(May 9th, 2013, 15:12)Sullla Wrote: We did found a new city this turn, and I went with the suggested name of Catherine. Odd choice for an odd city. This spot will be mildly terrible even with the sheep resource, and is majorly terrible before that.
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
Hmmm, I thought that most of the discussion for this turn would center around drafting cities, but we're off on some random tangents instead. I guess that's fairly normal with Realms Beyond.
I didn't miswrite any of the proposed city locations in the south, I wrote them all exactly as planned. However, I didn't realize that one of those spots failed to capture a crabs resource within its borders; one of the low-priority spots should indeed be S-SE of the furs, as otherwise it doesn't claim the food bonus. All the others were intended as written. Most people want to found the spot three tiles west of the galley first, which sounds like a good suggestion to me.
When it comes to the city of Catherine, it comes down to how we want to manage it, and what type of city we're looking to create. I wanted to get a theatre to run Artists and pop borders quickly because that's the only way to increase the food surplus there. The sheep alone cap the city at +4 food/turn, and I've always felt that that's not enough to be a productive city. There is no possible way to get the food any higher without expanding borders and bringing over some irrigation on grassland tiles. My thought was to have the city take an initial hit by working some Artists (it would take 6 turns of running two Artists), and then we'd be able to bring over the farms and run +6 food or even +7 food if desired. That would increase future growth by 50% and make it much easier to whip units/buildings and then regrow quickly.
The alternate plan is simply to ignore building any farms and work nothing but the sheep and coastal tiles. That greatly limits what we can do with Catherine though; there's only 5 coastal tiles, and we can't get more than +4 food. The city will essentially be capped at size 6, although of course that is large enough to draft. And it will take a full 50 turns for the borders to expand; less than that if we build a library or theatre (but then why wouldn't we just build the theatre first as I suggested?) This development plan would leave Catherine as a fairly crappy filler city that works a few coastal tiles and that's about it. We certainly can do that, I just feel as though we would do better in the long run by popping the borders and getting the city up to a higher food surplus with a few grassland farms. After all, by going from +4 food to +6 food, we would make up the 24 food lost from 6 turns of working Artists in just 12 turns, and that's not exactly a long payback time. That's how I would play this one, in any case.
I'm also not sure what cities T-Hawk has lying around in his games either. 36 gold/turn independent of the slider is pretty amazing to me. (It's not like the city is providing 36 total gold or anything, we get 100 gold this turn at 0% science, it's the fact that the income is independent of slider settings that makes it so useful.) That's worth a full tick on the slider settings, taking us from 40% to 50% break-even rate pretty much on its own. Shrines are definitely less useful in Single Player Civ4, where you can always sell outdated techs to AIs to fuel your own deficit research and go at 100% rate for most of the game, but we can't exactly do that here. I think that the hundreds and hundreds of free gold that our early shrine has provided has been a crucial factor in our economic success.
Everyone seemed on board with drafting four of the five cities, but there was some disagreement with Horse Feathers. I don't particularly agree with those comments; Horse Feathers will still grow next turn if we would draft it, I think that may have been a mistake. Seven Tribes is not a better candidate to draft this turn. It will be a turn away from instantly regrowing next turn; keep in mind, we're going to draft all of these cities eventually. We do better to draft Horse Feathers this turn (for instant regrowth) and then Seven Tribes next turn (again for instant regrowth). This works out better than reversing the order. And with regards to troop movements later, on the second round of drafting, we can draft cities in a different order if we feel it necessary for tactical concerns. We may as well go with the best options for city management right now.
No comments at all on the forge whip in Forbidden Fruit? Yes/no? I think that we should.
(May 9th, 2013, 16:39)kjn Wrote: Our capital has a number-of-cities cost of 5.51g right now, so we're not at the cap yet. Seems city size also factors in there:
City
Size
# cities maintenance
Adventure One / Horse Feathers
13
5.51
Gourmet Menu
12
5.32
Mansa's Muse
11
5.13
Focal Point
8
4.56
Ditchdigger
4
3.8
Frozen Jungle
2
3.42
Let It Snow / Catherine
1
3.42
I forget the exact formula (I'm sure T-Hawk has it, if it's not on civfanatics), but yes, city size does affect # of cities maintenance.
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
(May 10th, 2013, 12:20)Merovech Wrote: I forget the exact formula (I'm sure T-Hawk has it, if it's not on civfanatics), but yes, city size does affect # of cities maintenance.
Quote:Number of Cities Maintenance
Here is a simplified formula (ignoring rounding and leaving out CityRank caclulations). 'N' is the number of cities you control:
{from CvCity.cpp L4,940}
CityMaint = N * (Pop + 17)/18 * WorldSize_m * Handicap_m + (1 for some cities, depending on cityrank)
The full formula is (again apply the following multiplicative factors from left to right and round down after each multiplication: WorldSize_m, Handicap_m, Building_m):
CityRank is 0 for the captial, 1 for the next closest city, and so forth (more precisely CityRank goes by distance first, game turn founded second, and unique city ID third.) '%' is the modulo operation, i.e. 11 % 3 = 2. Intuitively cities with higher city rank get the +1. Because of the modulo though it ends up being more of a fudge factor. ]
Here's a google document I created to project # of cities maintenance. Worldsize and handicap were set based on a different game, but we can change those depending on the settings for this one. I've made it so that anyone with the link can edit.
I didn't see any objections to the stuff I outlined this morning, and we were the only ones who hadn't ended turn, so I went ahead and drafted HF, FF, ED, BBB, and SF. Quick test there, if you've been playing enough attention to know what all of those cities were from the abbreviations. I also did whip the forge in Forbidden Fruit for 3 population.
We are up for a new turn, which I will post on a bit later.
36 gold/turn independent of the slider is pretty amazing to me. (It's not like the city is providing 36 total gold or anything, we get 100 gold this turn at 0% science, it's the fact that the income is independent of slider settings that makes it so useful.) That's worth a full tick on the slider settings, taking us from 40% to 50% break-even rate pretty much on its own. Shrines are definitely less useful in Single Player Civ4, where you can always sell outdated techs to AIs to fuel your own deficit research and go at 100% rate for most of the game, but we can't exactly do that here. I think that the hundreds and hundreds of free gold that our early shrine has provided has been a crucial factor in our economic success. 
I also did whip the forge in Forbidden Fruit for 3 population. 
![[Image: ISDG-T138-aptmod-power-chart.png]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10039024/ISDG-T138-aptmod-power-chart.png)