[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

good question! i haven't really thought about it in too much detail.... but first-pass i think the traits i most underrated relative to this map were CRE, SPI due to how essential serfdom is looking, and possibly FIN as there are a ton of riverside hills that are almost all eventually going to get windmilled. IND is looking relatively strong as well just due to how the resources shook out, with 2 metals in relatively easy reach. but i also don't think PRO and AGG are poorly-suited to the map, per se - crappy cities increases the value of PRO's flat commerce bonus, and it looks like most of the good land requires pinkdotting others so i think there's plenty of opportunity for AGG to end up pulling its weight as well

no regrets about zulu; celts would have been fun but there are enough wide, open plains and deserts that this isn't the perfect map for them. and with the difficult tech situation at the start i'm really glad not to have mysticism weighing us down (if we had it we "could" build a monument at the second city to get two food resources, but i suspect that would take too long to be worth it honestly)

pitboss is interesting; the time limits are significantly stricter than PBEM as the turn will just roll over if you don't play in time, which i imagine explains some of the high rates of lategame burnout Civ4 has been seeing. but of course that has also meant 2 turns a day most day so far which is nice in the early going. civ4 is certainly less nerve-wracking than 6 (so far!) since the prospect of losing on the startup screen is remote, but the main thing is simming is SO much easier than in 6. the game just runs way faster and more smoothly (could be my PC though), so i'm finding myself much more willing to iterate than i was in comparable situations in 6. we'll see though, i KNOW i'm going to miss the naval combat

[ljubljana]

Turn 28/29 - Zululand

I'm going to split the difference and go for Plan H - stay on AH, cow city first, then copper into gold unless better options appear in the meantime. The difference in growth curve seems sufficient to warrant the extra fractional chance of dying due to slow copper hookup (on a big map with large distances between players), so I'll gamble (well, and I'm running out of time, which is another important difference from VI lol). But I am going to make the third worker before the settler, and the fourth as well unless we find a strong site up north, as we need them badly to road through the hills (or to a northern copper city) in any reasonable length of time, and waiting for the settler resulted in a giant mess every time I tried to sim it out.

Re: the north



you've got to be kidding me

This could still be where the food is, but not within first-ring distance... Not sure if the western scout should waste a whole turn moving north to check for seafood accessible only from that specific tile - I am actually leaning towards yes given just how bad the food situation is. And as for my excessive third worker, well.... if it's a 3-turn build is it really that excessive? I mean, maybe, but if we really need to go rush south this seems like pretty much the only way to road through those hills in time.

One thing I am not regretting is opening Bronze Working - it's a damn good thing we know the kinds of peregrinations we'll have to go through to get some copper, and are on track to have the kind of worker labor available we'll need to do so.

We've also reached the point where my sim has diverged from reality.... we are 1 turn closer to Animal Husbandry than the sim accounted for due to the KTB. I guess I'll fix that in a few turns when we're 1t away and I can just grant the tech in worldbuilder....



I turned the western scout south rather than try to determine whether GT's border in the fog is a capital or second city. We're looking likely enough to rush the gold (if turn 49 can be counted as a rush) that I think we'd better figure out who's down there (and start tracking their power) sooner rather than later.



Does it matter that we're last in food if we're first in everything else? 

GT still doesn't have another tech we don't have, by the way, so I think it's near-certain they're on BW as well, and probably are one of the civs who have finished it.

Hoping you are just as thankful after playing it!

Quoted for significance... in retrospect I think there's a fair chance of this being a tell re this map's "challenges". I'd certainly be very surprised if Pin gave others much better land than us, especially since their first and second-ring areas (or what we see of them) look not only not better than but strikingly, near-symetrically similar to ours...

[williams482]

We've also reached the point where my sim has diverged from reality.... we are 1 turn closer to Animal Husbandry than the sim accounted for due to the KTB. I guess I'll fix that in a few turns when we're 1t away and I can just grant the tech in worldbuilder....

You could create KTBs in your sim by adding AI civs but locking them tiny mountain prisons a long way away, and making contact and assigning appropriate techs at the appropriate turns.

[aetryn]

We've also reached the point where my sim has diverged from reality.... we are 1 turn closer to Animal Husbandry than the sim accounted for due to the KTB. I guess I'll fix that in a few turns when we're 1t away and I can just grant the tech in worldbuilder....

You could create KTBs in your sim by adding AI civs but locking them tiny mountain prisons a long way away, and making contact and assigning appropriate techs at the appropriate turns.

Or just give yourself the tech in the sim on the turn the game says you will have it - you can edit techs from the World Builder.

I'll admit to deleting and re-adding workers whenever I mismove them in sims, it's easier than re-simming.

I definitely vote for stepping on the northern hill to scout the sea. With as little food as we have so far we have to take the chance of finding seafood.

[ljubljana]

turn 70:

notes to me about this sim:

- total assets:

Ulundi - size 6, granary, ikhanda
uMgundgundlovu - size 4, granary, ikhanda
Nobamba - size 3, granary, monument (2 culture)
Bulawayo - size 2, monument (12 culture), granary chopped to completion this turn
kwaDukuza - size 1, monument finishes this turn

worker - 6
scout - 3
warrior - 1
impi - 2

- the road next to the capital absolutely MUST curve to the west like that....otherwise the ivory won't get hooked up
- slavery flip after the third city settler is worth serious consideration. we don't plan to whip before it's settled and the two come out very close together due to 900 chops
- apparently this is possible?



all i really did differently was improve the cow quicker, i think. so uh, in prod let's do that

edit: reloaded and yeah, here's the timing lol



actually this ONLY works if we revolt while the third settler is in transit (when the capital is on the ivory instead of the cow) or otherwise steal 2 FH from the second city by pushing it onto an un- or underimproved tile. but i mean, that could also be achieved just by growing the second city on the plains cow for the last millisecond of size 1 right

[Tarkeel]

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)

You do need 4-5 workers pretty soon, but you also need the cities for them to improve. Finding a balance between workers and settlers early on is one of those hard things.

[williams482]

A few more turns of scouting are needed to confirm it, but given the decidedly meh terrain we're seeing in the north, plus the ocean indicating that it is probably backlines, I am strongly in favor of this cow -> copper -> gold plan.

[aetryn]

There's certainly more green in the north. I think settling the cow in the east would be fine first, but we really want to defog where those rivers meat the coast as that's likely to be prime territory, and they look like they might well be right on the contested line.

Also random thought for consideration - would it be worth teching Mysticism so we can place the city in between the foods, build a monument, and have 2 of them? That MIGHT cost the NE river valley a food, but then it might not if there's food up there in the fog we haven't seen.

[ljubljana]

turn 30 - ljunbfjefwl



sheeps! :O

it's not within first-ring range of the copper or anything, but something something beggarchooser = don't do that

i was VERY close to mismoving onto the hill 1E of the scout and missing exactly this tile potentially for a while lol. Defog Thorougly



a vast and trackless expanse of desert!

lucky GT can take a copper city next to FP and a dry wheat! well... except that it's way further away from him than ours is, so i'm not sure it's better exactly...

Also random thought for consideration - would it be worth teching Mysticism so we can place the city in between the foods, build a monument, and have 2 of them? That MIGHT cost the NE river valley a food, but then it might not if there's food up there in the fog we haven't seen.

i did sim this out (and will try again) but signs don't look too good  the main problem is we're already on the edge of being tech-gated - we get the wheel on exactly the turn we need it to start roading south.... we could do mysticism after (delaying pottery...) but we'd be without a monument for an extended period of time. that could still change in the next few turns based on scouting info if we decide not to rush south, perhaps it could work out in that universe?

Do you guys think we should try for a fifth city in the west at the GT border wheat or in the NE river valley? It's a little early to ask that but the direction we send the third worker next turn determines whether the final plan has an extra road extending towards one or the other lol. Obviously GT wheat is a better site but it's very far away and early enough that I'm concerned it's a bridge too far in terms of pinkdottiness, especially if we are already rushing to the gold. even with AGG zulu we may not want to immediately forward-settle all our neighbors lol

[ljubljana]

waaaait i'm misunderstanding something here...



this is in the real game, not a sim. 16 bpt = 12 real commerce * 1.4 for two prereqs, rounded down.... am i not getting a KTB like i thought i was? or is it so small it comes out in the rounding?

no idea how i messed this up, oops... the sim has the same exact math (apparently) with no civs knowing the tech, so we are one turn further from the wheel than i thought we were. aaaaaand you may recall me saying that we get it on exactly the turn we need to start roading......... :|