And he'll get a taste for it and start reading fish forums, trying to master every element of fish acquisition and consumption. He'll realize this is quite difficult. Thanks for the info! Interesting that research is a modifier less than one. Makes it a lot more doable.
I figured out what BGN's scout is up to.
I don't think he ever got vision of my cap. And he's not spying on neighbors; he's booking it straight off to who knows where. Then it hit me: known tech bonus. He figures that with 24 players there's decent beakers to be made. Not a terrible idea. Also pictured is another of the lions that infest our western borders. We shall avoid. You can also see the worker about to finish chopping to overflow into a 57/60 worker.
We are dead last in all the demos that matter and close to the lead in the demos that show you're not working your cities to capacity. Oh well. There's a reason it's called a gambit.
Rick continues to find more elephants. They're his favorite animal. (Lions are his least.)
Also shown is another food resource. I forgot to check if it was irrigated, but I'll find out soon enough.
Here is the known world. Potentially anywhere outside there may be monsters.
I'm almost off the front page! Can't let opponents thinking I'm losing focus.
The past three turns have been uneventful. We found quite a bit more food, but also wolves. You can see one in this pic. We moved away from another on the plains hill 3W of the scout. Hopefully this first one deals little damage and we can move on, although at this point, with our immediate area pretty much defogged, I might push Rick a little harder.
I'll admit I've fallen off C&D. People are growing pop. I'm the only one still on size one. I glanced at Rusten's graphs, and I think he built a warrior and then teched hunting or mining. I should be checking rival land average to see when cities get founded. Rival best land area is 3600 which is probably Dark Savant enjoying Buddhist culture. So far, that's the only land growth. In three turns, a ton of people gain land, either from Creative or, for Rusten, from religion. I think I found on turn 26, so I won't be able to disguise the expansion. Should be pretty easy to tell when I expand. Hope I can recognize the signs in others.
I did some simming today. Here's a rough pic of where the empire could go. (Still using my old sandbox. The longer I put off updating the one Coeurva provided, the more work it's going to finally be. Oh well.)
I could not get the road connection down in time. This pic is from the turn of the third city's founding. I don't like that City 3 (Munich, here) is 5 tiles away. I also don't like that it won't be working an improved tile for a long time. Settling on the desert 1NW was my original plan because the city could have food from the start and the road network would already be in place. The trouble is that in the long term the desert site is much weaker than this one. I naturally tend to go for faster, more immediate benefits, but the thought of a city with zero food resources of its own was just so distasteful. You can also tell from the builds that I'm a bit overexpanded. Pottery is a long way off, and I don't have too many things to build. Three turns after this pic, copper comes on line, so I can feel a little bit better about building military.
(An irritating aside: this plan runs headfirst into the whipping modifier bug I made a thread about last year. After finishing a warrior, the cap works the ivory + sheep and gets a chop and ends up at exactly 55 hammers. The game does not allow the Imperialistic Julius Caesar to whip then, so a turn before I have to steal city #2's pig. Which is incredibly frustrating, but I haven't yet found a way around it.)
The wolf had a 0.0% chance to win and still got two shots in. Grumble grumble.
Along with two wheat, you can also see stone. It's too far out for me to do anything with it I think. Will be nice for walls and such. I knew that wolf was there, and I'm sure he'll take another bite out of Rick, but I really do want to meet some neighbors, so I might start playing fast and loose with his life. You can just glimpse in the lower right a warrior heading out to fogbust for the new city. Both chops completed and the settler arrives next turn.
I keep forgetting to check Rusten's graphs now that I have him, but he's very easy to follow just based on the demos screen. (Also, for the past couple turns I've been able to see his capitol's name in the best cities list, despite never having vision of it.) He's rival worst soldiers. He has built 1 warrior and teched a 2k tech. If I'm curious, I may sit down to figure out exactly what he's been doing, but I doubt I care that much. So long as he hasn't grown to size 4 to just crank out tons of warriors. (He hasn't: he has a crop yield of 18,which doesn't scream warrior pump to me.)
I also got the count wrong for when various people's borders pop. Rusten's just grew. (So, with 37 land tiles, we know he is at least 3 tiles away from that body of water to our east. Not that this matters right now.) Next turn, I think, the Cre civs expand.
A question for the lurkers: The Civfanatics demo guide gives the Population formula as "floor(PoP^2.8)*1000. For example a city with 1 pop point = 1000 people, with 2 pop points = 6000, 3 pop points = 21000. All these population scores are added up to give you the result." Does this mean that the pop of each individual city is ~cubed and then added together? So a 1 pop city added to an empire always only gives 1k pop points in the demos?
That's what it means, yes. So if your empire has pop 3 city, a pop 2 city, and two pop 1 cities, you have 21,000 + 6000 + 2x 1,000 = 29,000 citizens for demographic purposes.
(March 5th, 2018, 21:54)RefSteel Wrote: That's what it means, yes. So if your empire has pop 3 city, a pop 2 city, and two pop 1 cities, you have 21,000 + 6000 + 2x 1,000 = 29,000 citizens for demographic purposes.
Which is also why the "Population" number is rarely used for anything except C&D calculations. When people want to compare empire size to their foes, they'll generally look at Crop Yield instead, because that's closer to something that scales linearly with number of citizens. Of course it's still not a perfect comparison, but at least it's closer.
Thanks Ref and Mardoc. It seems like watching pop for city additions will be tricky. For now, might just watch for land growth less than 10. But if you like crop yield, I've got a post for you.
Rick didn't even get a scratch this time and is moving into more woods. Poor visibility, but hopefully better life expectancy. If I find a convenient forested hill, I'll heal him up.
I forgot to take a real screenshot of what was scouted. It was nothing interesting. Lots of trees. Instead, I grabbed a pic of some kind of body of water that Rick will make his way to. (I love the flying camera. I don't know why exactly, but maybe it's the rare change of perspective and the reminder that civ4 is modeled in 3d.) The reasoning behind all the tiny lakes is not lost on me, I think. I've played around on the PB18 map, which was super super lush and heavily rivered. I discounted RtR Fin because of an abundance of rivers (and so did the rest of the field, I guess). These lakes provide irrigation without nerfing Fin to the ground. One of the challenges for me in this mod is going to be not just playing the BtS cottage game. I wouldn't know what Mfg was if hit me on the thumb.
I just can't quit this whole C&D thing.
I've heard that graphs are two turns delayed, but this looks like only a one turn delay. I can tell from score increases that Rusten gained pop on the roll from turn 22 to 23 (score went 46-->47). Same with turn 17. He went worker first and presumably completed it in 11 turns like me. (I had thought that not everyone had plains hill starts earlier in this thread, but that seems unlikely from a (limited by only ever lurking) metagame perspective.)
Spoilers for me forgetting I have all the graphs and not just power...
After the worker, he took 6 turns to grow. I assume that, like me, he had a second ring 6 food resource (4 turns of working a 3food tile. 2 of working 6food.) He grew at the end of turn 16 with a 2 food surplus. He had 2 pop on turn 17 and 4 pop on turn 23, so he needed to make 48 food in 6 turns (24+26-2). I checked my old screenshots (pity there's no archive for civstats) and Rusten grew from 2 to 3 at the end of turn 20. (I get so confused trying to micro etc with counting turns because of when to count from turn end or whatever. He's at pop three on turn 21 is what I mean.) It took him 4 turns to get 20 food. If his best food tile was outer ring like mine, his worker finished improving it on turn 15 (born T11, move, put in 4 turns, but that 4th turn the city gets access to it). The worker needs 4 turns to improve another food. Assuming 0 travel time, the fastest that can get done is T19. (This is as far as I got before I realize I can track his crop yield.
Ok, so it looks like he has practically exactly the start I have. The turn Rusten increased to pop 4, rival best crop went from 16 to 18, so I assume he went back to his 2/2 tile. (Forested ivory?) If he completed his warrior turn 19, he can get another out by turn 24 (this turn). Otherwise, I guess he's building a barracks. (Or a scout for valuable map info and known tech bonus, but I suspect I'll see another warrior bump soon.) What interests me more is the rival best crop yield of 19. Someone farmed a floodplains? Working a 3/0 instead of a 2/2? Idk. There are now three cities in the world at size 4. Wonder when people should stay small versus grow big before the first settler. Probably too variable to make a rule of thumb.
I have no clue why on the turn the worker completes my own crop yield shows a little bump up then down. The turn the worker completed, the governor assigned our 1 citizen to the floodplains and off the ivory. I changed it back before the turn ended, so I don't know why it shows up. I was worried I screwed up my tile management, so I went to an appropriate save from my civ and did what I know I planned. Sure enough, there's this phantom bump. Weird.
The revolution has begun. Odd that people have a revolution to institute slavery, though. I almost forgot to do this. I had ended turn and was doing my usual stare at the screen for a minute trying to remember what I forgot. Since there's still a turn of movement, it wouldn't have been a problem.
I'm sure the revolutionary leaders don't tell their supporting masses that they're planning to institute slavery! They probably promise "change" (to slavery) and "jobs" (as unpaid slaves) and "making Centauri great again" (on the backs and the high-piled corpses of their slaves, which is to say their citizens) - or alternatively, I guess you could say the current leaders instituted slavery, and the revolution is a failed attempt to unseat them. The revolt will of course be put down, with the last fires of resistance stomped out after some 40 years, or as soon as the turn rolls, whichever comes first.
(I mean, last I saw, your civ was called Germany, but I'm guessing this is the Thorny Vineyard, and the Rick, that you mean...)
Great catch! I thought Thorny Vineyard would be too generic and Rick too obscure to get spotted. (The next city is Plex Anthill, since I couldn't find any good hill or pig related names, and that would've been less subtle.)
Now that I think of it, the pop-up does say "Your government has been restored." Top down society changes against which the people revolt every time? Grim.
I hadn't expected the turn to roll, but I check civstats with oceans of optimism.
I missed Xenu revolting to slavery. Could be I played before him on the turn he revolted and after him the turn anarchy ended, so I missed the GNP nosedive. Edit for easier solution: He's Hatshepsut, so Spiritual. Perhaps this is a settler coming on line. I haven't followed him closely. I still think I'm winning the earliest second city race.
"Thorny Vineyard" indeed seems generic at first, and "Rick" could be from anywhere, but context is everything: I didn't think about it until I actually wanted to figure out something to call your civ other than "Germany," and then I quickly realized that "Thorny Vineyard" - in spite of appearances - is actually very unlikely for the name of a city. That was by no means decisive, but the existence of a SMAC citybase with that name - together with the fact we're on a Civ forum - was suggestive. And then once I was thinking Centauri, it wasn't hard to find the only canonical "Rick" (as far as I know at least) who inhabits that universe. And considering how appropriate he is for the name of your starting Scout, that was enough to convince me I had it right.
I have to applaud. Let's hope our Rick is a bit luckier than his namesake. SMAC really established a lot of my taste in games, and I guess I'm still recovering.
I thought Thorny Vineyard would be too generic and Rick too obscure to get spotted. (The next city is Plex Anthill, since I couldn't find any good hill or pig related names, and that would've been less subtle.)
