[PB72 SPOILERS] Aetryn learns humility

[Mjmd]

So we don't always know the map script used, but usually instead we know a tile count. But 125 tiles a player could be 25 tiles between caps or 8 tiles between caps (which is why I now insist on a min distance). This can happen obviously even with larger tile counts to various degrees. (I use victory screen land %, but I think there is somewhere you can just see total number of tiles). 

So Xist and Bing are basically hoping that players are directly stringed out horizontally. which is the min distance I think you could do with this setup. Although assuming we both rolled maps right I still don't get these as if they even succeed I'm pretty sure others just gets tons of free land. Bing has civic as a ded lurker so I assume he was probably* involved?

Byzantium is just praying no one is ANYWHERE close. Again, maybe pro was partially picked as a just in case here (IE a hedge).

Vicky of Mali can play any of these scenarios. Although if it ends up being a knife fight we aren't AS well situated (I never built a mint for instance; but again unlikely with this script and size), but ya I feel good about your combo being able to play a variety of ways. The others don't have that luxury.

[aetryn]

So we don't always know the map script used, but usually instead we know a tile count. But 125 tiles a player could be 25 tiles between caps or 8 tiles between caps (which is why I now insist on a min distance). This can happen obviously even with larger tile counts to various degrees. (I use victory screen land %, but I think there is somewhere you can just see total number of tiles). 

So Xist and Bing are basically hoping that players are directly stringed out horizontally. which is the min distance I think you could do with this setup. Although assuming we both rolled maps right I still don't get these as if they even succeed I'm pretty sure others just gets tons of free land. Bing has civic as a ded lurker so I assume he was probably* involved?

Byzantium is just praying no one is ANYWHERE close. Again, maybe pro was partially picked as a just in case here (IE a hedge).

Vicky of Mali can play any of these scenarios. Although if it ends up being a knife fight we aren't AS well situated (I never built a mint for instance; but again unlikely with this script and size), but ya I feel good about your combo being able to play a variety of ways. The others don't have that luxury.

Thanks, that makes more sense - we have multiple ways to go, whereas if Boudicca of Rome gets past the age where Praetorians are worth it (which is, to be fair, a long time) without conquering someone else, they've lost a lot of their advantage.

We know (from the trees in our starting screenshot) that we're about 8-9 tiles from the top of the map and about 21-22 from the bottom of the map. Again, assuming that Krill hasn't edited the whole map, which doesn't seem likely. It seems unlikely we could all be strung out horizontally - if we're all along the top of the map, what's at the bottom of the map? Empty land? I guess it could have all been turned into ocean, but that wasn't the sense I got from the map request.

Either way, early scouting seems really important in this scenario to figure out who is near us and how to settle a defensible border with them. Might be another reason to get Hunting in pretty early - not that we need it for scouts, but we probably don't want our scouts eaten by animals if we can help it.

[Mjmd]

Barbs are off. Scout in arcs. I would probably go NE first and then circle back around. Just move efficiently for vision., make sure you can get back down and around by like turn 20 ish range so we can discuss first city. If you post scouting screenshots every turn I will be displeased. This thread is already going to be LONG.

Agriculture > Fishing (to note can build workboat before it finishes in mod which is best change) > BW, but if we can get away with it maybe myst next for stonehenge (assuming large map)? Probably don't focus on until after 2nd settler is done and obviously dependent on what city sites need tech wise.

I MAY* actually get to micro this weekend as I don't think I'll have turns in my games next couple of days. Anytime I'm imp I have a hard time turning down a two worker opening, but will see. Bellarch did spreadsheets, but I generally just write my turn timing down, but I have a pretty good feel for stuff. Some people have micro spreadsheets, but I have never used. Unsure if someone has one they are willing to share with the all the greens in general.

[aetryn]

Barbs are off. Scout in arcs. I would probably go NE first and then circle back around. Just move efficiently for vision., make sure you can get back down and around by like turn 20 ish range so we can discuss first city. If you post scouting screenshots every turn I will be displeased. This thread is already going to be LONG.

Agriculture > Fishing (to note can build workboat before it finishes in mod which is best change) > BW, but if we can get away with it maybe myst next for stonehenge (assuming large map)? Probably don't focus on until after 2nd settler is done and obviously dependent on what city sites need tech wise.

I MAY* actually get to micro this weekend as I don't think I'll have turns in my games next couple of days. Anytime I'm imp I have a hard time turning down a two worker opening, but will see. Bellarch did spreadsheets, but I generally just write my turn timing down, but I have a pretty good feel for stuff. Some people have micro spreadsheets, but I have never used. Unsure if someone has one they are willing to share with the all the greens in general.

Wait, does barbs off mean animals are off too? I assume it was only human types that were missing but animals were still around. Obviously if animals are off that's one less thing to worry about for scouting. I will only post scouting screenshots when there is something interesting to see, there's enough information to start discussing first expansion sites, or I have a specific question.

[Commodore]

Animals are barbarians too.

[Krill]

Its not 3.5 food, but it is 3 good food, which I will definitely take. I'm not sure if I'll have time for micro, but this is a pretty open start either way. Generally I know people only go workboat first when there is a fish and a plains hill forest to work, which we have, but two wet wheat and lots of forests also temps me towards worker first.

Point being, I think you can do whatever you want civ wise. Edit: Krill did confirm to not pick a "naval civ". What exactly that translate to as far as water will be interseting. I don't suppose Krill you would tell us if there is a global body of water?

Suggestion: Look at the micro for variant starts before assuming you know which one is best.

I have no clue what the tiles per player is for this map.

[aetryn]

It's been am amusing start to the game so far.

The first time I logged in, I got a message about not a matching version of the game files to the server (despite having downloaded the specific RB72 mod and did the right thing with the wrapper). So I decided I'd better install a fresh version of Civ4 since mine had some XML files edited and I assume that's what this was referring to. I don't have the Steam version, so that meant I had to locate the DVD within my office, despite not having seen it since I installed Civ4 onto this computer a few years back. So I diligently searched through my office for a while until I finally located the Civ 4 Complete Edition case... and discovered it was empty. I thought "Hmm, where could the actual DVD be and why isn't it in the case?" Then I got the bright idea of looking in the DVD drive of the computer. Yep, I just spent an hour searching for something that was already in my computer the entire time. .

So I installed a fresh copy of Civ 4, copied the mod files in, set up the wrapper, started everything and contacted the host... and got the same exact message about the files not matching!? Well, I thought I'd try logging in and see if it kicked me out or something and it let me log in. I wasn't actually going to play my turn because I might have still messed something up because of the files not matching, but I thought I'd at least take a look at the map and see if I could do any fog gazing. And I've been playing a bit of XCOM: EW Long War again recently, so I just automatically tried to improve the view of the southern tiles by pressing E to rotate the map or something (which is a thing you can do in XCOM, but obviously not in Civ 4). Which automated my scout and promptly moved him somewhere I wasn't planning to send him! Great start eh? Note: Before anyone asks, it's only one lost turn over where I was going to send him, I'm not going to ask for a reload over something so small.

[aetryn]

Its not 3.5 food, but it is 3 good food, which I will definitely take. I'm not sure if I'll have time for micro, but this is a pretty open start either way. Generally I know people only go workboat first when there is a fish and a plains hill forest to work, which we have, but two wet wheat and lots of forests also temps me towards worker first.

Point being, I think you can do whatever you want civ wise. Edit: Krill did confirm to not pick a "naval civ". What exactly that translate to as far as water will be interseting. I don't suppose Krill you would tell us if there is a global body of water?

Suggestion: Look at the micro for variant starts before assuming you know which one is best.

I have no clue what the tiles per player is for this map.

I did run sims for both WB first and Worker first. After I had fixed my failure to make the water big enough to actually be salt water (thanks dedlurker for noticing that!), the worker first start was faster by 3 turns and a big pile of worker labor. So I'm going worker first.

[Mjmd]

My head gets confused with warps until I see them in game, but I rolled a few maps and just doing a diagonal setup like PB65 makes a lot of sense. Also, small highlands is HUGE. Even accounting for lack of water we are talking 300 tiles / player. Sure it may feel like a 200 tile / player map, but that's still one of the larger maps we've played in a while. Its possible you sink the north and south to create connected seas again like PB65, but even still huge. Are you ok playing on that big of a map? Large empires are a real drain later in the game (as I type avoiding my PB66 turn because I'll spend the first 30 minutes just looking at things). Lurkers if this map is super big maybe confirm this question with all the players? Am I slightly fishing for size, maybe, but also its a valid question.

Aetryn seems fine with this, but it may be a good idea to ask the other players. We did have two people pick some rather interesting picks for a large map, indicating they may not have been aware. 

Aetryn - I do still like Imp because rolling some more maps its going to be important to get to the middle of the map pretty fast. The south has deserts instead of tundra, but its still greener and better land than the north, which means we need to get more in the middle.

I'll also mention stonehenge gets better with more cities you will settle.

[aetryn]

Here's my first city:



There's another peak S-SW of the scout that I failed to annotate.

General Plans
To the shock of nobody who knows things about map scripts (which does not include me), there are a lot of peaks on this map. This suggests that we're not necessarily looking at optimal city distance placements due to unusable terrain, lots of chokepoints, and not a great deal of straight line travel from point A to point B. The result should be that an already pretty large map feels even larger. It's possible (likely, even) that I'm misreading this game, but it doesn't really feel like a rush-friendly map. Lots of defensive terrain - you can already see how I have a wall of peaks west of my capital, and another wall of peaks southeast), lots of land distance to cross, even more than the straight line distance between capitals is likely to be. And yet we have half the players choosing military focused leader and civ picks. Maybe they are basing that more on the players than the map? Greens are probably pretty bad at defending against a well executed rush run by an intelligent player, so hit them and make them prove they can stay in the game? Regardless, my (boring) plan is to play pretty straight-down-the-middle civ and try to get ahead via extra turns not tied up building Settlers + the long-term scaling of Financial.

In the immediate future, I'm building a worker, farming the wheat, and then building a work boat for the fishes. This simmed out to about 4 turns faster to the first settler than work boat first, and work boat first also lost a lot of worker labor. Tech path will therefore be Agriculture->Fishing->Bronze Working. This does mean the worker will be done with both wheat farms before Bronze Working is researched, but I started with The Wheel, I can build some roads for a couple turns. Especially if my scouting turns up an obvious second city site to road to. After that, the tech choice will be based on whatever is needed for the second city. I'll want Hunting at some point - maybe before Animal Husbandry for the extra research bonus, maybe not. The hope is to put the next city either southeast on the river sharing the southeast wheat, or maybe to the east.

Naming Scheme: Virtues

Humility

Humility is the opposite of pride - thus making it one of the Lively Virtues, opposite to the Deadly Sins. Humility often is misunderstood in the modern world (only exceeded in misunderstanding by Charity). It does not consist of doing things to call attention to your lowly station - this is only another form of pride. Calling it "humblebragging" reveals that even modern people know this is not really humility. Nor is someone who doesn't bother to wash, dresses in ugly clothes, etc. necessarily humble - they may well be proud of not taking pride in their appearance. I've heard humility described as "valuing yourself rightly", but really the essence of humility is that you just stop worrying about your status. My favorite description comes out of C.S. Lewis: "Probably all you will think about [a truly humble person] is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him... He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all."

Humility is my capital city because it is the virtue I most expect to grow in during this game, by letting my own opinion of my capability at Civ 4 meet reality. It's also one of the hardest virtues (for me, at least) to work on in real life, because as soon as I feel like I've done well at it for a few minutes I'm starting to say things in my own mind like "Isn't it great that I was humble back there". Not that the point of virtues is necessarily to change the froth of passing thoughts that go through our heads on a daily basis - we have limited immediate control over that anyway. Mainly the point is to get in the habit of hitting those thoughts on the head when they do pop up, and that habit itself is the virtue. And, in the long run, DOES change the thoughts that cycle through my head.