[SPOILERS] Woden and ljubljana like boats

[ljubljana]

Turn 4 - Phoenicia



The first hit against the camp goes about as well as you'd expect - I think I'll heal up before trying another, since if our health gets too low it might decide to attack out and finish us off. Looks like we did manage to trap the scout, though. The capital switches over to the rice, with growth due in 3.

[ljubljana]

Turn 5 - Phoenicia



I do nothing, but post about it anyways, because I just like hearing myself talk, I guess . Nobody's size 2 yet, which is starting to get interesting, since it means no one's working even a 4-food tile. Coupled with the completely marginal land out by this barb camp, I'm getting the distinct impression that TBS crafted this map to be noticeably less fertile than the PBEM17 and PBEM19 ones. That's fine by me, of course, since, the worse the land is, the better all my Cothon-boosted sea tiles will look by comparison.

[Woden]

Turn 3 & 4-Woden
Just a little bit of movement, made it back to the coast and will follow it towards Cuneiform or I find a split between our 2 areas. Did find a couple of spots for some +3 campuses or holy sites. One for the capital if I want to buy a 3rd ring tile. My plan is to buy the pearls as soon as I can get 50nd work it with my 2nd population. Then I hopefully can get the second pantheon and might not need God King. Pretty sure Indonesia settled on the coast since  their team is leading the religious rankings right now, so doubtful of getting the first one.

   

[ljubljana]

Turn 3 & 4-Woden
Just a little bit of movement, made it back to the coast and will follow it towards Cuneiform or I find a split between our 2 areas. Did find a couple of spots for some +3 campuses or holy sites. One for the capital if I want to buy a 3rd ring tile. My plan is to buy the pearls as soon as I can get 50nd work it with my 2nd population. Then I hopefully can get the second pantheon and might not need God King. Pretty sure Indonesia settled on the coast since  their team is leading the religious rankings right now, so doubtful of getting the first one.

It makes sense to work the pearls to go up to 2 faith/turn, but I'm not sure I see the logic behind using it to drop God King. Urban Planning + pearls will be worth 1 food, 1 faith, 1 gold, and one hammer per turn, but if you ran God King and worked the deer instead you'd have more food and hammers and the same amount of gold and faith.

It might be a little late for this, but I'm starting to wonder if exploring up the coast is actually the most efficient scouting order for your warrior. The land up by my capital looks pretty narrow, and if the coast is shaped the way it appears to be, my second warrior might have nowhere to go but towards you, which would be redundant from a scouting perspective.

[ljubljana]

Turn 6 - Phoenicia



I do nothing again, as healing and then attacking next turn is slightly better than the reverse of that, since we'll have a lower wounded unit modifier for the combat itself. Still no city growths out there, which means mine will apparently be the first despite having worked the sheep for three turns (?). I guess everyone else is working a 2f/2h tile...

In other news, Suboptimal got 1 ES this turn, and Roland got 3! I don't think that can be a barb camp this early, so it's probably a land-based natural wonder, and fairly close too. I wonder if sub's 1 indicates that they sent their starting warriors towards each other, and both found the same NW halfway between them? If so, there's a good chance we'll have the same setup, which would be nice for an early Astrology reveal and boost. If you think that's plausible, we should maybe think a bit about which of us two should find it first for the extra +2 ES - I imagine the answer depends on how close we think the GA math will end up on my end. If Cothons and PoliPhil are both hard to get to by t61, which I think is plausible if not likely, the answer could be "quite close", which might justify waiting to reveal it with my second warrior just in case...

[Woden]

Scouting coasts are far better to explore than inner tiles on island maps for multiple reasons. City States are most likely on the coast and there may be ones just of the coast that we can find by exploring the coast. Also, the best way of finding another continent is by seeing an island just off coast. Finally, we can the shape and feel for our island without having to have our boats explore it. The best use of our boats is to explore out in the wild, not around our island.

As for God King, I will be running it when I finish Code of Laws and I have a reason but I will get to it in a minute.

Turn 5
Warrior continues and finds nothing of interest...
   

I read a trick that I am not sure no much we want to use it. It seems the designers, when developing the hidden tech/civic trees, still allow you to search them by theme. For instance, if I search for units on the civic tree, I see...
   

That would be Foreign Trade, the only ancient civic that provides a unit, the trader. If you search for wonders, the only one highlighted is the one after Code of Laws, which is Mysticism and the Oracle. Same goes for the tech tree. If I search for faith, I get...
   

Which would be Astrology. I haven't worked out many of the techs/civics because multiple techs/civic show up for many of the other filters but I think we can figure out the tree through the use of the filters. Problem is that I don't know if we should. I don't think this is a bug to be exploited, I just think it is an oversight by the developers. Using it kind of defeats the whole point of the hidden techs and gives us an advantage that might spoil any victory.

So, questions for the lurkers: 
Has anybody else mentioned this? I saw it at CivFanatics and I know suboptimal frequents there. 
Do you consider it a bug and exploit?
Is it fair to use?

[ljubljana]

Scouting coasts are far better to explore than inner tiles on island maps for multiple reasons. City States are most likely on the coast and there may be ones just of the coast that we can find by exploring the coast. Also, the best way of finding another continent is by seeing an island just off coast. Finally, we can the shape and feel for our island without having to have our boats explore it. The best use of our boats is to explore out in the wild, not around our island.

That makes sense, and is a reasonable plan; I'll have my warrior continue south along the coast when it finishes cleaning up the camp. The second warrior probably has nowhere to go but inland if you're coming up the east coast, but that's worth something too if we think there might be an inland NW. I do think that just for meta reasons it's a little unlikely that TBS put a bunch of city states just off the coast, since that's how they were placed in PBEM19, but of course that hardly makes it impossible.

I haven't worked out many of the techs/civics because multiple techs/civic show up for many of the other filters but I think we can figure out the tree through the use of the filters. Problem is that I don't know if we should. I don't think this is a bug to be exploited, I just think it is an oversight by the developers. Using it kind of defeats the whole point of the hidden techs and gives us an advantage that might spoil any victory.

So, questions for the lurkers: 
Has anybody else mentioned this? I saw it at CivFanatics and I know suboptimal frequents there. 
Do you consider it a bug and exploit?
Is it fair to use?

I do think it would be a little exploitive to use this if nobody else knows about it, since we'd gain a huge advantage by doing so for reasons unrelated to our civ skills. I'm fine with using it if the other players also want to, but since it defeats the purpose of the shuffle mode I think that's somewhat unlikely to be the consensus. We may want to consider polling the other players about this in the tech thread, depending on what the lurkers say.

[Woden]

I think I will give it a day for a lurker to respond and then post something in the tech thread to let everyone know you can do it and ask for discussion if it should be used. I will use the examples I showed to test it out, so everybody knows what we know.

[williams482]

Us lurkers are discussing this now. We'll see how many responses we get, but early outlook is not particularly favorable towards using this.

[Woden]

Us lurkers are discussing this now. We'll see how many responses we get, but early outlook is not particularly favorable towards using this.

That is what I figured and why I didn't dive to deep into it.

Addition: Even the peeps at CivFanatics think it is a bug since thread was moved form general discussion to bug reports section in the forum: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/b...cs.665498/

Hopefully Firaxis fixes it in one of the next patches.