Apologies if I was rude. I know you're looking out for Pind. 
There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
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[PB63] Lurking the night away
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January 15th, 2022, 11:48
(This post was last modified: January 15th, 2022, 11:49 by pindicator.)
Played
Suffer Game Sicko
Dodo Tier Player
January 18th, 2022, 21:30
(This post was last modified: January 18th, 2022, 21:31 by pindicator.)
Lurkers, appreciate those of you who took the time to look at the start and try your own hand at it. I think only Alhazard touched on how the worker was left with nothing to do, and that was a bit drawback for me in pushing for a Mining -> BW start. I liked the 5 pop start because it gave more commerce due to just how brutal the opening tech costs were (again Alhazard, thank you for pointing this out in the thread) and we could work both oasis and clam to get more commerce in. The plan would have been to quickly whip out the next settlers and to try and settle cities 3 & 4 faster than everyone else.
That being said, the plan was also made with the assumption that the map was bigger than it turned out to be. Tarkeel, I know we didn't put out a concrete number but look at the answers given under Map Size:
I read all those answers and I think the majority of players wanted a map larger than what was provided. Made worse was that my copper and superdeath's copper was pointed right at each other so that our 2nd cities would have had touching borders when their borders expanded. When your 2nd city and your neighbor's 2nd city touch borders that's a small map in my book. Some criticisms on us taking Greece, but again that decision was made with the expectation that the map was going to give us more time before we had to defend than it did. Plus, I really disagree that picking a civ/leader should eliminate you from the game before turn 50. There are balance issues going on if that is the case. One additional note: Barbarians. I didn't realize just how much No Barbs lends itself to enabling rushes. But without needing to defend against early attacks from barbarians, early units are free to do those kinds of things. Which makes me wonder why Cornflakes didn't rush War Chariots and at least target 1 neighbor to rush down. If I had his combination I certainly would have after discovering how small the map ended up being.
Suffer Game Sicko
Dodo Tier Player
There's about 120 land tiles per player, but because almost every water tile can be worked, the actual tilecount is closer to 12x16 = 192. I did look at making each area 16x16, but that turned out too large. I'm really starting to dislike that maps have to be a multiple of 4. Another possibility that occured to me too late was to shift on the other axis instead.
If you look at the map-making thread, one of the last things I did was to move your copper; it was originally more to the west. You were actually the only player that could hook up copper without wheel, but it would take sailing or chaining culture on the coast to do it. I also don't think anyone that's playing has a good grasp of the map-form yet, especially that there's really no backlines anywhere and you have 6 close neighbors. Very good call on the barbs; playing without them changes the game a lot more than people think.
@pindicator: I definitely missed some things in looking over the map. Was too casual about it. If you do something do it right. Still I found your play somewhat baffling. You were rightly concerned about a war chariot rush but then did not do anything to reduce your exposure to it. Not the tiniest concession. I also kinda doubt that early BW with lower pop settlers/workers would have reduced your growth curve over working such mediocre tile as the sea food.
(January 19th, 2022, 03:55)civac2 Wrote: @pindicator: I definitely missed some things in looking over the map. Was too casual about it. If you do something do it right. Still I found your play somewhat baffling. You were rightly concerned about a war chariot rush but then did not do anything to reduce your exposure to it. Not the tiniest concession. I also kinda doubt that early BW with lower pop settlers/workers would have reduced your growth curve over working such mediocre tile as the sea food. I think you missed some of our discussion on that very topic. We changed our plan to delay to size 6 and delay the starting settler specifically because of that chariot rush? Why delay the settler? Because we had to settle on copper with city #2. We had to know where copper was otherwise then we were waiting on a 3rd settler for the copper and ending up even slower. So it made sense to me to delay the settler to ensure that we were founding city 2 on copper (it's funny that not settling on copper becomes the main criticism later) because that would have been the only way to ensure it was upgraded. I think a fair criticism that was never brought up was that we had no plan on how we were going to accumulate 85g to upgrade our warrior into a spear. Turned out to be a pretty important detail later on. Now you can argue this was a bad choice, but don't say that all we did was complain and not do anything about it. I think those posts were the most frustrating to read in this thread because they clearly were missing the effort that was going in to trying to figure this position out. Honestly, I wish I would have followed my gut on turn 7 and just quit the game right there. Once I saw just how different the map was from my expectation (all the people criticizing Greece seem to be doing so with the benefit of full map details which I did not have), once I saw that first Cornflakes scout so early I should have just bailed and saved everyone the grief. Tarkeel, I did figure out the map shape around turn 35, thanks to having 2 scouts out. It's a nice solution to spacing out 9 players, it's just not what I thought I was signing up for.
Suffer Game Sicko
Dodo Tier Player
I dimly remember the discussion. My main point is that you should have gone for BW after Agriculture. After settling on copper you can make a spear by double chopping in in the copper city. That would be likely fast enough to hold a war chariot rush let alone SD's mediocre rush.
And my whole point has been that playing a map where I had to rush BW and rush copper just to survive past turn 50 was not a map I wanted to play.
Suffer Game Sicko
Dodo Tier Player (January 19th, 2022, 10:35)pindicator Wrote: Honestly, I wish I would have followed my gut on turn 7 and just quit the game right there. Once I saw just how different the map was from my expectation (all the people criticizing Greece seem to be doing so with the benefit of full map details which I did not have), once I saw that first Cornflakes scout so early I should have just bailed and saved everyone the grief. As I've said earlier in this thread, I think this was an issue of mis-communication around expectations. To be fair, the hardest requirement (other than 12 tiles) was your "no warrior rush". Warrior choking might have been possible, but at great cost I think. I certainly could have gone with a remake of the PB60 map, but that was something several of the players explicitly did not want. My interpretation of 12 tiles was more on how much land was available "for free". Here, everyone should have an uncontested inner ring of cities available, and then some second-ring cities in the east-west plane. (January 19th, 2022, 12:09)Cornflakes Wrote: It just occurred to me that since my food resources (except Banana) are all 2nd ring, Superdeath could be stuck with a captured capital site that can't pop borders to use the resources for 15-20 turns That's a great observation from Cornflakes; Superdeath at least has mysticism though. 
Once again we are at the T50 mark. So let's dive into the report. As always all the data can be found here: PB63 Tracking
Before we start some notable observations:
Now there is no new data compared to PB61, but I was able to fix the production trackings. Here a brief explanation of the new stuff: Actual gold/science: This works like the previous science and gold tracking, but this time the slider setting is included. Therefore we know exactly how much everybody produced in those areas. Production and TotalProduction: I thought about how to better judge all the hammer bonuses for buildings, units and wonders and thought that tracking the actual production might be a good metric to track. The production metric is somewhat useful though. Tech Tracking: Similar to wonders and great persons I'm now also tracking when each player researched each tech. Small downside, I'm not tracking which tech the players choose from Oracle or Liberalism and tech tracking. The former should still be easy to guess in the context of other techs researched and the last is only used in diplo games in the past, so I didn't bother so far. Tracking all the civics: I already tracked the labor civics in use. So why not track all of them. General state of the game First of all the city count
It should also be no surprise that Cornflakes is on top of pop count without Slavery. Like I already said in the beginning I'm also tracking the actual gold and science output of the players. But some additional info is needed. Like in previous PBs the gold number does not include maintenance cost of any kind and the science output does not include KTB and prereq bonuses from other techs. Reason is that I want to compare these numbers to the commerce output to see the effect of modifier buildings and in case of science I want to be able to compare the science output between players and KTB and prereq bonus are a distraction in this case. Both numbers do include extra gold/science from specialists, modifier buildings and other stuff I haven't mentioned so far. These actual numbers are most interesting when we add up all the numbers of each turn. For the current turn and the players potential income the virtual numbers are still more useful. These virtual numbers were my previous tracking and they treated the slider as always being on 100% gold or science. At first I want to look at the current turn numbers of the virtual gold income (all players running 100% gold). Science is basically the same numbers + 1 beaker:
Of course things get more interesting if we take maintenance into account. FYI info this is the sum of all maintenance factors (city, unit, supply and civic).
With the maintenance at hand we can now include that into the gold income to see how much gold everybody could make this turn:
Now let's see how good the player did across the whole span of 50 turns. For this we look at the accumulated actual science numbers, which I already have described above:
But what exactly did the players do with all those beakers. Well fear not here it is:  It should be fairly self explantory. It's all the techs the players have researched so far. The number in front is the turn the players acquired the tech. Nothing to surprising in here apart from the stuff already mentioned (No Pottery for Superdeath and JackRB and no Bronze Working for Cornflakes). Production Now next I want to turn to my new production tracking, but before that I have to explain in more detail how I collected this info for this PB. With this tracking I iterated through every city and added up all the hammers being produced this turn including forest chops and whips. It does include extra hammers from whipping, chopping and of course overflow. The only thing it is missing right now is hammers put into building wealth or science directly, but we are far away from that yet. I've also split the tracking into two categories Production and TotalProduction. Both work the same way but the important difference is that TotalProduction includes modifiers from buildings (forge, factory) and traits (All traits who have production bonuses). Now it's a bit sad that I can't divide it into more detail, but you can imagine that it will be very difficult for example to differentiate which extra hammer came from a forge and which from EXP granaries. Here are the accumulated total production numbers across 50 turns with the non-modified production numbers in parenthesis:
EXP (Fabled) = 64 EXP (Mr Cairo) = 60 IMP (Superdeath) = 48 IMP (JackRB) = 45 AGG or CHA (Cornflakes) = 20 not sure if he started a barracks somewhere or if those are from Monuments, I somewhat expect the latter. I'm very thankful that we have two EXP players here. So far we can say that EXPs granary bonus is better by the numbers compared to IMPs settler bonus. It remains to be seen how this turns out on T100. Financial Bonus This will be rather short since nobody is benefiting from FIN so far. Now the one thing worth mentioning is that the lighthouse-nerf is hurting the players in this game specifically.
Protective Bonus This is somewhat interesting even though nobody is PRO, so let's look into the accumulated numbers
Misc I'm tracking a lot more but there is not enough information there to justify an own paragraph. Therefore a little summary here:
I'm also tracking the labor civics and therefore can determine, when everybody switched to slavery. These are the times they did.
Comparing traits The main goal of all this tracking of course is to compare the economic traits related around commerce income or maintenance reduction. So let's do this:  As you can see I changed the layout a little bit again in preparation for the new production tracking. I already color coded the 4 economic traits so that you easily see, who uses which trait. Except for FIN every trait has a hammer bonus so I included all of them. But I'm still disappointed in how this looks. I like how the 4 economics traits have light colors that are easy to distinguish. But with 7 more traits I'm running out of these colors. If anybody has a better idea how to do this I'm all ears. Since this is an emperor game we can see that ORG already is doing some wonders, but PRO is still king in the very early game. Stay tuned for the T100 report.
Mods: RtR CtH
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