[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

oh don't worry that's not a "could have", we still have time before a settler is hard-committed. in the real world we're making a new scout this turn and heading straight there, while starting either the settler or, in the gold plan, an exceedingly silly third worker. there isn't reeeeally a universe where the settler comes out before like t34 anyways, even in the more normal-looking cow plan...

i might not be tempted by such shenanigans (or, ok, i would be TEMPTED but able to resist that temptation) but needing to wait for mysticism, a monument, and turn 60 to hook up copper seems too risky even for this map.... at that point, our neighbors could literally be scouting us with a chariot and just walk into a second city defended by just a warrior.

and while the cow city is clearly stronger short-term, i'm starting to come around to this idea that, uh, maybe it's counterproductive for the first two cities to sacrifice the capital's food tiles on the altar of "growth curve". with the dumb FP/copper city, at least we are claiming actual new tiles, and working 2 fp farms, plains farm, and copper will let it 5-3 whip stuff at +4 food surplus for a while (or we invest in another monument, pop borders, and 7-4 whip settlers)

i'm going to try the dry northeast copper plan too but like, it's a second city that will be totally without food until the same timeframe in which the "NE wheat second city" plan would hook up the copper.... i do not expect miracles

the nice thing, i guess, about all these workers is that seemingly in the regime where they still have forests to chop they are worth roughly 5 hammers/turn as an investment, which seems like a better return than the second city...? second city adds 5 foodhammer too but requires investment of worker labor to get there and a more expensive unit, so it won't fully come out ahead until it's been working both cows for a while. and with the capital border pop it will be a REALLY long time before we run out of chops. even with 5 workers on turn 40 they're still not running out of tasks in the sim, we just transition them to cashing in third-ring chops around turn 50, which seems totally fine since it looks like it'll be ages before we want to settle cities that are closer to those chops than the capital is

[aetryn]

This is kind of the cost of scouting so far south, but we really have to make decisions now with some key missing information. Here are some thoughts in no particular order

• We almost certainly have some at least moderately decent food sites nearby, we just haven't unfogged them.
  
• We want to settle land that's going to be contested soon over land that's going to be contested much later. That would suggest settling toward GT rather than away.
  
• I like keeping the capital strong by not permanently poaching all its food (temporarily poaching is okay)
  
• Nothing too wrong with hooking up copper with the second city but if our second city sacrifices growth for copper hookup we're probably going to be forced to do something with that copper to compensate for the economy boost others will get from settling actually good sites (note - I'm assuming this map has actually good sites since nobody asked for a barren wasteland. Ours might be all north of us or something, or maybe we have fewer of them than other players).
  
• We kind of went off the reservation scouting - too much first ring land that's still in the fog.
  

I don't know if that helps you any, especially if you have to make decisions now. I strongly, strongly urge you to finish scouting your nearby lands ASAP so you can at least choose with full knowledge for the third city.

[ljubljana]

well, i think we do still have a few turns before we have to make, like, irrevocable decisions - making a third worker now doesn't commit us and should pay for itself very quickly with 3 chops. what we do have to decide on is swapping to wheel vs animal husbandry, but if we go for a northern copper or strong first-ring food site currently in the fog, wheel is not a bad move anyways... unless that food is AH food but we'll have time to finish research while the settler walks up there. it's not the BEST move because it delays capital cow hookup,

i do think it's safe to assume the gold area will be contested with SOMEbody.... as a mapmaker i don't think you put a site like that at a distance from one capital that is half the inter-capital distance, and then NOT have another player within reach of it as well. but i could be metagaming too much there.

the problem with settling towards GT, at least this early, is that the land is kind of a nightmare..... there is no food until that wheat 8 tiles away, which looks like an intended border spot. we of course want that border spot, but if we reach out now to grab it we'll have a city that's nowhere close to our capital and nothing but warriors to defend it, that is pinkdotting another AGG opponent. eventually i think we want to try that but i feel like this early the risks don't make sense? and if the gold is pinkdotting someone, odds are their picks are less suited to calling us on it than GT's are, and of course we'd have a copper unit or two to enforce our claim

i wish i could say that the southern city is much weaker than the other options but honestly, floodplains and copper in the first ring adds about as much value as the first-ring dry wheat city. the double cow is better but it steals from the capital and is kind of the epitome of "land that's not likely to be contested soon". of course it is a much faster settle than the copper, and we could still do that now and THEN push south, maybe that would work out better

i definitely don't think we have fewer good spots than the other players because pin is a kind and loving creation deity and because this map's terrain seems, if not symmetric per se, at least to exhibit very regular patterns, which i think is consistent w the kind of heavy handcrafting that would catch such significant imbalances

[ljubljana]

some scenes from plan H, "cow city first, then rush gold"



turn 39 second city, because i still decided to make 4 workers before the settler lol. but you can see the copper city settler ready to go



copper city founded t44



gold city founded t49, a 2-turn delay from plan G(old rush). copper hookup would have been a few turns sooner than this in production due to slight mismicro, but it's still around t47. biggest issue i see here is we are founding the gold city before we have the means to defend it which could be fatal depending on who's down there. although it is nice that the copper city can whip its unit instead of hand-building one with the copper tile (which means it doesn't have to actually complete the unit)

turn 60:






significantly ahead on development, especially when measured in total cottages worked. but the capital is weaker since we stole its food, natch

turn 70:






here, i admit, is where this plan starts to really look strong. cow city is strong enough to contribute settlers (i misallocated workers, it should be growing onto plains farms and 7-4 whipping them), which gives us a second settler whip queue, and with both a high-pop cap working river cottages and a gold city online we will get to currency really fast. from here i think we whip a settler every 5 turns and then just REX like crazy...

[Tarkeel]

well, i think we do still have a few turns before we have to make, like, irrevocable decisions - making a third worker now doesn't commit us and should pay for itself very quickly with 3 chops.

3 chops takes atleast 12 turns, as well as the opportunity cost later. In general, a double-worker opening is slow but defensible, a triple worker seems.. Excessive.

[ljubljana]

3 chops takes atleast 12 turns, as well as the opportunity cost later. In general, a double-worker opening is slow but defensible, a triple worker seems.. Excessive.

uh,, well...... uh,,,, then what do you call it when you're deciding between a 4 worker opening (the sim immediately above) and a 5 worker opening (the one where we go for the copper settle immediately)

i did try more normal openings but i haven't figured out yet how to make them work.... two workers will take a million years to road through those hills and punt copper hookup into the turn 50s, which i think is really asking for trouble. or, we can found at the northeastern copper to hook it up quickly, but in a spot that is backlines, doesn't get us closer to the gold, and is most likely completely without food D: it leaves a ton of chops on the board at the capital too.... even with excessive workers we still don't really achieve the ideal of "chop everything we can, pretty much as soon as it becomes available"

i did also sim the 5-worker opening (Plan G: Gold Rush) out to turn 70 and it does look a bit weaker than the plan above:






if we pick one of these, in my mind the choice depends mostly on how important we think it is to have an impi or axe escort for the gold city settler. since that's probably a forward-settle and claims what's likely one of the best locations on the map, my opinion is that it is quite important. but i am not sure it's worth sacrificing the significant snowball acceleration that seems to be represented by the cow city...

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I get uneasy, having scouted dozens of tiles to the west while there's still fogged tiles literally 3 spaces from our capital. How can we be plotting a mad lunge to the gold city when for all we know the Garden of Eden is sitting just north of us? It's impossible to make any medium-term decisions until we know what's there. Gotta make settling plans flexible enough to shift in that direction, once the scout gets there.

...when WILL the scout be there, by the way?

[ljubljana]

@CMF next turn - this turn he comes out of the capital and next turn he will be there. and, indeed, if we find good land up there all this goes out the window so we can't make any choices that would prevent us from taking advantage in that case. rn i'm trying to figure out if "2 more workers, then the settler" and "settler, then 2 more workers" end up in basically the same place medium-term or not. if yes, we can sandbag production for a few more turns by swapping to the wheel, which keeps the gold lunge open and also will give us enough workers to quickly road up to, improve, and chop the shit out of the garden of eden city, if it exists. but if settler first + settle cow is much better, we may need to stick to AH and build the settler now....

@tarkeel i did a normal opening to t70, doing two settlers next before building a third worker. here it is:



it's certainly comparable to the silly openings, probably a bit ahead in expansion but significantly behind in tech and economy from the lack of gold (though that site is next on the agenda ofc). but it took until something like turn 56 to get the copper hooked up which seems likely to lead to someone's scouting chariot walking into an undefended city...

[aetryn]

That may well be a good gold city but if it's really the best spot on the map with ZERO food, this map is incredibly more barren than I'd expect. Good spots have triple or double food. Zero food spots are usually filler, though with a good lux and the general niceness of flood plains the proposed gold city is probably better than filler. And we haven't seen a lot of luxuries, so it's not utterly mad to want to claim it. If other players really do have nothing better than this it's going to be a VERY slow game compared to normal expectations. But I'm VERY skeptical that this is the case for all the other players without explicit instructions to make a barren map. We won't know for another 20 or so turns until it starts to turn up on the demographics (second cities working two food bonus tiles).  If only we have only this level of barrenness and no reasonable prospects, we're going to have to shift to aggression much more early than expected, but honestly, the game is probably already lost if that's the case.

[ljubljana]

well, i guess we COULD have had a second city working two food bonus tiles if we'd taken CRE... but i think that's the only way it was going to happen for us. CRE/PRO is certainly looking like a better choice than toku as of now, but i assume the value of CRE is not usually as high as "this is the only way to get a strong second city within a reasonable timeframe" eheh

confirmed the following:
- cow city then copper - gold requires AH asap, wants 4 workers before the settler
- copper - gold first requires wheel literally starting on this turn, wants 5 workers before the settler

cow first looks stronger as well as more flexible but idk about this late copper hookup guys. it's not until the late turn 40s, we could easily have someone's chariot show up before then