[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

i meannnn, it's not that painful, it only takes one turn

the horse is what seals it, i think. horse + cow is waaaay more capable of making the monument and then granary sufficiently quickly than just a cow would have been... i think with 2 good tiles the opportunity cost of one of those being a horse instead of plains cow is low enough to justify it

it's definitely correct to spend all this time roading to the third and fourth cities right? i know "all" we get from it is the trade route but for security reasons i think we have to prioritize it even if this means the third city in particular works unimproved food for a few turns

edit: testing now to see if fifth worker before third settler is smoother. seems a little heretical but it's only like a 2 turn delay on the settler coming out due to the way the chops work out

[aetryn]

i meannnn, it's not that painful, it only takes one turn

the horse is what seals it, i think. horse + cow is waaaay more capable of making the monument and then granary sufficiently quickly than just a cow would have been... i think with 2 good tiles the opportunity cost of one of those being a horse instead of plains cow is low enough to justify it

it's definitely correct to spend all this time roading to the third and fourth cities right? i know "all" we get from it is the trade route but for security reasons i think we have to prioritize it even if this means the third city in particular works unimproved food for a few turns

edit: testing now to see if fifth worker before third settler is smoother. seems a little heretical but it's only like a 2 turn delay on the settler coming out due to the way the chops work out

Generally I'd try to have all cities connected either at founding or very shortly thereafter, both for trade routes (which are doubled with PRO, so we especially want them) and yes, for defense. Even if our opponents aren't planning to rush us, they may try to call us out on a plant we can't defend, and roads are needed to respond to that kind of thing.

The interesting question is where to get copper from. I think the foodless flood plain spot is still probably our best bet, but I'd like closer zoomed in shots of both options once we've completely defogged them.

Have you been tracking average power in the world as well as our current position? Would be nice to know if other people besides GT are building warriors though I guess it's not going to matter too much if we're not next to them.

[ljubljana]

Unfortunately only river tiles within your borders seem to count for purposes of trade connections. Which makes about zero sense to me, but that's the game logic  edit: this may only be true until Sailing research, but that will likely be quite a while

I haven't closely been tracking average power.... I suppose in theory we could know someone is likely to have built a warrior if average power goes up by 2000 / number of players (which, hey, i guess is just 200)

There is a copper in the far southwest by the silver, but IMO the land there is too close to GT and, more importantly, too crappy to merit serious consideration. So then we have the southern and northeastern copper as candidates.

South copper has only really one plausible site IMO, SW of the copper tile.
Pros: food first ring, copper first-ring for somewhat fast hookup, occupies important strategic location toward enemies and towards gold site, does an OK if not great job redeeming some of the hills south of the capital (it does barely have enough food to work all its tiles in the lategame)
Cons: the first-ring food is crappy, the city itself is crappy long-term with a ton of desert in range, need to pause to build probably one extra worker beforehand to handle the labor demands of floodplain farms and roads through hills

NE copper we can get in few ways, all of which have one or more annoying drawbacks.

Move 3rd city west to get copper
Pros: Probably the fastest hookup option, gets extra value out of a city we were going to build anyways
Cons: City can only get corn first-ring by permanently orphaning the northern fish. Or we could settle with foodless first ring and suffer a major hit to the growth curve. City needs monument for copper hookup. Could end up front-line in a conflict with eastern neighbor, in which case we've both added more downside risk to fighting at our border city while also weakening it defensively by moving off the river lol

4th city on PFH with fish, copper in range
Pros: Most useful city long-term with food that redeems an otherwise pretty useless area.
Cons: Slowest option, needing a monument to get either food or copper online, and until it does it is cannibalizing corn from the 3rd city and does not really add value, fairly backlines

4th city by sheep
Pros: Can at least get either food or copper first-ring, could be fairly fast if we settle next to copper since we only have to road through flatground, is a decent long-term site that we want to found anyways as a possible Heroic Epic city
Cons: City is backlines and doesn't contribute to landgrab, city still needs a monument to not suck, city is food-capped at a very low size before Civil Service and probably does not cleanly surpass southern floodplain city in yields until Biology

[ljubljana]

contemplating early archery research, if our copper hookup is going to be late and we're forward-settling a lot. and i mean, are we PRO or are we PRO? you would think PRO archers and chariots would suffice for very early defense, and the copper sites are all slow enough that we really want at least the first four strong food cities before any of them imo...

edit: i have been self-reminded to think about binary research once we are below 100% science...

[aetryn]

t36 sim link in case anyone wants to play around with too many workers

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CHsPwK3...sp=sharing

Wanted to look at this but you did your simming in CtH5 instead of PB75

[ljubljana]

turn count is off by 30 but otherwise i thiiiink this is a faithful port to PB74:

just uh don't try to research horseback riding

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t9ri4Oc...sp=sharing

[aetryn]

Unfortunately only river tiles within your borders seem to count for purposes of trade connections. Which makes about zero sense to me, but that's the game logic  edit: this may only be true until Sailing research, but that will likely be quite a while

I haven't closely been tracking average power.... I suppose in theory we could know someone is likely to have built a warrior if average power goes up by 2000 / number of players (which, hey, i guess is just 200)

There is a copper in the far southwest by the silver, but IMO the land there is too close to GT and, more importantly, too crappy to merit serious consideration. So then we have the southern and northeastern copper as candidates.

South copper has only really one plausible site IMO, SW of the copper tile.
Pros: food first ring, copper first-ring for somewhat fast hookup, occupies important strategic location toward enemies and towards gold site, does an OK if not great job redeeming some of the hills south of the capital (it does barely have enough food to work all its tiles in the lategame)
Cons: the first-ring food is crappy, the city itself is crappy long-term with a ton of desert in range, need to pause to build probably one extra worker beforehand to handle the labor demands of floodplain farms and roads through hills

NE copper we can get in few ways, all of which have one or more annoying drawbacks.

Move 3rd city west to get copper
Pros: Probably the fastest hookup option, gets extra value out of a city we were going to build anyways
Cons: City can only get corn first-ring by permanently orphaning the northern fish. Or we could settle with foodless first ring and suffer a major hit to the growth curve. City needs monument for copper hookup. Could end up front-line in a conflict with eastern neighbor, in which case we've both added more downside risk to fighting at our border city while also weakening it defensively by moving off the river lol

4th city on PFH with fish, copper in range
Pros: Most useful city long-term with food that redeems an otherwise pretty useless area.
Cons: Slowest option, needing a monument to get either food or copper online, and until it does it is cannibalizing corn from the 3rd city and does not really add value, fairly backlines

4th city by sheep
Pros: Can at least get either food or copper first-ring, could be fairly fast if we settle next to copper since we only have to road through flatground, is a decent long-term site that we want to found anyways as a possible Heroic Epic city
Cons: City is backlines and doesn't contribute to landgrab, city still needs a monument to not suck, city is food-capped at a very low size before Civil Service and probably does not cleanly surpass southern floodplain city in yields until Biology

Yeah, looks like we're going to have to compromise somewhere to get copper. Normally you'd like your copper city to be a military pump (so hills for mines and lumber mills and stuff), but none of these sites is great for that since there's so little food to work big production tiles. The big question is: do our neighbors have similarly tricky copper hookups? If so, it's even MORE difficult to envision an early rush... though maybe chariots become a little more attractive with the difficulty of building spears. In any case, if we think our neighbors will also have hard copper sites, I favor high food for the first two expansions and grabbing copper on the 4th city (unclear which location is best). It's true we're not really playing to the UU strength of Zulu by doing so, but we picked it more for the starting techs and the UB anyway, so that's probably okay.

[Tarkeel]

Unfortunately only river tiles within your borders seem to count for purposes of trade connections. Which makes about zero sense to me, but that's the game logic  edit: this may only be true until Sailing research, but that will likely be quite a while

Correct, Sailing opens up trade outside your borders on coast and rivers.

contemplating early archery research, if our copper hookup is going to be late and we're forward-settling a lot. and i mean, are we PRO or are we PRO? you would think PRO archers and chariots would suffice for very early defense, and the copper sites are all slow enough that we really want at least the first four strong food cities before any of them imo...

The reason why people scott at archers isn't that they can't defend, but that they are static defenders and will have to watch on as your opponent pillages your land. PRO doesn't solve this, but chariots do.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

ljubljana
[quote pid="842886" dateline="1707523252"]
contemplating early archery research, if our copper hookup is going to be late and we're forward-settling a lot. and i mean, are we PRO or are we PRO? you would think PRO archers and chariots would suffice for very early defense, and the copper sites are all slow enough that we really want at least the first four strong food cities before any of them imo...

The reason why people scott at archers isn't that they can't defend, but that they are static defenders and will have to watch on as your opponent pillages your land. PRO doesn't solve this, but chariots do.
[/quote]

The same reason I hate building walls in Civ VI! Sometimes they make sense, but 9 times out of 10 you're better spending that production on a defender who can actually move and fight.

[ljubljana]

yeahhhh. in most cases i strongly agree, but here the growth curve hit from going for copper early is substantial. not only are sites 3 and 4 very strong from a food perspective, but they're full of chops too, which we actually have the worker labor to take advantage of immediately, taking them from "significantly" faster than the available copper sites to "way" faster. if archery tech lets us found one of these cities 10t earlier without being excessively vulnerable, maybe it would pay off. or we can just roll the dice, rely on chariots, and hope that nobody sends a spear our way before turn 60 or so - not too implausible IMO given the distances involved and our zuluness and early BWiness, and in a 10-player game i think the "it is good to maximize variance" argument for farmer's gambits is pretty compelling

Turn 36 - Zululand

we're finally last in land area! well, second to last, but rival worst is tied with us. and, um, i, uh, found an easier way to check whether GT has a second city or not



while we're GTposting here's their power graph, lest we worry about more menacing warriors coming our way



no new units, and i'd imagine the warriors they did make were sent in different directions from the starting scout, which seems to have come our way. our scout should determine if they settled towards us and/or on copper in the not too distant future

deforestation report:



slavery flip is not happening next turn though - each turn we delay wheel tech is a turn all four of our workers sit around doing nothing. i'll flip the turn after the third city settler comes out (turn 41 by my reckoning)

if i make another worker next would you guys hate me...? simming suggest it's the build order most compatible with advance roading to the 3rd and 4th city sites, and therefore with having workers in place ready to improve food as soon as the settlers come in

scouting:



i finally discovered the cultural lens, which seems to be civ4's version of using the settler lens to detect city borders one tile further than we should be able to. but....it doesn't tell us anything. i am starting to get, like, actively surprised that we still haven't met anyone down here



now here is some land that looks intentionally constructed to demarcate a border



border land with GT is looking much more open though. with the celts pick we'd be kicking ourselves over this, but zulus don't mind

northern copper glamour shot:



southern copper:



useless southwestern copper: