[SPOILERS - El Grillo PB54] Staying home and stargazing

[Lewwyn]

tiles that would've been improved by Incan Terrace: 2

Do you think it would have been worth it?

[El Grillo]

No way, not without knowing at the time of picking, and even then it's still too situational of a bonus. Maybe if there were guaranteed dry grains at everyone's start, plus a bunch of 3-5 tile flat grassland islands that you wanted farms on pre-Lighthouse?

[El Grillo]

T12:




Alright, this is starting to look pretty grim. Horses are third-ring of cap but can't be settled/worked by a city with food, I've found exactly 0 Hunting/AH food resources and exclusively Agriculture/Fishing ones, and there's still no solution to the issue of lacking commerce. I can't settle light-blue dot first because the one jutting tile of grassland stops me from getting pre-Sailing coastal trade routes, and I can't research Wheel any time soon between needing Bronze Working, Agriculture, Fishing, and Mysticism. I also need to finish a Worker tech in 15t or it runs out of actions.

If there's any silver lining at all, it's that I haven't found any other players yet, so maybe I'm blessed with a surplus of land to muddle my way through. And with this many constraints, surely the least bad option should be fairly obvious, right?

Oh, but before I forget: tiles that would've been improved by Incan Terrace: 3

EDIT: The sandbox says that I in fact can get coastal trade routes between my cities by settling on the plains hill for the shared clams. One of those quirks of tile adjacency calculations, I suppose. Now, as to whether that's actually a good idea or not... jury's still out. I still have 15 hours to think on this and despair. It pains me to be settling into the coast rather than towards my neighbors (presumably, maybe I'm on a giant private island), but trying to get through all the necessary techs at an effective rate of 8 bpt once maintenance from the second city is added in just sounds crippling.

EDIT 2: Teching BW -> Fishing more or less works when paired with light-blue dot. Getting BW out of the way immediately makes sense for a bunch of reasons as usual, but in this case also lifts the Worker-action constraint most effectively. Just need to massage the timings a bit, there are some decisions to be made about 1-pop whipping the first Settler and chopping the plains hill forest for 10h into the capital before it's wasted by the Settler. I thought it would be more, but I guess the formula counts diagonals as extra distance?

Fun fact: due to rounding, light-blue dot also only costs 1c in city maintenance for the moment, though we'll soon be wanting a third city which will bump costs up to 3c anyway. Getting 4c from PRO routes immediately and getting to work a 4f2c tile a couple turns after founding is the big draw here.

[El Grillo]

So here's the sandboxing thought process:

Let's start with where we are. Had I known what I know now about the map, would I have picked Khmer and opened AH? Probably not, honestly, but it is what it is.

T12: Worker1 moves onto pig, City1 works 3/0/0 rice and builds Workboat. Tech Bronze Working due EOT25.
T13: Worker1 pastures pig 1/4
T14: Worker1 pastures pig 2/4
T15: Worker1 pastures pig 3/4
T16: Worker1 pastures pig 4/4. City1 works 6/0/0 pig.
T17: Worker1 moves N onto grass hill.

Everything up to that point is straightforward enough.

EOT17: City1 grows to size2 and works 6/0/0 pig and 3/0/0 rice. Needing 22f to grow and a max surplus of +7f from pig and rice, we can't grow any faster than in 4t with 6f overflow. Naively, let's test that approach. Rule of thumb says food is king, after all. Other options include a second Worker at size 2, or finishing the Workboat earlier. We can discard the third option since the beakers on Fishing are the constraint there, and getting a Workboat earlier doesn't speed up the clams. It follows that the reason we'd want to grow on one Worker is to be able to whip from 3 or 4 pop sooner, compared to a two-Worker opening where we'd be putting our food into the Worker instead. So let's play those two ideas out:

Approach A: One Worker + Growth -> Whip
T18: Worker1 mines grass hill 1/4
T19: Worker1 mines grass hill 2/4
T20: Worker1 mines grass hill 3/4
T21: Worker1 mines grass hill 4/4.

We have another decision. City1 can continue to max food this turn, or swap to the mine for a higher total yield. So let's make another save here, and naively max food (the governor agrees, for whatever that's worth).

EOT21: City1 grows to size3 and works 6/0/0 pig, 3/0/0 rice, and 1/3/0 mine.

We can immediately see one consequence of maxing food through the previous turns. We now have the option of continuing to max food, working pig rice and a grassland forest, to grow to size4 in 3 turns with 1 food to spare (which means we get to work the mine for a turn anyway). That seems sufficiently better than working the mine and growing a turn later that I'm not going to make a save for it.

T22: Worker1 moves E onto grass hill. City1 works 6/0/0 pigs, 3/0/0 rice, and 2/1/0 GLF.
T23: Worker1 mines grass hill 1/4
T24: Worker1 mines grass hill 2/4. City1 swaps from 2/1/0 GLF to 1/3/0 GLH mine.

EOT24: City1 grows to size4 and completes Workboat with 1h overflow.

T25: Worker1 mines grass hill 3/4. Workboat starts heading to the clam N of plains hill. City1 queues a Settler and works 6/0/0 pigs, 1/3/0 GLH mine, 1/2/0 GHF, and 2/1/0 GLF. This gives 8 natural hammers for 4 IMP bonus hammers.

EOT25: Bronze Working finishes. Set research to Fishing.

T26: Revolt to Slavery. Worker1 mines grass hill 4/4.

T27: City1 2-pop whips Settler to (107+12)/100h. Worker1 moves NE onto grassland hill forest.

We'll lose a hammer to rounding but it can't be helped. I don't think it makes sense to delay the whip even a single turn because we want those trade routes and extra pop point ASAP.

EOT27: City1 completes Settler.

T28: Settler moves NW towards plains hill. Worker1 chops forest 1/3. City1 queues up another Workboat and works pig + mine. Workboat1 arrives and has 5 turns to explore while waiting for Fishing. (This is either okay, or means we could've built a Warrior before Workboat1. Given the island to the west and our peninsular start, exploring seems fine. Maybe we gamble that the map has pre-Optics circumnavigation.)

T29: Settles moves N-N onto plains hill. Worker1 chops forest 2/3.

T30: Settle City2 on plains hill, queue up a Workboat and work a grass mine. Worker1 chops forest into City2. City1 swaps from rice to grass mine. Save gold for a turn.

T31: Turn research back on, Fishing due EOT32. Worker1 mines 1/4.

EOT31: Both cities finish Workboats.

T32: Workboats move.

EOT32: Fishing finishes.

T33: Improve both clams. We can now set the capital up to do another 2-pop Settler whip for white dot in 4t when anger wears off, while City2 builds a Workboat for it, or the 1st Workboat can head back to it if there's nothing interesting to the west.




I can turn this into an attempt for the Great Lighthouse with 5 forests to chop at the capital and a decent tech rate heading into Sailing and Masonry. If I were really serious I could do it on 2 cities (give both clams to City2 to whip out a lighthouse and then 2-pop whip Settlers, City1 works pigs and 4 mines) and skip Agriculture and the Settler whip to instead get max overflow on a Worker whip to speed up the chopping timetable. Worth thinking about it, I think it could be very strong on this map where it looks like the vast majority of cities will be coastal. Naufragar of course has the upper hand with IND if he decides to hard commit, but that hasn't stopped me before!

Back to work for now, and I should probably test the other alternative with 2 Workers, just in case (though I expect the timings not to be great, finishing Fishing tech is the real bottleneck here and having extra chops earlier doesn't really do much).

EDIT: In any case, I think the tech path has to be Bronze Working -> Fishing by virtue of it being the only way I can both avoid wasting Worker actions and also improve the one city site that gets me trade routes, so I can set my research and not use any more of the timer. Like I said, enough constraints and the choices become easy to make (if not ideal).

EDIT2: Wow, someone is size 2 already as of EOT11. That has to be a fish with strong hammer tiles (maybe 3h in second ring?).

[Commodore]

2S, 1E of horse is a food city, right?

[El Grillo]

Fair enough, though I was thinking strictly in the short term and praying for the horse to be on one of the plains tiles west of the pig. Yes, with 3rd-ring capital borders and Mysticism, that city can chop out a Monument and work pre-pastured horse for a Workboat and be just fine.

[El Grillo]

A very sloppy sandboxing attempt from this opening finishes the Great Lighthouse EOT55 with some 3rd-ring chops but no wonder whip (and I did 1-turn the Lighthouse with a Worker whip+chop). I'll have to see how that compares to other games, and I'm sure I can optimize further.

EDIT: Hmm, EOT55 as a finish date is looking a bit tough to bring down (on the other hand it might make sense to finish it a turn or two slower and not put in all the 3rd-ring chops...), and it's also a bit tricky to search the forums for a wonder completion date. Figuring out who built the wonder seems to require some trial-and-error. So far all I've got is Commodore's EOT67 in PB43.

The thing is, the more I look at the situation, the more going for the Great Lighthouse makes sense. I get to turn a bunch of turns working the mines I've been forced to build as the result of my start techs into future commerce, IMP means that I can more quickly catch back up in cities, and PRO makes the extra trade routes more effective. If I invest into this and it pays off, it also allows me to further delay cottages and just spam cities while teching Mysticism and Archery to defend with.

Of course, the unavoidable problem is that naufragar's pick of IND/ORG Spain seems laser-focused on building the same wonder, and he gets a 107h discount on the package. I'm relying on him not going for the fastest possible, or anything remotely approaching the fastest possible finish date. Rather, perhaps he tries for an early religion or wants some more Worker techs, and perhaps he tries to build Stonehenge or Oracle first. It's a straight-up WIFOM scenario: he could expect to be such an obvious favorite for the Great Lighthouse that he could feel safe delaying it. Perhaps he gets a touch too comfortable and it slips right through his fingers.

[El Grillo]

T14:




No neighbors, no religion, more clams. In my sandbox, health actually became an issue due to only having a single variety of seafood and my other foods not being riverside. The whip solves that for now, thankfully.

It appears that I'm on a small donut-shaped landmass so maybe I just got lucky and everyone else scouted away from me. Still, it seems extremely unlikely that that coastal horse is supposed to belong to someone. Maybe the jungled marble is a midpoint tile?

[El Grillo]

With some more time in the sandbox, I was able to squeeze out a third city and Workboat while keeping the timetable for EOT55 Great Lighthouse. The tradeoff is delaying the Lighthouse at the second city, but the third city is obviously better (I mean, if nothing else, finishing TGL and not getting any extra trade routes is pretty sad). Note that I have an extra idle Workboat in all of these sims which I expect to be out exploring and attempting circumnavigation in the actual game.

I really like how one turn of saving gold is exactly enough to finish Fishing, Sailing, and Masonry in one go. A second turn of saving gold after that is enough for two cheap techs, any of Mysticism/Agriculture/Wheel/Archery. The drawbacks are of course the very light military, and we may or may not have copper in the settled area (though we will be able to hook up the riverside horse for Chariots). With luck we don't have a Holkan rush as a neighbor, and can skate past this vulnerable period and then post up PRO Archers. There seems to be enough room between us and our neighbors that we don't have to worry about not being able to settle at least one city to our south and southwest in front of the capital.

I still need to do more research on TGL completion dates. I suppose I could do a worst-case sim by playing as IND/ORG Spain, but I suspect it just comes down to when naufragar decides to go for it and how many chops he has to put into TGL as opposed to anything else.

[Lewwyn]

Considering I’m playing charlemagne of Spain in my game I’m very curious how this Lighthouse stuff plays out between you and Spain.