[SPOILERS] Charriu, chumchu, and Magic Science in Pitboss 45

[Magic Science]

After meddling around in sandboxes for a little while, it seems that starting with only one of the three key starting techs is really not that bad. The first column techs each take six turns to discover, while Bronze Working takes thirteen turns, but that is reduced to twelve if we build up overflow from two first column techs before it. As a result, the first worker must only waste one turn between when he finishes improving the food tiles and when he can start chopping, and, depending on which direction we settle and rather or not our second starting tech is Wheel (for example, if we pick an Agriculture/Wheel civilization), it may not be a wasted turn at all.

The thing to take away from the above is that our choice of civilization is not very constrained. Considering only starting techs, we could play anything except Byzantium, Japan, and Spain. I think that we should pick leader first.

Too bad we lose one of our few forests by settling in place. Well can't have everything.

The lack of forests is one of the weaker aspects of our start. I think that it recommends charismatic a little more, since we will need to move from chopping to whipping as the method of accelerating production at the capital sooner rather than later.

I'm not that into creative, expansive, organized and financial as we start inland by a river.

I agree about financial, but not necessarily about the others, at least not for the reason you state. We may not be able to see the ocean, but that does not mean that it does not exist or that it will be unimportant to us this game. If the map Beloved and Glorious Deity Commodore rolled for us is anything like the ones rolled for Pitbosses 41 and 42, then the ocean will be important. But even if we assume you are right, why does having an inland empire make creative undesirable? I agree with Charriu that creative is very helpful for grabbing seafood for low-production coastal cities, but I don’t think that is the defining feature that makes the trait worthwhile.

About early game military: the reason I titled that part of my post “Early Game Military Advantages” instead of “Pro/Agg” is that we don’t need to pick a military trait to get a military bonus. I like the idea of picking a civilization with a good Ancient Era unique unit so that we don’t need to worry about it when deciding on a leader. A civ like Babylon, Native America, or Sumeria could work for that goal.

Spiritual: I doubt you want to go this route, with a heavy focus on changing between civics, right?

Playing Spiritual could be a lot of fun one of these game, but I anticipate being busy in about four months when we reach the stage of the game that Spiritual is helpful in, so I don’t think that I could use it well enough for it to be a good choice this time.

Overall, the leaders I am thinking about seems to be the same ones you two are considering. I particularly like the idea of playing charismatic, to ensure that we can work all of the river tiles that our Beloved and Glorious Deity Commodore has bestowed upon us. On a small map, city maintenance will be high, and early economy will be more important. Also, charismatic could be handy for naval warfare later on, too. If I had to pick immediately, I would probably choose Kublai Khan for our leader and then take a civilization on the way back, but we don't actually need to decide yet.

[Charriu]

I agree with Charriu that creative is very helpful for grabbing seafood for low-production coastal cities, but I don’t think that is the defining feature that makes the trait worthwhile.

I didn't mean that this is it's defining feature. I just wanted to add that aspect to your analysis about Creative.

Cool:

There were 6 items in your list. Here they are in random order:

1. Magic Science + Chumchu +Charriu
2. naufraga
3. Boak
4. Superdeath
5. Borsche
6. Mr. Cairo
(So then following...)
7. Mr. Cairo
8. Borsche
9. Superdeath
10. Boak
11. Nau
12. MSCC

Map is a Small-sized Big and Small script for your sandboxing enjoyment.

I also wanted mention that we already have an "offical" nickname in "MS CC". Maybe we could do a ship related naming scheme.

[chumchu]

I'll would also enjoy playing a charismatic civ. I agree that it is great for naval wars later in the game. Pairing charismatic with Aztecs means we can whip a lot and solve get our courthouses early and cheap. We do not get any defense UU only a slightly better sword but on the other hand the Altars might act as a deterrent as we can whip units twice as often as anyone else.

I'm not sold on creative but I am willing to try it. If you want Kublai we can just choose him right away. I think that Cyrus would be slightly better because of the early hammers and city maintenance discount. It depends on how many cities we can get. If we can build many then IMP wins out but if we are crammed in close to our neighbors then creative will be very useful. If we get many fishing villages it will also be useful.

[Magic Science]

I do not think that pairing charismatic with the Aztecs is a good idea. The happiness bonus and the sacrificial altar do similar things, and the combined benefit is less than the sum of its parts. With a sacrificial altar in place in a city, that city can only accrue whip unhappiness if it whips more frequently than once every five turns. That situation seems unlikely even on a handmade map, and on a natural one, there will probably not be many places where there is enough food to make that practical. The result is that the charismatic happiness bonus does not allow the Aztecs to whip any more than they would otherwise, but it also won’t allow the whipping post cities to grow much taller than they would otherwise, because frequent whipping encourages keeping the population low so regrowth takes less food. That is not to say that the Aztecs are bad, but since we all are leaning towards charismatic, I don’t like them as a pick for this game.

The (Probably Unnecessary Since We Agree Already) Case For Charismatic:
Happiness is interesting as a limiting factor on city growth, because for a while it has no effect, until suddenly you hit the happiness cap and it slams growth to a halt because further population points can’t do anything helpful (other than in a few rare cases). Adding extra happiness does nothing unless you were otherwise going to hit the cap, and in the early game, the cap doesn’t need to be very high. The lower the turn number, the less time has passed for cities to grow tall at all, and in the early game, there is a strong incentive to consume population growths via slavery, which produces unhappiness that wears off over time. If you have enough happiness, then charismatic adding an extra two more is not helpful, and “enough happiness” is not a very high number in the early game. Maybe sometimes a charismatic player could gain an advantage by not needing to settle cities and use worker turns to connect luxuries, but most luxury tiles are good tiles, and building a road or two to connect them is trivial. I guess if a luxury appears in the frozen north or on an otherwise undesirable island, then being able to skip it could be handy, but skipping happiness sources because you don’t need them as a charismatic leader still seems like more of a middle game thing. The main point is, on a natural map, you can’t count on having enough luxuries within easy reach in the early game, so charismatic is stronger.

The second-most important bonus charismatic gives is the promotion discount, and that is more relevant on a watery map like this one because experience is harder to come by for naval units than it is for land units. Promotions are also more important for them, because there are not as many other sources of extra combat strength (like terrain) as there are on land.

[Magic Science]

I think that we should pick leader first.

I have been rethinking this statement. I don’t think that I gave enough thought to the issue before I made it.

Leaders are more powerful than civilizations. For an example, even one of the best civilizations, the Inca, could be described as “Pro/Cre, except far, far, worse”. However, in the snakepick, you don’t necessarily want to pick the stronger part of your combo first. You want to pick the half of your combo for which there is the greatest difference between the best thing left when your turn comes and the worst thing that you could end up with when your turn comes again, weighted for how likely it is that other people will be interested in taking what you want.

Taking into account balanced starts, cheap techs, and no-technology fishing boats, I think that the other players will probably not be interested in a different set of civilizations than us on the basis of needing different starting technologies. This means that to figure out what civilizations might be in danger of being picked by the enemy, I need to predict what other people of differing skill levels and play styles think of newly changed civilizations that have never been put to the test in a multiplayer game before. Wonderful, that's impossible. In theory, leader choices should be easier to predict because the traits haven’t been changed very much in this iteration of the mod, so there is more to go off of, at least for people who have played and reported games here before. In practice, humans are complicated and change their minds. The same applies for Always Chaotic Evil orcs like superdeath, albeit to a lesser extent. “Weighting” for what people are most likely to pick is unreliable.

The question is, for which is there more difference between the best thing we could get and worst thing we could be left with? Leader, or civilization? I don’t know, yet.

[chumchu]

I see the extra 2 happiness of charismatic as firstly an insurance that you are not stuck on a happycap of 4/5 early game and unable to whip. If you have 2 more happiness then you can whip and re-grow with less issue. Because of the changes to whipping in RTR it is most effective to whip 1 pop but that eats happiness really fast without an altar. Still, those 2 happy removes a big source of problems for a number of starts. Secondly, when you have more happiness than that charismatic can be thought of as enabling either 2 whips or 2 max population which is not bad.

Altars means that you get twice the number of whips per happy +1 and that you can twice as often which means that Altar whipping is multiplicative with happiness:

Say that you have 2 happy cap left for whipping. Without altars that is 1 whip + 1 whip per 10 turns. With altars that is 3 whips + 1 whip per 5 turns.
If you have 3 happy cap left that is 2 + 1 per 10 without and 5 + 1 per 5 with altars.
If you have 4 happy cap left that is 3 + 1 per 10 without and 7 + 1 per 5 with altars.

However there comes a point of diminishing returns where you can not use all the whips provided by it. Say that you go to happy cap 14 in the early/mid game. There is not time to have a pop 4 city doing 19 whips in a reasonable time unless you are in a protracted war to the death. Charismatic moves you closer to that point but unless you are close to it that .

The harder limit on whipping on a map like this is your ability to regrow the population every 5 turns. On a non-custom map like this that is not guaranteed for all cities. Most cities are able to grow 1 population per 5 turns. Buildings and later units often take more than 1 pop so altars are most effective for things like catapults and swords.

[chumchu]

Since we are talking balanced starts we should guess that many of the best five leaders or civs will be chosen but the other players might have other ideas than us. An estimate might be to make a list of best leaders and best civs and gauge the difference between number 1 and say number 4 (or 5 if you think that the others think like us).

[Charriu]

Buildings:
Harbour: +2XP to naval units.
Lighthouse: +1XP to naval units.
Customshouse: +3XP to naval units, cost 120.
Drydock: +7XP to naval units.

Don't shoot me, but add all these together with XP civics = 17XP, or 4 promo boats for all civs, which helps to manage the power of CHM in naval warfare. It also brings forward the available XP so that we can get double promo boats for all civs before Astronomy bulbs (ie for galleys and triremes with both XP civis and a lighthouse). Theo+Vassalage is no longer the province of making CHM boats unbeatable, now none CHM can use a lighthouse to match that. The Harbour provides and easy way to work around a missing civic up to double promotions, and then the customs house pushes everyone to triple promotions. Drydock alone then puts everyone to minimum double promotion, and easily attainable triple promotion.

Ultimately allowing every player to reach up to 4 promo boats is not wrong, just so long as players have to make the choices how they get there. This also makes West Point unlockable for every player without using a GG FWIW.

Just wanted to point this out, but Krill gave us another good argument for CHM in his latest RtR development thread. This change of course won't be in our version of RtR, which means CHM is still strong on water here.

[Magic Science]

Commodore, will you tell us the exact settings you used to roll our map? 

No. 

This is somewhat problematic. The settings used to create the maps for Pitboss 41 and Pitboss 42 were snaky continents with islands mixed in (there are a bunch of other settings to tweak for Big and Small maps, but those are the most important ones), and I have been assuming that they were used to make this Pitboss 45 map as well, because that is what I envisioned when I typed "A map along the lines of the maps used in 41 and 42 seems good". However, over the past few days I have rolled at least 30 or 40 maps with those settings in the process of hunting problems in the mod, and my civilization did not have an inland start like ours on a single one. This means that my beliefs about the settings are probably wrong, and I can’t confidently fix them with only the information from our start, and Commodore will not resolve this dilemma.

I don’t think that this changes the validity of our judgement of the value of charismatic, because that is only dependent on the map being natural, and I think that we can at least be confident that is the case. However, it does change the analysis for anything that is significantly affected by the importance of coastal and island activities. There are a lot of ways to tweak the settings so the map generator will produce landlocked starts frequently enough that they aren't unusual, and while some of them maintain the high importance of the islands and coast that characterizes snaky continents with islands mixed in, many do not. In particular, I am thinking of normal continents with islands separate, which is the default setting for Big and Small. On a map with those settings, most of the players start on one main continent rather than different smaller continents, and sometimes certain starts will have no early access to the smaller islands that do exist. The water is not guaranteed to be as important as I said earlier. I need to rethink things.

If Past Magic Science screws up my snakepicking or my game in general because he didn’t specify what he wanted for the map, then someone, please find him and punch him in the head. Don't feel bad about it, he is a thoughtless idiot, he deserves it. Try not to create a paradox, though. My grandfather was in town recently, so you’ll need to be careful. Thanks in advance, you’re really helping me out here.

In other news of Past Magic Science being stupid:

I do not think that pairing charismatic with the Aztecs is a good idea.

I no longer agree with his opinion about how bad of a combo charismatic and the Aztecs is. The happiness benefit from charismatic does help even sacrificial altar whipping post cities; I overemphasized the value of keeping city sizes small when you want to whip. The difference between regrowing from, for example, five population to six population and regrowing from fifteen population to sixteen population is notable, but the difference in regrowing from five to six and regrowing from seven to eight is a mere four food, two with a granary. That is nothing compared to the yields from two more worked tiles, there is no antisynergy here. Aztecs, please accept my invitation back onto the list.

[Charriu]

Well about the map settings. Krill had also a landlocked start in PB42 and naval warfare was certainly very important there. So I wouldn't worry too much about that. I doubt that Commodore would role a pangea like map, which certainly is not "A map along the lines of the maps used in 41 and 42 seems good".