[PB64] naufragar's bingo parlor for assassins

[naufragar]

How many didI get right?

Flawless.

3/6 are unchanged from the random result

2/5, since I didn't randomize my own. (Couldn't stomach anyone else getting Roger Rabbit.) This happened an embarrassing number of times in the analysis, too. But if I switched it, I would've dishonored Fortuna, a vengeful goddess.

This has to be SD right?

I encourage you to watch The King's Man, if you get a chance. I was apparently the only person on the planet who loved it.

The character is Rasputin, hence Gavagai, since I just resorted to national stereotypes. I admit I giggle to myself every time I imagine Amicalola as a buff kangaroo.

The settings look right to me:

For some reason, I thought we were gonna play on Small, but that's not what the tech thread says. Glad I checked. I had made my sandbox the wrong size.

I freaking love Civ4, man.


I settled in place, since I didn't see an immediately better spot. I have yet to sim out a plan.

Here's a few things I love about Civ4: do you see how there are three different types of trees in this shot? The northernmost trees belong to the warmest biome, while the snow-covered ones in the south belong to the coldest, so I know I'm south of the equator. I've never really understood the "queue up moves in the fog" trick, but I took a stab at it:


Does this mean there's ~10 tiles before I hit the polar regions?

So, getting back to the capital screenshot, I have a choice. Do I pop the northern hut with the scout this turn? When exploring huts, scouts get better results than warriors or borders. How much better? Idk. I need to look that up. But I want to pop at least one hut with the scout. If I pop the southern hut, then my scout is in the south (duh) which has less land to explore, due to where the equatorial line is. Perhaps I pop the southern hut and then swing up to the north to grab that one right before borders pop? It would depend on just how much better the scout results are. Otherwise, I would just grab one hut and get the other with either a borders pop or a warrior.

I haven't ended turn because I need to pick a tech. I quickly tried something out in my sandbox, and it turns out I can grab Hunting & Animal Husbandry just in time to improve the pig. This is efficient in the long term, since completing Hunting gets me a bonus on the AH research. On the other hand, if I'm not using Hunting any time soon, those 6 turns could be better spent on something like Mining or Pottery.

But what if I could find a use for Hunting? You know, Hunting is a prerequisite for Archery. I generated a few tiny Tectonics maps to look at spacing and people were generally ~12 tiles apart. The closest distance I saw was 9 tiles. The longest was 15 (sort of. Sometimes the script generates a vast amount of empty land for one player). I asked myself if I wanted to roll the dice on an archer rush? On the one hand, it sort of fits this game's theme of randomness. On the other hand, it would suck if it worked. After all, these handful of players are looking to generate their own fun, and I would be screwing one of them out of the blue. I'll have to think about it. I do really love the efficiency of Hunting into AH, though. I'm really tempted to make that path work, and Archery is one way to do it. Wait a minute. Why are my alarm bells ringing?

My temperament can lead me to do unorthodox things just to be unorthodox. I’d say I’ll try to tune it down, but I know myself too well to promise the impossible.

Man, I love Civ.

Btw, El Grillo and Civac, glad I was able to tease if not delight.

[naufragar]

Well, I can't find anybody who has broken down exactly what changes when you pop a hut with a warrior vs. scout vs. borders. In CIV4HandicapInfo, I find this list under Monarch difficulty:

Code:

-<Goodies>
<GoodyType>GOODY_HIGH_GOLD</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_LOW_GOLD</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_LOW_GOLD</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_LOW_GOLD</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_LOW_GOLD</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_MAP</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_MAP</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_WARRIOR</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_WARRIOR</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_SCOUT</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_EXPERIENCE</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_EXPERIENCE</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_HEALING</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_TECH</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_TECH</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_WEAK</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_WEAK</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_WEAK</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_STRONG</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_STRONG</GoodyType>
</Goodies>

I assume that this is a list that the game randomly draws from, so the duplicates increase the likelihood of drawing one of the outcomes.

At some places in the code, there's the tag "isnobadgoodies". I haven't yet figured out what that does. (I'm computer illiterate.) But if I had to guess, it's what makes scouts ignore the barbarians hut result. Since I've never seen border pops produce village barbarians, I wonder if borders are just as good as scouts when popping borders, but I really don't know.

[Charriu]

Mh I see another curious civplayer on the horizon

[naufragar]

Mh I see another curious civplayer on the horizon

I gotta say, Charriu, it's so nice reading the curious civplayer articles, especially when compared to reading 8 different civfanatics posts of people talking in the vaguest terms about their intuitive understanding of the mechanics.

At some places in the code, there's the tag "isnobadgoodies". I haven't yet figured out what that does. (I'm computer illiterate.) But if I had to guess, it's what makes scouts ignore the barbarians hut result.

I've made some progress. The isnobadgoodies is used in the XML for scouts and explorers only, so my assumption is pretty safe. Elsewhere, there's a function "doGoody". But we're at the limits of what I can figure out by guesswork.

[Charriu]

Don't take the xml tags literal

[Charriu]

I'm already looking into it. I can promise you it gets interesting.

[naufragar]

I'm already looking into it. I can promise you it gets interesting.

You are a lantern of Civilization knowledge in the darkness of ignorance.

We've replayed turn 0. I have also selected a tech and made a scout move:


At the end of the day, I just couldn't bring myself to archer rush someone. Not because I thought it was a bad plan, but because I'm too soft to ruin someone's fun immediately and out of nowhere. 

I've decided to use my scout to pick up both huts. I didn't want to scout the South before the North, so I wasn't going to only pick up the southern hut, and if I waited to grab the southern hut, I'd have less chance of a tech. So let's use what Charriu's revealed to see what might happen:

For the Monarch handicap, there are 20 possible hut outcomes, five of which are some kind of barbarian. (The list is a couple posts back in this thread.) Our scout ignores these barb outcoms, so we're down to 15 possibilities. Our scout doesn't need healing, so that one's out. Charriu saw that in the first 10 turns, the experience result is also impossible. So we're down to 12. We now know that in multiplayer games we'll never get warriors, so those two are out as well. That leaves us 5x Gold Rewards, 2x Map, 1x Scout, and 2x Tech. Any of these are fine. I'd most like scout and tech. We have a 20% chance of getting a tech from a scout-explored hut within the first ten turns of a multiplayer game. So, with 2 huts, we have a 36% chance of getting a free tech. Oh boy. That's not too shabby. 36% happens all the time. 

[Charriu]

You get the northern hut within 5 turns via border pop with the same results as a scout

[naufragar]

You get the northern hut within 5 turns via border pop with the same results as a scout

Very true, but I want to scout the northern land before the southern land. We're south of the equator, so I suspect I'm more likely to find other players north rather than south. This might be a false assumption, but it's why I want to turn the scout around. Mjmd said something about fixing the polar regions, but from the tectonics I rolled, the tops and bottoms of these maps are very inhospitable. (So another reason to scout the equatorial band.)

[Mjmd]

No pictures as I've had to regen maps a lot to get a couple that I like, but basically I'm doing a tiny tectonics map at 30% water. Regen for maps with somewhat minimal polar regions. Would do some minor edits to delete some* polar region to get tile count down as well as allow some more naval movement.