Welcome to my spoiler thread for PBEM74a! Since I've been lurking and reading reports here since my undergraduate days in 2010, I decided it would be fitting for my first game to use a naming theme reflecting my time at UC Berkeley, especially with the Cal Band.
I have no idea where I stand among my fellow players, but I'll do my best to plan, play, and report. I'm sure that it will be a learning experience for me, and hopefully this will be a source of occasional entertainment for you. So pick up your heels, turn your corners square, and drive, drive, drive!
As I said in the setup thread, trait/civ valuation has to be tied to both their relative costs and the map. While it's reasonable to assume that FIN/IMP will be good, other considerations aren't as clear: for example, the types of food resources of available at the start will heavily impact whether or not Agriculture is worth 1 point, and any information we get from the mapmaker about the land:water ratio, tiles/player count, and weighted average productivity (my rough estimate of land quality, emphasizing the first 3 tiles a city is intended to work, which can be estimated from the lushness of the start) will help me decide.
The other factor I want to take into consideration is the Quick game speed. I've played the vast majority of my games on Normal, with most of the rest on Epic, so I'll check the XML, try a few things in Worldbuilder, and see what's noticeably different. Off the top of my head, forest chops round up to 3t, roads round up to 2t, farms round up to 4t, and anarchy rounds up to 1t. I'll definitely have to spend more time than usual planning out the opening to account for things like that.
EDIT:
Since it looks like the point system will be undergoing significant changes, there's even less basis from which speculate on, in terms of priority picks and long-term planning. Opponent analysis would be limited to what I think of their usernames, for all I know about them :D. For now, I'll just be here quietly twiddling my thumbs. If anyone has any questions, ask away!
EDIT2:
Jotting down some numbers and thoughts on Quick speed:
- The worker action times I posted earlier were correct. As neither movement nor map size scale, this means that early forest chopping is weaker. A Quick chop costs 4t total and yields 13h, while a Normal chop costs 4t total and yields 20h. This also makes improving hills and jungles look less appealing. Roads taking 2t also discourages me from building any more than I have to, and makes me lean towards a second city that can form a trade route by river.
- One side effect is that Serfdom looks considerably better than in Normal speed. Normally, Serfdom brings down the cost of most improvements by 1t, but not Roads, and only chops see the highest efficiency gain, a 33% reduction from 3t to 2t. On Quick speed, Roads can be finished in 1t, and the commonly-built Mines and Cottages are bumped into the sweet 3t->2t spot. If I pick a Spiritual leader, it may be worth trying to get an edge from this.
- Cities take 14f to grow from size 1 to size 2, then +2f per size as usual: on Normal speed, 1->2 costs 22f, so this actually rounds down from 14.667f, oddly enough. Growing to size 2 on a 3f tile takes 5t on Quick and 8t on Normal. A 4f tile takes 4t vs 6t, a 5f tile takes 3t vs 5t, and a 6f tile takes 3t vs 4t. 3f and 5f sites come out 1t ahead, 4f sites break even, and 6f sites are set back 1t.
- Culture: The first cultural expansion costs 5c instead of 10c, and subsequent expansions cost 50% as much. Subtle buff to Cultural Victory, eh? More realistically, this means that +1cpt means of expanding borders (monuments/Stonehenge/religion) are slightly more appealing than usual, and a Caste System artist specialist + missionary or Build Culture could pop 2nd-ring borders on the turn a city is founded. Getting to 3rd-ring borders at 250c in a contested area is worth considering, and a Great Artist's Great Work rather unexpectedly brings a City to Influential, claiming one more ring of tiles than they would on Normal speed. Chaining Great Works towards Legendary culture is 17% more effective, though I highly doubt that this will come to pass :D
- Anarchy: I'm not entirely sure about this one, but I did some tests and it seems that the number of anarchy turns depends solely on the number of civics being changed and the number of Cities you control. Having more population increases the civic upkeep expense, not the number of turns needed (feel free to correct me on this). If this premise holds, then on Quick speed, having 13 cities means that changing 4 civics takes 2t, having 25 cities means that changing 3 civics takes 2t, and having 38 cities means that changing 2 civics takes 2t. On Normal speed, regardless of how many cities you have, changing 3 civics takes 2t. I didn't test for larger empire sizes on Normal speed, but most midgame swaps this game will only take 1t, swapping into and out of wartime civics without a golden age won't be quite as awkward, and I doubt our civs will approach 25 cities, so the last swap can still fit 3 civics in 1t. In the case of Spiritual, there's still a 5t minimum between civic swaps, unfortunately. On the other hand, religion seems to always cost 1t of anarchy on both speeds, regardless of population or city count. My takeaway is that I'd like to avoid non-GA 1-civic swaps and would prefer to bundle 3 or more if possible (e.g. swapping into Organized Religion without having a state religion yet).
There were 4 items in your list. Here they are in random order:
a
k
e
g
Timestamp: 2016-03-31 20:19:40 UTC, IP: 90.203.177.30
You have 10 points
7: FIN, EXP
6: India
5: Inca, CRE
4: IMP, ORG, HRE
3: SPI, IND, Zulu, Sumeria
2: CHA, AGG, PHI, Ottomans/Maya/Byzantium (with War ellie ban)
1: Civs that start with Agriculture Tech unless otherwise stated, Greece/Rome
0: America, Native America, Civs without agri not already stated
-1: PRO arabia, germany, celts
Please post picks in threads, unless major objections I feel that duplicates should be allowed within reason, because quite a few civs have specific point costs to try to open up the field from the usual suspects.
Map taster info - fully hand crafted. SMALL 40x40 (based off small doughnut script if you wish to generate a map that size) VERY rich in resources. Stone/Marble are present but not easily reached early. Highly balanced but not mirrored/duplicated. FLAT map. IMMORTAL difficulty (it is very rich!) Moderate amount of water, but you could easily get away without a navy. GLH NOT banned. Scout starts for all.
As per your choices, no barbs, quick speed
Unusual tiles note - to spice up naval encounters, there are a few jungle/forest tiles hidden in the seas - these will give a defense bonus. Think of them as rich but dangerous to attack into lagoons, or places on the high sea that are rather dangerous.
You're player 2!
Here's your start - fogazing should be treated with caution, but the map is unlikely to change tbh.
So I'm 3rd/6th pick. There's certainly lots to think about here, especially with the revised point costs, and I don't envy the first pick at all. I'm going to have to sit down and properly think through my pick priorities, so for now let's tackle the basics. The first few things to note are health/happy/maintenance outlook:
With the game on Immortal difficulty and the presence of 7 forests, 3 flood plains, and 2 jungles in the BFC (assuming SIP*), the starting health constraint is:
+1 from difficulty
+2 from freshwater
+3 from forests
-1 from flood plains
-0 from jungles (.25x2->0, barring 2 unlikely and frankly disastrous jungle spreads)
= 5 population
To this, add:
+2 from wheat and granary
+1 from deer
= 8 population
Pretty good, since a very lush map probably means that we'll have access to most health resources, and I doubt the mapmaker decided to go with a pig/corn/fish monoculture. Chopping all of the forests early would probably be unwise, but early non-India chopping seems questionable at best anyways.
Similarly, the starting happiness constraint is:
+3 from difficulty
+1 from palace
= 4 population
Sugar (those are sugar, right?) is the only visible happiness resource, and Calendar's typically a good 80-100 turns away on Normal speed, so 50-65 turns here? If the land is lush, getting the happy cap up is going to be the first priority from a scouting and teching perspective. I'll definitely consider getting one of the three early religions.
I'm also clueless as what Small Immortal maintenance costs look like, so I'll be simulating/estimating them using AI autoplay later this evening. More to come.
*I know the convention is to SIP or risk the apocalypse, but moving 2E and setting on the grassland sugar for a 3f capital is always an option.
(March 31st, 2016, 15:56)El Grillo Wrote: So I'm 3rd/6th pick. There's certainly lots to think about here, especially with the revised point costs, and I don't envy the first pick at all. I'm going to have to sit down and properly think through my pick priorities, so for now let's tackle the basics. The first few things to note are health/happy/maintenance outlook:
With the game on Immortal difficulty and the presence of 7 forests, 3 flood plains, and 2 jungles in the BFC (assuming SIP*), the starting health constraint is:
+1 from difficulty
+2 from freshwater
+3 from forests
-1 from flood plains
-0 from jungles (.25x2->0, barring 2 unlikely and frankly disastrous jungle spreads)
= 5 population
To this, add:
+2 from wheat and granary
+1 from deer
= 8 population
Pretty good, since a very lush map probably means that we'll have access to most health resources, and I doubt the mapmaker decided to go with a pig/corn/fish monoculture. Chopping all of the forests early would probably be unwise, but early non-India chopping seems questionable at best anyways.
Similarly, the starting happiness constraint is:
+3 from difficulty
+1 from palace
= 4 population
Sugar (those are sugar, right?) is the only visible happiness resource, and Calendar's typically a good 80-100 turns away on Normal speed, so 50-65 turns here? If the land is lush, getting the happy cap up is going to be the first priority from a scouting and teching perspective. I'll definitely consider getting one of the three early religions.
I'm also clueless as what Small Immortal maintenance costs look like, so I'll be simulating/estimating them using AI autoplay later this evening. More to come.
*I know the convention is to SIP or risk the apocalypse, but moving 2E and setting on the grassland sugar for a 3f capital is always an option.
Thought of this as part of the balance - Jungle can only spread onto grass tiles. Your BFC jungle cannot spread.
(March 31st, 2016, 15:56)El Grillo Wrote: So I'm 3rd/6th pick. There's certainly lots to think about here, especially with the revised point costs, and I don't envy the first pick at all. I'm going to have to sit down and properly think through my pick priorities, so for now let's tackle the basics. The first few things to note are health/happy/maintenance outlook:
With the game on Immortal difficulty and the presence of 7 forests, 3 flood plains, and 2 jungles in the BFC (assuming SIP*), the starting health constraint is:
+1 from difficulty
+2 from freshwater
+3 from forests
-1 from flood plains
-0 from jungles (.25x2->0, barring 2 unlikely and frankly disastrous jungle spreads)
= 5 population
To this, add:
+2 from wheat and granary
+1 from deer
= 8 population
Pretty good, since a very lush map probably means that we'll have access to most health resources, and I doubt the mapmaker decided to go with a pig/corn/fish monoculture. Chopping all of the forests early would probably be unwise, but early non-India chopping seems questionable at best anyways.
Similarly, the starting happiness constraint is:
+3 from difficulty
+1 from palace
= 4 population
Sugar (those are sugar, right?) is the only visible happiness resource, and Calendar's typically a good 80-100 turns away on Normal speed, so 50-65 turns here? If the land is lush, getting the happy cap up is going to be the first priority from a scouting and teching perspective. I'll definitely consider getting one of the three early religions.
I'm also clueless as what Small Immortal maintenance costs look like, so I'll be simulating/estimating them using AI autoplay later this evening. More to come.
*I know the convention is to SIP or risk the apocalypse, but moving 2E and setting on the grassland sugar for a 3f capital is always an option.
Also I have a feeling your're used to vanilla civ - difficulty doesn't affect base health/happy. You still get 4 base happy per city, and 2 base health. It just tech costs mildly and maintenance that is affected without the AI really.
Thanks for the correction. Also, I realized we're not doing a snake pick after all. An inauspicious start :D
EDIT: Still at the office, but some preliminary thoughts are:
- SPI/ORG Zulu: Secure the early game and then go wild with civics swaps
- CRE/ORG China: Expand greedily and lock down the borders
- AGG/CHM India: Rule the battlefield with fast workers and highly promoted units
EDIT: So I've never used a sandbox before, and it's quite fun! If I contradict much of what I said earlier, and also break two of the cardinal rules I've seen observed here at RB with SPI/ORG Zulu, this is the result:
Is this good? Is this bad? Have I gone too far? You decide :D
EDIT: After playing out some more standard SIP-based starts and thinking about the setup and premise, I think I'm going to go with The Sugary Alternative. It's certainly not too late to change my mind, and I want to see if there are more forests to the east, but here's how I see it:
1. The lusher the land is, the less important individual tiles and cities are. Growth and snowballing investments are the keys to victory, but on a naturally generated map, you might get a dozen food-positive tiles total, and those become the rate-limiting factor for expansion. When resources are plentiful, building queues and whip timers become the rate-limiting factor. I mentioned earlier that I think a city's first 3 tiles weigh heavily into my evaluation, and that's because getting to size 4 enables the 2-pop whip, an incredibly efficient tool at small city sizes. Some may see great land and think of hyperpowered metropolises 150 turns in the future, but I think sapping some of that in exchange for earlier 2nd, 3rd, and 4th cities will come out ahead.
2a. Expanding quickly under Immortal maintenance costs requires some serious help to not crash the economy. I ran some tests, 6-7 cities for a non-ORG leader average to 35-45gpt in total costs, depending on civics and distance. Yikes. Three ways to mitigate that are FIN, ORG, and maintenance-reducing buildings. FIN is costed prohibitively to pair it effectively, but with ORG, Zulu, I can get -50% civic upkeep and -70% city maintenance with 2 2-pop whips apiece for a cheap Courthouse and Ikhanda. SPI means that Code of Laws is a doubly attractive target, because Caste System will let my weaker cities work their 2-3 good tiles and then stagnate on specialists in between whipping cycles. On Quick speed, civics can be swapped every 5 turns and the whip timer is 6 turns, so it's not perfect, but I can work around that with planning and some excess happiness. SPI also means that I can get immediate benefits from the religions I'll likely found along the way, especially if I commit to an Organized Religion-boosted Oracle using the plains hill mine, which would also unlock cheap Temples. This leads me to favor the leader/civ combo over the other alternatives I listed.
2b. A more standard analysis would probably incline players to pick Huayna Capac of Mali (0-cost civ with relevant techs, synergy with IND/Mints, and probably the best way to take FIN without dipping into a -1 civ), and from the talk of duplicate picks I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the other players reached this conclusion before I did :D. That means the Oracle will be heavily contested, and they'll get a 50% modifier from IND to boot. That makes my opening all the more crucial - I doubt my competitor(s) will go for Oracle before Settler, and they'll be a turn behind if they want to whip it to completion. If I can get into OR in time to receive 3 chops while working the plains hill mine, and whipping Ikhanda overflow into the Oracle, I think I can get a competitive time, which would be fantastic for me and also diminish the value of their pick. This plan would require some detailed simulation once I get a feel for the land to the east, and I might even run some opposition-force tests as FIN/IND Inca to get a feel for how risky this would be.
3. Players who do end up crashing their economies will be building lots of units as a result. And here's where the Impi come in. They'll counter the mounted units most likely to be used in an early attack, while staying relevant for a long time as excellent sentries. Simply being Zulu might deter another player into planning an attack, and if I tech along the bottom of the tree, then I can swap into Hereditary Rule and set up a hornet's nest or two to inflate my power rating. Combined with the wide ORG plan giving me plenty of espionage, I should be safe heading into the midgame, where my traits will really start to shine.
I'm going to take another day to think about it, and I'd be happy to respond to any questions or concerns. I'll feel rather silly if I have to keep editing this post :D
EDIT: Some alternative routes through the sandbox:
Sugar.b) Trades the 3rd worker for an earlier second city and slightly more convenient ending worker positions. Doesn't waste 6 turns chopping a forest. Probably strictly better than the first attempt.
As a reference point/sanity check, SIP gives me these benchmarks instead:
SIP.a) A Mining->BW->Wheel->Pottery route: worker, grow to 3, settler: gets me a settler on t20, a second whipped worker on turn 22, overflowing into a third worker on turn 25. I get 7 worker turns that would depend on the second city, but this sequence makes it very awkward to build a mine, and Pottery comes in late.
SIP.b) A Wheel->Pottery->Mining->BW route: worker, grow to 3, settler: gets me a settler on t20, a second worker on turn 23, cottages both flood plains, and lines up so I can 2-pop whip a granary on t25. This is probably closer to what a more reasonable player would do. Depending on what my scout sees on turn 0, I can audible into this and I'd be pretty happy with it. Note that this sequencing requires Agriculture/Hunting to start, being able to put a turn into the plains sugar farm shaves a turn off everything that follows.
Adrien: FIN/IND of Mali
Khan: EXP/IND of Mali
Ginger: CRE/IMP of Babylon
Adrien and Khan have strong picks, and both of them wanting Oracle->MC makes my own plans for it look ambitious verging on delusional. It's going to be very important to not fall behind against three opponents with early-game traits, but I think they're underestimating the maintenance costs, especially Ginger. Skirmishers and Impi match up evenly, but I'll have the mobility edge, and I never planned to commit to early aggression. This will definitely be a fun game!
Starting location and settings check out. As stated earlier, I moved my scout E-E to see if the plant-on-Sugar plan had any merit. I'm guessing the mapmaker took precautions, but it doesn't hurt to check:
Scratch that. SIP it is.
Per my sandboxing, the plan is to go Worker first, grow to size 3 while putting hammers into an Ikhanda for an eventual overflow chain, then building a Settler and a second Worker, then growing to size 4 on t25 and 2-pop whipping the Granary. The tech path is Wheel -> Pottery -> Mining -> BW, letting me set up some flood plains cottages that a city to the west can share. It should look something like:
Here's what we've seen so far. All demographics are before ending turn.
T1:
T2:
T3:
Adrien and Khan each finished Hunting. The Scout has revealed some very food-rich land, though it's important to note that I haven't uncovered any new early happiness resources (with Whales at Optics). I'm going to circle counter-clockwise, and I'd like my first-built Settler to head west along the river in a position to share the Wheat/cottages with my Workers nearby, while my capital regrows after its Granary whip.
![[Image: kteqJkZ.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/kteqJkZ.jpg)
