or ownership of the cities.

The masking with known/visible cities would be good as it cuts the computational time greatly.

I like also how you have eliminated any issue with whips due to careful civstats monitoring. That wasn't possible with PBEM.

[kjn]

Brute force solutions probably works for a single civ at a time, but not for a full game once you start to approach the mid-game. I tried Kalin's solver for the cities circa T60 or so, and it gobbled up 8 GB of virtual RAM and ran for 36 hours straight or so before I killed the process.

[kalin]

kjn: how the you run the script? That is, with what parameters?
Kalin

[kjn]

I basically only use the diff-change.py version to get the candidate city sizes.

[kjn]

And here we have one team that's in a hurry to crash their economy: Univers settled their sixth city this turn, claiming 8 new land tiles, ie it is probably landlocked.

Total power increased with 1000 due to this.

And I need to update the city size list on the score tracking sheet…

[Sullla]

Considering the atrocious state of their research, I wonder if they will ever reach their precious Rathaus UB. (It's not totally crazy, since we'll be at 6 cities ourselves in 3 more turns, but I do question it from a team so badly lacking in research. We are much better able to afford more cities.)

[kjn]

Well, we'll be at 50% sustained science once we hit 7 cities, and we have a much stronger economy than they do. They've shown that they can generate lots of cities and grow them fast, but not that they can do anything otherwise useful yet.

They also did a 1-pop-whip this turn, by another player after they had first ended turn. Does not speak well of their team organisation.