Welcome to your C_IV SGOTM 5 Team Thread. Please use it for all internal team communication, turn logs and discussions. Subscribe to it to receive notifications, and do not visit the other team threads for this game until you have finished. Please also subscribe to the Maintenance Thread for this game, where teams and staff may post non-spoiler information of general interest.

The Game
You are Temujin, Leader of the Mongolian Hordes. You have tired of fighting the Barbarians, and so this time you have decided to join them instead. You will win a glorious victory in this Monarch game, of course, but you are teamed with the Barbarians, and you have to adapt to Barbarian assets and liabilities:


You have no starting techs.
The barbs are your friends, and are fighting on your team.
You will benefit from the Barbarian capability to explore the world in animal and human form.
You can research, but you will also learn techs that the Barbarians learn.
.... And you start off at war with everyone on the planet except the Barbarians. You can make peace with anyone.


The Objective
This Monarch difficulty game is on a Standard size, Gyathaar-special map, at Epic speed, against 7 rivals. All victory conditions are enabled, and the laurels for this contest will be awarded to the teams who achieve the earliest victory date in the game.

Versions
This game will be played in Civilization IV version 1.74, using special HoF Mod 1.74.SGOTM5.

Schedule
Start files for each team will be available on the SGOTM Progress and Results Page (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/submit/civ4sgotm_submission_list.php) at midnight, server local time, at the start of July 25.

I propose that you aim to complete this game in three months, that is by the end of October 2007.

Starting Position
Here's the starting position - click the image below to see a larger version.

http://gotm.civfanatics.net/civ4games/images/sgotm5_start_small.jpg (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/civ4games/images/sgotm5_start_large.jpg)

Map Parameters
Playable Leader/Civ - Temujin of Mongolia
Rivals - 7: China, Japan, India, Arabia, Spain, Persia and Greece
World size - Standard
Difficulty - Monarch
Landform - Special, sort of a fractal archipelago
Environment - Temperate climate, medium sea level
Game Speed - Epic
AI Aggression - Normal
Barbarians - Raging, and teamed with the Mongols
Permanent Alliances - Not Enabled
City Razing - Enabled

Notes

Please visit the Civ4 SGOTM reference thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=168439) to check out the rules and procedures to ensure that you are adequately prepared for this game.

Teams will compete for up to four awards - the Gold, Silver and Bronze Laurels for the fastest finishes, and the Wooden Spoons for the lowest scoring finisher. The number of awards will depend on the number of teams.

All teams must play the sponsored variant - awards will be given to teams who achieve victories in the least turns.

All saved game files uploaded to the server are parsed through software that extracts and archives data about your save, including reload count for each turn set.

Please enjoy the game :)

Signing in.

Signing in!

Signing in! Looks like we got a very nice team together.

Signing in ! Although I will ask our dear and beloved captain :D to skip me until further notice :( (I love the whip, but not *that* much).

I should be able to play (and will get BtS I think), but I am not sure to have a decent internet access during my holidays. As soon as I'll know, I'll update.

In any case, go Smurkz :goodjob:

Game on! :salute:

As captain, let me welcome our new members Kulko, Wotan and DaviddesJ to the realms of Smurkzdom. If you are unknowledgeable regarding our proud history, take a look at our history thread (that Methos seems to have removed from his sig, but which still shows up handily at the top when googling for Smurkz :D). Also welcome back to all our old Smurkzers, especially Marc Aurel who returns after some time away. It'll be a pleasure to play with all of you. :)

If you've followed (or participated in) some of our previous games, you will know the drill. We are normally a very talkative team, and can discuss details and strategies to no end if not stopped by the necessity to play on. We often take our time playing, to hone and perfect the strategy, finishing early has been unheard of.

As captain, I will hold the whip and manage the roster. Intial order will be determined by order of first posts, unless someone wishes to be moved up or down. The player who is up should post a strategy consisting of our long-term objectives, our mid-term objectives, and what specifically should be done during his turnset. The point of this is to summarize the discussion that has been, so that nothing gets lost and forgotten, and give the other players a chance to comment, so that we are sure that we're all on the same page and pulling in the same direction.

Any thoughts and comments on the starting location? The starting spot seems like a good location for the first town, with the pigs, the river and the coast. Scout W-(N/S)W to see what else is hiding there?

Starting location seems fine, and since map style is archipelago-like with some Gyathaar special fractal sauce in it, I tend to like being coastal :lol:

Of course from what we see we may be on the low end on production...

Scouting options are W-SW (or W-W). A radical one is Settler N or NW, even if I hate loosing one turn on settling.

Wouldn't it make more sense to move the scout W-NW to see i there is anything worth moving the settler for.

The starting position looks very production thin to me, but unless we find something better,....

BTW did anybody play any of the testgames around? Is Domination still the fastest Victory condition to achieve?

Personally, I'd go with Scout W-NW. This would open up five tiles, three of which would be in the fat cross if we settled in place. I didn't play any of the test games so I have no clue how the barbs affect the game.

Signing in!

Hi to all and thanks for the warm "welcome back" !

Have had bad news for me! Need to be in hospital for the next 3 weeks, cause my achilles tendon is torn apart. Still do not know whether that means that I have extraordinary much time to play Civ and SGOTM or none at all. Will have to wait for 2 days after the surgery to get more info about that. Let's see!

Signing in. Updating my CIV has turned out a bit ugly, I have Warlords working but Vanilla still acts up. Should have it fixed soon i hope...

Ohoh lets hopes this gets better then the 2.5 Player rotation currently in place in the CIII-SGOTM12 :-).

Yeah, sounds like sick bay is full already :).

Get well soon, MA! And your computer too, Wotan!

I've played one of the test games. Observations sofar:

it's fairly easy to make peace with most civs after 40 turns or so. But unless we share a landmass, it may be better not to make peace. The barbs get fairly strong early on, and their axes and swords can menace the AI quite a bit.
we cannot pop goody huts with units, but we can with our borders. All I got is gold sofar (3 huts).
research is best done deep and narrow, for example to Alpha (for libs and trading) or to IW (to start our conquests, and to help the barbs get better units?). The barbs will pick up the low level techs that the AI researches, so we can skip them as long as we can afford the wait. Pottery (and AH) early on seems quite useful to make something out of the capital region.
We don't need to escort our settlers as long as the AI cannot hit them. Pretty obvious, but easily forgotten.
Barbs will found cities, apparently from turn 80-90 onwards. To prevent them from founding in our preferred spots, it seems enough to place a fogbusting warrior there.


What will be our victory condition? Is domination the fastest, or diplo? Domination certainly outperforms histo, conquest and space. I never tried culture, but I am guessing it will be slow.

Since it is a archipelago map we would need Astro for any kind of military Victory.
Diplo seems unlikely with all the negative relationship multipliers we get because of our apparent barbardom. (At least -3 for starting war and there was something else because everybody hates our buddies)

Culture? Never tried that too.

Hmm, I have yet to upgrade to 1.74, guess I'd better do that to make sure nothing's amiss.

Nice analysis zyxy, it all seems very reasonable. Question, what is the deciding factor behind when barb units of various strength appears? Will fast research of IW lead to faster appearance of barbie Swordsmen? Seems reasonable I guess, but are we sure about this?

Methos, you who know the HoF in and out, is Culture even something to consider? Astronomy isn't all that far off after all, and with the barbies to help us early on it shouldn't be too hard to run over the world, or?

Culture is slow, though I stop researching after Liberalism (take either PP or Nationalism as free tech). After than it's finishing the build phase and than 100% culture until you hit 75k. There's a little more too it, but you get my drift.

The laurel goes to the fastest victory date, which would probably be either domination, conquest, or diplo. I'd suggest we use the barbs as much as possible, such as keeing a lot of fog around and killing off AI settlers. If we continue to harass and keep land unoccupied, we'll have one massive size barbarian force running around.

I'd say go for conquest. If it looks like we're getting too far into the tech tree than aim for a backdoor diplo, or dom if we can hit it before the UN.

Since it is a archipelago map we would need Astro for any kind of military Victory.
Not necessarily I think, we can see some land across the water already...

Anyway, with the tiles we can see the capital will be very slow if settled in place. Starting to build a worker asap means that the worker will have nothing to do for a while - it takes 23 turns to train a worker, and about 40-45 turns to reach BW. Before we get to BW the worker can only mine the pig hill.
Alternative is to work a riverside tile for extra gold. Then we get more gold and it takes 30 turns to finish the worker, but of course growth will be slowed by 7 turns.

Yet another option is to start with a settler...

Does anybody on the team has any kind of prepared planing sheets available for the start?

Hmm having a worker sit around for 20 turns sounds wrong to me. shouldn't we rather grow first and then build worker?

Hmm having a worker sit around for 20 turns sounds wrong to me. shouldn't we rather grow first and then build worker?

I've always built a worker right out of the gate, so long as I had something for the worker to do.

So is the roster setup our typical setup, the way folks signed in? BTW, I'm considered an official lurker here, but if its needed I'll help out with playing turns. I realized during SGOTM4 that time was a bit tighter now, hence my lurking this one.

Quoting klrius from the pregamethread.


In fact it's the same in vanilla for team attitude. And the attitude value towards the barbs is fixed at -100.

That means nobody will ever vote for the barbarian team, if somebody should think about going for diplomatic .

On the other side the human will be nobody's worst enemy, because the barbarian team is not considered for worst enemy.

But more importantly with the list of leaders (none of the loose traders), there will be no tech trading before you get a leader to friendly (which is effectively cautious).
The same for bribing anybody to war.
There will be no trading of any kind with Tokugawa ever.
Open borders with Alex, Isa and Saladin would also require to get them to friendly first, which looks pretty impossible starting with -3 for having declared on them.

There is no difference whether the others are cautious or pleased. Both is effectively annoyed. So unless there is a chance to get somebody to friendly (maybe possible when sharing a religion with Asoka or Cyrus), there's not much point in trying to get on the good side of the civs.

A big problem will be war weariness. The barbarians don't suffer from it, but they collect war weariness points for the whole team. As they will lose lots of units in foreign territory that will ramp up quickly.


I think that rules out the diplo option.

I've patched and the starting save loads ok.

Methos, if you want to kick it off that's ok with me. I think however that we still need to decide our opening play. And personally I would prefer to wait until everybody signed in (unless that takes too long of course).

Roster sofar:
Methos
zyxy
Kulko
unkle [on leave]
Niklas
Marc Aurel [sick bay?]
Wotan [pc in sick bay?]

daviddesj is still missing, I'll pm him.

I would consider moving the settler S or SW, in the hope of gaining more production or resources. While it is possible that Gyathaar has put sea resources next to the pig, I think the game itself never does that, so it seems a bit unlikely. If this is true, then by moving SW we do not lose any potential resources, while a move S could only lose a possible sea resource W-W of the pig.
Moving S will at least gain a hill for extra production, but we will have useless coastal tiles. Moving SW apparently leaves us with just one (useless) coastal tile.

I guess in either case a scout move W-NW (or W-W?) is best.

Ok I tried creating a little test game to get a feeling for the game and these are my results:

The Barbs get Axes as soon as we research BW. But they don't use them.
I got various Techs for special Barb research, but never what I needed:
2950 Archery (I am quite sure we hadn't had Hunting at that time)
2400 Fishing
1700 Masonry
950 Agriculture

I went Mining --> BW --> AH --> IW myself, while the barbs brought Hunting and Mysticism into the happy alliance. But since I found nothing useful on my island IW is really slow. Also since I realized, that the Barb is not using his free axes against the well defended AI cities anyway, I am not sure what it will help to provide him with Swordsmen.

Signing in. I have successfully patched to 1.74 and loaded the 4000BC save.

My preference for the scout is NW-NW.

I think we want a coastal capital, and we want to keep the pigs in the fat cross. Fresh water is not so important, since we're Expansive (but we are likely to have it anyway).

We probably want to either settle in place, or 2W. (I think the space 2W 1N of settler is coast, is that right?) Moving the scout NW-NW probably gives us the most information about whether to move.

Moving W-SW reveals more of the map, but we aren't going to move down into the jungle, whatever we find down there. So that can wait.

P.S. I'm available from now through next Tuesday, then I will be away for 5 days, probably with internet access but no Civ4 access. I'd be happy if I could take my first turnset before then.

2W 1N looks like coast to me. Scout NW-NW is also a good option I guess.

Why a coastal capital?

I would set research to mining -> BW, and probably start with a worker because there's nothing better to do.

Methos, I guess we will not easily reach consensus on where to settle (and it will also depend on what the scout finds, I guess). Settling in place, 1SW and W-W all seem reasonable suggestions to me. I would suggest to wait 1/2 - 1 day for last minute brainwaves and then kick it off. (Or did I misread your post?)

David, perhaps if we put you in the roster between Methos and me?

Methos, I guess we will not easily reach consensus on where to settle (and it will also depend on what the scout finds, I guess).

Actually, I never suggested where to settle. I just mentioned possible move for the scout. I just figured we'd do like usual and move the scout and than decide where to settle. If I remember correctly, that's what we've done for most of our past games.

So the question is, what route goes the scout?

What suggestions have been made for the scout?

W W
W NW
NW NW

Seems like pretty much a consensus , with only a minor detail to decide.

Since we prefer settling in space so far, I think W W gives the fewest information. And without barbarian Lions to fear, there is no problem in finding the rigth city spots longtime before or settler is finished.

That leaves the question how far north we move. I think the field 3W will be an interesting one, as this is one we leave out of the fat cross, when we settle in Space. So I would prefer W-NW as the scouting move. I agree every discussion on citay spot is rather moot until we know the results of the scout.

A coastal capitol since this is a map where we will need lots of ships.

I agree with Kulko's reasoning. Without further knowledge, settling in place is what we're looking at. Thus it makes sense to try to see what we'd miss out on. W-NW would be my preference.

Methos, do you want the first turnset? You never answered zyxy on that.

What suggestions have been made for the scout?

W W
W NW
NW NW

Seems like pretty much a consensus , with only a minor detail to decide.

I'd prefer any move (on the scout) that helps us decide where to settle, or if the current spot we're in is a good one. Here's my take on the above options and how they figured into settling in place:
W W: If we settle in place this move would only reveal two tiles in the fat cross. Not a whole lot of options.
W NW: This move would reveal three tiles in our fat cross.
NW NW: This would reveal four tiles in our fat cross

I'd say the NW NW is our best option (as suggested by zyxy), as it reveals the most tiles. After this move we could than decide on whether we want to settle here, or somewhere else.

NW-NW was actually suggested by david.

It seems to me that the difference is that scout W-NW reveals the tiles S-S-SW and SW-SW of the settler, while scout NW-NW reveals the tile W-NW of the settler, which we already guess to be coast. (Does this move also reveal tiles across the water? It would seem so.) Of course, to decide on a settler move, it is also beneficial to know the tiles outside the current fat cross, but inside the potential new fat cross, so these tiles may all give useful knowledge.
If we go on the theory that the tile SW of the settler just captures four resources on the four edges of the fat cross (this seems to happen a lot), then a scout move W-W would be helpful, to check on the presence of a resource on the SW edge.
It seems to me that it's just a gamble with more or less equal prizes. I doubt we would move for a sea resource, so I have a slight preference for W-NW since it reveals most tiles. But I'm OK with either move.

Methos, I didn't mean to say you and I disagree on settling, but our team disagrees. The paragraph was directed at you, since you're up first :).

Methos, do you want the first turnset? You never answered zyxy on that.

Whoops, I missed this post somehow. :blush: Sure, I'll take it. I leave for work in an hour, so if we can make the scout decision before than I'll move him and post a screenshot.

If we move NW-NW, then we should see at least 5 tiles, that we can't see otherwise: from that location the scout should be able to see 1N 1W (coast), 2N 1W (across water), 2N 2W (across water), 1N 2W (across water), 1W. In particular, we might spot a seafood resource. I think it's definitely worth moving if we can get an extra seafood in our fat cross, as well as the pigs, at the cost of only one turn.

The other information that we get from moving west seems less likely to be useful to me. But it's a guessing game, of course.

Getting bored so I made a little dotmap. Red (NW-NW) reveals 7 tiles, Blue (W-NW) 5 tiles, Brown (W-W) 5 tiles. As I said, I like NW-NW because I think it has the highest probability of revealing something worth moving for. And, if we find seafood, we can get Fishing a lot quicker than BW or AH. Plus we don't have to worry about barbs pillaging our fishing boats. :-)

Unless I hear any major disagreement, I'll move the scout NW-NW tomorrow morning. It appears the consensus is that this is the best move.

For those of you who are new to Smurkz, I hope you don't mind our tendency to over discuss moves! :lol:

Sure, NW-NW is fine by me. :)

NW-NW gets my vote too. i'll reinstall CIV during the weekend and let BtS deal with upgrading. Hope it solves my Vanilla problems.

I concede the decision.

And I really don't think it makes that much of a difference. Each move shows 2 interesting fields, so its guessing where e will find that precious extra ressource. I also buy into that fishing argument.

Depending on what the scout sees, we could still move the settler SW to see one of the "blue" tiles. On the one hand, I sort of like settling on the coast (and we have cheap harbors). On the other hand, moving SW before settling doesn't cost us a turn, and is much more likely to get us an additional resource than to lose one.

Scout NW NW

http://www.civfanatics.net/methos/games/sgotm5/4000bc_map.JPG

Settling in place seems to be the way to go. Moving S-ish will bring the mountain within the borders. And a seafood resource in the SW won't help us if our capitol isn't on the coast.

I agree with settling in place, as there seems to be no compelling reason to move.

The banana definitely improves matters. We can mine the pig, irrigate the banana (once we get the basic techs), and have decent production and growth early on.

Hi All - hope you don't mind if I lurk this game. Don't expect too many comments but I might chip in with 1 or 2

Fine by me ruff! Espeically when you consider I signed on as a lurker and am playing! :lol:

So settle in place than, as it does seem to be the best option. What about research? AH and Pottery seem to be the only appropiate worker techs. There may be a coastal resource over the hill that we can't see, so than we'd go the Fishing route. Mining would definitely be good for some :hammers:. Without any appropiate techs I don't think starting with a worker would be wise.

Just rambling.

I would go mining -> BW. Mining the pig hill will help, chopping the forests will help to get the first settler out. BW will not be researched by the barbs very quickly, and it may help to get it to them quickly.

Pottery is good but requires 2 prereqs. In my test game Fishing, Archery, Hunting and Myst came from the barbs quite quickly after I got to BW IIRC, with Agri and Wheel a little later.

There seems to be nothing useful to build but a worker, or a warrior followed by a worker. Can we grow to size 2 by the time the warrior finishes?

@ruff_hi: sure, welcome!

Can we see a turn-by-turn sequence for citizens, builds, research and growth?

Going for BW fast sounds reasonable, though Pottery and Agri are tempting. But I guess the early settler wins out. Not having to worry about barbies helps there. :D

A problem with settling in place is that we lose any chance of putting a second city on the north part of our island. That could be a significant problem, since the island might be pretty small and the south part might be all jungle.

Settling 2W would give us more flexibility in placing future cities. And it might still get us a fish. At worst it costs us one turn. (I guess we could be unlucky and accidentally settle on our copper or horses. :( )

If we have only the pigs and bananas, I am not enthusiastic about mining the pigs---that gives us only +3 food, plus whatever farms we build. So I am tempted to research Agriculture followed by AH. That leaves us with very little production, until Slavery, but we are well placed to build settlers (and workers) quite fast. The question is how much colonizable space we have (and how much of it is jungle-covered and not useful for a while).

We're clearly going to need Agriculture, whether as a stepping stone to AH, or our main food source, or both, so I am inclined to do that first. If we research Mining-BW-Agri, our city growth will be really slow for a long time. If we go Agriculture first, then we will have a lot more of the island explored by the time we need to decide between Mining and AH next.

Anyone know which we are more likely to get first from our Barbarian partners, Mining or Agriculture?

P.S. If we do decide to settle 2W, then we should probably move SW-W this turn, to get as much information as possible.

Can we see a turn-by-turn sequence for citizens, builds, research and growth?

Do you know exactly how long it will take us to research various techs? That will be easier to work out once we settle. Or from a test game, I guess.

Going for BW fast sounds reasonable, though Pottery and Agri are tempting. But I guess the early settler wins out. Not having to worry about barbies helps there. :D

Building a settler might be slower with Agri-AH than with Mining-BW, but I don't think it will be a lot slower. And we'll still have the forests for future chopping. I can work out details if someone gives me our research times.

Don't barbs get a tech when every other civ knows it? I got horse riding from a deity crazy barb game and everyone said that was really bad luck as it gave the barbs horse archers.

Vanilla running without any problems now, so PC out of sickbay.

Settle in place does seem as the best option when there are no obviously better sites available.

A problem with settling in place is that we lose any chance of putting a second city on the north part of our island. That could be a significant problem, since the island might be pretty small and the south part might be all jungle.

Settling 2W would give us more flexibility in placing future cities. And it might still get us a fish. At worst it costs us one turn. (I guess we could be unlucky and accidentally settle on our copper or horses. :( )
I don't agree with this. I don't see how it would give us more flexibility, rather the opposite since the land seems to end beyond the pigs. Settling 2W would make it very hard to settle a town that would cover in the spices, in fact it would probably waste the entire eastern coast of our island. Settling in place covers in all available land in the north.

Do you know exactly how long it will take us to research various techs? That will be easier to work out once we settle. Or from a test game, I guess.
I used to know this and be able to calculate, but with all the patches and whatnot I'm not sure what still goes. But the first techs should be easy to figure out anyway - we'll make a static amount of :science:, we have no contacts that know the techs we research, and we don't know any of the prerequisites. All we need is the list of tech costs, which should be in the War Academy somewhere (I'll check that soon).

Building a settler might be slower with Agri-AH than with Mining-BW, but I don't think it will be a lot slower. And we'll still have the forests for future chopping. I can work out details if someone gives me our research times.
I'll be on it in a short while.

Settling 2W would make it very hard to settle a town that would cover in the spices, in fact it would probably waste the entire eastern coast of our island.

If we settle 2W then we have the option to later settle 1E, or 1E1S, and share the pigs. Conversely, if we settle in place, then we can never settle 2W, or 2W1S, even we discover additional resources (like fish or seafood, offshore) that we would like to work.

On archipelago maps, I tend to like to squeeze in more cities, even if they aren't "as good" in the long run. Whether that makes sense here is hard to tell at this stage.

Certainly settling in place is not so bad. But 2W will be a lot better if it does have a fish.

I would prefer not to squeeze towns that much...

Anyway, for those that want to play around a bit, I have attached a test game that reproduces the starting location as far as we know it.

Haven't had time to do any calculations, sadly. But here's the breakdown anyway:

Base tech costs can be found here (http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/info/techs/). We play on Monarch, Epic speed which means roughly a x2.2 modifier on costs. Agri is 133 I think, AH is 222 (these numbers are easily checked in the save). Caveat: I don't know how being teamed with barbies changes this. Still, the save will tell, no surprises there.

The calculation goes like this: Every turn we add beakers towards a tech according to this:
Take the number of commerce your capitol produces, presumably 8 or 9 early on (8 for palace, 0 or 1 for first citizen)
Add 1 if you have a town (we will have one).
Multiply by the known opponents factor - 1 + RDDW (0.30 * # known Civs who have the tech / # of Civs who started the game)
Multiply by the prerequisite factor - simplified that's 1.2 for every prereq we have (additive, not multiplicative).

Got to get to bed now, will have to do the calculations in the morning. :sad:

Since the consensus is settle in place, I suggest we go ahead and do that and see if it reveals anything more that is enlightening. Meanwhile, I'll try to model alternative starts (Mining or Agri seem the only two real possibilities).

Given how production-poor our capital is, I'd like to avoid starting by chopping down the forests, if at all possible.

It's also not clear how useful it is going to be to chop an early settler. If the only places we could put it are in dense jungle.

We may end up wanting to chop the forests for a galley.

Since the consensus is settle in place, I suggest we go ahead and do that and see if it reveals anything more that is enlightening.

Sounds good, so here she is:

http://www.civfanatics.net/methos/games/sgotm5/4000bc_settled.JPG (http://www.civfanatics.net/methos/games/sgotm5/4000bc_settled.JPG)

Darn, no coastal resources. I went ahead and selected a worker and mining, but both can easily be changed.

Anyway, for those that want to play around a bit, I have attached a test game that reproduces the starting location as far as we know it.

It doesn't seem to quite match. In the test game, I founded Karakorum in the same position as the real game, and it shows 15 turns to research Mining. The actual game is 14, in the screenshot above.

It doesn't seem to quite match. In the test game, I founded Karakorum in the same position as the real game, and it shows 15 turns to research Mining. The actual game is 14, in the screenshot above.

I think maybe that has to do with turn order or something. It switched to 13 turns after playing 1 turn.

In my test games the barb's research is somewhat random. Over three test games, archery is always the first tech they obtain, and always on turn 35 precisely. Hunting and fishing always appear early on (somewhere between turn 50 and turn 70. Speeds on agri, mining, wheel and myst vary.

Going from a testgame that represents the world as far as we know it, I tried two options:
1) Agri -> Wheel -> Pottery.
2) Mining -> BW
In both cases started with a worker (done on turn 23), followed by warriors, focussing on gold and growth at the expense of production, except before the first border expansion.
1): Agri on turn 16, Wheel on 31, Archery on 35, Pottery on 48. Worker first irrigates banana (done on 31), then another grass (done on 38), then builds some roads. On turn 48 Karakorum is size 3, growth in 2, and we have 2 farms and 2 roads (could have been 3 farms instead, and that's probably better).
2): Mining on turn 13, Archery on 35, BW on 40. Worker first mines the pigs (done on turn 29), then has to wait until turn 40. On turn 40 Karakorum is size 2 and needs 6 turns to grow to 3, and working the pigs means good production but less gold.

In short: I have changed my mind and now agree with david to go for Agri first.

It doesn't seem to quite match. In the test game, I founded Karakorum in the same position as the real game, and it shows 15 turns to research Mining. The actual game is 14, in the screenshot above.

It could well be that there is some difference, I'm not experienced at making testgames. I also noticed some other problems, namely that animals appear way too late, and China apparently never settles.

In short: I have changed my mind and now agree with david to go for Agri first.

Funny, because now I'm thinking we could go Mining-Agriculture:

turn 14: discover Mining
turn 23: build Worker, work Bananas/build Barracks for growth
turn 29: discover Agriculture, complete mine on Pigs, keep working Bananas
turn 34: grow to size 2, start Settler (7/turn)
turn 38: complete farm on Bananas (now 8/turn)
turn 54: build Settler

It's nearly the same if we go Agriculture-Mining:

turn 15: discover Agriculture
turn 23: build Worker, switch to Barracks for growth, working Bananas
turn 29: discover Mining
turn 31: complete farm on Bananas
turn 34: grow to size 2, start Settler (6/turn)
turn 39: complete mine on Pigs (now 8/turn)
turn 54: build Settler

(Compared to previous, we have +3 food at the end, but -6 hammers carryover; i.e., not much difference.)

This assumes we have a good 2nd city site, and we don't need immediate defense. (If we feel we need a warrior, we can build warrior instead of barracks in plan 1, working the mined pigs at size 1 for a while. That delays the settler only one turn, while generating a warrior on the way, instead of the partial barracks.)

I'm going to have to ask for a skip. My father just went into the hospital (again). For those of you who have been with Smurkz a while you know this is common place, it's either my dad or my wife's grandma.

Here's the current save (http://www.civfanatics.net/methos/games/sgotm5/saves/Temujin%20BC-4000.Civ4SavedGame).

Another approach is to just build the settler before growing at all:

turn 14: discover Mining
turn 23: build Worker, switch to Settler (4h/turn + 2h carryover)
turn 29: discover Agriculture, complete mine on Pigs (now 6h/turn)
turn 38: complete farm on Bananas
turn 50: build Settler, start working Bananas
turn 56: discover Bronze Working?
turn 59: grow to size 2

which gets the settler out 4 turns sooner, at the cost of delaying our capital's growth by 5 turns.

Sorry to hear that Methos, hope he recovers in good order.

Roster:
Methos - Just Played
DaviddesJ - UP!
zyxy- On Deck!
Kulko - Warming Up
Niklas
Wotan
unkle - On leave
Marc Aurel - Sick bay


EDIT: Changed order on DJ's request.

Sorry to hear that Methos, I hope all will be well.

As for the game plans: it seems that the build order is fixed for the first 23 turns, and after that it will probably depend on what our scout finds (are we alone?).

As for research, I would be tempted to head for Pottery and then Writing (for the lib). This will also give our worker useful things to do for a while, whereas Mining and BW generate just a few tasks. Also, BW and/or Sailing may be needed early on, depending on our surroundings.

It seems to me that the best thing is that david just picks the start he prefers (either Mining or Agri, it seems fairly equivalent) and then he or the group can reevaluate when we know a bit more.

With the shield poor start that we have, I would like to see BW and Slavery pretty soon. However, I realize that Slavery won't be very efficient without farms anyway, so I'm fine with going for Agri first.

I'm not sure a 5-turn delay of growth in the capitol would be worth it. I guess it depends on what other sites we find for towns. Perhaps DJ could play 23 turns until the first worker, which is the point where we need to decide.

I don't think accelerating the settler is worth delaying capital growth, especially since it would be nice to have either AH or BW before we build the settler, so we can use information about horses/copper to situate our city.

I discovered that Agriculture-Animal Husbandry can give us a settler on turn 53, one turn sooner than if we start with Mining (based on research rates in the test game).

turn 16: discover Agriculture
turn 23: build Worker (92/90), switch to Settler (4h/turn + 2h carryover)
turn 24: switch to Barracks for growth (3f/turn)
turn 31: complete banana farm (4f/turn)
turn 34: grow to size 2, switch back to Settler (6h/turn)
turn 37: discover Animal Husbandry
turn 42: complete pig pasture (9h/turn)
turn 53: build Settler (153/150)

Since Agriculture-Mining also works as a strategy, I'm going to start with Agriculture, play the first 16 turns now (until Agriculture), then post screenshot for further discussion.

OK, here's the screenshot. We got Agriculture in 15 turns; the number of turns seems to fluctuate up and down somewhat unpredictably, I guess this has to do with barbarian influence. We have a few good city sites on the southeast peninsula: clams-stone, or gold-rice, or stone-clams-gold (but needing cultural expansion for the last two), or gold-stone-rice (but needing cultural expansion for the last two).

Key decision is Mining or AH next. Game reports 23 turns to AH, but I think this is not completely reliable. I'll upload the save now, so people can get it---I am happy to continue after discussion, or pass the baton to zyxy.

3550 BC save: http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/civ4sgotm5/Smurkz_SG005_BC3550_01.Civ4SavedGame

P.S. Asoka founded Buddhism on turn 13. Hinduism is not known yet.

The discovery of gold in a relatively convenient location (as these things go) suggests perhaps that we prioritize Mining rather than AH. We can get Mining-BW before we build settler, and use information about copper in deciding where to settle. We can also switch to Slavery after we build our settler but before it settles, thus reducing the effects of anarchy (the 2nd city will avoid losing a turn to anarchy, as it would if we switch either before building the settler, or after settling it).

AH seems relatively less useful since we haven't found anything else that needs a pasture. However, I still think it's a reasonable option, too. AH gets us the settler 1 turn sooner than Mining, and leaves our pigs in a more productive state. However, discovering copper is more likely than horses, and also more valuable.

I think DaviddesJ has a good point with going Mining-BW now and switch to Slavery when Settler is in transit.

I agree with Wotan. I think the virtues of knowing the location of bronze, and having access to the whip, outweighs the value of AH in the short run.

The location 1E of the gold, or possibly 1S of there, seems to me the best location(s) for our second town. The nearby short river guarantees that we'll have enough food to work the valuable gold and stone tiles.

I am back from the hospital. Everything went as good as could have been hoped for! Now I have to rest in bed for the coming two weeks and not much else to do than playing CIV ...
So you can count me again amongst the people who can play ATM.

nice bit of free scouting from the lion. Any other map info revealed by the other animals?

@MA: :goodjob: Glad to have you back!

@ruff_hi: Good thinking, we should be able to get the animals to find out quite a lot about the map.

Regarding play order, I still think DJ can play up to the completion of the worker and hand off there.

I just tried to load the save and the game hung - anyone else had similar problems? Yes - I have installed the SGOTM mod.

I just tried to load the save and the game hung - anyone else had similar problems? Yes - I have installed the SGOTM mod.

Game loads fine for me.

Is the problem just with the 3550BC save? Can you load the 4000BC save?

My current inclination would be to build 2nd city where we get immediate access to gold and rice. Later we can build another city with access to stone and clams. Of course, discovery of copper or horses could change build priorities (or maybe we will find a good site to the southwest, although currently it doesn't look so promising).

Sounds like the consensus is for Mining, I can't argue with that although I still have sympathy for AH. But it's expensive research and if we get Mining we can afford to put off AH for a long time. (Pottery will probably be next after BW? Any chance we'll get The Wheel soon enough from barbs to be useful?)

Barring other comments, I will play on this evening, probably to completion of Mining (since there aren't any real decisions before then).

Is the problem just with the 3550BC save? Can you load the 4000BC save?Yes, all saves including the test save that someone loaded. I get a MS Visual C++ runtime error. Its not a big deal as I am not playing any turns - was just going to have a look at the other barb explorers.

Saladin is on the island south of us. Izzy, Asoka, and either Cyrus or Alex is on the big island. I'm guessing Cyrus, because he met Asoka and Izzy. Cyrus also knows Toku, so he's probably on the same island.Perhaps we should try to make peace with these civs, so that they will hopefully start to hate each other more than they hate us, and maybe start some wars amongst themselves. OTOH, the barbs, when armed with axes, might cause them some trouble, so perhaps it is too early for peace yet...
It looks like we are alone on a fairly small island. There's probably a coastal connection to Saladin.

Barbs don't seem to be far in research on anything yet.

I agree Mining -> BW is better than AH, especially since we can only see one pasture-resource on our island sofar. I would like to get Pottery soon as well, but I guess BW first is better.

Based on the current state of affairs I would place the cities like david suggested. Another option is E of the stone, which leaves room for a semidecent town 2E of the rice.

BW will take almost 40 turns, so there's no rush on the settler - better grow the capital first. We will need some warriors as fogbusters to prevent the barbs from settling on our island.

Perhaps we should try to make peace with these civs, so that they will hopefully start to hate each other more than they hate us, and maybe start some wars amongst themselves. OTOH, the barbs, when armed with axes, might cause them some trouble, so perhaps it is too early for peace yet...

In my testgame I went immediately after BW, so the Barbs got axes really soon. But still since they only get single Axes, they are no match for the 2-3 Bowmen the AI has by then, meaning they have no real effect. Only thing that happens, that the AI must reproduce 1 or 2 warriors, biut I think having peace is worth more.

While it doesn't affect the next few turns, I don't understand the comment about "BW will take almost 40 turns so no hurry to build settler." I think I calculated the timeline pretty carefully, the earliest we can build settler if we go Mining next is turn 54, i.e., 39 turns from now. This is a few turns longer than it will take us to get BW.

With all of the jungle around us, it will take an awful lot of warriors to fogbust our whole island. I'm not convinced that's productive. I'd rather just try to settle the key sites we want.

(Does fogbusting even work, when the barbarians are on our team?)

I guess I should have looked at the timeline more carefully... all fine then.

I don't know if fogbusting really works, but based on my testgames sofar I think it does. It seems that even the barbs themselves fogbust :).
At least, not fogbusting does not work.
We may not have to fogbust everywhere, but perhaps the key locations if there are any.

I don't even know how barbarian cities appear. Do they come from barbarian settlers? Or do they just spring into existence out of thin air?

If barbarian cities just appear, and they don't appear anywhere that we can see, then I agree that a couple of fogbusters at key locations are probably a good idea. How soon do we have to worry about barbarian cities appearing?

OK, I just played through finishing the worker, as suggested. We're 2 turns from Mining (barbarians seem to be helping).

3310 BC save: http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/civ4sgotm5/Smurkz_SG005_BC3310_01.Civ4SavedGame

Almost finished exploring the island. It's pretty crappy (see screenshot). There's one decent site in the west, with rice-dye-bananas, but only after we can clear jungle. I think our first two cities are likely to be the gold-rice and clams-stone in the southeast. Let's hope copper pops up somewhere useful.

I set production to Barracks. If we're going to switch to settler as soon as we reach size 2, then the logical thing is to build Barracks while we grow. Only other choice is Warrior, but the hammers will just decay if we don't finish it.

Worker spent one turn farming the space next to Karakorum. Next turn it can begin farming bananas. Then mine pigs, then go back and finish the 2nd farm.

Passing to zyxy, maybe he will have some other ideas.

Nice going DJ, a solid start! :)

Roster:
Methos
DaviddesJ - Just Played
zyxy - UP!
Kulko - On Deck!
Niklas - Warming Up
Wotan
Marc Aurel
unkle - On leave


Go zyxy!

Are we goging to switch to standard 10-turn Sets? Or do we play until the Settler is build?

And are there any open points? or do we just implement the posted plan?

I think we can run with roughly-20-turn sets for a while longer.

Every player is responsible for posting the plan that he intends to implement. Of course things may come up during the turnset that will change those plans. Standard procedure then would be to stop and post, letting others see the situation. But if you know there's only one way out, just go ahead.

As an aside, I have now finally patched up everything successfully, and the save loads just fine.

If someone can figure out exactly how barbarian cities form, we can make a plan for how much fogbusting we need, and when. That seems the most pressing piece of information. It would be a significant dent in our plans if barb cities pop up at our key city sites. If we need to build several warriors first, the time to decide that is now.

I hate to do too much fogbusting, as we should use the barbs to our advantage. If anything, I suggest we fogbust the locations we plan on settling and leave the rest for the barbs. Barb cities should help us out (though I'm unsure how exactly) and the barbs running around our island will help us with defense.

Good start indeed! Well done!

Got it.

Qin is on the land to our north. Alex, Saladin and Qin haven't met anyone yet.

I agree the land is very poor, but the SE will support two fine cities. The SW will support about 3 after jungle chopping is available.

I don't know how barb cities form (is this visible in the SDK?) but I guess the following based on a single test game where I paid attention to this:
- They appear from turn 70-80 onwards.
- They do not appear in areas where the fog of war is lifted by cities or military units. Scouts, workers etc do no count as fogbusters. Barbarian military may or may not count, I don't know - I would guess that they do.

Research: Mining (done on turn 25) -> BW (ETA roughly turn 50-55).

Builds:
Davids plan:
23: work banana, train settler (overflow 2).
24: start irrigating banana, switch to rax.
32: irrigate E of banana for 1 turn.
33: move worker to pigs.
34: start mining the pigs. Karakorum has grown to size 2, work banana + pigs. Switch back to settler, 20 shields in the rax. Settler due on turn 54. On turn 54, we can start a warrior, due on 58. Karakorum will grow to size 3 in 9 turns.

If we want to train a warrior, then the settler will be delayed. The earliest I can get it is on turn 58:
23: work banana, train warrior (overflow 2).
24: start irrigating banana.
31: banana farmed.
32: irrigate E of banana for 1 turn.
33: move worker to pigs.
34: start mining the pigs. Karakorum has grown to size 2, work banana + pigs.
39: warrior trained, overflow 1. Pigs mined. Train settler, due on turn 58.

The difference between these options is in the timing of the settler (4 turns difference) and the warrior. Moreover, the first option collects 20 shields for a rax (when do they decay?), the second collects 23 food.

Another alternative is to train a second warrior on turn 39 of the latter option, and let Karakorum grow once more:
39: warrior trained, overflow 1. Pigs mined. Train 2nd warrior.
41: start irrigation W of Karakorum
43: grown to size 3, work bananas, pigs, and plains or forest.
44: 2nd warrior trained, start settler, due on turn 61.

I would prefer to get that first settler completed fast. If barbie towns don't appear until turn 70-80, we should have plenty of time regardless.

With this much jungle around, I'm tempted to go for IW pretty fast. Of course we will want AH first, and presumably also Pottery. Writing, maybe. For everything else I would rather rely on the barbies.

I played one more test game and tried to check carefully.


- The first babarian city appeared in turn 65. The second in turn 75.
- From then on no more appeared, although there where areas of land which where only fogbusted by Barb Archers (Like also part of my island.)
- A new warrior/animal never appeared in a place that was fogbusted by an existing Barbarian.

I would conclude the following from this:
- Barbs bust fog for the purposes of new Barbs appearing (AT least in our moded version)
- randomly appearing barbs will not be a military force in this game, as there cannot be more then 1 or 2 of them in the same place.

As for or concrete situation this seems to demand the following actions:
- Let 2 Barbs Archers appear which then secure our city spots for us.
- Don't give away any potential of our own position in order to strengthen the Barbs. They are just too incapable of making use of it.

I've been mucking around with a teamed with Barbs OCC and found:

- WW was bad - really bad, WorldBuilded myself the globe
- Barbs are hopeless city developers, their build order is silly (granery, barracks, walls, worker)
- if we want to maximize barb cities, assign one of our workers to work their cities
- barbs are hopeless defenders - there were cities with 4 barb archers defenders that were under attack, the next round, 3 archers just wander out of the city (need to leave some good defenders in these cities if you want the barbs to keep them)
- no co-ordinated attack, one unit at a time when it gets to the city
- axes appear when you have copper
- swords appear when you have iron
- horse archers appear when you have horses and horseriding
- they provided some useful tech (lots of filler tech but also code of laws)

It's not really necessary to switch to settler for one turn before barracks. We get the settler on turn 54 either way. Basically we have the choice of 3 hammers in barracks, plus 3 extra food, or 6 hammers overflow from the settler when we finish it on turn 54. It's about a tossup.

I believe the hammers in the barracks should not start to decay until 75 turns of not building it (50 at normal speed). So that would be turn 109.

I like the turn-54 settler, followed by pumping out a few warriors while we grow, then a granary once we get Pottery. It would be nice if we could get Wheel from barbs rather than having to research it ourselves.

I wonder how soon we have to worry about enemy galleys showing up. Maybe we can make peace before then. (Temporary peace, because I think our strategy may be to cross the straits and take out our southern neighbor fairly early.)

OK, it sounds like the plan for the next 20 odd turns is set: settler on turn 54 it is.

I'll play later tonight (in a few hrs), unless someone protests.

Turnlog

Turn 23, 3310BC: strange... if I start the game from the save, then all scores are 0, but if I load the save from the game, they're not...
Anyway, switch Karakorum to settler.

Turn 24, 3280BC: start irrigating banana. Switch build to rax. Our scout has nothing of interest to do, except uncover a few sea tiles.

Turn 25, 3250BC: Mining -> BW. ETA in 27 turns.

Turn 28, 3160BC: Hinduism founded in an unknown place.

Turn 31, 3070BC: uncover another "interesting" ocean tile. Bananas are irrigated now.

Turn 32, 3030BC: irrigate SW of Karakorum for 1 turn.

Turn 34, 2980BC: start mining the pigs. Karakorum has grown to size 2, switch back to settler.

Turn 35, 2950BC: the barbs have discovered archery for us!

Turn 39, 2830BC: pig mine done.

Turn 41, 2770BC: worker continues farming the tile SW of Karakorum.

Turn 45, 2650BC: our scout really has nothing to do anymore, so I fortify him on the gold mountain.

Turn 47, 2590BC: finished the farm, start another. Cyrus has slavery.

Turn 49, 2530BC: barbs have archers and warriors now, and have uncovered new (probably small) islands, to our southeast and to our west.

Turn 51, 2470BC:
http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b293/zyxy/Smurkz4_5_BC2470_wealthiest.jpg

Turn 52, 2440BC: we discover BW. There is one source of copper on our lands.
This seems a good moment to hand off. We will have a settler in 2 turns and need to decide where to go, perhaps a dotmap would be good.
We also have to decide what to research next, AH is just a suggestion, we could also spend a few turns on, say, IW, until the barbs give us hunting, and then switch to AH.
The barbs will get us fishing and hunting soonish. Wheel is also underway, but will still take a while.
We can spot the borders of all civs now, except Alex. Still no sign of him. He could be on some small island.
Nobody switched to Hinduism, so I guess Asoka founded it (he already has Buddhism).

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b293/zyxy/Smurkz4_5_BC2440_our_island.jpg

The save. (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/civ4sgotm5/Smurkz_SG005_BC2440_01.Civ4SavedGame)

Looking good, well played!

Roster:
Methos
DaviddesJ
zyxy - Just Played
Kulko - UP!
Niklas - On Deck!
Wotan - Warming Up
Marc Aurel
unkle - On leave


@Kulko: Time for the big debut! :D

Got it.

The Plan:

Finish Settler and move to gold mountain. (Location suggestions welcome)
Build second Settler (to send to copper?)
Switch to slavery in between
Research AH.

I am inclined to put the first city SE of gold mountain. This means we'll want to send the worker along with it, to irrigate the rice then mine the gold. Therefore we won't have another worker available to build a pig pasture, for quite a while. Therefore I think there's no big hurry for AH, so I suggest that we research Wheel-Pottery, so that we can immediately start taking advantage of our cheap granaries.

I am also inclined to build a couple of warriors for fogbusting and patrolling, while we grow Karakorum. Rather than an immediate second settler. But I feel less strongly about that.

Turn 31, 3070BC: uncover another "interesting" ocean tile. Bananas are irrigated now.

What/where is the "interesting" ocean tile? I don't see anything interesting in the screenshot. I can't load the save right now.

Can't DL the save right now, GOTM server seems to be down. But from the screen shot it looks as if there are 5 viable city locations on the map. So haw many do we use early? 2 or 3? Will post a dotmap for discussion when I have looked at the save. Bronze and Golds seems to be the most important sites maybe followed by one near the fresh water or near our horses when they are revealed.

What/where is the "interesting" ocean tile? I don't see anything interesting in the screenshot. I can't load the save right now.

I think he was being sarcastic. The quotes (to me) implied that it wasn't interesting at all. Maybe a grin would help.

Turn 31, 3070BC: uncover another "interesting" :D ocean tile. Bananas are irrigated now.

Yeah, I should have added the grin. :)

My reason for going AH would be horses (to help our city placement), much more than the pasture. But it's definitely a weak reason, and if it turns out we can actually use pottery then I would be happy to go for that. Main drawback is that the barbs are researching Wheel, so postponing pottery saves research cost (but potentially costs gold if we have to delay cottages).

On the plan:
- I too would put some warriors between the settlers. And I think a turnplan is still helpful at this stage.
- I would not switch to slavery until we actually have to whip something.

... is that the barbs are researching WheelHow do you tell what the Barbs are researching? Do you check the beakers invested in the techs and if there are beakers invested, then it is from the Barbs? OR is there another way?

Finally managed to get the save downloaded. Have looked at the map and if we place the next town SE of Gold as suggested do we go with another 3 (max) towns on this island. And if so are the dots I have placed on this map a good suggestion. Remember I am still learning Civ4 so be nice to me if I am oblivious of something apparent. Also what about the huts, do we pop or let towns expand to pop them?
http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/28942/Smurkz4_5_BC2440_our_island1.JPG

That's pretty much exactly what my dotmap would look like as well. :thumbsup: Only thing is that we might want a town in the far SW as well.

It seems that since we're teamed up with the barbies, we cannot pop huts other than with borders. So we don't really have much choice in the matter.

OK thanks for the comments. I did not place a dot in the SW since we talked about carrying the war (I am a warmonger you know) to the arabs there at the first possible opportunity and a north coast town on their island would use the clams better. Might be wrong but the one thing i have learnt the hard was was to limit towns in Civ4... ;)

@ ruff-hi

I think this is twofold.

First the Barbs are officially researching a tech like everybody else. Since they are our allies, we can see that in the Scoreboard. Unfortunately the spend the grand total of 1 bpt on their glorious quest for enlightment. This will grow a bit, when they gain cities, but still.

Second the Barbs gain freebeakers in every tech so which is known to other civs. These are not too much either but a nice way to fill some gaps in our tech tree. To find how well e stand for these, we can only look in the science advisor and check how the beakers accumulate (we shre Beakers with Barbs.)

Hope that clarifies your question.

Re Slavery:
Well I behave like zyxy when I play alone, but the idea to minimize impact by switching when we loose the least production appeared to make sense for me. And since sooner or later we always go into slavery ...

Main drawback is that the barbs are researching Wheel, so postponing pottery saves research cost (but potentially costs gold if we have to delay cottages).

I don't think this is a drawback. The barbarians are researching Wheel, so if we also research Wheel, that helps us (a little bit), since our beakers are combined. And when we finish Wheel, they will switch to something else, which might help us too. There's no reason to avoid what they are researching. In fact, it's a (slight) advantage to research the same thing.

I would not switch to slavery until we actually have to whip something.

Why? It always costs 1 turn to switch, so I normally try to time that when the impact is least. In general, that's when we have a settler built but not settled yet.

Agree we switch when Settler in transit

Yep, I agree with that as well. We know we're going to switch, so no need to wait.

The drawback in researching TW comes not from the barbies researching it, but the trickle of beakers that we get from other civs knowing it. Researching high-level techs that no one else knows yet guarantees that we get as many free beakers in the low-level techs as possible. That said, I think the early cottages will more than make up for the supposed loss.

I think we should try to decide on a long-term strategy regarding research pretty soon. We know most of the map, so no need to wait.

Dotmap looks very good to me. I would settle green, and then pink. The other spots will not be useful early on.

Niklas has the right explanation for my Wheel comment. The barbs are actively researching hunting.

I typically prefer to wait with switching to slavery because sometimes I never do, or by the time I switch I can make a double civics change. But there is usually no gain and I'm ok with switching after the settler is out.

As for pottery: when do we need cottages? I.e., when do we have a worker available to build them? That should determine the timing IMO.

Research: we will get Fishing from the barbs quite soon, and will need Sailing and preferably IW for overseas war. IW is also needed to clear all that jungle. Wheel is useful and will be learnt by the barbs soonish. Apart from this, pottery is useful for the economy, AH has some use as well.
If we don't need pottery soon, then IW seems the best choice for research right now.

Karakorum:

Turn 54: Finish Settler Switch to Warrior (0/36F, 6/22P)
Turn 55: Switch to Slavery (0/36F, 6/22P)
Turn 59: Finish Warrior , switch to Baracks (16/36F, 20/90P)
Turn 64: Grow to Size 3 , Switch to Settler (0/38?F, 60?/90P)
Turn 81: Build Settler

Open Question: build a second warrior (delaying the settler by one turn) instead of working on Rax.I do not see the point, as we have Fog busters galore with all these handy Barbs.

City 2:
Turn 60 Build City, Start on Warrior (0/34F, 0/22P)
Turn 66 Finish Farm on Rice, start Mine? (18/34F, 6/22P)
Turn 70 Grow to Size 2 (0/36F, 10/22P)

Open Question: Do I Road the rice first or rather hurry to the Gold mountain for a faster mine?

Diplo:
Sooner or later the first AIs will appear and whine for peace. I suggest we give it to the guys on the main continent, to make sure they can start wars between themselves. As for the others, I think keeping them worried a bit about their settlers seems fine to me.

Research:
I agree with zyxy, that it would be more useful to start on IW as long as we don't have the worker turns to make use of wheel or pottery.

Speaking of worker turns: Since we can't capture a second guy, we will build it? and where?

The drawback in researching TW comes not from the barbies researching it, but the trickle of beakers that we get from other civs knowing it. Researching high-level techs that no one else knows yet guarantees that we get as many free beakers in the low-level techs as possible.

This sounds right at first, but I think it is fallacious. If we research TW first, insetad of AH, then we get less help from the other civs toward TW. But we get more help from the other civs toward AH, because we're learning it later. I think it comes out basically the same either way. Thus we should learn what is the most helpful.

I agree with zyxy, that it would be more useful to start on IW as long as we don't have the worker turns to make use of wheel or pottery.

The reason to research Pottery isn't to build cottages. The reason to research Pottery is that we have the advantage of being able to build half-price granaries, and we should start doing that as soon as possible. In conjunction with Slavery, it will help all of our cities, as we put them down.

IW would be very useful, but I fear it will take a really long time, and we aren't delaying it that much by doing Wheel/Pottery first.

Road for rice is not important, imho. Until we get Sailing, or build lots of roads, we won't be able to share resources between cities, anyway.

I'm inclined to sign peace with everyone, if only to prevent WW from accumulating. The theoretical benefit from slowing their development doesn't seem so important.

Tripleposting eh? :nono: Better put them in a single post instead. :)

This sounds right at first, but I think it is fallacious. If we research TW first, insetad of AH, then we get less help from the other civs toward TW. But we get more help from the other civs toward AH, because we're learning it later. I think it comes out basically the same either way. Thus we should learn what is the most helpful.
If we don't research anything at all, we'll get all techs from the barbies! But of course that's a rather moot point, since it would take way too long to get them, and we'd want to work fast. So the issue isn't how to get as many beakers as possible from the barbies, but how to get as many beakers per turn from them. The way to do that is to have as little overlap as possible between what we research and what the other civs know, preferably none at all.

For this particular example, we would get help towards AH only if some other civs learn it. And we would only get as much help if as many civs know it that knows TW. For AH specifically, it would seem that we might actually get some help from the barbies, but for IW we certainly want it way before the AIs drag their researchers over there.

The optimal research strategy would be to research deep, and maximize the overlap between what the AIs know and what we don't know. And only go in to research some specific low-level techs if we really need them here and now.

The reason to research Pottery isn't to build cottages. The reason to research Pottery is that we have the advantage of being able to build half-price granaries, and we should start doing that as soon as possible. In conjunction with Slavery, it will help all of our cities, as we put them down.

IW would be very useful, but I fear it will take a really long time, and we aren't delaying it that much by doing Wheel/Pottery first.
That's a good point. Can we see some turn plans on when we could have pottery, and when it would be beneficial to start a granary?

Road for rice is not important, imho. Until we get Sailing, or build lots of roads, we won't be able to share resources between cities, anyway.

I'm inclined to sign peace with everyone, if only to prevent WW from accumulating. The theoretical benefit from slowing their development doesn't seem so important.
I agree with both these statements. No point connecting the rice, we won't have health issues in our towns for a long time yet.

It's complicated to guess when the barbs exactly will research a tech, when you only have 1 turn to look at. it would be helpful to track the Beakers/Tech from turn to turn, to see how many they get. Of course that will be easier once we know what Techs other civs have.

Would it be allowed to look into the last turns autosave to compare?

Tripleposting eh? :nono: Better put them in a single post instead. :)

I don't see a triple post....:mischief:

Would it be allowed to look into the last turns autosave to compare?

You can look at the save, but you can't make any moves or actions. Open it up, look around, but don't make any moves that can't be reversed.

Edit: If your still unsure, I suggest speaking with the GOTM Staff.

No complaints so far from me! Well played Methos DaviddesJ and zyxy!
I also agree to most of the dotmap from Wotan. However I have one single comment on that point: I would place the light blue dot on the coast 1 W in case we could guarantee a passageway for galleys by culture boarders across the western sea. That depends on how far the island west of us extends to the east, so we have to wait for fogbusting barbs there, but I think I can see some lighter bue water beloe the fog 3W of our home island. I have developped a playstyle in which I try to strike at the most dangerous civs first and spare the weaker ones for later. Saladin and Qin are on small islands helplessly isolated. so they are no match for our forces later on. But the big continent will see some early strong AIs. So I think, the main priority is to land on the big continent if possible. What do you lot think of that issue?

If we don't research anything at all, we'll get all techs from the barbies! But of course that's a rather moot point, since it would take way too long to get them, and we'd want to work fast. So the issue isn't how to get as many beakers as possible from the barbies, but how to get as many beakers per turn from them. The way to do that is to have as little overlap as possible between what we research and what the other civs know, preferably none at all.

You could say more precisely that you want to minimize the overlap between what we know and what they know (since we still get extra beakers in techs that we're researching while they know it).

If we research Wheel and Pottery first, then there will be more turns when we know Wheel and so do they, but there will be fewer turns when we know AH and so do they. I think these effects approximately cancel out.

For this particular example, we would get help towards AH only if some other civs learn it.

Surely, if we research Wheel-Pottery-AH, several opponents will discover AH well before we do. And we're talking about even Wheel-Pottery-IW-AH, in which case probably everyone else will discover AH before we do.

And we would only get as much help if as many civs know it that knows TW.

Is the amount of help that we get a fixed number of beakers per turn per opponent who has the tech? Or is it related to the cost of the tech, so it's more in more expensive techs?

I have developped a playstyle in which I try to strike at the most dangerous civs first and spare the weaker ones for later. Saladin and Qin are on small islands helplessly isolated. so they are no match for our forces later on. But the big continent will see some early strong AIs. So I think, the main priority is to land on the big continent if possible. What do you lot think of that issue?

I am not so sure this is practical. First, of course, we may not have access before Astronomy. Secondly, since none of those civs like us very much, we will have trouble fighting them just one at a time. Once we land, we may find ourselves fighting several at once, which will be difficult.

I am not so sure this is practical. First, of course, we may not have access before Astronomy. Secondly, since none of those civs like us very much, we will have trouble fighting them just one at a time. Once we land, we may find ourselves fighting several at once, which will be difficult.

Oh yes, if we need Astronomy for that you are right. But what I meant is that we should try it if we can get there with galleys. Therefore we have to know whether we can extend our culture borders as far as we need to see shallow coastal waters over there at the island in an adjacent tile. We just don't know yet. You surely know about galleys crossing deep water tiles in case they are in your or a friendly nations cultural borders - an AI with whom you have an "open borders" agreement or are at war with will do.
Concerning the fighting one after another, I think that problem never vanishes throughout the game unless we decide on not going for a military victory at all. We will need some land on the big continent to win by domination. Since we can make peace with AIs, I don't just yet see why a couple of AIs should not be willing to accept peace at at certain point.
But I didn't think so far yet. I stumbled upon this issue, while thinking about our UU. There is hardly a more useless UU in CIV than the Keshik, since its only value is that it ignores terrain movement costs. In the Mongol GOTM there were a couple of players (me included) who build only very few Keshiks. The Keshik is just useful for pillaging when we have a lot of hills and jungles and woods in that area. But having a large Keshik force only pillaging is just not worth the amount of upkeep you spend on it. But this time we have the opportunity to hand over these units to the barbs, who do the pillaging for us (OK out of our control, they surely will attack also cities with them. But AFAIK Barbs will pillage a lot.) So what might that unit in barbarian hands do to the AIs? We just need a barb city on our way to the large continent for handing them over. We will not pay maintenance for the Keshiks but hopefully they will cause a lot of trouble for the AIs to leave them backwards, while we can develop. By the way, we have not considered mysticism so far. HAve we already given up on the very effective CS Slingshot? We have Gold available, so I guess at least CFR will try it. Balbes is too fond of it not to try ...

I didn't understand that. How could we give Keshiks to the barbarians. :confused:

I didn't understand that. How could we give Keshiks to the barbarians. :confused:

Just move a unit in the barbarian culture border and press the "present" button in the bottom action for units bar. That's it.

I didn't understand that. How could we give Keshiks to the barbarians. :confused:I wouldn't do this. Barbarians use units even worse than AIs do. Once you have horses and horseriding, the barbs start to spring horse archers.

I see no point in giving units to the barbarians. I haven't thought about CS slingshot. Might be practical.

I would really like to have some fogbusters of our own. There are not that many barbs on our island (only 3), and there's no way to say where they will go. I would hate to lose the copper spot to a barb town, and we'll need several (maybe two, I don't really know the settling rules for barb towns) warriors to prevent barb towns from springing up in that area.

It will take 9 turns to grow K(arakorum) to size 3, and another 8 to grow to size 4. We can build 2 warriors in 8 turns, and another 2 in 11. So I think we can either

grow to size 3 and build 2 warriors, or
grow to size 4 and build 4 warriors, or
grow to size 4, build 3 warriors and put some hammers in the rax.


After this, I would build a settler,which will take 15 or 17 turns, depending on the size of K. Almost certainly we'll want to follow up with a worker (9 or 10 turns, or less if we whip) to help improve our towns.

After the worker, I think we need pottery to build a granary in K and start some cottages. I would choose to grow to size 4 (either of the latter two options is fine) and whip the worker (can we whip 2 pop at size 4?). This means we would need pottery some 35 turns from now. It takes half that time to research it, so I would invest a dozen turns or a bit more in IW, then switch to Wheel if needed and follow up with pottery. IIRC the beakers invested in a tech are never lost.

In our second town I would probably start with a WB (we hopefully have fishing by then) for some exploration. After that, a granary seems handy. The town will be founded 10 turns from now, and it will need about 20-25 turns to finish the WB, so we are looking at a similar timing. (I'm too lazy to compute exactly, but it will take 9 or 10 turns for the town to grow, during which time it does 1 hpt, then it does 3 hpt for while, and at size 3 it can go to 4 hpt. A WB is 45 hammers.)
Obviously,if we want to build a granary here before a WB, then we have to go for pottery right away. I would certainly not base the decision on the few beakers the barbs get every turn, but rather on our needs for the tech.

I would let our current worker finish his current job and then travel with the settler. Irrigate rice, mine gold, and only after that perhaps start some roads (we don't need health yet).

Well from my experience in the test games, we are quite fine when we build 2 warriors and grow to size 3. Everything else seems a waste of ressources to me. Also the faster we build settlers, the less is the risk of losing city spots.

As for research, I think we really should try to calculate some numbers here.

I don't think early workboat in city #2 makes sense, unless we have a plan to settle city #3 somewhere that it can immediately work a seafood tile, and we want the workboat prebuilt. Normally, workboat is nice for making contacts, but we don't have that motivation here.

I would just build warriors in city #2 until Pottery, and then immediate granary. Thus my desire to research Wheel-Pottery now. We can also potentially rush settlers in Karakorum faster than building them directly, if we can get granary out quickly, and generate hammers for other uses as a side benefit.

Well from my experience in the test games, we are quite fine when we build 2 warriors and grow to size 3. Everything else seems a waste of ressources to me. Also the faster we build settlers, the less is the risk of losing city spots.

What do you mean by "quite fine"?

In my test games, barb cities will spring up in locations that lie in the fog. With just two warriors, we can maybe prevent them near Copper town, but nowhere else.
Of course our towns prevent barb towns, but we cannot build settlers very fast, and we cannot found too many towns either, because of the corruption. Most of the settling spots are quite useless until we can chop jungle, and hence will contribute next to nothing in the short run.

I don't think early workboat in city #2 makes sense, unless we have a plan to settle city #3 somewhere that it can immediately work a seafood tile, and we want the workboat prebuilt. Normally, workboat is nice for making contacts, but we don't have that motivation here.

I would just build warriors in city #2 until Pottery, and then immediate granary. Thus my desire to research Wheel-Pottery now. We can also potentially rush settlers in Karakorum faster than building them directly, if we can get granary out quickly, and generate hammers for other uses as a side benefit.

The WB would be for finding passages to other islands, but we may not need that yet.

So, this alternative would be to research Wheel + Pottery right away. Grow K to size 3 and train 2 warriors, then follow with a settler. Whip the settler after Pottery is in and when the whip only costs 1 pop. Then follow with a granary.

This sounds rather good to me. I'm not sure about timings, but it seems to work out reasonably well. The obvious pro is the early settler and granary, the obvious cons are the small number of fogbusters and limited research help from the barbs.

After following the discussion, I agree that an early WB seems a waste for this game, and that it's probably best to go for TW+Pot right away. The small trickle of beakers we'd get from waiting doesn't seem to outweigh the wait at all.

I also don't feel worried about fog busting at this point. Those barbie towns don't show up just yet, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem really.

I can try to estimate the timing for the Wheel/Pottery plan, but not until Monday at the earliest.

Re Fog Busting
In my Testgames the Barbs always appeared in the areas with a certain amount of free fog, not, not like in CIVIII where a single field will leave you with a new Barb village every other turn. Specifically I played a game where there was an area of 6 or 8 spots left unexplored by me or an Barb. I waited 25 turn and tehre was never an Barb Warrior or an city appearing there. Especially for the city this is a significant result I believe, As they seemed to spring up every 10 turns and over the whole 25 turn no other city sprang up. So my feeling is, that the algorithm found no available places for sproinging up cities. I would guess, that he is looking for the whole 22-tile cross being in the fog, before a city is build.

I will try to start 1 or 2 more testgames tonite tpo collect further data.

So for me the situations is as follows:
A We will build a city on the Gold, before the first Barb cities appear.
B We can secure the copper spot with warriors before the first Barbs appear.
C The scout can secure the red spot
D The random Barbs should fog bust the blue spot

Concerning C somebody noted, that scouts don't prevent Barbs springing up, but I never ever encountered that in any of my CIV games. All the barbs came into view by moving into the spot or me moving into their area, never by just appearing.

Concerning D there is some risk left, as Barbs mnmove randomly. But they seem to prefer fog busting in the hope of finding an enemy instead of walking through our visible area, so I consider that risk very small. On the other hand building more warriors definitely wastes ressources now, which will not be very useful, once we have secured the island. Therefore I would say build two warriors to play it safe and build more in the gold town, as long as we don't have better things to do.

Research
Looks like we begin to lean in the direction of TW + Pot.

Build Order
Kara: Wa, Wa, Se, Gra, Wo,
Gold: Wa, Gra,

Diplo
Make peace with everyone.

Seems like Smurkz are doing just fine :goodjob:
I'll be trying to set up my playing environment tonight (MOD / test game) to get up to where you are (if you have advice on how to do that, or forum pointers, that'll prevent me for checking the forums frantically :rolleyes: tonight).

I *should* be available this week and next week for discussion, but cannot yet commit for a turnset (better to just warn the team than delay its pace).

In any case, go Smurkz !!

I think we should try to get a move on. Discussion is fine, but there's a time limit to think about.

Kulko, I agree with your plan. Will you play it out tonight? (:whipped: ;))

Kulko will play no further than discovery of Pottery (or less)? We would still have to decide what to do after that.

The main decision we're making at this point is to give up on CS slingshot, which may well be the "best" strategy.

I agree we need to get moving on.

ad A) I assume you meant settle next to the gold.
ad Diplo: do we really want to make peace with the AI? As long as the barbs still hurt them, I would prefer to stay at war.

In Vanilla (and even after :rolleyes:), CS slingshot is awfully powerful since Bureaucraty is so great early on (I am less convinced by other Oracle slingshots...).

Of course if we think we go all war, Vassalage can have its use too. I never tried a Feud slingshot :confused: but that could be done for sure....

It seems to me that we're going to have to make peace with most of the AIs or be overwhelmed by war weariness. Plus there is some hope that we can do some tech trading.

If we do go for CS slingshot, are we going to want Pottery anyway, for granaries? Or do we need to skip that? If we would need to skip Pottery to get CS slingshot then I would prefer to study that more carefully before we proceed, although I can understand if others want to press on.

Are we all agreed on putting the 2nd city SE of the gold hill? That seems best for any strategy.

Not going into pottery can be bad if:
- we plan early cottages
- we will whip a lot

I am still not able to open the save so tough to give more to the discussion.

Have we make a choice on victory condition ?

Well I wanted to play actually, at least until Kara grows to size 3.

But as I understand it, CS Slingshot means starting with another technology then TW right now?

Another observation that (I think) hasn't been made before: we only accumulate beakers in a tech when we have the prerequisites. Thus, for example, if we research The Wheel, then we'll stop getting free beakers in TW, but we'll start getting free beakers in Pottery.

We really have a lot of options. Plan #1 is to build several cities quickly, which requires Iron Working soon. Obviously, this is incompatible with CS slingshot (or any Oracle build). This is a perfectly viable approach. In this plan, we should put city #2 1SE of gold hill, since we will relatively soon afterward build another city to work clams and stone. Because Pottery is immediately useful, and we'll eventually have several cities that need granaries, and IW is so expensive, I do think it makes sense to go Wheel-Pottery-IW in this scenario.

Plan #2 is to limit ourselves to two cities for now, in order to simply rush to CS as quickly as possible. In that case, the optimal approach might be to put city #2 1E of gold hill (rather than SE), and research Mysticism next so that we can immediately build an obelisk for cultural expansion. This gets us the best city #2, with good production for Oracle (including a stone quarry eventually---we should get all or most of Masonry for free, by the time we need it). This clearly gives the best chance of a successful CS slingshot, so it's definitely a viable plan.

Plan #3 is a slower CS slingshot, with Wheel-Pottery first, and probably building a third city along the way. In this case we're back to putting city #2 1SE of gold hill, because we'll want city #3 to have the clams and stone (the only other decent location before Iron Working). Without a test game (which I don't have the time or energy for), I don't know if we'll be fast enough to COL. In this line, our research path would probably be Wheel-Pottery-Writing, to get us libraries, and only then go down the religious track to Priesthood and COL. The power of the granaries and libraries could well make up for the research delay, so I'm perfectly willing to try this path too, and we can always decide that we're too slow for the slingshot and go for IW instead of the religious techs. We'll have quite a bit more info by then.

Has anyone run test games with these settings even to predict how fast the AIs will build Oracle?

I played one mor egame through and greece build the oracle by turn 106.
We gained Mysticism from the Barbs in Turn 84, which would be to late to beat turn 106 I believe.

OK, I think there's no way we can research Mysticism-Meditation-Priesthood-Writing-COL by turn 106, even if we optimize solely for that. We would have had to have skipped Bronze Working. So we should just forget about CS and pursue the more standard plan. Wheel, Pottery, probably followed by Iron Working (although you aren't going to get past Pottery in this turnset).

It's hard to know for sure, but I think we need about 24 turns to learn Pottery, at least assuming we're going to farm the rice before we mine the gold. That means:

2 turns to build settler
1 turn of anarchy
9 turns to grow to size 3, generating 42 hammers (1 warrior + more hammers in barracks)
12 turns to put 108 hammers in settler

The granary won't do us any good while building settler, so I would say after that we would just finish the settler, then take 2 turns to rush granary, then grow while building a workboat for our 3rd city (which I think will go 1N of stone).

Another idea is to build the 2nd settler at size 2, something like this:

2 turns to build settler
1 turn of anarchy
18 turns to build settler
3 turns, generating 12 hammers in workboat
1 turn working bananas+farm, generating 2 hammers in granary
rush granary for 1 pop (now size 1 with 17/33 food)
4 turns to regrow to size 2

That gets us the 2nd city about 8 turns sooner, but perhaps that's not a substantial gain, since we won't have Masonry yet when it's done, nor have a fishing boat built.

So I'm happy enough with the "original" plan (finally?).

I started wondering if we should mine the gold, before farming the rice. The farm is only +1 food, while the mine is a much bigger increment. The alternatives are:

7 turns working unirrigated rice (+21 food)
3 turns working irrigated rice (+12 food)
4 turns working irrigated rice + forest (+16 food, +4 hammers)
5 turns working irrigated rice + gold mine (+10 food, +15 hammers, +35 commerce)

or

5 turns working unirrigated rice (+15 food)
9 turns working gold mine (+27 hammers, +63 commerce)
5 turns working irrigated rice (+20 food)

So, after 19 turns, we can be size 2 with 26 food, 19 hammers, 35 commerce, or with 2 food, 27 hammers, 63 commerce. I guess the extra food is probably better, because getting to Pottery a couple of turns sooner isn't a big help here, while being able to build a granary quickly in city #2 is going to be quite desirable.

So again I end up in support of the "original plan" (farm before gold mine).

Ok so we go by Plan A.

Only correction: zyxy marked correctly, that he rather would have as many fogbusters of our own, so we decided to build 2 warriors. This should allow us to secure the Copper spot and the marble spot (using the scout) against all odds of a barb warrior moving the wrong direction or anything. Do I need to skip in a turn on the Rax in between so we don't lose decaying hammers?

On more finding concerning barb free research:

I am positive the barbs gain free hammers, even when we are not allowed to research the tech. They are just not shown in the screen (would be a nice bugfix for the mod if they wantto make it available for other games too.

Findings:
When the barbs gained Myst in my test game there were 26 beackers invested in Poly 2 turns later. I checked the growth per turn and it was only 2 bpt. So they obviously gained 24 beakers while we were not able to see it.
Also we gained Archery although didn't know Hunting.
Although that second leaves a lot of open questions for me. Since everybody who knows Arch also knows Hunting, the growth rate on Archery seems much higher then it should be. I would guess its hardcoded into the game, that the Barbs gain Archery on turn 35.

Only correction: zyxy marked correctly, that he rather would have as many fogbusters of our own, so we decided to build 2 warriors. This should allow us to secure the Copper spot and the marble spot (using the scout) against all odds of a barb warrior moving the wrong direction or anything.

Marble? I don't think we have any marble on the island. Are you talking about the stone?

Two warriors is ok, if you prefer that. It's only one extra turn, I think.

Do I need to skip in a turn on the Rax in between so we don't lose decaying hammers?

Switching back to a project for one turn doesn't reset the clock, so, no, there's really no point in that.

I am positive the barbs gain free hammers, even when we are not allowed to research the tech. They are just not shown in the screen

OK.

Marble? I don't think we have any marble on the island. Are you talking about the stone?

Of course. All that Talk about the oracle messed me up.

Two warriors is ok, if you prefer that. It's only one extra turn, I think.

correct.


Switching back to a project for one turn doesn't reset the clock, so, no, there's really no point in that.

ok noted.
I will play tonite. (from about 9pm CET)

Concerning the barb research on Archery, that indeed seems hardcoded. In all my testgames the barbs got 5 bpt on archery every turn, to learn the tech in 35.

It seems that apart from this, the barbs gain beakers in every tech known to someone else. Perhaps they can also get beakers in techs that are unaccessible to them, as you suggest.

Plans look good to me. I'm still not convinced about peace with the AI now (why not wait until WW actually hits?), but it doesn't matter much to me.

I kind of agree with zyxy re. WW and peace. Why remove teh barb problem for teh AI until we suffer from WW?

After founding the gold city I am saddled with 2 gpt city maintenance. WOuld have to reduce research to 90%. Any other way to deal with this?

Preflight:
Switch Research to TW Due in 9

Check Science numbers:
Fish 78 + 2
TW 64 +10 + 8
Hunt 98 + 3
Myst 32 + 1
AH 38 + 2
Mason 40 + 2

Turn 54:
Kara Settler -> Warrior

Turn 58:
Kara Warrior -> Warrior
I can actually see Beakers growing in pottery already, although TW will come online only next turn.

Turn 59:
We research TW (7 turns) Barb research seemed to add 8bpt here, four times as much as in any other tech.
Barbs research Hunting
Switch to Pottery due in 16

Turn 60:
Alex suggest peaceful coexistence and I agree.

Turn 61:
Fort Smurx founded SE of Gold.
DAMN! Forgot about the switch to slavery. I decide to switch now as long as we work the unimproved rice only.

Turn 62:
We don't even receive Barb beakers when we are in anarchy. I would call this a bug.

Turn 64:
research science rates again:
Fish 102 (2)
Myst 44 (1)
Pot 78 (9+6)
AH 68 (5)
Mason 64 (2)

Turn 70:
First Barb town founded on northeastern end of the Alpha continent. That whole area seems to have created quite a few barbs, which are happily occupied harassing India. So that is one guy we don't want to make peace with until WW really kills us or he threatens to take the new town.
Research rate on AH is up to 6.
Research rate on MYsticism is still on an all time low (1) and nobody found Hinduism. Maybe the Slingshot was possible after all?

Turn 72:
Fishing researched by barbs.

Turn 74:
Research Pottery (15 turns)
I select Writing, but of course that can be changed.
Last check on research rates:
Myst +3
Sail 0
AH +9
Mason +4

Session log:

Here is your Session Turn Log from 2440 BC to 1780 BC:

Turn 52, 2440 BC: Tokugawa adopts Slavery!

Turn 57, 2290 BC: You have trained a Warrior in Karakorum. Work has now begun on a Barracks.

Turn 58, 2260 BC: You have discovered The Wheel!
Turn 58, 2260 BC: You have discovered Hunting!

Turn 60, 2200 BC: You have made peace with Alexander!

Turn 61, 2170 BC: Fort Smurx has been founded.
Turn 61, 2170 BC: The revolution has begun!!!
Turn 61, 2170 BC: Temujin adopts Slavery!
Turn 61, 2170 BC: The anarchy is over! Your government is re-established.

Turn 62, 2140 BC: Isabella adopts Slavery!

Turn 64, 2080 BC: You have trained a Warrior in Karakorum. Work has now begun on a Barracks.

Turn 67, 1990 BC: Saladin adopts Slavery!

Turn 71, 1870 BC: You have discovered Fishing!

Turn 73, 1810 BC: You have discovered Pottery!

Afterthoughts:

We are at Peace only with Greece, but war weariiness is counting already. Both cities cannot grow above size 3 currently.

The barbs are keeping india to a single city. They promote the archer to new heights, and collect war weariness for us, but the settler and worker don't dare to move a step outside the city.

AH is due in about 17 turns from the barbs, I think thats fast enough for us.

>The save< (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/civ4sgotm5/Smurkz_SG005_BC1780_01.Civ4SavedGame)

I cannot see scores (they are all set to 0).
Is that the same for you guys ??

By the way I was wondering where Alex is. Between us and the large continent it seems.

Are we planning in getting Myst to open the 2 tribal villages quickly, or waiting for Writing->Lib (whipped maybe ?).

Good going Kulko! :)

Roster:
Methos
DaviddesJ
zyxy
Kulko - Just Played
Niklas - UP!
Wotan - On Deck!
Marc Aurel - Warming Up
unkle - On leave

Got it! I'll be back with my thoughts on the situation later, probably won't be able to check the save until tomorrow morning since the CIV computer is occupied. But keep throwing thoughts around.

uncle the scoring bug is normal. When you open a save it shows all zeros as score.

I also have a few unintresting screenshots which I will post tomorrow morning.

After founding the gold city I am saddled with 2 gpt city maintenance. WOuld have to reduce research to 90%. Any other way to deal with this?

Nope.
67890

Research rate on MYsticism is still on an all time low (1) and nobody found Hinduism. Maybe the Slingshot was possible after all?

Hinduism was founded in 3190BC by India.

If we're going to build city #3 1N of stone, we need a workboat to make good use of it. Here's one plan for Karakorum:

t74: switch to granary
t75: rush granary
t76: granary complete, switch to workboat
t82: grow to size 3, switch to settler
t90: settler complete, switch to workboat
t92: workboat complete (30/39 food)

We will have to bring one of the warriors back to Karakorum to garrison it, for hap