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

[WilliamLP]

Interesting take on it! I haven't figured out if this is a game where we can get away with spamming out a whole bunch of cities really quickly that stay size 3-4 for a while, or if we need to slow down for a bit first until Currency (and maybe Alphabet). I can see that this site has plenty of advantages for the spamming part and probably means we get to the gem and horse spots a little sooner. (Aside from not needing a border pop and 2 work boats, and claiming a much better new food resource, even growing on the sheep is better than the cow, because it's +5 instead of +4 and the capital better uses the 2 hammers from the cow for workers and settlers.)

[WilliamLP]

Turn 52:




So our scout started 2W of of the axe, and I knew where the bear was on T51. I moved NE, and wanted to scout further afield. So I reasoned that there were six possible tiles the bear could have moved to, or it could have stayed in place, and only one of those places was bad. But... of course that's where the bear went, 1E, and the scout ended up next to it. I rolled the dice and lost here so the scout is probably dead. With W1 in a forest I think it's slightly worse than a coin flip to win the combat.




Trigger was founded. We're going to be staring awkwardly at Pindicator over the water for the whole game. Oh well, at least he isn't running pre-nerf circumnavigated Vikings or something.

Ceil comparing him and Scooter to the Beatles breaking up made me laugh. I think Commodore must have been the Yoko Ono in that situation.

The capital is working 2 cottages right now, but one of them will be flipped on and off a lot. I'm getting a scout to the west, just because being able to reason that barbs can't come from that area, even theoretically, makes military concerns a lot easier. A granary finishes in Trigger EOT 52, the wheat will be improved T54.




I think the 4 point power increase from Darrell is 2 warriors. He's left his copper unimproved for so long, if he hasn't been building warriors it's just a lot of hammers thrown away for nothing. I don't think he knows AH yet.

MYKI, judging by C&D, seems to be playing a very sane opening, and his total pop is about 8 or 9 on three cities. Good news for him since he's learning the game (at this point in AlaePB he had a size 1 capital), bad news for getting a punching bag to easily grab land from in the era of knights.

[MindyMcCready]

So I'm going to need a couple of days to go through the stages of loss with my old micro plans.

:LOL:

Personally, I'm not really lamenting this loss as much as you are - despite having stated that I'd come around to accept your whales plant. Your spot had its advantages but still hurt. :LOL: From what I can tell of the map, those whales are our by virtue of us having the ability to plant 2 culture-producing cities. We're going to get that tile in due time,...let him build the workboat for us.

Pindicator (unless there's more land that's 2-tiles away?) cannot reasonably dispute that location. The second we plant a city 1N of fish, he's going to have to choose A.) Mentally conceding the whales to us, B.) Razing our costal cities. With the extreme low profit involved in a naval, mainland invasion for the sake of a luxary, he's very unlikely to choose that option.

City #3 can super-springboard a 1N of fish and challenge from there.

[edit - looked at a differnt pic of the map,...Pindicator could settle another city. ]

I'm going on the theory that most people on RB tend to expand too early when they don't have a worker force to support that expansion optimally. Demos mislead, because for every city you really ought to subtract 2 food and appropriate commerce. They laughed at Einstein, Newton, and also Bozo the Clown, and all that...

Fair enough. However, I'm going to point out that the land quality here is ridiculously powerful. Losing out on land in this game would be very unwise. Use all that super-food to powerout more workers.

I switched tech to Archery because we don't need immediate Writing anymore

I don't understand this given that we have copper and whippable city sizes. IIRC the game is primarily barb warrior at this point (unlike BTS?). One axe will take down an army of barbs,...

This city, we can hope, doesn't implicitly start an inevitable naval war.

Absolutely no reason that it should? We can't shy away from both Darrabod and Pindicator.

MYKI has his axe wandering around. It looks like it's leveled up on barb animals and / or warriors. Darrellbod might be more concerned about it than us, but I don't think he can afford to send it too far astray with the barb blitz coming nearer.

We'll need chariots soon enough. Hopefully, you'll post a new dot-map plan.

I can say it now: Pindicator did you a favor. You're settling the best possible snowball city.

Master Commodore has spoken.

Interesting take on it! I haven't figured out if this is a game where we can get away with spamming out a whole bunch of cities really quickly that stay size 3-4 for a while, or if we need to slow down for a bit first until Currency (and maybe Alphabet). I can see that this site has plenty of advantages for the spamming part and probably means we get to the gem and horse spots a little sooner. (Aside from not needing a border pop and 2 work boats, and claiming a much better new food resource, even growing on the sheep is better than the cow, because it's +5 instead of +4 and the capital better uses the 2 hammers from the cow for workers and settlers.)

I think that we have to seriously consider a Pyramids run by moving Pink dot 1E as the next city. +3 happiness from representation would break this game wide open. It's a low likelihood of success at this point but not impossible. Also, the fail-gold from stone + industrious could power us towards some important techs like math/calendar/currency. I'm considering it a win in either event - and one that will enable city spam onto this incredible land. Cheap walls as a deterrant.

[WilliamLP]

Personally, I'm not really lamenting this loss as much as you are - despite having stated that I'd come around to accept your whales plant. Your spot had its advantages but still hurt. :LOL: From what I can tell of the map, those whales are our by virtue of us having the ability to plant 2 culture-producing cities. We're going to get that tile in due time,...let him build the workboat for us.

Pindicator (unless there's more land that's 2-tiles away?) cannot reasonably dispute that location. The second we plant a city 1N of fish, he's going to have to choose A.) Mentally conceding the whales to us, B.) Razing our costal cities. With the extreme low profit involved in a naval, mainland invasion for the sake of a luxary, he's very unlikely to choose that option.

The whales don't really matter much post-Calendar. At that point our happiness is fine. Their value is giving us basically half the value of Charismatic instantly, at precisely the moment when the Charismatic trait is most powerful, in precisely the situation when it is most powerful (a low happiness opening).

Fair enough. However, I'm going to point out that the land quality here is ridiculously powerful. Losing out on land in this game would be very unwise. Use all that super-food to powerout more workers.

The land quality is really powerful for two things: getting more food and workers and settlers out, and having potential places to vertically grow. There's a real danger in falling into the kind of trap that Care Bears did in PB14, except the things that made it fail are much worse in this game. One we need to actually build military and support it too, and, tech is inherently weighted higher by being more expensive.

The land around us in PB13 would have been phenomenal to horizontally expand into because of all the high commerce resources around (gold + silver). But, um, well...

My intuition here is that I'd much rather have a little less land, but hit the key tech break points a few turns earlier. There's a separate snowball game there too, with, e.g. Alphabet and Currency, and CoL speeding up later techs. Metal Casting speeds up everything. Hitting Catapults and Knights many turns before a neighbor is worth a lot, and so on.

I don't understand this given that we have copper and whippable city sizes. IIRC the game is primarily barb warrior at this point (unlike BTS?). One axe will take down an army of barbs,...

It's pretty arguable, but it's cheap (3 turns and finishes this turn anyway so too late), we need it anyway, archers have plenty of advantages over axes, especially when we don't have many warriors. (Cheaper at nearly 3 for 2 ratio, better all around city defenders, more cost effective and less alarming to rivals as forward scouts.) An axe can only take down as many barbs as it can move to, and I just got paranoid from reading other reports of players who got their pants pulled down by the barb rush, together with some possibly unlucky rolls.

Absolutely no reason that it should? We can't shy away from both Darrabod and Pindicator.

You want to bet?

We'll need chariots soon enough. Hopefully, you'll post a new dot-map plan.

I'm still pretty firm on city four being centralized for the stone and flood plains area. My biggest fear in this game is being geometrically locked out of the center of the map by Darrell, and sort of confined to be a sub-province of theirs with a Spain + Portugal kind of geography. Plus the long term value of the stone + incense is very strong. I'm quite willing to give up planting the best city for short term growth for this.

Master Commodore has spoken.

He has his own style. I'm pretty sure he's wrong, but then being overly deferential to my elders has never been much of a character flaw of mine.

The Civ IV metagame can be disrupted. The style of, e.g., Mackoti shows this. The bits I see of his play style intrigue me.

A size 4 city needs 28 food to grow to size 5, and it will have 13 already from a granary coming from size 3. So it's a cost of 15 food to grow to size 5. Then, that, plus some worker turns, means we get an extra grass river cottage or so per every city, started earlier, for very little cost. A new city costs a settler, plus a geometrically growing amount of maintenance per turn, plus defensive and road considerations. And you have to invest food to grow it and improve its tiles too.

A settler can be viewed as the opportunity to grow onto tiles. The whales give the opportunity to grow onto more tiles, for less. 90 food for 6 additional tiles in 6 cities! As opposed to a city, which is 100 food hammers (settler) + 60 hammers (granary) + 22 food (size 2) + 13 food (size 3, best case) + 14 food (size 4)... and that's way more investment and you've only added four tiles to the empire! And it costs much more per turn! You also add the 2/1/1 or 2/2/1 from the city tile itself, but that's like adding an additional improved tile, not nearly enough to invalidate the figures.

The arithmetic doesn't just support it, it knocks it out of the park.

Someday I'll get a chance to prove this by translating it into success, but this game won't be it, sadly, because of Pindicator's move. I'm forced to make the move which conventional and more common play thinks is better but I think is much worse.

It's really how PB11 was won. I got on the vertical train quite a bit earlier than everyone else, and that was what changed a (ostensibly) weak position into perhaps the strongest.

(Admittedly, one key thing I'm missing in this analysis is the long term strategic value and growth potential of land control.)

I think that we have to seriously consider a Pyramids run by moving Pink dot 1E as the next city. +3 happiness from representation would break this game wide open. It's a low likelihood of success at this point but not impossible. Also, the fail-gold from stone + industrious could power us towards some important techs like math/calendar/currency. I'm considering it a win in either event - and one that will enable city spam onto this incredible land. Cheap walls as a deterrant.

A serious case for Pyramids needs to study realistic completion dates. They fell in the mid 50s in PB5, similar in PB17. If we wanted them we already needed to get moving. Going for it with this many players means that if we played 100 games at random we need to be a in a better position for it than about 97 of those games would have been.

I also need to be playing this game as a daily project until at least 2015, so I'll admit really high variance strategies aren't too appealing in that light. However you slice it 500 hammers is a hell of a lot, even modified, worth at least 2-3 extra city settlement efforts. But whatever the potential chance was, a pyramids run needed to commit and plan probably 30 turns earlier than now.

With the whales setup, we were actually in a pretty good place to try for MoM, even without Marble. This, because it would have been an attempt at a nearly optimal Calendar beeline.

[MindyMcCready]

Ceil comparing him and Scooter to the Beatles breaking up made me laugh. I think Commodore must have been the Yoko Ono in that situation.

That's hilarious. Bare naked Ladies song is coming to mind.

MYKI, judging by C&D, seems to be playing a very sane opening, and his total pop is about 8 or 9 on three cities. Good news for him since he's learning the game (at this point in AlaePB he had a size 1 capital), bad news for getting a punching bag to easily grab land from in the era of knights.

Ok, well I'm going to point out that I disklike giving up the 'on-the-line' pigs again. It's a good plan so long as we have easy pickings but if we don't it's a serious concession that will cost us in long-term competitiveness. I also continue to feel that the wines are ours. Suggesting:

City #4: 1SW of Stone. Research Masonary
--> City #2 with 2 hills + cows + 3 forests seems like a contender for a fail-gold Pyramids attempt.
City #5: 1S of Pigs - whip cheap stone walls if necessary. Better yet 1SE to share the east corn
City #6: 1N of Fish, whip/chop barracks + (monument?) for deer + rice + fish maintenance + whales contention.
City #7: Gems city - tbd. I like the fully defensive hill plant, but not fully entrenched in my thinking (unlike other things). The west seems challenging dot-map wise.
City #8: When borders of City #6 have popped settle 2N of south side dry wheat. River defense + 1st ring cows.

On the whales claim. Given the 2S of Maoi site's fish, that may influence Pindicator into settling in a way that doesn't keep control of the whales. We'll need a workboat down there to better guess if he'd plant to strongly control those whales. Also, the awesome maoi site on horses will have to figure without those fish since Pindicator could easily get the fish first ring.. All-in-all, I'm losing some love for that city spot for those reasons. We'll have to think about that some more.

[MindyMcCready]

The whales don't really matter much post-Calendar.

That's definately true. So I guess we just let it be or passively pursue it.

A serious case for Pyramids needs to study realistic completion dates. They fell in the mid 50s in PB5, similar in PB17. If we wanted them we already needed to get moving. Going for it with this many players means that if we played 100 games at random we need to be a in a better position for it than about 97 of those games would have been.

I also need to be playing this game as a daily project until at least 2015, so I'll admit really high variance strategies aren't too appealing in that light. However you slice it 500 hammers is a hell of a lot, even modified, worth at least 2-3 extra city settlement efforts. But whatever the potential chance was, a pyramids run needed to commit and plan probably 30 turns earlier than now.

With the whales setup, we were actually in a pretty good place to try for MoM, even without Marble. This, because it would have been an attempt at a nearly optimal Calendar beeline.

Definition of failure:
1 forest chop (pre-math) = 50 gold.
1 Plains hill mine = 10 gpt.
With this much food around, getting the extra cities isn't the problem (or the objective from what you're saying). Isn't this pretty much like working a gold mine?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but for generating commerce I don't think that we have a better alternative to that. Other than the Masonary research what's the downside?

My intuition here is that I'd much rather have a little less land, but hit the key tech break points a few turns earlier.

See above?

There's a separate snowball game there too, with, e.g. Alphabet and Currency, and CoL speeding up later techs. Metal Casting speeds up everything. Hitting Catapults and Knights many turns before a neighbor is worth a lot, and so on.

Absolutely no reason that it should? We can't shy away from both Darrabod and Pindicator.

You want to bet?

All-in on the successful Knights play vs MYKI. Nothing high-variance about this play at all. Should be fun.

We'll need chariots soon enough. Hopefully, you'll post a new dot-map plan.

I'm still pretty firm on city four being centralized for the stone and flood plains area. My biggest fear in this game is being geometrically locked out of the center of the map by Darrell, and sort of confined to be a sub-province of theirs with a Spain + Portugal kind of geography. Plus the long term value of the stone + incense is very strong. I'm quite willing to give up planting the best city for short term growth for this.

No dispute here.

[WilliamLP]

Definition of failure:
1 forest chop (pre-math) = 50 gold.
1 Plains hill mine = 10 gpt.
With this much food around, getting the extra cities isn't the problem (or the objective from what you're saying). Isn't this pretty much like working a gold mine?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but for generating commerce I don't think that we have a better alternative to that. Other than the Masonary research what's the downside?

It's not the core of what you're trying to say but in this version, stone is only +50%, not +100%.

Lump output of gold probably isn't a good use of forests early in the game. (Maybe, for a really specific and timed tech objective.) Under Seven's heuristic, 40 gold is worth about 1.3 gold per turn forever. Now, I do want to invest, really heavily, on gold and beaker output, but I want the investments that pay forever and compound.

If the plains hill mine can work a wonder that has a resource multiplier, and it doesn't tie the city up from building something we'd rather have, yeah, it's like a 0/0/8 tile. We'd work those if we had them. A plains hill gold mine (not on a river) would be 0/3/7, or 13 gold per turn if you can reinvest hammers at 2 for 1. So it's not quite as good. And it's also a rate that doesn't last forever, unlike making the effort for a gold which does.

The standard for commerce to compare to is just putting down cottages. A grass river cottage is 2/0/2 which grows up to 2/0/5 eventually not including later game perks. As long as we have those to grow onto, they're going to be better than the 0/0/8 tile if you do long-term analysis on them, let alone the tile at 0/0/4 building wealth.

At this point I think the chance actually landing pyramids is close to 0. Unless there's one of those mass mutual psyche-out scenarios where everyone is afraid, and these do happen. But if "contingency" gold (nicer to say that "fail") is the goal, I don't think it's worth going out of the way to make special settlement efforts for it.

All-in on the successful Knights play vs MYKI. Nothing high-variance about this play at all. Should be fun.

Well presumably you've seen me in action before, especially at this point I'm not going to initiate an attack if it seems to be high variance.

The "downside" is just growing peacefully and using the point where Org + Ind + Courthouses + Forges + National Wonders shine most brightly to have a competitive economy with our neighbours. But if MYKI (more likely than Darrell or Pindicator) starts to seriously lag in tech by that point in the game, I'd absolutely think about an attack. See PB13, in a game this big even surviving means you have to somehow make out with 2 or more civ's worth of land by a certain point in the game.

[Commodore]

William, you might have had extenuating circumstances, but your PB13 dotmap was a crime against humanity. Pindicator is helping you with buffing the super-capital...which is is 100% a Mackoti Standard, if that's your preferred paragon. The extra happy is a good idea, but I'd have put a whales plant 3E of Trigger.

Stone and Ind. I think I see you're going for the strongest happiness option with city #4.

[WilliamLP]

William, you might have had extenuating circumstances, but your PB13 dotmap was a crime against humanity. Pindicator is helping you with buffing the super-capital...which is is 100% a Mackoti Standard, if that's your preferred paragon. The extra happy is a good idea, but I'd have put a whales plant 3E of Trigger.

Stone and Ind. I think I see you're going for the strongest happiness option with city #4.

I would love specific critique after you can learn the details of the extenuating circumstances. But our start and second city were so ridiculous in that game that I doubt there's much to criticize in the early opening. Settling for shared wet corn + river gold + 9 forests to chop + commerce from settling on a silk on turn 32 with the capital still at size 4 with an early religion.

By turn 45 I knew just from the power graph that we weren't going to be playing to be competitive with the world, but playing a duel with a guy seven tiles away throwing his game away for no other purpose. And duel we did: every decision was made single-mindedly from that perspective. We'd have been out of the game even going for city #3 early, let alone something like a library.

Then, a little later with the upper hand, the trick was how to keep a guy with complete freedom to expand from dominating the other side while Retep was still trying to do everything he could to bring us down with no other consideration, even as far as pillaging resources and suiciding chariots to do it. So every city plant on the main land was in the light of whether we could keep it in battle while in eternal war on both sides.

(And never mind those horrible island plants later, obviously, that were also purely military thinking.)

Also, I don't mind being pretty satisfied overall. The empire is still kicking it, when nobody would have predicted this, while RB darlings like TBS and Lewwger folded like houses of cards when struck at just the right angle.


Anyway... back to this game. A lot of choices have trade offs, and when you get to grow in relative isolation you can actually use quantifiable analysis and sandboxes to try and find what's best. (Not so much when the dominating consideration could be a move's effect on other people.) A plan that gets a happy online on turn 69 (the one I wanted) has benefits to the capital when it can grow onto an additional cottage tile for free, and all other cities sharing with it can as well. In competition, Trigger's site we have now also has benefits, including growing cottages that can eventually be worked by the capital at max size.

Is A greater than B? I don't know, but (unlike a lot of intangibles) it's a question that has an objective answer somewhere. When hearing an authority opinion my first reaction is to want to be a contrarian, explore the idea of what if you're wrong. This makes me a terrible choice to ever be some kind of protégé. But, like I'm saying, the metagame here can be disrupted, and that disruption is going to come from someone (perhaps not me) who simply defies convention and majority opinion from the wiser ones.

[Commodore]

Heh, my ongoing article series in PB13 can basically be titled "the old metagame is wrong".

But I'm no authority, Mindy's odd honorifics aside. Don't let his baffling admiration for my questionable game record bias you.