[PB67] Charriu promotes the arts

[Charriu]

Welcome, welcome all.

Some of you might remember that in the end of my last PB (59) I said that I grow bored of civ4 multiplayer. That's still the case, but this is a diplo PB and I hope this will make things more interesting again for me. Actually this diplo aspect is the main thing I started playing here at RB. You know in all the years I played civ4 single player I always was a bit disappointed with the diplo aspect of the game. The developers made a good attempt at the AI diplo, but in the end it's no substitute for real people. You can imagine how disappointed I was at first to see that (almost) nobody likes to play diplo these days. So I'm very happy that I can finally play in one of these and cross another thing from my civ4 bucket list.


The reporting in PB59 was very enjoyable for me so I will keep it that way. Meaning:

• I won't report every single turn
  
• Same crazy micro managment spreadsheet
  
• (Almost) no sims: I will actually run almost no sims this game, because my spreadsheet can replace them fully. I remember back in PB52 I stopped running sims about T50 or so, but I used my spreadsheet up to T110 or so. Expect more of that.
  
• C&D: This is very tedious for me and the benefit is smaller. Even if we play with score I won't bother with this analysis.
  
• Of course this being a diplo thread I will attempt to write down the important diplo stuff down as best as possible.
  

Now you (and the other players) will be wondering: What's up with that thread title. Is he actually making an attempt at a culture victory here? Alas no, but I hope my idea will be as enjoyable for you. Some of you may know that I'm a huge fan of video game music and of course I'm listening to a lot of remixes and arrangement of that music in multiple genres. In the 15 years I'm listening to this music I started to collect an ever growing library of music of that sort. So for this PB I plan to add one music track to each turn report with a little write-up about it. I will concentrate on music that feels mostly like classical symphonic music aka your Beethoven, Gustav Holst, Debussy etc. (By the way VGM also brought me to this classical music). I will try to embed those songs as youtube videos most of the time, but unfortunately not everything is available there. So also expect a lot of links to bandcamp and other platforms. I will also note down, where you can buy that music. To give you an example of what I mean. Let me share one of those songs.

The song

https://ericbuchholz.bandcamp.com/track/...n-market-2

Music: Eric Buchholz - Zelda: Ocarina of Time "Castle Town Market"

Eric Buchholz dropped this all around amazing album back in 2017. It consists mostly of songs from the Legend of Zelda series, but as you will find out later (it's not the last song I will promote) Eric also mixes in a lot of other music mainly from famous japanese animated movies.
The song here is from Ocarina of Time specifically the Castle Town theme when you enter Hyrule for the first time as a child. The original theme is very peaceful and cheerful, which is very fitting at that moment of the plot and the game overall. But what Eric manages here is to make this theme very more grandios and majestic fitting for a town with a majestic castle in the backdrop. Just listen to the beginning and you get a feel for what I mean. Still Eric keeps us grounded to the original theme even here if you listen to the bells at first and then the string. After this big opening we return to a very pure rendition of the theme at 0:40 on the flutes, but not for long as this is a town worthy of a king. So we return to the pomp and glory at 1:12 with the addition of brass, which culminates in the finale at 1:50 when the strings return in full. I also really love what Eric is doing behind the main theme like for example in the brass section at 0:19 or 1:50 or in the strings right at the beginning. All in all an excellent arrangement. I love arrangements that manage to bring something new to the table and do not just blindly transpose the song to an orchestra.

You can buy this song directly from bandcamp. Now I hate to bring this up here, but I better should before the beginning of the game. This album is sold by Materia Collective. I've brought a lot of great music in the past, but as I learned preparing for this PB, there is a bigger scandal around Materia Collective. Apparently they weren't paying their artists promptly or at all. This led some of the artist to remove their music from Materia Collective and Materia Community. We lost some great albums that way and I hope they will return some day in some form. Going back to this song and album, I contacted Eric and he assured me that it is fine to buy the music from bandcamp and that he gets his money.

So now you know what you can expect. I will try to fit the music to what happens during the turn to add some immersion. As for the naming theme I will go into a similar direction as with the songs. I will name each city after some famous video game composers and do a little write up about the person.

Other then that expect the usual stuff from me.

Password

music

Bookmarks

[Charriu]

Micro spreadsheet:

Planning PB67

Reserved for useful links that I always have to double-check

Great People Tech Preferences
Soldies Points of Units/Techs + other demo stuff
When do Barbs Enter Our Borders
When do Barbs Appear

Barb spawning mechanics (stolen from SevenSpirits):

Barbs are spawned for each landmass individually. The game will spawn barbs up to a max of one barb per 50 (on prince) unowned tiles on the landmass. This is why islands (smaller than 50 tiles) won't get barbs.

At other difficulties, unowned land tiles per barb unit:

Noble: 60
Prince: 50
Monarch: 40
Emperor: 35
Immortal: 30
Deity: 25

Also: how many barbs spawn per turn on a landmass? It's one, plus one more for every four missing units. So if a landmass supports 20 barbs, and there are currently 4 on it, then there are 16 missing, so 1+4=5 will be created.

Full Change log:

To be added later

[Miguelito]

Fancy a dedlurker? (Not applying for the foreign ministry post office, but I understand you want to handle that yourself anyways)

[civac2]

Did I miss your spreadsheet? Is it the same template as in PB59. I'm a bit of spreadsheet enthusiast myself.

[Charriu]

Dedlurkers are welcome and aside from occasionally subbing nothing is required. I want to do everything myself. 

Yes, the spreadsheet will be similar to PB59. I usually set it up and link it when I have the following:

- Enough data about map type etc
- A decision about civ and leader
- A screenshot

[Charriu]

Before the actual snake pick, simming and other stuff begins, I wanted to tell you what my plans for this PB are. By now I played in 4 PBs with the following traits:

PB39 (RtR): AGG/EXP Khmer
PB40 (RtR): AGG/PRO China
PB52 (CtH): EXP/PRO Celts
PB59 (CtH): SPI/IND Greece

As you can see I haven't played some traits yet namely:

FIN
CRE
CHA
IMP
AGG (in CtH)
PHI
ORG

I really enjoyed SPI last game, which as we know requires a bit more planning to get good use out of it. To that extend I want to play PHI this game. By now we have seen some more players pick up PHI with some great usage. What I wanted to do with it is generate a lot of scientists with it. I want to use those first scientist to build the academy and settle some scientist specialists in that academy city. Only later do I want to use specialists to bulb techs. I know the public opinion is that bulbing is always superior then settling the specialist, especially on RB maps, which are lusher and therefore move on a lot quicker through the tech tree.
Scientists are actually the best for bulbing starting at a base value of 1500 beakers per bulb and dependent on population can even go up to 1800 with 100 pop. I did play some test games with PHI and I regularly managed to generate at least 3 scientists before T100. By that time I'm somewhere in the early classical era with tech cost of around 400-800 beakers. So bulbs can only be worth that much at that time. But assuming that the game goes at least towards the T200 marker settling early scientist would generate at minimum 600 beakers without modifiers. If we factor in that almost every tech gets a modifier from prerequisite techs those 600 actually go up to 720. Importantly bulbing does not get this prerequisite bonus to my knowledge and of course no added modifiers from buildings. And of course on top of that the settled scientist also generates hammers too. Yes, bulbing can beat that, but it requires more planning around the tech path and the longer the game goes the better the settled scientist gets. Using the first of my 3 scientist for an academy is even better beaker-wise as with the 2 scientist settled in the city the academy-scientist also produced the same amount of beakers thanks to the 2 specialists, but also multiplies all other beaker sources as well as adding culture.
Lastly there's another more meta aspect I want to run this strategy. This style of play allows me to run a more steady if lower tech rate. As we have seen players do tend to judge huge spikes in GNP a lot more and sometimes jump the gun thinking that this player is running away with the game. To give an example consider a player A saving money for 5 turns and then running 5 turns of 600 GNP per turn compared to a player B running 10 turns of 300 GNP. I would think that more players are afraid of player A rather then B even though both had the same output. We have seen multiple times that having an early lead in a game can generate a dogpile against that player and with this strategy the chances of that happening might be reduced.

Having said all of that there are still a lot of other questions.
1. What about pyramids?
2. How do I get to representation without pyramids fast?
3. What second trait should I choose?
4. What civ works well with this playstyle?
5. When to start bulbing instead of settling scientists?
6. Any other interesting wonders (Great Library)?

I will answer all of these questions with my next posts or when we have a screenshot.

[Miguelito]

Pericles/America? We want them settled scientists early, if we want them.

[Cornflakes]

Do it!! Pericles/America was my dream combo for PB65 before the mob ruled in favor of block picks

[El Grillo]

Yeah, that sounds sweet if you can put it together. I'm sure others have mentioned it before, but the idea of pre-building a CPL to accumulate generic GPP and then later build a forge to run one engineer turn for a guaranteed GE has to be worth trying at some point.

[Magic Science]

Play PHI/ORG