[SPOILERS]PB46: (In Search of) Fine Foreign Dining, by Hannibal of England

[GermanJoey]

I agree that sailing seems like a critical tech for this start. We should really prioritize getting out a pair of explorer workboats in the first 60-70 turns; like you say, we need to be a bit wary if the land across the strait is someone's backyard, PB25-style. (trigger: PTSD over fucking PB25)

[GermanJoey]

Getting an early Aesthetics via Fin for the TGL is an intriguing idea. Great Scientists are particularly valuable on a water map and yet other players are unlikely to value early Aesthetics. The two Ind players are likely to be concerned with the big Ancient-era wonders at this point, while other players will be mostly concerned with not crashing their economy.

I am a little concerned with building the damn thing tho... 350h without a forge or a marble-boost is quite a huge investment. I wonder if it's worth it to get MC first for the forge... hmmm, would save 70h, but then that would give up the big head start we'd have by getting the tech before anyone else. It occurs to me that an early Religion+Monotheism is a much more lucrative path than it was before, relatively speaking, due to the huge hammer savings that OR gives for building wonders.

To make this work we'll need to start planning for it very early - identify a site with a shitload of food, high hammer potential via mines, and quite a few forests that we'll need to save. Remember that this city will also need to build the NE - do National Wonders still get the resource boost?

[Krill]

We already have all of that, minus forests. The capital is ideally placed to reach size 8 with what we see, and can reach base 23hpt. I've been looking at the whip unhappiness, but we start so early on the whips it's not an issue IMO. The unhappiness wears off by the time we could reach Literature. We'd really be looking at a different city for SoZ and HE but that part of the plan is optional, really. It's the bulb plan that is the core idea for taking this game by the scruff of the neck and making every other player focus on how to keep up, rather than his they can shove a HA stack down our throats.

National wonders do get resource boosts. OR needs religion though, so unless we drop everything we aren't going to have OR. I doubt any competitor does. Forge is a further 120 hammers anyway. I'm not saying a specific beeline to Literature is what we should do, mind, just we might want to reconsider our tech position if an early Sailing and intercontinental trade routes gives us more beakers to play with than usual.

[Krill]

Another pick evaluation:

I'm skipping over my pick because I'm going to do a more detailed post regarding what I consider the major decisions. So GCK is fourth from last of the remaining opponents.

GeneralKillCavalry: Darius [FIN/ORG](29th pick) of Aztecs (4th pick)

The fourth pick of Aztecs seems pretty reasonable, because the UB seems overloaded. The Sacrificial Altar, a courthouse available on Monotheism (1 bonus), that gives 1 happy (2nd bonus), 2 priest slots (3rd bonus, halves whip unhappy timer (4th bonus) and costs 90 hammers (5th bonus). Starting techs include Mysticism which can hurt tech intensive starts (ie multiple food techs before Mining>BW), and the UU gives fre W2 on a basic sword. In theory an IW rush could lead to fast swords (there is also a bug, the jaguar does not require iron in 4.1.1.5, but it should do), so there is a small speed advantage in a sword rush, but the Aztecs power is on the UB. The return pick of Darius was made from the remaining ORG leaders, but that wasn't entirely necessary. I kinda hoped he went for Joao, because it would be fun to watch (from a distance) but I can't see why Darius is bad. The Aztecs mean that with a bit more set up, GCK can just whip everything he needs to get the hammers he needs for expansion. The problem he will have is unless he has double the food resources of anyone else, the Sacrificial Alter whip happy is not going to help his happy problem: BW and Pottery take 30 turns for us with perfect start techs. A run to Judaism would likely take until T50 at the earliest, more likely T60 if he doesn't have seafood commerce from an early start (and that just adds Fishing to the tech path). So the whip happy buff is only really helpful later on for whipping units up until Medieval units with a bit of production in each city, and that still requires small cities. So Out of those 5 bonuses, I don't rate one.

The Priest slots raise an interesting conundrum for Pindicator: Both Pin and GCK could consider a Theocracy bulb (GCK if he misses Judaism at Monotheism, but I doubt he does). If GCK does land Judaism, then he has the means to make his shrine, but he also has the option to add in a spy spec to then catch up and trigger a golden age (23 turns from 0 to 200gpp), and as it is a courthouse, no problem is spamming them, especially at 45 hammers. Pin and GCK could race eachother for a Theology bulb, but at a push, I think Pin can start his GP sooner as Writing should be reachable by T40 for us, but then it is a question of wanting to research the intervening techs. There are some very difficult choices that could be forced in this game. I doubt thy happen though. But again, this is a "Power" versus "Interesting" point. Two priest slots on a courthouse at Monotheism don't really give significant power compared to a temple with a single priest slot at Meditation (ignore building costs affected by trait as that is trait power at play, not the civ). A bit, but not much, yes the shrine should potentially go down quicker with two slots, but not necessarily, and it is possible to power out the second GP with just library pair of scientists with decent timing. So I don't think this adds great power either.

So I reckon the real power is a courthouse available on Monotheism that saves 30 hammers (with ORG, 75 hammers from base courthouse) and gives +1 happy. Those are the real power parts of the civ. But GCK is going to have to rush to Monotheism to open up religion for border pops and extra happy, and then shrine that for the gold that, he must hope, keeps him as close to max science as possible.

This puts GCK in a rather rough position though. He has possibly the slowest starting combination that exists in this game. There is no way the Aztecs were picked because the start techs speed up his start as Myst counters that entire argument. ORG/FIN gives him nothing in the first 50 turns except seafood commerce and cheap lighthouses if he gets Sailing after Pottery and BW. He is going to have to play a perfect start, find some way to get granaries down and work a few cottages and then get to Monotheism. I have a plan, but we don't have tech constraints and good starting techs. GCK has the opposite. I don't think he can get there before someone else, starting faster, gets there off resource commerce.

Those 75 hammers saved on courthouses don't matter compared to the development of others, until they hit the horizontal expansion limit and wreck their tech rate. But they will still be able to get to IW and/or HBR and break things. GCK has to find a way to deal with those threats and I don't see it.

What I think GCK does is grab a food tech, then push to BW (finishes around T25), then return for Pottery (and if he needs the other start tech, grab that as well), around T40. Then he has to push for Monotheism, misses it around T60 because he is slow on commerce, and returns for Sailing, Archery, AH and Writing (probably only gets three of these around T80) whilst generating a GP, and then misses the Theology bulb to Pin, then gets eaten by HA or TBW using preats off boats around T90.

The problem I see here is just plain speed, and even if isolated on his own island I don't see how he keeps himself safe.

[Krill]

I agree that sailing seems like a critical tech for this start. We should really prioritize getting out a pair of explorer workboats in the first 60-70 turns; like you say, we need to be a bit wary if the land across the strait is someone's backyard, PB25-style. (trigger: PTSD over fucking PB25)

Right now, I am perfectly happy with the worker whip into granary plan with a settler eot35. If we find something better, that would be amazing, but from what we see right now I think the granary plan is more than serviceable.

We finish Pottery eot29. Tech is much easier with tech cost scaling, but add in the FIN seafood and we go at a decent pace. It's important to understand how we can whip the capital though. We can get a further settler eot44, and another settler eot51. Faster if we improve the rice, but those timings give a decent understanding of how useful the granary is in a 4>2 whip cycle.

We probably want to get the settler for city 3 eot43, but after that we would still only have 2 workers unless the new cities whipped one. I reckon we likely don't want to push out too fast because we will not have the workers or units to defend, but those two workers will have more than enough time to improve food at both new cities, road some of the way and probably chop a forest for a granary whip at size 2. These figures are just for understanding the timeframes. Hunting can be completed by eot34 with no difficulty, so we can improve any food resources we need. Even with Hunting eot34, Sailing can be researched in 9 turns, including a turn of saving gold so we can fit in a lighthouse whip in the capital. That means no workers needed at the capital and we can burn the happiness into settler whips, a galley, and even axe double whips as needed.

The lighthouse and improving the rice are one option, another is just going straight for settlers, but we have so few hammers would not even have warriors to fogbust. Realistically, we want to mine the single river grassland hill, and farm the rice. We could get those done T39 and T44 with one worker, whilst the other worker roads towards and improves the second city. We could change this up and whip a worker T41, but...why? Then we would have 2 workers and no settler due until eot48. Feels bad. Lighthouse and improved rice means 10fpt, so we can stick to a 6>3 or 5>3 whip cycle, or 15 food hammers per turn at size 4 if we needed to stagnate. But the commerce generated by a lighthouse around T47? Jesus. That is what gets us a decent tech position in the Classical era. And it gives us the easy galley to settle and explore.

We need to scout more. We need to know the city locations we want. We need to know copper isn't screwing us. But we can make plans for what to do post T35.

[GermanJoey]

Agreed. The granary-first plan seems fine; I had been planning to take another crack at the micro, I've just been way, way too busy lately. For the explorer workboats, I was talking 30-40 turns *after* the granary. Perhaps they'll not even be relevant, if our scout happens to discover that it's a peninsula rather than another land mass.

Is map trading on this game?

[Krill]

No map trading. We get circumnavigation all on our own.

[Krill]

Turn 1




Scouting. The next obvious choices are SW-SW, but other options are SW-NW and N-SW. I'll discount N-SW right now: we would be looking for high yield, inner ring seafood and we don't have the hammers to improve that . SW-NW fits in quite nicely with our need to have the south scouted by T9, and we could then move SW-SE on T3 to end up on the forest hill SW of hte rice, and from there we just follow the edge of the FoW and we get the land scouted that we need with no fuss. SW-NW is my current preference.





Once borders pop we will uncover the tiles S and SE of the plains hill eot4. If there is seafood (read coastal fish) there, then we may want to reconsider that early settler. I think we want the scout to be on the forest tile SW of the plains hill on T9, or potentially slightly south of there for maximum uncovered area. That's the finish point for the current scouting path.





SW-NW puts the scout on a hill and shows every tiles except the tile north of the ivory. The plains ivory looks like an extremely poor city location with no food, but NE of the rice gets 2 choppable forests and the 2/2/1 grassland ivory, and is more difficult to boat. We could make that work as city 3, but we would need 2 workers to get it improved fast enough: work plains ivory whilst improving grass ivory, workers move to chop both forests, then farm the rice. Work a shared capital cottage on the tile S of the grass ivory, and plan to never whip the city before size 5. Use it as a unit pump: barracks to pop borders for the extra grass hill mine, and steal one grass hill mine from the capital. Decent city at size 5, 12 hpt. Unless there is more food in that area, we are not getting anything else out of that area unless we throw in a lighthouse for a bit more commerce.





I think we are looking at 200 tiles per player. Settling wide feels like the right choice in general, for us with the higher happy cap and standard costs per city.

[Krill]

Actually, there is a scenario for improving the ivory city with a city on the plains ivory: Requires 2 workers but if settling TX, and improve the ivory TX+1 and build a library first, chop both forests TX+5, which completes the library on TX+5. Growth@2 and border pop eotX+10 to open up the third forest with a granary at 29/60. So if there is an outer ring seafood tile there, this is one way to bring it into borders rather than leave a city with just a dry rice for food.

But as none of this is workable with a quick settler, it could wait. I'm not sure though. I think we could fit in this detour? Because even with the granary plan, we don't finish another scout/warrior until eot23, and if we start leaving holes in our scouting now we are going to reach a point around T40 where we have too few units to cover our cities, units, and still scout.

Here is an idea:

[GermanJoey]

That works, if it works.

FYI, I tend to not like debating early scout moves. I'm heavily in favor of a strategy of "scouting out our second and third cities around the capital and then using the scout for fogbusting" over "scouting far and wide", but AFAIK we are in perfect alignment about that. So, just feel free to move the little guy however you like. That said, I'm very interested in seeing the land !