[SPOILERS] William discovers a source of horse. FDR of Mongolia

[SevenSpirits]

GLib is kind of like 3 scientist slots and 6 grassland farms to feed the scientists and one grassland town to pay for all the extra maintenance from population and 7 extra land tiles to put all the improvements on and 10 population and 10 happiness and 10 health, except that unlike a wonder which gave those things, it doesn't increase the food cost to grow additional population in that city!

[WilliamLP]

Gavagai sent me a link to RB which turned out to be William's thread for this game. I closed the post as soon as I realised, reading only the fact that its a ranking of who the thread owner would prefer to start close to.

Wow... Well at least he would have to read the whole post to find out where he himself stands.

Interesting analyses on the GLib in terms of net tile additions to an existing city, thanks. I wonder what a new city would look like that would have equal value to building the wonder. Certainly 8 scientist points isn't easy to obtain though while 6 is trivial. For example, how much worse is a 5-pop city working 2 grass farms, 1 cottage, and 2 scientists? (Ignoring that if you went to the trouble to settle that city you'd certainly want to make it much better than that. Also obviously that city takes some time and worker turns to set up and get a library in...)

Certainly it's clear that if you can get it for 175 base hammers (+50% IND, +50% Marble), you're going for the tech anyway, and can get it with certainty, you build it 100% of the time, every time.

By the way, a more general note. My personality style is to have strong opinions, held weakly. I have no delusion that I'm very good at this game yet, but the way I learn things is to challenge everything (at times rather aggressively) and see what holds up after thinking about it closely. (E.g. even this Great Library discussion is teaching me something, which I started by claiming it isn't that good.) This style of learning has upsides and downsides compared to a protege / master relationship where you start by accepting advice uncritically.

[WilliamLP]

For the record, I think it should have been clearer that trading your choice was possible before the pick process started. This changes how people would choose to accept or reject picks, since they might want to go for something with high trade value, rather than passing it up for something they actually want to play.

That said, I don't really care. I'm not feeling like attempting to play a hardcore competitive game where every bit of extra probability is ground out of rules minutia.

[Ceiliazul]

you're right, rules shouldnt be changing now. it's a terrible precedent. especially in a no-diplo game.

"...If you won't trade me, something *unfortunate* might happen."

On the other hand, I wonder what qgq could have got in trade for Ragnar!

[WilliamLP]

I actually got a private message to trade civs (we're actually allowed to trade just one or the other of civ or leader, and not just the whole package?) I'm turning it down and I'm not going to "out" anyone, but yeah, the whole thing is a bit of a mess. Like you say, why introduce something that is clearly diplo to this game?

[NobleHelium]

By the way, a more general note. My personality style is to have strong opinions, held weakly. I have no delusion that I'm very good at this game yet, but the way I learn things is to challenge everything (at times rather aggressively) and see what holds up after thinking about it closely. (E.g. even this Great Library discussion is teaching me something, which I started by claiming it isn't that good.) This style of learning has upsides and downsides compared to a protege / master relationship where you start by accepting advice uncritically.

Well I think this is rather contradictory, I don't think your opinions are strong if you hold them weakly. But I get what you mean, you're more than willing to be corrected which is the most important factor.

I'd say the GLib is a "good" wonder but it's not a key wonder. I haven't built it or even tried to build it since my first game. I would say the Parthenon is not a good wonder, but it can be worth building if you get enough bonuses on it. Notre Dame is probably about the same as Parthenon in power level on most maps. Lower than them I would say is something like Hagia Sophia. Really bad wonders would be like Angkor Wat or Chichen Itza, and we actually should have built Angkor Wat in 38 in retrospect.

[WilliamLP]

I do think this game is a complete non-starter without civstats, and we're going to find that out really really quickly if we try it. Hopefully the author or maintainer of it is available to make a quick fix.

(I wonder how it gathers its information? Does the PB server have some sort of API built in perhaps? If so, there's no shortage of programming talent here but I certainly could hack up a clone of it in a day or so if I had to. [EDIT: Nevermind, it uses a custom uploader of some sort running on the PB machine, without source obviously available. I have no clue how that would work and it's probably beyond me.)

The actual game:

+ Wheel / Hunting is a fine pair of starting techs in RBMod. The capital will have multiple riverside grassland animals for sure, so we can go right to bronze, right?

The good news is that Hunting is an ideal starting tech here. Also, tons of river tiles favors non-financial because the RBMod FIN bonus doesn't apply on rivers.

The bad news is that settling in place would yield a 15 turn worker, which is never what you want. Three turns off the worker is three turns for the whole game since the first worker bottlenecks everything (except for a few turns of capital beakers). But certainly moving 1W looks pretty terrible from this view. I think Krill might be going for a long walk if he has this exact start.

Settling in place looks to be a hammer-poor capital with only the single grass hill other than the pig (and the plains hill, which makes a very poor tile in the early game). I probably would prefer settling 1E or 1NE over that.

For the scout move, I'd like to at least try and rule out the 1W plains hill settle (or miraculously discover another food resource for it). There are 8 fogged tiles in its BFC. Moving SW-NW reveals (I think) 5 of them. Moving simply NW reveals at least 5 as well. I'll have to get a better read on tile bleed with world builder.

There's always "pulling a retep" and taking a hike east as well to see what we can see. Mapmakers love that kind of thing.

[MindyMcCready]

Hello, hello,

$0.02

I'd think about 1NE since it looks like there's more forests up that way. Also, with that river opening I'd think that you could fit in another city with shared sheep + a lighthouse (cheap) powered lake. That second city could be a pretty strong generalist city with riverside + 3 hills and +5 food before farms.

[WilliamLP]

I haven't moved anything yet, I think the map will be reloaded again anyway. And I still think that if the CivStats issue can't be resolved this game is dead as soon as people start meeting each other.

Trying to reproduce the map in WB:




I probably made some mistakes in the tile reads. But the main interesting question is whether there could be food in the plains hill BFC. There's probably nothing else that would be worth spending a turn moving the settler without settling. And the move would be very painful - the 6 foodhammers for the pig is the best we see.

The secondary question is whether there are more resources in the BFC of the start position.

Possible scout moves:

1. SW-NW
+ The only move that reveals the western "Z" tile which is one of the things that could make the plains hill a good settle.
+ Glimpses over the lake.
- Misses the northern fog tiles which could inform the capital location.

1b. SW-W
+ Efficient scout route, hill reveals extra tiles.
- Misses the western "Z" (I made two Z's because I messed up, heh). Because, I'm reasonable sure the tile 3w of the start is a forest and the hill can't see over it.

2. NW
+ Reveals the interesting northern tiles, perhaps the only move that reveals "W".
- Only one move means less efficient scouting coverage. With huts in play this has very tangible value.

3. NE-N
+ Efficient scout coverage, hill reveals extra tiles.
+ Informs a decision between setting 1E or 1NE.
- Doesn't do a good job ruling out the plains hill settlement. It does reveal the interesting grass tile 2N though.

For the capital, if not the plain hill (which is unlikely to be good), I'm leaning on 1E over 1NE. It can improve the sheep 1 turn earlier but that probably doesn't matter since the pig is a better tile and probably should be improved first. NE moves away from 3 grass river tiles, probably gains 2. 1E still has a site available to share the sheep (1E2S of the sheep) if need be.

But, a possible scout move could reveal NE to be a bonanza.

Settling in place is probably not best. The only interesting tile that could make it much better than moving (I think) is the northern "Z" tile, but that is a plains.

Really, I'm extremely torn on where to move the scout. In the end the choice will look clever or stupid depending on where the resources are in hindsight. E.g. in the best of all possible universes the plains hill is the best site just for the faster worker and it picks up food we don't see yet. So do we maximize for the best case, or try to pick a better okay case, knowing we'd miss the (small) chance for the best one?

A factor is that techs are priced according to a huge map, which is a little more than I'm used to. E.g. Hunting, Agri, and Wheel are 103 beakers instead of 96 for a large map (PB11, PB13).

We know the map is cylindrical now, at 60x124. (I assume 60 is the Y dimension otherwise that's just really weird.) Unless Commodore has changed his mind, he mentioned it would be like a plausible world (oceans, coastlines) rather than a zigzag of water and peaks that makes an abstract mathematical maze (Torusland). My aesthetic tastes run this way too.

[NobleHelium]

Yeah, I agree with you that this game will not work without Civstats. Of course, I don't think it'll work with Civstats either, so yeah.