[SPOILERS]Acrid Pinot and other Pindicator anagrams

[NobleHelium]

We should get normal trade routes with Ruff in about three turns or so.

[Merovech]

What if I told you that you already had one?

How could I have missed wonderful Hem Cover?

[pindicator]

Turn 80

So I've been tracking a number of things this game, giving it the full C&D effort. One thing I've been tracking since Scooter grabbed Currency was the amount of gold I could see. Scooter got Currency the end of turn 71 and has been saving gold ever since. At first I thought he was saving up for Calendar, but when he topped 200g I realized it couldn't be that. Maybe he was a fan of Metal Casting and wanted to get some triremes in the water? When he topped 300g on turn 78 I joked to Noble that he was going to tech HBR and then mass upgrade to Numids. Finally on turn 80, with him sitting on a bank of 438g, did I get my answer:



He's gonna put an academy in his capital and burn through that gold. Nice plan scooter, if I had a golf clap smiley I would use it here.

The only other technological news of note was Ruff beat out Rego in the pursuit for Currency. Ruff landed it end of turn 79; Rego is going to get it end of this turn. Ichabod... Ichabod just finished Math.

On to the turn!

Remember last turn I was fretting about Rego's warrior in the north? Hoping he didn't have a settler coming? Well I think that was a little justified, because Rego fortified that warrior in spot and proceeded to whip 20% of his population away -- that's 5 out of 25 total pop. With zero soldier points gained, my guess is he's either whipped a worker/settler pair or even a pair of settlers to rush to the island. Sadly for him, he is a little late:



The rest of the turn was a bore. This was one of those points where we didn't have a plan set up -- largely because Rego helped mess up the old plan that was in place. I had done some work earlier in the day, and Noble had as well, but we were just tuning each other out, each doing our own thing while the plan slowly came into picture. The result of which produced a lot of reminders so I would know what we were doing:



I just noticed that as a result of some of the changes we made today (moving up a number of whips), we may not get Calendar at end of t90 now.

Demos. Researching a 2 pre-req tech at 100% is doing wonders for the GNP:

[NobleHelium]

We should swap back to 2 EPs on rego next turn if possible, else we might lose research visibility during the turn. Also, our bpt will go up once we get a few 3c routes with Ruff. We should get two of them in OAT and 3-4 across HC and HT.

[pindicator]

We should swap back to 2 EPs on rego next turn if possible, else we might lose research visibility during the turn. Also, our bpt will go up once we get a few 3c routes with Ruff. We should get two of them in OAT and 3-4 across HC and HT.

I had just thought of the trade route boost. Peace was signed on turn 58, so that means on 83 we get our increased trade yield, right? If so then we'll be fine for Currency at end of t90.

[NobleHelium]

Yeah something like that, subject to one-off adjustment.

Remember to turn on Avoid Growth next turn in RUO. You don't have a sign for that. And I think we should offer Fur for Ivory to Ruff next turn assuming we successfully settle the city.

[pindicator]

Fun With Food Numbers

So off the last demos we have 81 food. I always thought this was a bit of a misleading measurement. When you think of food, you think of growth, but demo food just counts all the food you have total throughout your empire. That means all those citizens that are soaking up food by just existing are inflating your food number. Really, that 81 could be 40 citizens not growing at all, or it could be 20 citizens in 5 cities growing at an amazing surplus.

How to get something more meaningful from that? Well, if you know the number of citizens and the number of cities, you can start to get a little more meaning to that 81 food.

My civ has 24 population in it. That 24 population accounts for 48 of the 81 food. So I'm not growing by 81 food, I'm really growing by 33 food each turn. Or rather, my empire produced a surplus of 33 food this turn. To put it into context, when you open your city screen the number do you look at your size 12 city and say "Yeah, I'm pulling in 16 food per turn!" No, you don't care that the 12 citizens are eating 2 food apiece. You look at the city screen and say "I'm making +4 food per turn". That's what I'm doing here but on an empire-wide level. We want to see on average how fast is each city growing, or get the Food Surplus per City. Here's my civ:

Food	Pop	Cities	Food Surplus	Surplus per City
88	24	7	33	+4.714

Can I compare that with other civs? I've been keeping track of cities and population for other players, and we can get a decent estimate with demos for crop yield with some help from the crop yield graph:



Looking at the demos I posted last report and going off the graph above we can guess at the following values:

Ichabod - 56
Regoarrarr - 63
Scooter - 66
Ruff Hi - 67

And since I know how many cities and total citizens each has, i can fill in the table:

Player	Food	Pop	Cities	Food Surplus	Surplus per City
Pind	81	24	7	33	+4.714
Ruff	67	20	6	27	+4.5
Scooter	66	22	6	22	+3.667
Rego	63	20	6	23	+3.833
Ichabod	56	16	4	24	+6

So this tells us a different story than we might take from the demos. If you look at the demos you would say that Ruff, Scooter, and Rego are all growing about the same, and Ichabod is languishing behind. But there is a lot more to it! Ichabod is really growing FAST - cities are averaging +6 food per turn. His fast growth had caught my eye before delving into these numbers because he was just at 10 population a mere 5 turns ago, but here we can see just how fast he is going! He is more than 50% faster than Rego & Scooter are (and he needs to be, because he's still got a ways to go to catch up).

To toot my own horn a bit more, this also says that despite having the most population, I am still growing faster than Rego, Ruff, and Scooter.

The problem with this is that it's just a snapshot - it's a 1 turn delta measurement on a value that can wildly fluxuate depending on what tiles a particular turn has you use. Better would be to average a few turns worth of data, but it's already late enough.

But I will start tracking this and we'll see if the growth continues at the same pace, especially once we've averaged a few turns out. I will leave an example of how my food growth looks when I average it out over 5 and 10 turns. I'll try to get a comparison of 5-turn and 10-turn averages for my opponents, although guessing on the demos is going to be the toughest part of getting a good number.

Duration	Food	Pop	Cities	Food Surplus	Surplus per City
1-Turn (t80)	81	24	7	33	+4.714
5-Turn Avg (t76-80)	75.2	23.2	5.6	28.8	+5.143
10-Turn Avg (t71-80)	71.6	22.5	5.3	26.6	+5.019

So, useful stat or waste of time while I wait for the save?

[SevenSpirits]

Awesome!

Love the stats, the micro, and the reporting.

[pindicator]

Thanks Seven! Glad i'm keeping my lurkets happy :D

I started averaging up each city's food required for growth and then realized there's a much simpler way. To get the average food needed for growing you just need P * 2 / C + 20 where P is population and C is number of cities. For example, ichabod has 4 cities sizes 6,5,4, & 1. Pop needed to grow for each is 32, 30, 28, and 22. Average of those is 28. Or plug in P=16 and C=4 to get 16 * 2 / 4 + 20 = 28.

But I also need a quick and dirty way to account for granaries.

(P * 2 / C + 20) * (1 - 0.5 * G) where G is the ratio of population with the benefit of granaries to total population.

See where I'm going with this?

[Commodore]

See where I'm going with this?

Bored and a little stir-crazy?