[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[Tarkeel]

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

There's an even easier way: The scoreboard in the lower right corner shows number of cities.

[pindicator]

I'm pretty sure this is the first 4-worker start we've ever had in a rb pitboss game.

[ljubljana]

LOL omg really what does that asterisk next to the city number mean?

ok, so scrolling up reveals that they did settle their second city this turn. so we're only 3 turns behind their pace despite our opening, and somehow i don't think they have 80 chop-hammers about to come in towards the third settler/fifth worker

tested archery research and it looks like it only comes in something like 5 turns before we'd have copper hooked up. not sure if that's worth it. maybe the play really is to just throw caution to the wind and rely on chariots to dissuade them. according to the article tarkeel linked, chariots give the same soldier count as an impi. so if i were in the fog contemplating an attack, surely i'd read zulus + rush BW + 2000 power spike as implying we built some impis and are therefore unrushable, not as us faking having metal hooked up by making chariots

or we try to time it so we get 2 chariots on the same turn to allow them to conclude we have an axe 

I'm pretty sure this is the first 4-worker start we've ever had in a rb pitboss game.

that's what us noobs are for, right?

[aetryn]

LOL omg really what does that asterisk next to the city number mean?

ok, so scrolling up reveals that they did settle their second city this turn. so we're only 3 turns behind their pace despite our opening, and somehow i don't think they have 80 chop-hammers about to come in towards the third settler/fifth worker

tested archery research and it looks like it only comes in something like 5 turns before we'd have copper hooked up. not sure if that's worth it. maybe the play really is to just throw caution to the wind and rely on chariots to dissuade them. according to the article tarkeel linked, chariots give the same soldier count as an impi. so if i were in the fog contemplating an attack, surely i'd read zulus + rush BW + 2000 power spike as implying we built some impis and are therefore unrushable, not as us faking having metal hooked up by making chariots

or we try to time it so we get 2 chariots on the same turn to allow them to conclude we have an axe 

I'm pretty sure this is the first 4-worker start we've ever had in a rb pitboss game.

that's what us noobs are for, right?

Asterisk means they've already played this turn.

It's nice to avoid archery if we can. However, archers combined with chariots aren't terrible as they counter each others weaknesses (archers can't attack out, chariots get no defensive bonus), though obviously dragging archers around with chariots nullifies their speed advantage. However, you're still really vulnerable to a big stack of spears.

I think we have enough workers now. I'd probably build a warrior for cheap MP - remember that cities get increasingly unhappy if they have no garrison, and one of the early civics gives you a bonus happiness per garrison unit (over and above cancelling the "we're unprotected" penalty). In fact, you'd like to build several warriors before hooking bronze if you can just to garrison your backline cities with something cheap. Also growing into unhappiness will give us free pop to whip later. If the horse gets hooked up, build chariots obviously. If you don't even have enough turns to finish a warrior before that happens, I'd put the hammers into the Ikhanda - you're going to want the maintenance savings eventually and building more experienced chariots will help, and buildings take forever to decay so it's not going to be a problem if you stop mid-building to build a chariot or two, or the next settler.

As for faking having Impi, if they've scouted well they'll know where we have cities (i.e. not on copper) and it's too early to be trading it with someone else. Of course, we could have settled on the copper since they last scouted it, but still - they'll have some idea. Once we have a trade connection they can just check directly, which will happen sooner than you think if we're both settling our border.

Sorry I haven't been following the sims closely, or I might have noticed the 4-worker opener - I was mostly focused on the scouting and settlement locations.

[ljubljana]

is there a way to see if someone has cities in areas you have previously scouted but don't have vision on? like, does the culture lens tell you? or do you have to send a unit back over? i am a little skeptical that GT has adequately scouted us, we haven't seen any sign of their units since we made contact, and they'd have to have gone all the way around us while avoiding our borders to know all our copper sites. we don't have that kind of scouting info yet, and we built actual scouts instead of warriors...

the era of time in which we'd be reliant on chariots for defense and thus very vulnerable to well-placed spear would be roughly turn 50 to turn 60 if we settle the four food spots before copper. i'm pretty confident we won't get a trade hookup that early, so given what is likely to be poor scouting on their end, GT may still be in the dark about our copper situation at that point. and of course our eastern neighbor won't even have our graphs (although that may be a downside since they can't see BW). personally i don't thiiink i'd rush someone with AGG + BW in GT's position, especially if it's a 10 turn walk to the nearest city, and if i did i'd use chariots. on the other hand:



SOMEone out there (and it's not GT) has 22k soldiers, which is all the techs we have + 7k extra. i am hoping it's 4k from the wheel, 1k from having 4 total pop, and 2k from a warrior. but it COULD be 4k from wheel, -1k from a whip down to 2 pop, and 4k from a war chariot. if i were gavagai, especially on a map like this which seems to have a pretty regular structure from which neighbor locations can be roughly predicted, i would at least think about rushing specifically whichever of my neighbors it takes longer to contact, like just sending WC into the fog at whoever's there so they don't know they even border egypt until they have WC in their capital. if that's coming our way, hooking up copper with our third city instead of our fifth would obviously make a major difference

i'm a little skeptical about putting too many hammers into warriors. the second city has exactly enough hammers at size 1 to make one before the horse is hooked up, so i'll do that, but after that i think i'll stick to chariots and then metal units. point taken about garrisons but with our ivory hookup we won't need units for MP until our cities are at size 4 i think. and generally it seems better to garrison with an impi that can reinforce somewhere via our road network in a pinch than to put hammers into a unit that can't fight... impis in particular should make good garrison units for a long time (eg even in HR), they can even mob down knights in sufficient numbers

omg no need to apologize - i have yet to regret the workers, though maybe that time will come . the reason i want a fifth is, well....because that's what we need to road the way west to the fourth city before the settler gets there. this could be really misguided but my operating theory so far has been that we want enough workers such that, within at least 2-3 turns, new cities should be hooked up by road and have one or more workers on their first-ring food tile. even with 5, we will actually fail to meet that goal at the third city by a couple turns... with just 4, we would settle the fourth city significantly before workers can reach it, whether we go for food or copper with the fourth city settler

[ljubljana]

ok, here is a direct comparison of the situation when the third city settler comes out if we do worker next vs settler next:

settler next:



workers reach city site t46, city 3 founded (1N of the NE cow) turn 43

worker next:



workers reach city site t44, city 3 founded.... turn 43 because next turn's roads speed the settler. we can then devote 2 workers to the horse to get it hooked up 1t after the warrior finishes, while still having 2 workers on the third city's food (which works out to getting cow + corn improved on the exact turn it hits size 2)

now the fourth city will be significantly later (t51 vs t47 if at the NW food) in the second plan due to having put 60 chop hammers into a worker instead of the settler. but it has a version of the same problem - is it really better to found 4t earlier if it spends those 4 turns working an unimproved cow? i think some combination of the oddball conditions of this land, eg the total lack of water, the long distances to good city spots, the huge surplus of chops at the capital and cities 3+4, and PRO heavily incentivizing road hookups, has resulted in a start that places very high demands on worker labor, which is why i'm going this hard. maybe i'll come to regret or recant this, but in my sims, even out to turn 80 i've been chronically short of worker labor as pottery tech comes in, borders expand at old cities to add new chops and food resources, and new cities need their own chops and cottages to come online. it's possible that with this plan i'll eventually hit a wall with a ton of workers sitting around with nothing to do, but i haven't seen it happen yet...

edit: here's turn 80 of the sim in question:






even with 10 workers for 9 cities i still feel behind - new cities have to cannibalize existing food tiles for something to work while chops/work boats come in, and are still consistently founded without pre-existing road connections + available chop/food labor (though maybe in prod i'd micro around that), floodplains and horse lingered unimproved at the NW super-city for a shameful amount of time. the south looks over-workered but it's not, borders down there are about to pop to bring in a bunch of urgent FP farms. it's possible better micro will reveal i went a little too hard here but i don't think the early opening is where that happened (and honestly it's not like we can afford more cities at this point anyways)

[aetryn]

Warriors are more than twice as cheap as Impi, and generally your backline garrison isn't going to matter overly much. If you don't like the Warrior, I'd at least build the barracks over another worker so your capital can grow.

[ljubljana]

hmm.... with this choice of second city, the capital doesn't have a tile to grow onto, the second city needs the cow to grow onto the horse (i at least feel pretty sure that slow-building monument at size 1 working just the horse is not the play). but if we moved the second city that would make sense. a bit worried about settling that far away this early though.... second city is a slower site than 3rd or 4th in this plan so maybe, but i think we want the second city on a warrior and then chariot early so the other cities don't get owned by some dumb GT warrior....

re warrior builds yeahhhh, point taken. if we think the western + eastern food cities are likely our border, i think an impi would be better at cities within one move of those, but yeah maybe warriors make more sense closer to the core. thought it would still be nice to, if someone invades us with an HA or knight stack, have available the move of double-whipping an impi at every city, then moving that and the garrison impi out together since the city will now be small enough not to need the happy. of course, if it actually comes to that we're dead dead, but if someone scouts around and sees way more impi on garrison than we need maybe they will anticipate that line and rethink their knight push

edit: i guess i could make a plains hill riverside mine and grow the capital onto that. i am not sure how compelling a tile that is especially in the prime of slavery civic, but it does rescue a worker-turn i was struggling to find a good use for... i'll try it out

edit2: capital has 32 hammers of chop overflow this turn, then one chop the turn after and 2 chops the turn after that..... so if all that needs to go into a civilian unit (as i believe it does) i have maybe screwed us out of getting to grow before the next settler/worker build, ooooops

[ljubljana]

well guys..... turns out i did overlook something and there is technically a way to do the fourth city settler before the fifth worker while ending up in a worker labor situation that is somewhere north of "nightmarish", and retaining a fourth city founding time in the t46-t47 range. not sure you're gonna like it though......






even so, third city retains conspicuous problems getting its corn online in time to grow to size 2. but there's a good chance it's better just out of sheer snowballiness

[ljubljana]

well, i think this is the strongest t50 of any sim so far. but there is a window of 8 turns from t46-t54 where if a GT scouting warrior shows up at our fourth city in the NW we just immediately lose the game. what do you guys think? should we be willing to play things that fast and loose in the interest of maximizing reward if our plants go unchallenged? i guess we could try warpeacing them at t45 but honestly if someone did that to me i'd send my units straight at them to see why they are feeling that fragile in this 10t window lol

we'd be soft-committing this turn by starting the capital on the third city settler build instead of the worker i was planning. or we can let the capital chop-complete a warrior first for the NW, but it slows the city by most likely 2 turns and GT would probably still attack if it's warrior vs warrior and we have just the fortify bonus to tile things in our favor. our NW scout would have an important role to play in this too - we would transition them to a sentry keeping an eye out for evil GT warriors until the first 4 cities are secure. edit: actually we can't do this, if we try the rule where you can't overflow more than the cost of the unit appears at the worst possible time and eats a bunch of chops

edit: another option is 3-2 whip a chariot in the capital after the 4th city settler's out. OUCH at the resulting growth curve hit but, i mean, if that's what keeps GT away