[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

behold, iteration:



fourth worker before the third city settler + settling nobamba one tile south on the ivory for the extra chop and 2h city center tile is what enabled this

[ljubljana]

This is close enough to a wash that I think I do indeed want to go for BW first for flexibility and safety. Logging on and playing a double-turn...

Turn 10 - Zululand



omg you guys, land that doesn't suck butt

given the distances involved i am pretty concerned that this is the border region with another civ, and that the mapmaker put very good land there.... but, wait, why am i concerned that's why we're zulu :D

time to Project Some Power?

scout's going to turn south soon i think, maybe even as early as next turn, to figure out which of our endless nameless foes is down here and how easy they are to bully

[aetryn]

behold, iteration:



fourth worker before the third city settler + settling nobamba one tile south on the ivory for the extra chop and 2h city center tile is what enabled this

Of course, most of those cities would actually be fairly low priority settles (basically it needs to pick up either new food, a strategic luxury, or a luxury to be a good target, and just adding one food tile is... okay, but by no means a great location), but of course you can only work with the land you've revealed.

If you were CRE you could put the near eastern city on the river between the wheat and the cows and it would be decent. I'd actually still consider whether that's the best option but it wouldn't work for the second city, since you don't have time to research Mysticism that early. Maybe we'll find a good spot in the west or south and can take those first and then go east later?

[ljubljana]

yeah.... idk, i have an irrational grudge against mysticism and against any build order that goes monument first lol. hopefully there will be some way to make 1N work, but it's just sooo slow without mysticism researched (and the double-cow has the hammers at the start to contribute settlers early as we've seen). also, not founding the second city on that river does mean eating a significant economic slowdown, since our current plan is to use the economy from that trade route to get the wheel and that would require going to other way around.... but yeah, we just have to see what's where i guess. east cow city is very short-term optimized but at least it has the food to work all its tiles if we go farms-and-windmills - it is quite likely that in the long game, if we found it 1N, that whole line of tiles we move away from will be lost to us forever (or until biology but that's about as forever as it gets) due to lack of food for a city south of there

i kinda do not think there's much chance that the land is so good that it justifies sending the first settler south though.... it would take one billion years to get there and costs 4c relative to the east cow just by being practically unconnectable by trade. it is also very likely to be pinkdotting someone, and if we're going to do that i think we'd better hook up copper first and get a road down there so we have any chance of reinforcing it... but i DO have an eye on performing such a pinkdot with maybe our fourth or fifth city settler backed up by AGG impi. i am a little worried about taking the only good border land in that way making us a gamelong enemy, but hopefully if it is "just" winning a settler race with force rather than capturing a pre-existing settlement it won't be viewed quite so harshly...

west city seems like a plausible first plant iiiif there is more agriculture food out there so we can do wheel before AH and connect the rivers. another benefit of bronze opening is it allows that, i think going AH into mandatory bronze as third research would have pretty much committed us to the cow

[aetryn]

yeah.... idk, i have an irrational grudge against mysticism and against any build order that goes monument first lol. hopefully there will be some way to make 1N work, but it's just sooo slow without mysticism researched (and the double-cow has the hammers at the start to contribute settlers early as we've seen). also, not founding the second city on that river does mean eating a significant economic slowdown, since our current plan is to use the economy from that trade route to get the wheel and that would require going to other way around.... but yeah, we just have to see what's where i guess. east cow city is very short-term optimized but at least it has the food to work all its tiles if we go farms-and-windmills - it is quite likely that in the long game, if we found it 1N, that whole line of tiles we move away from will be lost to us forever (or until biology but that's about as forever as it gets) due to lack of food for a city south of there

i kinda do not think there's much chance that the land is so good that it justifies sending the first settler south though.... it would take one billion years to get there and costs 4c relative to the east cow just by being practically unconnectable by trade. it is also very likely to be pinkdotting someone, and if we're going to do that i think we'd better hook up copper first and get a road down there so we have any chance of reinforcing it... but i DO have an eye on performing such a pinkdot with maybe our fourth or fifth city settler backed up by AGG impi. i am a little worried about taking the only good border land in that way making us a gamelong enemy, but hopefully if it is "just" winning a settler race with force rather than capturing a pre-existing settlement it won't be viewed quite so harshly...

west city seems like a plausible first plant iiiif there is more agriculture food out there so we can do wheel before AH and connect the rivers. another benefit of bronze opening is it allows that, i think going AH into mandatory bronze as third research would have pretty much committed us to the cow

I mean, if you really hate monuments that's a REALLY good argument for CRE unless you're going to leave your cities at size 1 borders with no cultural defense for 50+ turns while you limp to a library. I agree south is unlikely, but if we find double gold and food down there it changes things, pink dot or not. Also would like to see what's on the other side of the river - if it's all desert I wouldn't put strong odds on someone being RIGHT there - that's more like a no-man's land with a river as a kind of road through it. Borders are usually more deliberately contestable or they're not nearly as interesting!

[ljubljana]

haha well, if we did want libraries it wouldn't take thaaaat long... bulawayo can chop into 2-pop whip and the others can 2-pop whip and get 30 natural hammers in a reasonable timeframe. but yeah there's no way that's the play (....right? when do people usually start building those other than the one for the first GA?) i do think we will eventually build monuments, but my goal is to express my hatred by delaying that point as long as is practicable to lessen the impact on our snowball. the nice thing about these plants in particular is that none of them badly needs one, at size 4 they can each work one food and three river cottages in the first ring. i don't think a monument build is likely to be worth trading a plains river cottage for a grass one until we find a way to raise the happy cap...

i think with 14 tiles between capitals there can't be anyone riiight there.... the vibe i'm getting is more that there are more FP and other goodies in the fog, and that the ideal spot in the area is a few tiles south of the scout and will just so happen to be exactly halfway between our capital and someone else's... in which case it'd probably be the kind of pinkdot we'd need to invest in impis to defend. i can only hope that if that is the case, there is a similar terrain obstacle between our opponent and that area as there is between it and us, otherwise i'm not sure how we're going to hold it if it's all by its lonesome and 7 tiles removed from any other viable zulu city site

[aetryn]

haha well, if we did want libraries it wouldn't take thaaaat long... bulawayo can chop into 2-pop whip and the others can 2-pop whip and get 30 natural hammers in a reasonable timeframe. but yeah there's no way that's the play (....right? when do people usually start building those other than the one for the first GA?) i do think we will eventually build monuments, but my goal is to express my hatred by delaying that point as long as is practicable to lessen the impact on our snowball. the nice thing about these plants in particular is that none of them badly needs one, at size 4 they can each work one food and three river cottages in the first ring. i don't think a monument build is likely to be worth trading a plains river cottage for a grass one until we find a way to raise the happy cap...

i think with 14 tiles between capitals there can't be anyone riiight there.... the vibe i'm getting is more that there are more FP and other goodies in the fog, and that the ideal spot in the area is a few tiles south of the scout and will just so happen to be exactly halfway between our capital and someone else's... in which case it'd probably be the kind of pinkdot we'd need to invest in impis to defend. i can only hope that if that is the case, there is a similar terrain obstacle between our opponent and that area as there is between it and us, otherwise i'm not sure how we're going to hold it if it's all by its lonesome and 7 tiles removed from any other viable zulu city site

You want libraries everywhere that is a commerce hub - which, by the way, we should try to pick out commerce cities and production cities and specialize them. We want a military pump city with good production - probably wherever copper is, and really 2-3 is better than 1, especially if you want to go to war. Yes, we'll whip some troops, but it's still really valuable to just have one churning them out through natural production. Commerce cities should build libraries as soon as is practicable (i.e. they aren't contributing to expansion and don't need anything higher priority). Production cities may never build libraries at all. At the moment it's too early and we have to hope there's more resources out there we just haven't scouted yet before we can really locate cities properly.

[aetryn]

When you say flexibility and safety, under what circumstances do you see yourself Impi rushing, and at what % would you estimate the chance that someone rushes you?

Also what makes up for the extra food from AH in the BW scenario? I find it strange that it ends up a wash.

Basically chopping forests turns into production that substitutes for food used to build workers or settlers. It's probably not a wash if you count the future production value of those forests chopped into something else. But the traditional thing to save forests for is wonders (though saving them for Knights is also not a bad plan), so maybe we don't care about deforesting lots of stuff early?

[ljubljana]

When you say flexibility and safety, under what circumstances do you see yourself Impi rushing, and at what % would you estimate the chance that someone rushes you?

hmm, i think i will consider a dedicated impi rush if we find a neighbor who is definitely not close to bronze working (maybe subjective but i'm thinking mysticism open + went for a religion as one of their first two researches) and whose lands are easy to reach (so, close to the min 14 tiles away and not on the other size of some hideous hill range that negates the impi movement advantage, bonus if they settle toward us). so probably not highly likely that all those things combine, maybe 5-10%? but what i think is significantly more likely is needing access to fast impis to secure an exposed, possibly semi-forward settle like at the newly-discovered floodplains region, given the pretty lackluster quality of the spots near the capital. but the exact odds of that are harder to precisely estimate without more scouting info

odds of me getting rushed, well, we have 3 other leaders who are probably at least considering it with superdeath + AGG rome, gavagai egypt, and GT boudica. odds of us neighboring at least one of them, given 4 neighbors per player, are 1 - (6/9 * 5/8 * 4/7 * 3/6) = 88% if that math is correct (which it may not be i'm rusty af). in the case that we do neighbor one, would we be their presumptive target, and tempting enough a target if so for them to commit? we are AGG zulu yes, but it sounds like these kinds of rushes can usually land around t40 (praets probably excluded) with AH first, we get bronze on t32 which is fine, but the issue is that unless we open scout - worker - worker (and the second worker would have nothing to do because it can't chop) or have our settler sit around for a few turns, we will already have committed the second city location before we reveal copper. so we can't have it actually settled and hooked up until the third city comes out which is in the t40s and therefore in the danger zone. if an opponent, through a combination of scouting and demo-scrying, discovers that we settled our second city before discovering bronze and around t30 (and we are sufficiently easy for them to reach), i think that coupled with what might generously be termed our "new player discount" would make us a good rush target. hard to put precise odds on that, but if we open AH first and neighbor someone who wants to rush i think we are a better target for them than the average of their neighbors, so maybe 88% * >25% * odds that they commit to a rush at all = something in the 10-15% range? but maybe "odds that they commit to a rush at all" is smaller than i give it credit for here...and, yeah, i am noticing that my OWN odds of committing to a rush are significantly lower than that, but my odds will go up if WE discover info like that about another player via scouting and demo-scrying

but if we get BW first, especially if we settle for copper but maybe even if not, those odds should be very low. not sure how low, but if it's WCs i think we'd only need a handful of impi to defend against them, and if i'm egypt and my zulu neighbor already has bronze when we make contact (which it sounds like they will know from the soldier count, plus we'll be in slavery lol) i'd consider them pretty much off the menu even if there is a possibility they haven't yet actually settled for copper.

re the foodhammers we lose from BW instead of AH, we start working the Capital Cow on t21 in the AH first plan, and t35 in BW-first (but after slavery flip which makes up 1t of the difference), and the marginal gain of working it over the deer is 2fh + 1c/turn. so long-term i guess we have spent something in the range of 1.5 capital chops (and therefore 4.5 turns of worker labor, but BW plan spams workers early so i think we make that back) to achieve whatever the odds deltas above are. was that, like, the /right/ decision? lol idk, but the fact that the "spent" hammers appear to only really materialize when we would run out of capital chops (so like t70) instead of right away makes me feel significantly better about it

^^ this is basically where my internal logic was when i committed to this yesterday but, uh, as always feel free to point out any cognitive distortions you may observe within LOL

@williams, if you see this, could i please have edit access to the spreadsheet i requested it as "swanfangcollective@gmail.com" as is my idiom lol

[ljubljana]

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

for comparison the BW-first plan is
tech BW - AH - wheel - pottery
worker 1: wheat - deer - chop - chop - chop - capital cow - second city cow
worker 2: chop - chop - capital cow - chop
capital builds worker - scout - worker - settler - worker - worker - settler - settler
second city builds warrior - settler