[PB64] Amicalola Gets To Heaven with Tarkeel and Ljubljana

[Mjmd]

I set up a quick test game and luckily first hut popped a map revealing some food I had placed.

[Charriu]

I have to check about huts preventing resources to spawn on their tile.

Oops, I didn't phrase my question very well. What I meant was: When you get a map from a hut, what determines the tiles that stay unrevealed within the otherwise-revealed area? Are those tiles more likely to be food resources/other huts/etc, or are they identical and it's just random chance?

Ah ok understood. It's completely random. Resources (or improvements) are not relevant

[Amicalola]

Thanks for the answers, guys! That bodes ill for our starting location then.

[Tarkeel]

There's a reason why I've been hammering on that this will be Man against Environment for some time.

[Amicalola]

T4-5
We found an actual food resource! Cows! Which, by the way, was hidden under one of the few foggy tiles....


We may want an early Monarchy here, between the wines and the lack of other happiness. 

The main reason I post is to ask about that hut near Warm Healer, though. Should we send the scout up there to pop it (a warrior is some 30 turns away), or should we continue to send the scout southwards looking for more huts. I'm not sure, dedlurker thoughts appreciated.

Also, the border pop revealed what may be an island, and what is certainly a lot of coast (not ocean) to the north. 


Moving almost certainly would have been correct in hindsight, between being able to settle a Moai city 1N of the fish, and being able to have a strong-ish second city on the grass/jungle hill near the cows. D'oh.  An island there would be excellent news with Mao, though.

We also seem to have A LOT of coastline, so it might be worth thinking pretty seriously about GLH. No one is super well-positioned to get it, so with a dedicated push we might be able to.

[ljubljana]

Neat! I've heard about them playing here before, but I've never really listened to their stuff. Are there any particular albums you'd recommend? 

Hah, yeah personal life is annoying like that. I hope you fixed the housing situation! Thanks for the offer - it mostly boils down to my university screwing me over and forcing me to scramble and find my own placement (after 3 months telling us not to). For some reason the automated system was unable to find me one out of the 500-ish people in my course, despite my living in the middle of the city. It's really weird, even they remarked on it. My course would not function without a placement, so it was a pretty stressful situation! Luckily, I've found something that looks vaguely promising now.

well, the one album i listened to before going (as "research") was Milano, which i enjoyed but which is a few years removed from their current work at this point, so YMMV

oh that sounds exhausting and frightening! and very congruent to my own stressful experiences in academia (i mastered out of my Ph.D program on ~t20 of PBEM20). i'm glad everything worked out for you! what program is this, if you don't mind my asking?

(ps lurkers, or amica, feel free to jump in and veto this increasingly off-topic diversion )

an attempt at game feedback re the hut: it looks like popping with a 100 HP scout on what would be t8 invalidates many possible hut rolls, most of them relative duds - healing due to HP, barbs due to scout, and experience + warrior because it's too early. our remaining odds according to the rerolling process given by civwiki are roughly

58% some amount of gold
8% scout
17% map
17% tech

popping with a warrior on t30 would apparently not invalidate anything and give us the listed odds. in particular, both tech and gold are 1.7x more likely if we pop now with the scout, so if we're optimizing purely for expected economic output, we would have to miss out on a full 0.7 expected warrior-huts from the 6 turns of lost scouting for the t8 pop to not come out ahead, which i'd say seems unlikely? that's an oversimplification for sure but if i faced this choice in what would be my first-ever game of competitive civ4, i'd probably do the t8 scout pop.

[Mjmd]

I am also curious about which program / major.

Also, are you doing detailed micro? Past ded lurkers are curious so their eyes can briefly glaze over.

[Amicalola]

Neat! I've heard about them playing here before, but I've never really listened to their stuff. Are there any particular albums you'd recommend? 

Hah, yeah personal life is annoying like that. I hope you fixed the housing situation! Thanks for the offer - it mostly boils down to my university screwing me over and forcing me to scramble and find my own placement (after 3 months telling us not to). For some reason the automated system was unable to find me one out of the 500-ish people in my course, despite my living in the middle of the city. It's really weird, even they remarked on it. My course would not function without a placement, so it was a pretty stressful situation! Luckily, I've found something that looks vaguely promising now.

well, the one album i listened to before going (as "research") was Milano, which i enjoyed but which is a few years removed from their current work at this point, so YMMV

oh that sounds exhausting and frightening! and very congruent to my own stressful experiences in academia (i mastered out of my Ph.D program on ~t20 of PBEM20). i'm glad everything worked out for you! what program is this, if you don't mind my asking?

(ps lurkers, or amica, feel free to jump in and veto this increasingly off-topic diversion )

an attempt at game feedback re the hut: it looks like popping with a 100 HP scout on what would be t8 invalidates many possible hut rolls, most of them relative duds - healing due to HP, barbs due to scout, and experience + warrior because it's too early. our remaining odds according to the rerolling process given by civwiki are roughly

58% some amount of gold
8% scout
17% map
17% tech

popping with a warrior on t30 would apparently not invalidate anything and give us the listed odds. in particular, both tech and gold are 1.7x more likely if we pop now with the scout, so if we're optimizing purely for expected economic output, we would have to miss out on a full 0.7 expected warrior-huts from the 6 turns of lost scouting for the t8 pop to not come out ahead, which i'd say seems unlikely? that's an oversimplification for sure but if i faced this choice in what would be my first-ever game of competitive civ4, i'd probably do the t8 scout pop.

That's a really helpful analysis, and I'm persuaded! Thanks. Unfortunately we are well past that analysis being helpful in-game, because as that direction looks like a dead-end and I haven't had the time to properly think about it, I (wrongly) opted for the other option of greedily searching for more huts in the south. Unsuccessfully, so far.


As far as the course, it's a Masters of Teaching (Secondary students), at a nominally excellent University for that. I say nominally because we've all been pretty unimpressed so far; maybe COVID is making things difficult. In particular, for the first placement round, about 100/500 students didn't get a placement and we were promised makeups in the second round + SWOTVAC (pre-exam studying). Then in the second round, still about 10/500 didn't get them, of which I was one. The university didn't really offer any positive solutions this time, suggesting a worst-case of delaying our course by 6 months. That was disastrous in multiple ways, hence my desperate scramble. Particularly unimpressive is the fact that I was able to get a (pretty good!) placement with my first phone call to a Secondary School, which is something we are not supposed to do due to its supposed unlikelihood of success. So if I was able to get one straight away without any resources or notice, and in a poor manner, what the hell was the Placements Team doing for five months?!   Currently, my suspicion is that I was accidentally taken off the list of eligible candidates before I got one - that sounds ridiculous, but so does the idea that they couldn't find one in that context.

I am also curious about which program / major.

Also, are you doing detailed micro? Past ded lurkers are curious so their eyes can briefly glaze over.

As far as micro, I have a vague plan - it's not super detailed because I'm not taking this game very seriously. I can write/post something but a lot of contextual changes affect it anyway, even in a serious game. For example, I might try to find a way for our worker to pop that hut now that the scout has not (Oops ). Or maybe we can wait until T50 for the borders to pop instead? What are the odds that no one else finds the hut (although a T50 hut is way worse than a T8 anyway)? The warrior popping has a 25% of barbarians... Oh well, maybe we find another hut in the south which makes up for it.

[Amicalola]

Turn 'Early Turns Where Nothing Is Happening'

So the big question that Miguelito asked, and I've been pondering, is 'How Do We Actually Win?'

By coincidence, I was chatting with Ginger just before the game started about Mao Zedong, and we concluded that he might be the ideal leader for a quick Horse Archer (HAs) rush. You use PRO-commerce to get to Horseback Riding (HBR), and EXP-granaries to get every city in a whip-able state by T80-90. Then you massacre someone before they know what hit them, or you tech an early construction and kill someone with War Elephants (WEs), HAs and Catapults (Ginger preferred the former, myself the latter).

Ironically, for how much I've talked up the aggressiveness of this game's lineup and our own victimhood, I think we also fall into the former category. A Construction and/or HBR rush is almost certainly how I'm going to play this, maybe even Civforum-style and skip Currency.

The big issue is that because of our terrible techs (and maybe my weakness at openings; would lurkers be interested in playing out our start in the lurker thread?), our start sucks. Like, really sucks. Our second city gets out T42-ish, and it doesn't get much better from there. The best we can hope for is that a nearby neighbour is even worse off, although I don't know how likely that is. If not, we need to beeline Construction even harder and hope that we catch someone farmer's gambit-ing to Currency/Calendar. Maybe we can harass them with Immortals beforehand like Cornflakes did so well to Fabled in PB63, there's probably something to learn from there. It also would be worth saving a few capital forests to chop into HAs/WEs during the big buildup.

But to be honest, I'm not optimistic. I think there's a tiny chance we pull it off, and way more likely we aren't far enough ahead at Rush O'clock to kill someone. But we'll try!

[Charriu]

 'How Do We Actually Win?'

By coincidence, ...

I admit. I had to laugh for a short moment.