[SPOILERS] Magic Science and Nobody Else in Pitboss 66

[Magic Science]

P1: "Fortune favors the bold."
P2: "Fortune" and "Lady Luck" are different names for the same thing.
P3: "They say Lady Luck has gone blind."
P4: Blind people can easily be tricked.
P5: It is possible to trick people into believing you are bold.

C: Therefore, it is possible to easily trick Fortune/Lady Luck into favoring you despite not being bold by presenting an unconvincing facade of boldness. True boldness is so inconvenient and dangerous, you know!


BEHOLD MY BOLDNESS BELOW:
Here, in the very first post of my spoiler thread, a place that could easily be seen by any careless player who places a single click wrong, I present to you the deepest secret of the Glorious [TBD]ian State! I will even go so far as to refrain from concealing it within a spoiler, such is my BOLDNESS.

BOLDNESS BELOW:
The secret is:
No More Colons After This I Promise:
I Lied:
The National Anthem of the Glorious [TBD]ian State is:

I Will Derive!


"At first I was afraid, what could the answer be?
It said given this position find velocity.
So I tried to work it out, but I knew that I was wrong.
I struggled; I cried, 'A problem shouldn't take this long!'
I tried to think..."


If you listen to this song and sing and dance along every day before eating breakfast, then you will be guaranteed success in calculus and in Civilization IV. True fact. So now you see why it is so bold to reveal the fact that it is my national anthem in such an unsecure location.

Anyway, I will accept Fortune's favor in the form of having metal resources miraculously pop into existence on every mine I work. Also it would be pretty cool if my starting scout lived past Turn 50.

...

I promise that posts of serious substance will follow this one before long. HERE WE GO!

...

EDIT: The secret password that grants absolute power over my empire to anyone who uses it is:
homeo4001

[Mjmd]

Note I may still very well change anything outside the cross.

[Krill]

Start 12 - Magic Science

[Magic Science]

Thank you Krill.

If all these starts are hand-crafted, then why did you decide to include those inaccessible Crabs? Of course you cannot answer that now, but I would love if you could post an explanation of that Crab tile's role in the start balance in one of the lurker spoiler threads for me to see in many months. It is the strangest feature I have encountered in a Pitboss start yet.

[Magic Science]

Snakepick Prologue: Vanity
In Pitboss 40, I played as Mao Zedong (EXP/PRO) of Incaland (Quechua/Terrace).
In Pitboss 45, I played as Kublai Khan (CHA/CRE) of Babylhan (Bowman/Garden).
Both those games were played with Rebalance the Realms, not Close to Home, and all 6 of the played components have changed in the intervening years, but I still want to try a combination that is all new for me.

“Two new traits, one new civilization!” – me, right now, not out loud

Also, it would be nice to pick a civilization that facilitates a good naming theme* that retains the normal Civilization Adjective. That makes things easier to keep track of for players and lurkers, especially when the colors are changed.

*

“Good naming theme” = a naming theme for which:
1) there are enough city names that are at most 15 characters long for you to give custom names to all your self-founded cities.
2) there is a matching Long Civilization Description that fits without awkwardness at the places where the game calls that field (bonus points if you do this without including the word “Empire”).
3) there is a matching Short Civilization Description that fits without awkwardness at the places where the game calls that field (bonus points if you do this without starting with the word “the”).
4) there is a matching Civilization Adjective that [BOILERPLATE] (bonus if you can retain the normal Civilization Adjective).
ExtraCredit): there is an associated well of inspiration for unit names for all categories of units (workers, boats, scouts, basic boring land combat units, etc.).
MostImportant): just have a good naming theme. You can probably think of something that fulfills all the conditions while still being garbage that the sun should never be required to witness.

And now you know Magic Science’s Rules of Naming Theme Creation to Live By.

[Magic Science]

Snakepick Interlude: Map Thoughts
Script: Torusworld (by SevenSpirits)
Wrap: Toroidal
Size: Standard
Dimensions: 68 by 44 tiles.
Scattered Improvements: None.
Water: Inland Oceans (44% water)
Mountain Ranges: 8%
Civilization: 12
Also: Starts: Hand-built. And Krill: cool as a cucumber.


Those are the settings I used to generate a batch of Torusworld maps to examine. The relevant conclusions of my examination of the script with those settings are as follows:

• The map consists of one giant continent that spans the world, and a few large oceans twisting around within it. The land surrounds the water, the water does not surround the land. I repeat, the land surrounds the water, the water does not surround the land. Everyone starts on this continent.

• Those oceans will have a few islands. All of them will be accessible before Astronomy (in fact, there are nearly no yieldless ocean tiles on the entire map). There may be enough on the entire map for every civilization to have one, but they are not distributed evenly, so that is unlikely to occur. Some civilizations will be utterly doomed to lack peacefully-acquired islands on Turn 0! These islands will mostly be small, even as small as one tile. That tile may be a resource tile. If you want to have domestic intercontinental trade routes, then I suggest you muster the moral fiber necessary to literally settle on deer. 


• However, islands are not the only places that you need Sailing to settle. With 8% peaks, (neat setting ) you could have a nearby region that is inaccessible by land. Also, some of the land you see across the water might actually be part of your continent, but when it is a 44-tile trek away by land, then you need a galley.

• Everyone should expect to have 2 land neighbors that are about 10-15 tiles away (Ancient Era war possible but not certain), and maybe more who are farther away than that. It depends on where all the little winding isthmuses by your capital lead. Everyone should also expect to have an uncertain number of additional amphibian neighbors. Some people will experience the usual formula of contested islands, but I think that will not be the most common situation in this game. More likely is that the big landmass you see across 2 tiles of coast from your capital, which is technically on the same continent but only practically reachable for you by galley, is contested with someone who is more like 10-15 tiles away from it, but over nice dry land. Prepare yourself for incompatible ideas of what “reasonable, natural, God-given borders” look like for these regions, leading to war in the later Ancient Era.

• Torusworld is unnatural/anomalous, at the bigger scale as well as the smaller scale. Big picture, the usual rules of climate distribution barely apply. There seems to be some regulating function that tries to stop tundra or snow from being adjacent to desert or jungle, and it usually succeeds, but that is all. Tundra and snow at the poles, desert and jungle at the equator? No. Little patches of everything are everywhere.

• Small picture, there are some impossible tiles. Some. I saw a lake Fish, a forest hill Silver, a grassland Fur, a bare desert Dye, and some others, but never a hill Cow, a coastal Whale, and some others. Mostly this is irrelevant in the big picture except for the thrill of novelty and transgression, but the effect on luxury distribution could matter. No point in searching the tundra for furs, or the jungle for dyes. Everything is equally likely everywhere. ALSO, all the Calendar resources will exist outside the jungle and therefore not require Iron Working somewhere, but only for some copies, maybe not for the ones within your borders. ALSO ALSO, luxury resources of the same type do not display their natural tendency to cluster together.

• Penultimate fun observation: There are many lakes on this map. At least one lucky person will have the opportunity to build the Moai Statues in a city with 5 lake tiles. The honor of all Realms Beyond demands that they accept this opportunity, no matter what.

• Ultimate fun observation: canals!

[Magic Science]

Snakepick Preparation: General Thoughts About Civilizations and Traits
This may be a bit terse and unpolished. I expect to be called upon to pick both halves of my combination within the next 270 minutes. This may be bad and wrong. However, I think it is better to post SOMETHING, even if it is bad and wrong, than NOTHING at all. Here we go.
Civilizations first.

General Thoughts About Civilizations:
Ignoring Starting Technologies, every civilization is a bad gamble. You make the gamble because it is free to do so, other than the opportunity cost of not taking a different bad gamble instead, not because success is likely (also you are required to make one, there is no “Nobody Null Civilization” to choose. Except Germany. ).

All civilizations are bad gambles because none of them are likely to be significantly better than nothing. The players who are good and lucky enough to win these games could still win if they played the Nobody Null Civilization with no Unique Things. It would set them back only slightly. Consider the universally beloved War Chariot, Unique Unit of Egypt. Great unit! But even that unit is no good unless it is correct to fight an Ancient Era war with Chariots. It might not be! The War Chariot is not so incredible to make the choice always yes, and if the answer is no, you lost the bet. You might as well have been the proud owner of a Normal Peace Chariot instead.

And that is the War Chariot, which has the simplest, easiest bonus of them all: more base strength. Many units are more obscure/niche. Consider the Mongolian Keshik. To be of special use compared to the normal Horse Archer, it requires all the following: that you use Horse Archers (not certain, this is a big one), to attack an enemy (if you defend your territory, then you control the roads and Mobility is useless), with primarily horse archers (your combined arms attack stack is not moving any faster, since not everyone in it has 2 moves and mobility), in territory with forests and hills blocking relevant tiles. A lot of hoops to jump through! Not so likely to be helpful.

And I have not even brought up the common requirement of “that you make it this far down the tech tree while your fate remains uncertain”, or the need to outweigh the possibility of your own Unique Unit causing you problems that its normal counterpart would not have.


Unique Buildings are all bad gambles also, but for different reasons. Few of them are as obscure/niche as the average Unique Unit. Consider the Malinese Mint. To benefit from that building for the rest of your civilization’s life, all you must do is build Forges, which is what you want to do anyway. However, it is a bad gamble because the unique benefit is small. How much does a bonus of +10% gold in cities more likely to be production-oriented than commerce-oriented (12 hammers for 1% of multiplication is worse than the normal multiplier buildings for commerce cities) amount to? Enough to make any real difference?

The Unique Buildings that have an Obscurity/Nicheness Rating comparable to that of the average Unique Unit (“average Unique Unit”, what an absurd phrase) are mostly the ones that grant extra promotions or experience points. The ones that grant extra culture maybe rate a similar Obscurity/Nicheness Rating (how often does a culture struggle hang so closely in the balance?) but in that case I struggle to disentangle that rating from just having a terrible Unique Effect.

Still, I mostly like UBs better than UUs. I like the guarantee. However, I do acknowledge that Power of Unique Thing = Marginal Gain Over Normal Thing X Chance That Situation Enabling That Gain Happens. UUs have less chance the gain happens, but the possible gain is huge. War is the big sharp point of Civ IV, defeat or victory in the conflict and in the whole game possibly hinges on as little as one tile, one turn, one battle. If your unique gives you the necessary edge, you win big.


I have more ideas about Unique Things that that, but time is running out. More like 120 minutes are most left now, so let’s lean into the promised terse lack of polish and do a bullet point list. Maybe these concepts can be developed better in the pre-game of Pitboss 71.
• Two exceptions to the Unique Unit generalities: Fast Worker (primarily peaceful, guaranteed value) and Carrack (primarily peaceful, extremely obscure value, potential payoff is the best of them all). I like the Carrack, but not on this map.
• Two kinds of Unique Things: Uniques where the special power is added to something that is already good, and Uniques where the special power comes from something that is terrible, so all the power is in the uniqueness. For Type 1, the War Chariot is the example success story, the Landsknecht is the example non-success story. For Type 2, the Cho-Ko-Nu is the example success story, the Baray is the example failure story.
• Any Unique Building that is cheaper than its normal counterpart is pretty good (obvious). It is anti-synergistic to select a Unique Building that is cheaper alongside a Trait that offers a production multiplier for that building. Do not play an ORGanized leader of Sumeria. On the other hand, with a UB that costs the same or more than normal, the synergy stands. Do play EXP Carthage.
• It was inflammatory to say “All civilizations are bad”. The ones that we pick often are picked often because they are not bad, even “good”, you might say.
• Many Unique Units are qualitatively different than their normal counterparts in a way that sometimes makes them worse than normal (Dog Soldiers, Vultures). This is almost never the case for any Unique Buildings (could be true for Totem Poles and Ziggurats because of their changed technology requirement, but unlikely).
• Starting Technologies are not a bad bet, starting technologies are awesome. This is because the hypothetical Nobody Null Civilization would start with no technologies, putting them about 130 beakers down in the vital early turns. Think long and hard before picking any civilization that does not have the best possible starting technologies for your start. How likely is it that their bad Unique Things will compensate you adequately for your loss?
• The non-military UBs (so, the basic output per turn UBs) only succeed if the game lasts at least an era past their construction. If you build your nice Stock Exchanges, and then 20 turns later the game ends with Rifling and Military Tradition, they did not help you.



Traits next. Terse immediately. Thank you Tarkeel.

Generals Thoughts About Traits:

Traits, like starting techs, are awesome.

Traits are awesome because they are good gambles, they are almost guaranteed to provide you lots of value. All you need to do is survive long enough (longer for some, like SPIritual, than for others, like IMPerialistic) and not be an idiot who does something like refusing to swap civics as a SPI leader or not working specialists as PHIilosophical. It would be a great struggle to win a game without any traits, no matter how good you are. The worst trait is better than the best civ.

With traits, the dilemma is not about trying to extract any value at all, but about trying to extract the most value. There are two parts to this.

One, you try to outsmart the designers of Civ IV, and now also Charriu and his many advisors (formerly Krill and his). Did they make any mistakes? Which traits are unbalanced? Which are overpowered, and which are underpowered? In the old days this meant you always picked Financial. In the current day the traits are all equal thanks to CtH (previously RtR), theoretically. I think AGGressive still seems weak in CtH.

Two, you try to account for the few details that you can glean in advance about the map. How many civilizations are there, and how big is the map? How much coast will there be? How many islands? How many luxuries? And so on. The answers to all those questions each affect the value of one or more traits. Could all snakepick decision-making be reduced to one flowchart of moderate size? I lack the experience to do so, but maybe it is possible.

Lastly, I categorize the traits like so:
Basic Economy Traits: PROtective (early), FINancial (mid), ORGanized (late).
Complex Economy Traits: PHIlosophical (early and mid), SPIritual (mid and late).
Early Foodhammer Acceleration Traits: CREative, EXPansive, IMPeralistic.
Jacks?: AGGressive, CHArismatic, INDustrious

[Magic Science]

P.S. I wonder if we have a bias for civilizations with Type 2 Unique Things?
“Look, I am playing China and I built all these crossbowmen, that would be garbage for everyone else, I am so unique, I am benefitting so much from my civilization!”
“Yeah, but any other civilization would have just built catapults for their collateral, and how much worse would that have been?”

P.P.S. You know what, just have these two pages of the physical scrawl I produced that preceded the preceding post. I will happily answer any questions anyone has about what it all means.

The images were too large, so I made a pdf. This is absurd.

  Civ Scrawl.pdf (Size: 908.65 KB / Downloads: 10)

[Charriu]

One aspect you are missing about UU is the deterrent factor. Take Rome for example. We've seen players take Rome to discourage other players attacking them. Those players may not have (fully) used the UU, but it still provided an important defensive purpose.

[naufragar]

I'm a sucker for a good theory post, so thanks for these.

I think you're being a little too scientific in your analysis. It's true that a War Chariot is just +1 strength on a normal chariot. It's also true that a chariot rush that catches an opponent without copper is likely to succeed if using chariots or War Chariots. But then look at the margins: according to Ramkh's Vodka calculator, 2 vanilla chariots have a 27% chance to kill a vanilla spear, whereas 2 War Chariots have a 52% chance. If your plan from turn 0 is "I'm going to chariot rush," it's significantly better to go about that plan with War Chariots. I think we can imagine plenty of scenarios in which a chariot attack fails because one spear survives at 0.1 health where a War Chariot would've finished it off. I'm not going to comment on the merits of the plan "I'm going to chariot rush," but if that is your plan, it's better to use War Chariots. And that leaves aside all the incidental value. What if you need to get some defensive units somewhere in an emergency? A 5 strength War Chariot defends a city against an attacking Chariot or Axe much better than a 4 strength chariot. Sure, if we look at a War Chariot as just a Chariot with +1 strength, it's difficult to judge against, say, a swordsman with +2 strength, but there are a laundry list of cases in which you want War Chariots instead of normal Chariots. So when I say you're being "too scientific," I guess I mean you're not accounting for all the edge cases that can make a unique unit better than its vanilla counterpart.

But wait! I hear you say. You're discussing choosing between different unique units, not choosing between War Chariots and vanilla chariots.

But even that unit is no good unless it is correct to fight an Ancient Era war with Chariots. It might not be! The War Chariot is not so incredible to make the choice always yes, and if the answer is no, you lost the bet.

I don't see you taking into account that the answer to the question ("is it correct to...") is a variable that the player can control. If you are Darius of England neighboring players that have capitals on copper tiles, is it correct to fight an Ancient Era war with Chariots? Probably not, but this is extreme and you can engineer situations where it is correct. You can pick different leaders. You can target weaker neighbors. You can use different angles for your chariot attacks. Admittedly, ancient era wars are often bad ideas, but I'm intentionally choosing a weak example to demonstrate how players have agency to both make good picks and make their picks good.

Players can create new strategies that unlock the value in their Unique Unit's uniqueness beyond the arithmetic. Here's a few at random:
Cho-ko-nus cause collateral damage like catapults, true, but catapults don't collateral off of boats. Chuckles do. And Cho-ko-nus get Protective promotions. You can build a strategy around this.
Praetorians, hammer for hammer, beat everything at their tech level. You can build a strategy around this. (Commodore can tell you why they still suck.)
East Inidamen (unless I've missed a nerf) can be bulbed immediately whereas everyone else takes forever to get their galleons. You can build a strategy around this.
Even stinkers like Landsknechts can shine. Landsknechts can be Engineer-bulbed incredibly easily and sent off at whoever skipped Machinery and Crossbows. YCBASAT.

I'm not trying to vindicate every Unique Unit. The use cases of things like Vultures and Jaguar Warriors are so small that you probably can't build a strategy around them, but I suspect that for the vast majority of unique units you can build a strategy around them. Maybe it's not a great strategy. Maybe the strategy gets undone by the actions of other players. Nevertheless, when you're evaluating these Unique Units, you have to take into account the agency of a player to extract value from them through changing up their playstyle.

I guess I can boil down my points:
1) From turn to turn, there will be tactical situations that unlock the marginal value of units, whether getting better rolls due to +1 strength or enabling otherwise unavailable forks with the mobility promotion.
2) In the grand scheme, the value of each Unique Unit will depend on the player using it to enact a good plan.

Like I said, I'm a sucker for theory posts. Keep 'em coming!

Pseudo-edit: As the lady said, "Superior training and superior weaponry have, when taken together, a geometric effect on overall military strength. Well-trained, well-equipped troops can stand up to many more times their lesser brethren than linear arithmetic would seem to indicate."