[PB64] Amicalola Gets To Heaven with Tarkeel and Ljubljana

[Amicalola]

T6-10

 'How Do We Actually Win?'

By coincidence, ...

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

Hah, that was totally unconscious but it works!

Meanwhile in game, our brave scouts battle lions and panthers in their quest southwards. There is a long chain of hills and jungle to our east, which is why we haven't checked out that area much. Also...


Greed Wins Again!

[ljubljana]

hooray for greed!!

re the northern hut, i think i missed significant something in the civwiki page that makes greed the right play after all:

Barbs are not valid if:

• the game option No Barbarians is on.
  
• the hut was popped by culture.
  
• it was popped by a Scout/Explorer.
  
• no cities exist yet, or if there is exactly 1 city located at a plotDistance < 8.
  

so maybe this means you're good as long as you don't found your second city within 8 tiles before making the pop? in particular the worker pop looks good as it will lock out experience as well. that is, if we are 100% confident that civwiki is right about this mechanic, an assumption that i have no direct support for and by which i have been burned quite badly in the past...

if i were you i would promise to sim it out, be too lazy to actually do so, and get my worker eaten by barbs

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.

wow! what a bureaucratic nightmare 

i'm glad you were able to fix things by taking it into your own hands! but really, grad students are stressed out enough as a population without having to handle things like that on their own... i hope your experience in the program improves going forward...

[Mjmd]

While turn by turn scouting reports are sometimes a bit much, when you leave off about to pop a hut I think you just want lurkers to suffer.

[Amicalola]

While turn by turn scouting reports are sometimes a bit much, when you leave off about to pop a hut I think you just want lurkers to suffer.

In the immortal words of a student today: I am cruel and viscous.  

More seriously, my internet got cut off a couple of days ago for a bunch of silly reasons. I'll get it back in the next couple of days, hopefully, but for now I'm using a 0-1 bar hotspot that cuts in and out; barely enough to login, let alone upload pictures. When the internet comes back, you'll start getting proper posts again.

[Amicalola]

T11- ...34!  Amicalola is Back

When the internet comes back, you'll start getting proper posts again.

Ahem.

I have been busier than my wildest dreams on my placement. I've been playing a 2min double-turn every morning, and not thinking about the game at all otherwise. But a lot has happened! Some of it is quite bad. Some of it is very good! Let's get into it.

So Ljubljana was either correct, or we were lucky, and that western hut did not spawn barbarians when we opened it; instead we got a small pile of gold, which is decent. Even better, we found another hut to the north, which also gave us some gold!


No techs is sad, but a free 70 gold is pretty nice and I shouldn't complain. We're probably getting to the end of the hut era; I think Ginger was the only one to get a tech in the end (might be misremembering, though).

The scout, on the other hand, is no longer with us. It met Gavagai, Superdeath, and Ginger before being eaten by a pair of panthers. What we found from his travels were...

Food resources (cows) underneath 2 of the 6(!) hidden tiles from that hut map. I am very skeptical of the answer I received earlier!  



A double-luxury + wet wheat city, once we can get a road network down here. Probably a contested area, and a huge priority, I'd say. City 4-5, maybe?



Further south, the land of milk and honey. I doubt this is 'ours.' Gavagai gets a wet corn + plains hill/river gold for his second city. I'm not jealous, you're jealous.




Gavagai's capital.



To the east, we have a long chain of mountains and hills. We should send a warrior in this direction soon though.




The close observer will have noted something earlier: I've been planning around sharing the fish with our second city, which gets us Protective trade routes from the turn we found. But the warrior finds a first-ring clam in the north! This is huge! We'll chop out a work boat in both the capital and the second city as the next builds, I think, since the commerce is such a big deal for this start. Here's a picture again, for clarity:




With all of the coast nearby, and Protective, it's quite possibly worth going for Great Lighthouse. On the topic of other things we might want, Stonehenge could be great with no good way to pop borders. Alternatively, going down the religious path early like in PB60 could be great, especially since we have marble in the long-term for all the religious wonders. Colossus also looks nice, so perhaps Oracle->Metal Casting, instead of Stonehenge/GLH? Could be fun to try something different to my recent games.

I thought I'd totally bungled the micro, and that we'd end up with a settler at 99/100 hammers on T38. Luckily, I've found a way to fix that and get it to 101/100 hammers, so we aren't delayed. That was also quite good news; we should settle on T41.




Mjmd - I did have a micro plan, but I didn't write it down. Then, between my placements and my casual stance on this game, I totally forgot what to do and definitely did it wrong (we're a bit less efficient than in my sandbox). But I'm not sure what I did wrong, and I don't have the original anymore, I'm sorry. Casual Amica is a different beast.

[Tarkeel]

How about moving the northern city one west? Check for seafood both ways first of course, but that way it picks upp less ocean, and the marble. I don't think we want more than one city up there.

[Amicalola]

How about moving the northern city one west? Check for seafood both ways first of course, but that way it picks upp less ocean, and the marble. I don't think we want more than one city up there.

Normally I would agree, except that I want the instant +4 commerce from the trade route, for which we have to settle on the indicated tile. Also, if we get GLH, I could see another city being worth founding.

[Tarkeel]

Yeah, that's a valid point. I was thinking a bit too far ahead here.

Settling south afterwards is going to be rough with all that plains and lack of food, but I think settling on the river-wine and NW of the gold. Alternatively, S of the riverwine to get those cows inner ring, and N of the gold if the capital culture has claimed the sheep, which is likely.

[Amicalola]

T35-39 - Progress
The first settler is out! He will go found on T41, and work the forest for 5 turns while we chop out a Work Boat for his clam. I think. Perhaps we'll do something different to that, I'm not certain yet - will do some maths when it comes up. 


We also convert to Slavery. Worker-wise, I made a misplay. I started chopping the forest in the capital's borders (for the 2nd city), where I should have started chopping the one 1S of the 2nd city instead. That would have left us with an extra forest in the capital, where they are more useful - semi-big deal if we go for Stonehenge/GLH. I made this mistake because I'm used to a single-player mod which restricts chopping to within borders, and I didn't make the mental adjustment. Oops.  

Horses are revealed in a fairly unhelpful place. I guess at least we have horses, just probably not ones that can be used for an immortal rush. 

 
We sure have a lot of plains tiles.  

I increasingly think that Serfdom will be the way to go. We have basically no food resources, and almost all of the ones we do have are 3-4 food, rather than 5-6 (e.g. cows, clams). Additionally, there are so many plains and rivers in 'our' area that I have to imagine that farms will be quite strong. Besides, I always talk about how Serfdom is good on low-food maps, and this is definitely one of those; I guess we asked for it!  



It's a little boring given my recent games, but I suspect building Stonehenge -> GLH would be very strong on this map - there are very few cottageable tiles, which makes GLH/Colossus better relatively speaking. The other option will be to rush Construction/HBR and massacre someone, but I don't know if that's realistic, as we seem reasonably far apart on this map. I am still considering the third alternative of Oracle -> Metal Casting (Colossus), but that just doesn't seem as strong when we're Protective. Someone change my mind? The best argument against Stonehenge/GLH that I can think of is that with Serfdom, it's better to have fewer/stronger cities, which is directly anti-synergistic with those wonders. 

If we do go for Stonehenge, we need to research Mysticism straight after Pottery. Even that might be too slow, since Commodore starts with it. But it would be something to chop the final 3 forests at Warm Healer into, and I do love me some free border pops. Why haven't I ever played Creative, again?   

On the other hand, the thing that pushes me towards a catapult-era rush is that with such little food, and with EXP/PRO traits, we're strongly incentivised away from city infrastructure. I'm thinking things like Forges, Libraries, Courthouses - those suck here, relatively speaking, because we can't efficiently whip them out. So we might as well grow our cities to the happy cap pre-Construction, and just put all those whips into units instead, is my instinct. Interestingly, that happy cap will actually be unrealistically high, since it looks like we have three luxuries within vaguely 'easy' reach. We'll see if we neighbour anyone less prickly than Wet-Corn/Gold Gavagai to our south.

Edit: Wait! We're saved! We can chop the capital forest for the capital, and then chop a forest for the 2nd city in time (thus not wasting the capital one). The trade-off is a wasted worker turn for the southern worker on the forest, but that's better than a wasted forest. Bah, I should have drunk my coffee before playing.

Edit 2: Ah fuck, nevermind. That doesn't work with the hammers and growth timings. I guess we are wasting the forest. We can put the other one into Moai or something, and cry about it.

Edit 3: Wait, we're saved! I think I've figured out another path. Ok, I'm going to stop editing now.

[Charriu]

Ok, I'm going to stop editing now.

Don't stop. You were having a run.