[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

Zululand - Turn 8

close fog-gazing apparently reveals a huge line of peaks in the SE of the scout position:



and, if i'm not mistaken, it continues north as well at least a bit:



i decide i do think we should prioritize west for this turn..... if there is sufficient food, i guess SW of the plains cow could theoretically be a candidate early city site. what we find is....



yyyyikes

to confirm, it is impossible for resources to naturally generate under forested hills, right? so if i don't defog those two FH to the northwest of the scout, there's no chance that in doing so i'll miss our copper location?

here is some semi-interesting info:



somebody has a sixth food income.... but not extra pop, so either they have a 4-food tile hooked up or they moved to settle on bananas or something. i guess the most likely answer is crab/clam, but what kind of start would make work boat first into clam optimal...? relatedly, technically i guess we should be alternating between working the ivory and the cow while making the worker just to obfuscate these numbers for everyone else

i think the fact that there is that much land area variability confirms that some people have seafood starts, yes?

also i'm guessing the 21 GNP is from creative?

soldiers = 4000 means someone opened with a scout, yes? or does a warrior produce the same size milpower increase? what's it called when a warrior wanders into an undefended capital again, getting Mortius'ed? that has never actually happened on CtH where everyone has scout starts, right?

what's maybe more concerning is someone has soldiers = 0   what does that mean? with barbs off, is there any way for someone to have lost their scout already except a) someone did open with a warrior and b) someone else's scout has already run into and killed said warrior?? i thought it was too early for that.... or perhaps barbs are not actually off, but if i got my scout eaten by a bear on a no-barbs map i feel like that would at least warrant a post in the tech thread lol

[aetryn]

Zululand - Turn 8

close fog-gazing apparently reveals a huge line of peaks in the SE of the scout position:



and, if i'm not mistaken, it continues north as well at least a bit:



i decide i do think we should prioritize west for this turn..... if there is sufficient food, i guess SW of the plains cow could theoretically be a candidate early city site. what we find is....



yyyyikes

to confirm, it is impossible for resources to naturally generate under forested hills, right? so if i don't defog those two FH to the northwest of the scout, there's no chance that in doing so i'll miss our copper location?

here is some semi-interesting info:



somebody has a sixth food income.... but not extra pop, so either they have a 4-food tile hooked up or they moved to settle on bananas or something. i guess the most likely answer is crab/clam, but what kind of start would make work boat first into clam optimal...? relatedly, technically i guess we should be alternating between working the ivory and the cow while making the worker just to obfuscate these numbers for everyone else

i think the fact that there is that much land area variability confirms that some people have seafood starts, yes?

also i'm guessing the 21 GNP is from creative?

soldiers = 4000 means someone opened with a scout, yes? or does a warrior produce the same size milpower increase? what's it called when a warrior wanders into an undefended capital again, getting Mortius'ed? that has never actually happened on CtH where everyone has scout starts, right?

what's maybe more concerning is someone has soldiers = 0   what does that mean? with barbs off, is there any way for someone to have lost their scout already except a) someone did open with a warrior and b) someone else's scout has already run into and killed said warrior?? i thought it was too early for that.... or perhaps barbs are not actually off, but if i got my scout eaten by a bear on a no-barbs map i feel like that would at least warrant a post in the tech thread lol

All bets are off with strategic resources - there's no telling where the mapmaker may have handplaced your copper and even on a mostly generated map I'd expect the mapmaker to move copper around for each player so it's fairly similar. Sometimes it's even mirrored:  in PB72 all of us had copper in the third ring of our capital, where we could either settle a city claiming it sooner, or wait for the capital to expand borders around turn 30 or so and pick it up (I ended up doing the latter, and was fine-ish though I had to make sure to have workers on hand to mine it the turn it was in culture, as I needed the axes RIGHT after that to defend). There's even a decent chance a mapmaker balancing luxuries would have put those where they don't naturally generate, though generally gross distortions like grasshand gold won't happen, at least not unless everyone gets it. So I would probably scout it.

I expect some people do have seafood starts, yes. Sure, someone could have 6 lake tiles, but it's unlikely with that much water.

The 21 GNP is almost certainly creative + working a higher commerce tile. 

The soldier count are differences is starting tech. Some are worth soldiers, some are not. Scouts are not worth anything, so it definitely doesn't indicate a scout first opening or a scout that got popped. America and Inca start with two techs that aren't worth any soldier count, so they're at 0. Ethiopia has Mining and Hunting (both worth 2k), so they're at 4000. The rest started with 2k and may have already researched a second tech worth 2k. We'll jump to 4k once we hit mining. The soldier count thing is why Bronze Working can be detected when someone gets it - it's an 8000 jump when it gets picked up. You can track the rival average and see 8k bumps (will show up as 889 increase since there are 9 rival players) - and if score was on you could correlate those with the score increases from PBSPY, but it isn't for this game. If you want to track the soldier count increases of everything, see this: https://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strateg...explained/

[pindicator]

All bets are off with strategic resources - there's no telling where the mapmaker may have handplaced your copper

[Tarkeel]

yeah. unless my "whip everything every 10 turns, otherwise stay at the largest size you can without unhappy" approach is incorrect

It's not wrong, but there are circumstances you want whip both more and less. But you are treating the whip-timer as a resources, which is absolutely correct.

As for happy, most maps will let you have atleast one early resource. Sometimes you get a joke of a map like PB67, where the only happy-resource I could claim was a pair of wines, while my neighbor had gold at the capital. Yes, I'm still salty about that game.

@aetryn how long does it usually take for opponents to get graphs on us?

Like everything else, it depends. The espionage system is fairly opaque, but the basics is that each benefit has a base Espionage Point (EP) threshold which is then modified by both your opponents EP spending on you and both of your total EP generation. For graphs it's pretty simple; the base threshold is 30, modified by 30% of what your opponent has put into you. As the only source early on is the palace (at +4EP/t), you will both have a relative modifier of 1.

This means it takes 8 turns to get graphs on someone who is not opposing you (at 30 EP) and 11 on someone who is (at 42). Incidentally, many take it as a sign of good will that you stop EP spending in the 42-44 range, as that is the point you will both have graphs on each other. In order to break graphs, you need to outspend them by a fair margin.

to confirm, it is impossible for resources to naturally generate under forested hills, right? so if i don't defog those two FH to the northwest of the scout, there's no chance that in doing so i'll miss our copper location?

Correct, but a a mapmaker could theoretically forest any tile they please, including lakes. It's not common to forest copper though, as it adds to the hook-up time (unless you settle on it).

also i'm guessing the 21 GNP is from creative?

Base GNP is 8 (palace commerce) + 4 (palace EP) + 2 (palace culture) + 1 (sid beaker) + 1 (city tile) = 16. You can easily get another from working a riverside tile, and Creative would get another 2. Any unconditional modifiers will also show up here, such as pre-req/arrow bonuses.

soldiers = 4000 means someone opened with a scout, yes? or does a warrior produce the same size milpower increase? what's it called when a warrior wanders into an undefended capital again, getting Mortius'ed? that has never actually happened on CtH where everyone has scout starts, right?

what's maybe more concerning is someone has soldiers = 0   what does that mean? with barbs off, is there any way for someone to have lost their scout already except a) someone did open with a warrior and b) someone else's scout has already run into and killed said warrior?? i thought it was too early for that.... or perhaps barbs are not actually off, but if i got my scout eaten by a bear on a no-barbs map i feel like that would at least warrant a post in the tech thread lol

For demographics scrying you should have this article bookmarked. Power rating has four components: Total population, technologies, buildings, and units. Every other population point is worth 1K, while the values for the others are listed in the article (make sure you're reading the BtS tables).

At this stage it's very usual that all you power comes from tech; the most important early techs are:
2K for Hunting, Mining, AnimalHusbandry and Sailing
4K for Wheel
6K for Archery
8K for BronzeWorking

The 8K for BronzeWorking is often very easy to spot on graphs.
For units, scouts have 0 power, warriors have 2K, archers have 3K, spears/chariots have 4K and axes 6K. Most UUs have values that differs from the base unit.

All bets are off with strategic resources - there's no telling where the mapmaker may have handplaced your copper and even on a mostly generated map I'd expect the mapmaker to move copper around for each player so it's fairly similar. Sometimes it's even mirrored:  in PB72 all of us had copper in the third ring of our capital, where we could either settle a city claiming it sooner, or wait for the capital to expand borders around turn 30 or so and pick it up

Capital borders will expand on T5 and 50 for non-creative, but more likely T51 due to slavery-revolt. For a CRE leader it's T3 and 25.

[aetryn]

All bets are off with strategic resources - there's no telling where the mapmaker may have handplaced your copper and even on a mostly generated map I'd expect the mapmaker to move copper around for each player so it's fairly similar. Sometimes it's even mirrored:  in PB72 all of us had copper in the third ring of our capital, where we could either settle a city claiming it sooner, or wait for the capital to expand borders around turn 30 or so and pick it up

Capital borders will expand on T5 and 50 for non-creative, but more likely T51 due to slavery-revolt. For a CRE leader it's T3 and 25.

Yeah, I built Stonehenge in PB72 so I guess I got the 3rd ring expansion earlier than normal? I don't remember exactly when it was but I'm pretty sure it wasn't all the way to 50.

[ljubljana]

a mapmaker could theoretically forest any tile they please, including lakes

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/adv48/page4.shtml

thank you all so much for this analysis and advice!! ok, yeah, if i were the mapmaker i would personally not put the copper on a forested hill in an otherwise completely unsettlable location, that would be sooo swingy and would heavily favor rushes of course. but.... in the end i decided not to gamble our game on pindicator's mercy and take the inefficient scout move for now as there is no other way to get to these tiles in a timely fashion. i might have chosen otherwise but fog-gazing revealed a desert SW of the scout's new position, so at least NEXT turn we will get the full 2 moves....



time to commit on bronze working! i'm feeling quite good about it right now, we gain a lot of flexibility and i do not think we sacrifice anything in terms of top-end economic snowball relative to AH first (well, other than the forests, but i imagine we're supposed to sacrifice those more or less as quickly as possible ). but i will do a bit more thinking and open the floor for discussion for a few hours before committing

[ljubljana]

in the second-worker-first scenario, if we take it out to turn 50 and are willing to be, like, maximally aggressive about chops, we reach the following position, which is so cute it kinda makes me wanna throw up:



cities are badly out of stuff to build now - the first two have ikhandas and the third has a half-finished one. but this is probably about when pumping military starts to make sense anyways

...

here's a more settler-optimized version of the earlier t60 micro plan

here is my best AH-first try so far: 

tech AH - BW - wheel - pottery
improve wheat - cow - deer - second cow at city 2
capital builds worker - scout - settler - worker - worker - settler - settler
second city builds warrior - worker - settler

we actually do have really good worker timings with this plan.... the second city is NEVER working an unimproved tile, and we have workers in place to road to the third city and improve the ivory as soon as they are needed so actually the same is true of the capital as well. and we are about a turn ahead on pottery research, a bit behind on the third city growth curve, but we have more chops remaining too so maybe we'll catch up

turn 43 illustrating how the ivory camp finishes as soon as city 3 steals the wheat:



in the BW first plan, the cities prebuilt settlers waiting for pottery tech to come in at significant inefficiency. with this plan we finish settlers four AND FIVE before starting granaries...

ok, but how're your granary timings looking:



more or less identical and we're up a clean city over the best bronze plan, since the second city got up to speed fast enough to chop a settler first?? we traded that for ikhandas which we have zero of but we may have been to early for those in BW-first anyways. ulundi is a bit slower on the granary but it also looks like it won't have to whip it so it can grow onto cottages instead

turn 60:

[aetryn]

Personally I really like the timings from AH first - it is really nice to get your second city productive enough ASAP to contribute to the expansion phase - but I can understand if you want BW for flexibility and defense. If you want to risk the econ play this is very likely the map for it though.

You had asked about Monarchy a while back and I don't know if I gave enough thought to answering. Currency clearly provides us 2*(number of cities) to commerce, plus more when we build markets but that's a later benefit that is less about when we get the tech as when we have build queue space to build it. The Markets also give +1 happiness from Ivory, which is not insignificant in this environment. Monarchy gives us the yields of every tile we could be working if we grew to the new happy cap. With as much riverside land as we have that MIGHT be equivalent + gets cottages developing. However, I don't know what our tech path to Monarchy looks like, as we need at least 3 techs to get there. Probably we need Mysticism before Currency anyway, simply because some city will need to expand borders to get food or happy resources and we won't want to wait until Turn 90+ to do that. But we'd still have to tech Polytheism/Meditation->Priesthood->Monarchy. And then somehow get into Monarchy without burning a wasted turn, so yeah, that's almost certainly not going to work. If we don't find any happiness resources out there in the next 20 turns we can re-evaluate. But odds are good we find something.

I agree with more settlers before Ikhandas as well.

[ljubljana]

yeahhh hmm, i agree that the timings seem better so far with AH even though it is slow to start chopping and it does semi-waste a bunch of worker turns early on by laboriously moving from cow to deer and back again through the forest. but the major thing we lost is the flexibility to settle for copper with the second city and then chop out a bunch of impi, for either defensive or offensive purposes. i think we would completely give up on the possibility of an impi rush with AH, and i'm not sure the economic gains, which are significant but not overwhelming, will be worth that.... bluh i'll keep aimlessly worrying about it lol

i also should maybe clarify that even with BW first the second city is working an unimproved tile for i think a total of just one turn (two if we revolt to slavery in transit, which i wasn't doing to trade a second unimproved tile turn for getting a worker out faster and starting the pasture asap) (and ofc with the AH first plan we have no choice but to flip to slavery when the second city is working good tiles). so the difference could in part be a build order thing

re monarchy, right but....currency + math are way more expensive than monarchy + prereqs, even moreso if we skip writing too although in that case we would have to flip to HR with anarchy. i'd think that could be worth it though if our situation is really happy-capped? especially with AGG for half-maintenance garrison units. but yeah we can compare those routes more effectively in about 40 turns or so lol

[ljubljana]

ok, here's an attempt to do basically the same build order with BW first:



relative to AH first, the capital is way behind, second and third cities are a turn ahead, fourth city is way ahead, fifth city is still an almost-finished settler. seeeeems more or less like a wash. also if i had worked ivory instead of cow at the capital on growing to size 2, the settler would be coming out this turn smh

turn 60, in which i tried to be smarter and build settlers by double-whip instead of slowly in cities 2 and 3:



the larger cities and fast connection to city 4 make this the best econ opening yet, monarchy ETA is just turn 79 which is much faster than currency would have been