[SPOILERS] Small Wunders and Izzy of Inca: The fat lady sings

[WilliamLP]

Also, I'm not sure if you read the tech thread, but on me asking if there's any interest in a pause over the Christmas break:

Draft Mindy to play! Dust and ash may be all that greet you upon your return, but hey...

Are you reading our spoiler thread or something?

I've read Mindy's other dedlurking gigs. Dude admires my record, you know that's whack.

[MindyMcCready]

Also, I'm not sure if you read the tech thread, but on me asking if there's any interest in a pause over the Christmas break:

Draft Mindy to play! Dust and ash may be all that greet you upon your return, but hey...

Are you reading our spoiler thread or something?

I've read Mindy's other dedlurking gigs. Dude admires my record, you know that's whack.

:LOL:

[WilliamLP]

This is the first evidence I've seen that Cheetah has any teeth. Maybe his population will be reduced to a single mating pair and then be able to repopulate later, albeit with very little genetic diversity.




There he is doing emergency forest chops.

Feudalism is in. Unfortunately I thought that archers were made obsolete by longbows - they're not! So I wasted about 64 hammers of them in pre-builds, thinking they'd auto-upgrade in the build queues. Oh well, they aren't completely useless yet, for HR garrisons and fully fortified in hill cities.

I saw no reason not to switch to Vassalage - it actually increases our GPT at 0% science from 102 to 107, because of the extra free units it gives. And the +2 experience is really nice too - meaning that longbows can come out of barracks cities with 2 promotions for G2 or CG2.)

I'm vetoing Mindy on the island effort - a galley finishes and a settler disembarks next turn. It will only go with a spear for now but more military can go later if needed. I'm guessing that there's nothing fiercer than maybe barb warriors over there now, we'll see. If there are barb axes we can get a chariot over very easily. If Scooter or Commodore are there, well :shrug:.




The red dot column fourth from the right is maintenance, so half of that is roughly the GPT we'd get from CoL and courthouses. Even in WT (the farthest large city), the 3GPT saved is 40 turns away from paying for the 120 hammers for a couthouse, so I can agree it's not an immediate urgent priority.

The spear in Barbiere is because it had one already in the queue, so might as well finish it. A settler comes out in 3, and the missionary is for the copper / marble city next, that really needs a border pop and to save the hammers on a terrace and lighthouse, to get started decently.

[MindyMcCready]

Vetos away!!! When can i get one of those? :LOL:

Anyway, I don't mind the island effort,...I'd just prefer to claim the entire island. If we plant 3 cities and Scooter plants 3 cities then we're going to have to heavily militarize that border as well eating up hammers and unit maintenance.

If we instead bent our entire economy on this objective with the goal of having all 6 cities or whatever, I'd be fully supportive. Even if Retep's demise is further delayed.

Looks like we're running about 40% break-even?

[WilliamLP]

Looks like we're running about 40% break-even?

Yeah, it's about +6 gold at 40, -13 at 50, so breakeven is 43% or so at the moment. A market in Manon next turn will yield +9-10 gold at 0% too, which will help quite a bit.

[Ceiliazul]

re: payback cost of courthouses, remember that 1 hammer does not equal 1 commerce. this is not a suggestion toward a specific course, but you are both doing excellent analysis, so food for thought there.

also, regarding payoff times, seven started a great thread some time ago. search "payoff" in the civ general forum.

edit: the thread I'm referring to is definitely NOT directly applicable to this game, again just hoping to spak some more excellent analysis.

[WilliamLP]

also, regarding payoff times, seven started a great thread some time ago. search "payoff" in the civ general forum.

Thanks for bringing this up! I'm sure you must mean this thread, which I hadn't seen before and has some really interesting discussion in it.

1. Conversion of food, hammers, and beakers
1 food = 8 points
1 hammer = 5 points
1 beaker = 3 points

It's kind of interesting that this is coincidentally similar the Reinfeld values for chess (queen=9, rook=5, bishop/knight=1). And even there the real answer is "it depends".

Obviously if these values were always accurate nobody would ever build wealth, and they do. But of course the point that it depends is brought up a lot there. E.g. The value of food depends on what you're growing onto. The value of hammers depends on what those hammers are building. (For instance the hammers for an initial granary I'm sure should be valued much more highly.)

A new thing for me is the estimate that the cost of a citizen per turn is 2 food, and one commerce because of how much they increase maintenance. I had thought pop was less costly than that. But in this light, an analysis of the value of a cities to our east with no resources is not going to come out very well.

Also really interesting is the attempt to calculate the baseline interest rate on per-turn investments, thus assigning a finite sum to an infinite series. And the rate (for quick speed) appears to be about 3.5-4%, so he estimates one commerce per turn, forever, is worth 20 commerce now.

[MindyMcCready]

I'm not so sure that the one commerce was an estimate so much as a guesstimate. Seven, Krill and others seem to discuss that a little farther down. IIRC, part of that was 0.4 gpt for actual maintenance and then some amount for unit maintenace assuming a happy cap + HR.

Building wealth doesn't violate this value system per se - just the voodoo valuation of an earlier tech is tossed into the equation as well. But, yeah, the discussion that follows does talk about increasing the hammer value when building a granary for example.

They really broke the mold after making this game. No surprise that Civ5 doesn't measure up. And the robust thinking that went into the design of this game meant relatively few things had to be nerfed for balance later on (or the nerfing was done prior to launch - who does that nowadays anyway).

[Ceiliazul]

if civ 5 was just remade civ 4 with hexes and better graphics, i think we'd all be playing that by now. maybe Some improved ai Would have helped too!

[WilliamLP]

Absolutely I'm with the choir on Civ 5. After my first game of it I was actually quite depressed for a while, since my expectations were so high. It's unbelievable (balance issues from BtS not included) that the team managed to make a game with balance and strategic depth still interesting a decade later.

I don't really get why hex grids are superior, other than that they appeal to some aesthetic like that in a square grid, game distance along diagonals (one move) is a factor 1.41 less than the geometric distance. And so the area you can cover with, say, 10 moves, resembles a circle less. But mathematically, if you take a square grid, and take away two opposite diagonals (say, you can move NE or SW, but not NW or SE), what you get is exactly a hex grid in topology: every square has six neighbors. So I don't see why it's a big deal, or why it's worth losing the way of speaking of positions everyone has already, in terms of N, E, S, W. (It's not that easy to describe distant positions along hexes, the way you would say or think of "8E5N".)

Anyway...




The limiting factor in getting to the NW island is the galley moves, so there's no point in taking the risk of having the settler hop on the boat yet. I think the way to do this is to have a settler and chariot get on the boat at 138, and then on 139 they get off (and a worker or two hops on). And then T140 the chariot can have 1 turn of preliminary scouting to choose the city location. The most likely spot seems like 1SW of the deer.

The next settler is out in 2 turns, and it's either heading for the copper, the double fish spot to the west of Rigoletto (though that would probably tempt Retep too much before we have even more of an overwhelming military advantage), or maybe even a second city on the island.

The great person out of Turandot is due in 7 turns. I really, really hope it's a prophet (75% chance). We should have a city dedicated to working a couple of scientists now as well, and we don't. Tosca is probably the best candidate for an acceptable GP farm (though it's not a good one) if only because it has nothing good to work except food tiles. The fish + fish + Bambi site would be better but it's going to take too long to get it running.

We'll get MC in 4 turns, or maybe 3: it's very close.

On the discussion of how much a citizen costs:




We're paying 102 maintenance for cities and civics, or 118 with inflation. (Though a bit of inflation is from military costs.) We have 74 citizens. But, every fourth citizen saves a gold by adding a free unit. So assuming City Maintenance plus Civ Upkeep plus (most of) Inflation scales with citizens: the net cost of 74 population is 113-ish (upkeep plus inflation) - 19-ish (unit cost savings).

But, because both city and civic maintenance have components for the number of cities (and we're talking about the cost of growing an existing city), the real number is somewhat lower. And it will depend on a lot of stuff like which civics we're running and whether we're organized and / or have courthouses.

In summary though, the back of the envelope sees no reason to doubt that a citizen costs about 1 commerce per turn. Since (I think) the per-population costs typically dominate the per-city costs.

Graphs:




In arguably the most important metric, we're at least keeping up the slope with the bigger kids. Mackoti is probably terrifying though.




There hasn't been much depletion between Cheetah and Ichabod. Getting three cities without loss is a pretty amazing result from Ichabod's point of view. Having Cheetah's tiny core be a thorn in his side, and not economical to take out, isn't that bad for us as Mindy pointed out. It's sort of analogous to what Retep is to us right now.