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 :)

Checking in.

Looks like I got here first. Since it's Monday already here I guess that's not surprising is it?

Welcome back XTeam! :thumbsup:

A special welcome to our new member, Mad Professor! :salute:

EDIT: X'ed with MP, looks like he's anxious to begin!!
:lol: :lol: :lol:

:wavey: I'm here.

OK, with the updates in place, if you have problems getting the patch to work due to a dll not found error, follow the link in the post http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=232577. If you do this one, then you don't get the shader error.

:wavey: to the Mad Professor!

TGOM checking in. <Scuffing up the boots and rusting the sabre so as not to embarass the scruffy allies>

Gator swims out of the river.

What's the thoughts on a gameplan for this one? I'd lean towards finding out if there are horses nearby and then find out how close the nearest neighbor is. But I've also not read the SG this is based on. If there is a nearby neighbor and we can get horses in our fat cross we might want to skip building a settler.

Gator returns to the safety of the river.

Settle where we are and start research towards Animal Husbandry and start training a worker. I don't exactly know what is meant by a "fractal archipelago" but it probably includes islands of one size or another.

We need to know where the horses are before anything else, then depending on what we find out there and what the scout and his friendly lions show us I would want to start on the seafaring techs, or make a run to Keshiks through the wheel if we find we have neighbors. Chariots and Keshiks are devastating suppression tools and culture poor cities with archers defending are mincemeat.

Gator swims out of the river.
I think it is the first time I've actually been happy to see a Gator come up out a river!! :thumbsup: :wavey: Nice to see you visiting again. :cheers:

On strategy, I created several test games and played around a bit. My initial thoughts were to use the Barbarians to try to take a city or two to slow down our opponents. To do this, I researched to Bronze Working as fast as I could to give the Barbs Axes. In four test games, they never took a city as they don't spawn only Axes, but also Warriors and Archers. What they did do was pillage our rivals, which does slow them down. For me, this invalidates the idea that we must to go for Bronze quickly (unless we want to do an Axe Rush, see below), as Archers are also effective pillagers.

The other interesting concept is that if we make peace with a civ, the barbs can no longer attack or pillage them. I could not play much past this point as the game crashed whenever I tried to trade with a rival civ. The most important lessons I learned were that we need to make peace before we get to Alphabet, if we're going to make peace, because every civ demanded Alphabet for peace once we had it. Additionally, because we start out at war, we know all the other civs and can call them up whenever we want to. We start out with an immediate -3 in diplo for the war which quickly become -11. If never got worse than -11, even if I attacked them.

I did not find our UU to be particularly effective. The best game I had was when I had Copper available and started an Axe Rush. It was very effective, should we decide that conquest or domination is the way to go. We will need a navy to move troops too. Hopefully, Gyathaar left us enough coastal tiles to get around the map fairly easily.

I know rrau played some scenarios as well. Perhaps she as had a different experience than I did? :hmm:

EDIT:
Chariots and Keshiks are devastating suppression tools and culture poor cities with archers defending are mincemeat.
Guess I didn't use them very effectively? :rolleyes:

I think I found that by the time we had a navy in place, the horses hooked up and everything ready, that many cities had enough culture to be a problem?

I think I found that by the time we had a navy in place, the horses hooked up and everything ready, that many cities had enough culture to be a problem?

This could be the key. I didn't play any test games past the initial exploring stage and testing relations between my scout and the lions :) The catch though could be the archapelago bit. You can send units to pillage with only a galley or two built, but it is difficult to send a significant empire crunching force without building several galleys and that puts your assault back by that many hammers at a time when getting in early makes a big difference in the number of spears, walls and increased cultural defenses you will face. All three are problems for our UU. I think a lot will depend on the map layout.

AH early is a good idea because then we know where the horses are or aren't and we need to I think. BW fairly early is always a good one for me. The slavery and forest chopping are too important, never mind whether you want to use axes or not.

I'd be surprised to find that we can reach everyone with galleys, so we need to watch our economy because if we can't reach them with galleys, the date we get astronomy will be critical in determining how quick we finish it if we're heading for a military victory (which generally tend to be quicker, and I don't fancy the idea of trying to get a diplo victory when we've declared war on everyone already and are teamed with the barbarians...)

Checking in with a query and comment:

If we start at -11, who would trade with us even if we do obtain a peace treaty with them?

"BW fairly early is always a good one for me. The slavery and forest chopping are too important, never mind whether you want to use axes or not."
I certainly agree with that observation.

If we start at -11, who would trade with us even if we do obtain a peace treaty with them?
It depends upon who the civ is. :)

India (I used Gandi) was willing to trade, as were, iirc, Cyrus and Alex? The -11 goes down to -3 or -4 in most cases, so we should be able to get in good if we are in a position to give them a gift? :rolleyes:

Spain and Japan were not willing to trade, as usual... ;)
"BW fairly early is always a good one for me. The slavery and forest chopping are too important, never mind whether you want to use axes or not."
I certainly agree with that observation.
Yes, as we are allied with the Barbs, we got Hunting and Agriculture fairly early from them. The other nice one to get is sailing as that allows them to ave Galleys to explore, and attack, with.

I think one of our decisions will be whether we want peace, with who and how soon? I know this will depend on where our rivals are. I think we will know this fairly quickly, once the Barbs start moving around.

Starting out as a barb team, we don't know ANY techs. So we have to research to AH and then wheels to get chariots, then by the time I got them built in my test games it was too late. I was hoping that Leif had better luck with axes, but it doesn't sound like it.

I was hoping that Leif had better luck with axes, but it doesn't sound like it.
If Copper is available, Axes worked quite well. It was the Barb Axes that disappointed me. I thought they would surely be able to take a city, but they never did. :sad:

I think the question we need to figure out is what to research towards first, Bronze, with Copper and Axes or Animal Husbandry, with Horses and heading for our UU? :hmm:

Sounds like we're all thinking a military type of victory? :D

Sounds like we're all thinking a military type of victory? :D

I was thinking military because the laurels go to the fastest victory. Military is generally faster. :D The alternatives are not great in this instance. Diplo when teamed with the barbarians having already declared war on everyone sounds like GOTM's on challenger ;) If we do it, we'll sure have bragging rights, but it will be hard. Space Race victories in my universe are never the fastest victories, and nor are cultural, but from some reading I've done I see one can pull off miracles in this area if one really tries. Time is never quick (!!) So take out time, space, diplo and cultural and we're left with.... Hence I was thinking military ;)

Hm....If we make peace with everyone and let the barbs build cities and we research the expensive techs and let them get the inexpensive ones, I wonder if a spaceship victory would be doable? Too bad we can't test it due to the tech trading bug causing crashes.

Starting out as a barb team, we don't know ANY techs. So we have to research to AH and then wheels to get chariots, then by the time I got them built in my test games it was too late.

Hmm. You have a good point. I was thinking along the lines of AH-BW as about the first two techs studied... But that only works when you start with hunting and mining... Sadly when you start with none, it's not that simple. Lief has a point, we probably need to figure out which is better to go for first.

BW is often an early favourite with the AI too, which means that by the time we get substantial numbers of Keshiks and galleys out in the wide world we are very likely to be looking at the wrong end of spear shafts in quite a few places. This no-tech start hamstrings Mongolia significantly doesn't it? Maybe it's better to get to BW first, then look to AH? Another consideration - what does our starting position look like? Is there reason there to want AH earlier?

Edit: I just checked and I see we have pigs. Perhaps this is a factor in whether to try for AH before BW? Then again I see quite a bit of forest too.

Hm....If we make peace with everyone and let the barbs build cities and we research the expensive techs and let them get the inexpensive ones, I wonder if a spaceship victory would be doable? Too bad we can't test it due to the tech trading bug causing crashes.

We could test once they give us the SGOTM5 mod couldn't we?

The catch though could be the archapelago bit. You can send units to pillage with only a galley or two built, but it is difficult to send a significant empire crunching force without building several galleys and that puts your assault back by that many hammers at a time when getting in early makes a big difference in the number of spears, walls and increased cultural defenses you will face. All three are problems for our UU. I think a lot will depend on the map layout.

AH early is a good idea because then we know where the horses are or aren't and we need to I think. BW fairly early is always a good one for me. The slavery and forest chopping are too important, never mind whether you want to use axes or not.

I'd be surprised to find that we can reach everyone with galleys, so we need to watch our economy because if we can't reach them with galleys, the date we get astronomy will be critical in determining how quick we finish it if we're heading for a military victory (which generally tend to be quicker, and I don't fancy the idea of trying to get a diplo victory when we've declared war on everyone already and are teamed with the barbarians...)

If we are alone on an island trying to put together an "empire crunching" force will take too much away from getting the economy up and running. On the other hand a couple of Keshiks on the loose can really mess up the AI's efforts to get their economy up and running.

The supression approach on one or two of nearest overseas neighbors, together with wiping out any homeland neighbors while cutting peace deals with the rest may serve us best.

That suggests AH followed by Mining and Bronze and the Wheel then the seafaring techs depending on the neighborhood.

I would not put any settlers on the ground until we have knowledge of resource locations, including Copper, unless horses are not local to the capitol.

Any idea when the mod's going to be available? It sounded like with the updates, the HOF mods might have to be redone, too.

This is not a great starting position. Settling in place may be a mistake. I suggest we move the scout 1W and then 1NW; plus, we might even want to take a turn to put the settler on the hill if the scout doesn't discover additional resources.

At epic speed, the fastest developmental route is almost always to produce two workers first. The fastest way to get the second worker out is to chop him. I doubt we could do that if we research AH before Mining and BW. If we go with those techs first, I think we will be able to research AH before we can produce a settler as our third unit. That way we would know where both copper and horses are when the settler is ready to settle, but we wouldn't be able to pasture the pigs quickly. It's not a clear choice. Hope someone has time to just work that out.

Any idea when the mod's going to be available? It sounded like with the updates, the HOF mods might have to be redone, too.
There is a HOF mod ready and Gyathaar is asking for feedback on how well it works in the Maintenance Thread, HERE. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5715190&postcount=5)
Wat the HOF Mod addresses is listed HERE. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5715217&postcount=231)

I have not received BtS yet from Amazon. Don't know if I should upgrade vanilla or wait for the disk? If those who have upgraded get a chance to check it out? Perhaps I will patch mine this evening and give it a go?

In other games we have moved the Scout, taken a screenie and saved the game. Then posted and discussed what to do. Looks like we will need to do that in this game as well.

EDIT - BTW, Frederiksberg is supposed to be back on the 26th of July. I don't see any need to hurry the start and perhaps wait a day or so to see what he thinks about this? Well, let's see how it goes. just a thought. :D

Delaying past the 26th works well for me.

I'm thinking we may not want to research Agriculture and let the barbs get it for us. Only then would we go for AH. We could go Mining, BW, The Wheel, and even Iron Working if necessary -- that would save us the turns required to research Agriculture. What are practice games telling us about what, when, and the order in which the barbs gain techs? Perhaps it will be smart to avoid researching most of the first line techs.

I'm thinking we may not want to research Agriculture and let the barbs get it for us. Only then would we go for AH. We could go Mining, BW, The Wheel, and even Iron Working if necessary -- that would save us the turns required to research Agriculture. What are practice games telling us about what, when, and the order in which the barbs gain techs? Perhaps it will be smart to avoid researching most of the first line techs.
I kept a log on one of the test games. Let's see:
The Barb animals begun to show up on turn 6.
As there were Fish in this test game, I started with Fishing, completed on turn 10, then Mining, completed on turn 24 and then Bronze Working, completed on turn 50, then The Wheel, completed on turn 58 and then Sailing.

The Barbs gave us Archery on turn 35, the Barb Archers and Warriors appeared on turn 40. We knew were all the other civs were by turn 45 or so. Barb Axe started showing up on Turn 60. On turn 59, the first Barb city was founded.

We completed Sailing on turn 79, Barb Galleys immediately began to show up, and started on Animal Husbandry, which completes at turn 88. We received Mysticism on turn 89 and Agriculture on turn 94 from our Barb allies. On turn 104, Barbs give us Masonry.

Stonehenge completed on turn 78 and The Oracle on turn 125.

On turn 141, we discovered Alphabet and all the civs wanted it as a condition of making peace, where they would have made peace straight up before we discovered it.

We completed Sailing on turn 79, Barb Galleys immediately began to show up, and started on Animal Husbandry, which completes at turn 88. We received Mysticism on turn 89 and Agriculture on turn 94 from our Barb allies. On turn 104, Barbs give us Masonry.

Sounds like we have some control over when barb galleys appear then. We get a tech, the barbs get it. Does that means barb macemen appear the instant we get SS and Machinery? :devil: Barb macemen can be a bit of a handful if you don't have crossbows or maces yourself. We could watch our barb allies have some fun if we get a tech lead...

Looks like agriculture came a bit late in your test game there lief. I would imagine there'd be a fair chance it would come earlier.


On turn 141, we discovered Alphabet and all the civs wanted it as a condition of making peace, where they would have made peace straight up before we discovered it.

Something to be carefully noted. We want to get peace with those we want peace with before alphabet. Somewhere along the line we'll need to have a discussion about who to get peace with early, and who not to.

Hi guys! I am still on a vacation and have now reached Chicago where I found an opportunity to get internet access :cowboy:.

Looks like you have already started making plans for the game :goodjob:.

I was wondering if we should also discuss how we work together in the team and maybe see if some things could be improved? I have a few suggestions myself that I hope you will consider. Most important is, of course, that we are all having fun and for me that means that we try to be competitive. There are a few teams (The two russian teams and Murky Waters) that are clearly stronger than the rest but I think we should be able to compete with any of the other teams. One thing I really liked in our previous SGOTM was the small summaries made by the person who was going to play. As I see it this is a team game and the real game is played by disussing in the team thread. To me this means that the person who is up need to be active in the discussion before playing his turn set and should post a small summary of the plans and ideas he/she wants to persue in the turn set. If the mouseholder doesn't have time for this I would rather have that he asked for a skip. Another thing I have thought about is that we had some pretty long turn sets at some points in SGOTM4. I think that long turn sets can potentially be a problem because you tend to play less carefully and make more mistakes if you know you have to play 20 turns in the midle or late game. In my opinion carefull play is absolutely necessary to be competitive (Unfortunately :) ) allthough a good strategy can of course offset some of the turns you loose by playing fast and with less attention to detail.

I would like to hear your opinions on this subject. I think we have a very good team and should be able to compete with most of the other teams if we put a little more effort into active discusions and careful play.

I will be back on the 26th and should be able to participate actively again ;) .

One thing I noticed last game is you guys apparently have time to discuss strategy in the middle of my workday and by the time I'd gotten home in the evening, the strategy would be already be agreed upon. I have a very busy day and can't really log on to discuss during the day even though I have access - most times I work through lunch, too, catching up on paperwork.

By the time I'd be able to post, there didn't seem to be anything left to post about.

I've been known to say on more than one occassion "I'd rather play smart than fast", and that is what Frederiksberg has just said. This is a team that is capable of challenging for a laurel.

One thing that the Xteam's games are known for is the good game discussion and the interaction among team members.

I'm hoping to have a little more time to get involved in this game than I did the last one, even if it is just to help with the discussions.

OK. Just figured out how to do a test game with the new mod installed - for updated civ4 only. Has just the same players but not the same start position/tiles.

I'm certainly comfortable with Frederiksberg's suggestions. We could build in a 24-hour delay to give everyone a chance to offer constructive criticism and alternatives.

The turn log of leif's is interesting. Mad Professor, can you create another one from a different set up and see how the barbs progress without any research on our part? Finding out what we don't need to research should facilitate a quicker victory.

The turn log of leif's is interesting. Mad Professor, can you create another one from a different set up and see how the barbs progress without any research on our part? Finding out what we don't need to research should facilitate a quicker victory.

You mean set research to zero and see what techs we get? Just thinking through that - it might give a us a good idea but our own studies would also effect things I would have thought. How about doing one where I play through researching as normal, but I deliberately avoid studying the first level techs (Except mining on the way to BW for example) and see how quick stuff like Agriculture pops up? That's basically what lief did, but several run throughs might give us an idea for how fixed that log is...? I could do something llike that in the next 24 hours or so. See if I get different results to lief. It would confirm or deny the variability...

One thing I noticed last game is you guys apparently have time to discuss strategy in the middle of my workday and by the time I'd gotten home in the evening, the strategy would be already be agreed upon. I have a very busy day and can't really log on to discuss during the day even though I have access - most times I work through lunch, too, catching up on paperwork.

By the time I'd be able to post, there didn't seem to be anything left to post about.

Well we now just about have the globe spanned between us. I don't know all your time zones, but imagine there's some GMT-5's or GMT-6's among you, and I'm at GMT+10, and Fredericksberg when he's home is at GMT+1. Letting the world turn at least once before coming to firm decisions seems like a good idea :)

I'm getting crashes with my test game :(

Good discussion. Sorry, I've been off reading "Deathly Hallows"... :mischief:

A couple of things to address. First, remember that I played in the unpatched version, so I think it is good to do some testing to see what differences there are. I will try to patch and play a bit tomorrow as the family dog had to have emergency surgery today and that has taken up a bit of time. So far so good for him, so I hope things will work out for tomorrow.

I think Frederiksberg has some very good points, as have those who responded to his post. I would like to propose that we build in an extra 24 hours to our turn sets. It would look like this:

24 hours to post a "Got it"
24 hours to post an outline of what the mouse holder thinks should happen in the turn set and time for us to check in with that outline.
72 hours to actually play the turn set.

I know I rely a lot on what the player before writes in an After Action Report and any recommendations they may have. In addition, I like to read what others think, so during the first 24 hours, waiting for a "Got it", we can post our ideas about the upcoming turn set. This would give the next player a chance to think about what we have written before posting a brief outline.

Lastly, I know that I can concentrate well knowing what objectives I hope to accomplish or what goals we are working towards as a team. I get into trouble when something happens that I am not sure about. I think we should all be able to stop, save and post to ask others about what we have encountered. I know that, through discussion, I often find gems that work out better than if I was left to my own devices. :blush:

@rau - If you are getting crashes, please post the conditions that caused the crash, as far as you know them, in the pre-game discussion thread so that Gyathaar knows about them. He will probably ask you to post a save as well.

Sorry, a bit long winded... ;)

It's like it was back before I got the new comp....Press enter and *kaboom* The blue screen of death. I PM's him and posted the save in our thread for him.

OK, thanks rrau.
I'm sure the PM will work just fine. Keep up the good work! :goodjob:

"How about doing one where I play through researching as normal, but I deliberately avoid studying the first level techs (Except mining on the way to BW for example) and see how quick stuff like Agriculture pops up? That's basically what lief did, but several run throughs might give us an idea for how fixed that log is...? I could do something llike that in the next 24 hours or so. See if I get different results to lief. It would confirm or deny the variability..."

Excellent. In case we discover a cow near the starting position and heading for AH seems optimal, try to find out how soon the barbs get Mining as well.

"so during the first 24 hours, waiting for a "Got it", we can post our ideas about the upcoming turn set. This would give the next player a chance to think about what we have written before posting a brief outline."

Yes, ideally everyone would read the previous player's log, look at the save, and make suggestions early in those 24 hours.

Just played rrau’s test game to T100 once with the idea to see when barbs get techs without our help. I could do it again as time allows.

Rules I played by:
1. Never ask for or accept peace
2. Never study base level tech except mining to start

Other side effects:
1. Less than ideal play as Ag might have been handy earlier for than corn
2. Not ideal city management as I was concentrating on other things and didn’t want to take a long time playing this.

I studied as follows: mining-BW-IW-Poly-Writing
Initial builds in Karakorum: warr-wkr-archer-settler-barracks-and on etc

Here’s a selective log:

T0: settled in place
T1: started studying mining
T6: first animals appear
T8: spot Tokugawa territory
T9: first animals dies
T10: spot Asoka territory near Karakorum across water
T11: spot Arabian scout
T12: get mining, start BW, Buddhism founded by Saladin, spot Saladin’s area
T13: Mao gets slavery (therefore BW), spot Alex territory
T15: completely explored own island
T16: A lion visits Karakorum! :lol: Spot Cyrus scout
T17: Spot Mao borders. We now see where all our opponents are already
T30: Get archery from barbs
T34: Get BW, revolt to slavery, start IW, no copper on our island
T41: First Barb military unit appears – an axeman!!
T48: Hinduism founded
T54: Get hunting from barbs
T55: Get fishing from barbs
T62: Toku asks for peace. A variety of barb units visible, mainly archers, several axes and warriors
T64: Get wheel from barbs
T65: Cyrus adopts slavery
T67: Saladin asks for peace
T68: Alex asks for peace
T69: Get Mysticism from barbs, Judaism founded by Alex, Asoka adopts slavery
T74: Get IW, start Poly (very tempting to go for some base techs, but I’m ignoring them to see when the barbs give them to us. 1 iron on our island
T80: Get AH from barbs
T82: Get Masonry from barbs
T83: Get Agric from barbs
T85: Saladin adopts slavery
T87: Get poly, start writing. First Barb swordsman appears :cool:
T88: Sal asks for peace (for 2nd time) We hook iron up
T93: Alex asks for peace (for 2nd time)
T94: We are apparently least advanced
T98 Cyrus asks for peace (for first time)
T99: Barb sword eats Cyrus archer and settler :D

Summaries:

Techs from barbarians:
T30: Archery
T54: Hunting
T55: Fishing
T64: Wheel
T69: Mysticism
T80: Animal Husbandry
T82: Masonry
T83: Agriculture

Some firsts:
T6: first animals
T8: first enemy territory spotted
T12: Buddhism founded
T13: first enemy to get slavery (BW)
T30: first tech from Barbs (archery)
T41: first Barb military unit (an axeman)
T48: Hinduism founded
T62: First enemy asks for peace
T69: Judaism founded
T87: first Barb swordsman appears, 13 turns after we get IW
T99: First major successful barbarian attack, a swordsman on archer and settler

Other observations:
By T100 our map is pretty good. We don’t see a lot of cities, but we know where a lot of them are!
Barbarians wander around aimlessly doing nothing most of the time. We can't rely on them to win our wars for us.
Some base level techs would have been handy earlier, though we did eventually get the lot. I wonder what the balance is in the payoffs between studying ourselves and developing quicker earlier, and ont wasting the beakers on them and getting them for free?

We'd need to do more run throughs of this to see if there are variations to the above lists. As I said, if I get some time I'll do that.

I played rrau’s test game first 100 turns again. Same kind of rules/approach as last time. This time the techs coming from barbs were not so fast, and religions were founded earlier. I took the same tech path as last time though this time I went to sailing before poly, and the result was barb galleys floating around before the end of the 100 turns.

Here’s the techs acquired from barb list:
T35: Archery
T59: Fishing
T76: Mysticism
T80: Wheel
T83: Animal Husbandry
T98: Agriculture and Masonry

Religion founding list:
T12: Buddhism (Saladin)
T29: Hinduism (Asoka)
T52: Judaism (Asoka)

Nobody got BW (slavery) anywhere near as early as the first one. I suspect Mao popped it from a hut in the first one. I was slightly slower to BW too this time and I think that's because last time I had a little help from the barbs' free beakers because Mao already had it.

First Barb military unit didn't appear til T47 this time, and the first animals still appeared the same at T6.

The oracle was built this time – finished in T86. I didn’t see any barb swordsmen this time despite getting IW about the same time, and barb galleys suddenly popped up 4 turns after we got sailing.

I also noticed that the beakers of progress towards techs by the barbs are visible to us at any time in the tech bar at the top of the screen. At the end of 100 turns, the barbs were 188/234 on the way to Meditation, and 106/234 on the way to Pottery.

Again, because of the corn it would have been nice to have ag earlier, and the wheel was later than I would normally have let it go too.

Edit: I see hunting is missing from my tech list above. I'm sure it wasn't available at the end so we must have got it at some stage and I forgot to write it down. Sorry.

Two trials is not much of a trend, though it seems that the techs from barbs come in more or less the same order each time if not at the same speed.

It seems Archery, hunting and fishing do not need to be studied for any reason. Probably not Mysticism either. Whether the wheel, AH and Agriculture are studied would depend on specific needs of our starting position. If they are left until after Mining, BW, IW, the barbs have already accumulaed most of the beakers and they can be very rapidly acquired if we don't want to wait for the barbs to get them.

We found out where all our opponents were in less than 20 turns both times.

Who knows how much that will change in the real game...

Nice work MP! :thumbsup:

Just patched my version and installed the HOF special mod. Looks like it all runs fine, so I will play with it later in the day, once back from RL. :rolleyes:

I'm planning to make a save that looks like the start. The problem, of course, is what is in the fog to the west of our starting location? Any recommendations on what might be there, what we should add? Or shall we play it as if nothing else is there? :hmm:

Appreciate the info, Mad Professor. I'd still like to see what happens when you don't research Mining, though I think it highly unlikely we'd want to go that route.

From reading your latest post, it seems that we can somehow utilize barbarian research to further our own. Is that right, and, if so, how does it work?

In your practice games, have you mined the pig hill? I think that may be optimal (as opposed to a pasture), unless there is an immediately useful food-poor resource within the fat cross. If there are no other good tiles to work, then staying at size one and concentrating on workers and settlers may be wise. If there is a food-rich tile within the cross, then we can quickly mine the pigs, improve the food tile once we have the tech, and only then utilize that improved tile to expand to size two.

@CP - Gyathaar posted this in the maintenance thread. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5717173&postcount=11) Apparently, the Barbs do not "research" themselves as all the civs do in a game. They get free beakers that apply to Techs that the other civs already know in the game.

In our case in this game, the Barbs will automatically know what we research and we will get whatever they come up with from the other civs. This makes me think that the more well known a tech, the more likely it will show up for the Barb nation, and thus, us?

I read the post, but it doesn't clarify this comment by MP: "last time I had a little help from the barbs' free beakers because Mao already had it."

:blush:

Apparently the reason for the crashes was that when I reloaded the save after changing the worldbuilder save, I didn't reload the sgotm5 mod first, so it's an unmodded save. Sorry guys.:blush:

I read the post, but it doesn't clarify this comment by MP: "last time I had a little help from the barbs' free beakers because Mao already had it."

What I was trying to say was that the first time through I got to BW quicker than the second time without changing anything I did as far as I know. The first time though Mao revolted to slavery at T13 which must have meant he had BW - surely popped from a hut to get it so early. Once a civ has a tech, (I think) the barbs get some free beakers towards that tech too. I think the more civs, the more free beakers - is there someone among us able to go through the code to confirm that? I think that's how it works. That means the first time, since Mao had BW from T13, that the barbs got free beakers towards BW from T13, which helped US get BW quicker.

I'm fairly sure it works this way because when you finish a tech and have a choice of techs to go to, the beakers already accumulated by barbarians are there as if we'd studied them. You can even check this each turn by clicking on the tech bar at the top of the screen to get the available techs listed. When you hover the cursur over a tech icon, you'll get a box shoing you the beakers necessary, beakers accumulated, and how many turns it would take you to study the rest at current study rates. I did this the second time through and noticed EACH TURN that several of the base techs were accumulating beakers for us without us studying them. This means the free beakers the barbarians are getting are available to us too as their team mates.

:blush:

Apparently the reason for the crashes was that when I reloaded the save after changing the worldbuilder save, I didn't reload the sgotm5 mod first, so it's an unmodded save. Sorry guys.:blush:

Yes, I noticed it was an unmodded save. I don't think that changed the behaviour of the techs though. In the first 100 turns the only thing was that we didn't have our score up there! I had no problems runnning it for 100 turns.

In your practice games, have you mined the pig hill? I think that may be optimal (as opposed to a pasture), unless there is an immediately useful food-poor resource within the fat cross. If there are no other good tiles to work, then staying at size one and concentrating on workers and settlers may be wise. If there is a food-rich tile within the cross, then we can quickly mine the pigs, improve the food tile once we have the tech, and only then utilize that improved tile to expand to size two.

The practice game I was using was one rrau came up with which had a different starting position - no pigs. That wouldn't effect the way the barbarian techs work though, nor the appearance and behaviour of the barbarians I would have thought - nor the speed of opponents' teching etc.

You are right about mining that pig hill though. What I noticed in leaving base level techs like I did was that it hamstrung the worker somewhat. He could build mines and chop forests - and that's ALL he could do until wheel, agriculture, AH, etc. fell in our laps from the barbarians. In the starting postiion we have in the actual game, we might find it very efficient to mine that pig hill early on before we get AH if we're going to wait for it to fall from heaven.

We can still benefit from the Barb teching in this way, but hurry things along a little. I noticed that beakers were accumulating slowly on agriculture, AH etc., for a quite a long time before we got them. That means that at some stage 10 turns or more before getting AH, we could study it for 1 or 2 turns ourselves and get it that way, still benefitting from beakers accumulated by the barbarians before we started studying.

:) Not a problem rrau. There is much to remember when creating a save. ;)

Just completed a test run with 0% research on our part. The Barbs gave us:
Turn 35 - Archery.
Turn 50 - Fishing.
Turn 66 - Mining.
Turn 76 - Agriculture and Hunting.
Turn 79 - The Wheel.
Turn 83 - Animal Husbandry.
Turn 97 - Mysticism.
Turn 99 - Masonry.

Other events:
Turn 13 - Buddhism founded.
Turn 36 - Hinduism founded.
Turn 62 - Judaism founded.
Turn 86 - Oracle completed.
Turn 96 - Stonehenge completed.

Mao adopts Slavery on turn 65.
Tokugawa adopts Slavery on Turn 73.
Alexander adopts Slavery on turn 89.

The start is a real dog, unless something good appears to the west. If we settle in place, without Animal Husbandry and at size 1, a Settler requires up to 38 turns, at size 2, 30 turns. Let's hope for some good terrain and tile bonuses nearby! :please:

I've attached a save in case anyone would like to play a bit. I realized I left a hill in to the Southwest that isn't there by mistake (see rrau, it isn't only you!) :blush: :rolleyes: :)

Yes, I noticed it was an unmodded save. I don't think that changed the behaviour of the techs though. In the first 100 turns the only thing was that we didn't have our score up there! I had no problems running it for 100 turns.
Yes, but you didn't try to trade. It would have crashed if you had. :p

I think I have one that's modded correctly *crosses her fingers*

Just completed a test run with 0% research on our part. The Barbs gave us:
Turn 35 - Archery.
Turn 50 - Fishing.
Turn 66 - Mining.
Turn 76 - Agriculture and Hunting.
Turn 79 - The Wheel.
Turn 83 - Animal Husbandry.
Turn 97 - Mysticism.
Turn 99 - Masonry.

Other events:
Turn 13 - Buddhism founded.
Turn 36 - Hinduism founded.
Turn 62 - Judaism founded.
Turn 86 - Oracle completed.
Turn 96 - Stonehenge completed.


This looks familiar. There are variations in the exact dates, but it's a pretty similar scenario. Looks like it might be fairly reliable.

I just loaded up my game 6 and apparently it's unmodded, too. I don't apparently know how to mod a game, change the worldbuilder save and get it to stay a modded game, so use leif's save.

[edit] I went back and tried again and loading the scenario is has the sgotm mod tag in the right upper corner of the screen until the scenario starts, then it's gone and it's unmodded. *shrugs* Whatever.

[edit 2] When I try to load Leif's save, I get this: http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f259/AngelSpice2/ScreenShot001.jpg

Any ideas? Did I not get my game patched correctly?

"The start is a real dog, unless something good appears to the west. If we settle in place, without Animal Husbandry and at size 1, a Settler requires up to 38 turns, at size 2, 30 turns. Let's hope for some good terrain and tile bonuses nearby!"

The start does look barren. That may be part of the intended challenge.

I'm not at all wedded to the idea of delaying AH, but it is an option to be considered if another pasture resource doesn't show up -- especially if it looks like we're on an island.

Without chopping, producing a settler is always slow, unless you get a great starting position and 50% accelerated production. Two workers to improve and chop gets a settler out reasonably quickly and by then you usually know where copper and horses are -- plus you have two workers to get your new city going.

In your practice games, with the barbs doing so much scouting for us, has stealing a worker been an option?

In your practice games, with the barbs doing so much scouting for us, has stealing a worker been an option?
Not the ones I've played as we need Galleys to go and steal a worker.

The option I have used has been Archipeligo and Archipeligo. Gyathaar characterizes the map as a Fractal Archipeligo, which may mean less water, but I have no idea. All of the starts I have tried have put us on our own island.

@rrau - did you have your game running with the SGOTM05 1.74 mod running when you created the game and ran Worldbuilder? I think you simply need to be in the mod wen you create the save. Then you have to call the worldbuilder save up in "Play a Scenario". Then you can save it and it should be "in the mod"?

Yes, it was in the mod when I created it and ran worldbuilder, then I exited the game, edited the worldbuilder and then loaded the game, with the mod again to run it and I used play a scenario.

Yes, it was in the mod when I created it and ran worldbuilder, then I exited the game, edited the worldbuilder and then loaded the game, with the mod again to run it and I used play a scenario.
That's exactly what I did. Can't see how it is not a modded save? :hmm:

Must be that new computer... :mischief:
:joke:

If there's a way to mess up a computer, it'll happen to me :s

Are any of the barb animals tied directly to a tech?

Also does the barb city generate extra commerce tiles like we do? That could explain the 5 turn faster pace to archery in several of the test games. Because that faster pace continues. In Mad Professor's #1 game archery was researched on turn 30 while masonry comes in on turn 82 versus turn 98 in his #2 game and turn 99 in leif's game.

Here's a pattern I'm picking up based on the 3 test games posted so far:
Researched (base cost)
Archery (60) gives a unit
Fishing (40)
Wheel (60) unit?
Masonry (80)

The other techs have appeared at irregular intervals and in different order to have been researched. So they had to have been learned from another method. For instance, in MP #1 game, Hunting appears the turn before Fishing is learned. Myst is learned 5 turns after Wheel and AH comes in 2 turn in front of Masonry.

Research wise it looks like the Barbs are ignoring the terrain improving techs and relying on the other civs to research them. Keep on eye on this as you play a few more test games.

Leif, can you take a look at your worldbuilder save? In the first long paragraph at the end where it says "modpath=" is there anything there? There's not in my games. Maybe I don't have the mod loaded or installed correctly.

OK, we have time to play a few more tests.

I am beginning to think that we should identify the critical techs we need and go after those and let the Barbs fill in the rest. Perhaps something like this:
Mining, Bronze, The Wheel, Animal Husbandry (if we need it and after the Barbs have given us either Hunting or Agriculture), Sailing (after we get Fishing), and then Iron Working?

The saves will be available tonight at midnight server time, which I think is -6 or -7 GMT. I think we need to open the save, move the Scout either west and northwest or northwest and northwest (the reason is that the forest will block out the upper most NW tile if we go W and NW). Then we can take a screenie, post it and decide what we wish to do.

Frederikberg should be back with us by then as well.

I'm thinking that perhaps CP would start us and the roster might look like:
Cactus Pete - UP
Bede - On Deck
Mad Professor
rrau
Frederiksberg
Leif

@Gator - didn't know if you would like a spot in the roster? :)

The only reason I suggest the roster is that whoever will start us off should be the one who opens the save and moves the Scout.

Leif, can you take a look at your worldbuilder save? In the first long paragraph at the end where it says "modpath=" is there anything there? There's not in my games. Maybe I don't have the mod loaded or installed correctly.
Mine says the same. Please open the spoiler to see:
Version=11
BeginGame
Era=ERA_ANCIENT
Speed=GAMESPEED_EPIC
Calendar=CALENDAR_DEFAULT
Option=GAMEOPTION_RAGING_BARBARIANS
Victory=VICTORY_TIME
Victory=VICTORY_CONQUEST
Victory=VICTORY_DOMINATION
Victory=VICTORY_CULTURAL
Victory=VICTORY_SPACE_RACE
Victory=VICTORY_DIPLOMATIC
GameTurn=0
MaxTurns=660
MaxCityElimination=0
TargetScore=0
StartYear=-4000
Description=
ModPath=


EDIT
@rrau - Were did you unzip the mod file?

both in my personal folder on the desktop in mygames and then after reading in the thread, I went and put it in the C: folder, too. Unless someone comes up with how to fix it, I'm probably out of the game, cause I won't be able to open it. Whatever's keeping me from modding a game, crashes your correctly modded save when I try to load it.

both in my personal folder on the desktop in mygames and then after reading in the thread, I went and put it in the C: folder, too. Unless someone comes up with how to fix it, I'm probably out of the game, cause I won't be able to open it. Whatever's keeping me from modding a game, crashes your correctly modded save when I try to load it.
Are you running Vista or XP?

Whatever the case may be, when you start Civ 4, and then go to Advanced and Load a Mod, it reboots. Then you should see, in the upper right corner of your rebooted game, the version of the mod that is loaded. If it says Mod ver 1.74 SGOTM05, or something like that, the mod should be loaded.

Sorry, but I have never used a Vista machine, so I am unfamiliar with the directory structure. :sad:

Are you running Vista or XP?

Whatever the case may be, when you start Civ 4, and then go to Advanced and Load a Mod, it reboots. Then you should see, in the upper right corner of your rebooted game, the version of the mod that is loaded. If it says Mod ver 1.74 SGOTM05, or something like that, the mod should be loaded.

Sorry, but I have never used a Vista machine, so I am unfamiliar with the directory structure. :sad:


Vista. It does get that screen with the little flag in the right upper corner after it reboots when the mods's loaded. I don't know what else to do.

Vista. It does get that screen with the little flag in the right upper corner after it reboots when the mods's loaded. I don't know what else to do.
The save that I posted will not load at all?
When it crashes, is there a message on why it crashes?

Edit - And you are running version 1.74 of Civ 4 Vanilla?

Edit2 - Perhaps a PM to Gyathaar to ask if the mod runs in Vista? I'm running out of ideas...

I posted a screenie of what happens when I try to load your save last page. I'd edited a post so you might have missed it.

[edit] The check for updates option says there's none available.

If there's a way to mess up a computer, it'll happen to me :s

@rrau - somewhere I read that you have the 1.74.SGOTM5 mod installed in both the My Games path and the Program Files\Firaxis path. Delete it from the My Games path before doing anything else. Then right click on the Firaxis folder and open the properties dialog box, go to the Security tab and make sure that the Users group has all the permissions in the Permissions box checked. You will need to have Administrator privileges to make those changes. It will take a bit of time for the machine to process all those files so be patient.

Once you do those two things you should be good to go.

On the subject of starting the game: I really don't see the justification for delaying Animal Husbandry to turn 83. Even if we self research Mining and Bronze first we could research Hunting and Animal Husbandry at least ten turns faster. And if I understand the mechanics of our partnership with the boyos in the bearskins aright, we will be getting some help from the beakers they pick up from just being alive while we get there.

And why an ultra early settler when we don't even know what's out there for that settler to claim? The only reason I see is to prevent a barb city from appearing on top of a resource how will we even know until we know where the resource is? Am I missing something here?

Can't wait to get a look at the real game.

On the subject of starting the game: I really don't see the justification for delaying Animal Husbandry to turn 83. Even if we self research Mining and Bronze first we could research Hunting and Animal Husbandry at least ten turns faster. And if I understand the mechanics of our partnership with the boyos in the bearskins aright, we will be getting some help from the beakers they pick up from just being alive while we get there.

It is my feeling also that waiting for AH to fall from heaven is too slow. It certainly felt like that playing the test games anyhow. I'd like to know where horses are, and I guess early exploring will help us see how urgent AH is too by how many cows, pigs, sheep are around.

The accumulated beakers the barbs get definintely count for us too. In one of the test games, AH was 1 turn to study and I wondered why, hovered the cursur over the text, and it showed me accumulated beakers for it. A few turns later, we got it free from the barbs - so at any time we want to study it ourselves, we'll still get the benefit of the barbs free beakers to that point. The benefit of delaying is that the longer you delay, the more free beakers you get, and you can use your study funding for something the barbs aren't accumulating beakers for. The trade off must come in deciding when you simply can't wait longer for it, and must have it!

I think we should go mining-BW first though, and we'll certianly do a little exploring in that time to turn up cows (particularly) and other animals.

Bede: :bowdown: :hatsoff: :woohoo: :bounce: :dance: :thanx: :thanx: :thanx:

It worked!!!!!!

I'd strongly prefer not to go first, as I have a busy agenda until about August 5 (then plenty of free time) and I don't yet know how to produce good screen shots (though mastering that is one of my goals for this game). Moreover, I haven't had time to play a practice game and probably won't.

I like moving the scout and then discussing what to do with the settler. If we decide to move the settler onto the pig hill, then we probably would want to consult again after that.

Congratulations rrau!! :goodjob:
And thanks Brother Bede for helping rrau get that resolved. :thanx:

No problem CP. Let's try this roster then?
Updated Roster:
Bede - UP
Mad Professor - On Deck
rrau
Frederiksberg
Cactus Pete
Leif

The save is available as I just downloaded it.

Do we all agree that we ought to move the Scout NW and NW or W and NW? If so, Brother Bede can grab the save, move the Scout, take a screenie, save and post the screenie for us all to see? [party]

Moving scout now

The high level view

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/37083/Civ4ScreenShot0000.jpg

A little closer to earth

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/37083/Civ4ScreenShot0001.jpg

Here's the save (http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/37083/Temujin_BC-4000A.Civ4SavedGame)

In the fat cross we will have Pigs, Dyes and Bananas if we settle in place. Here is a clearer view:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/26891/4000BC_SGOTM05_Start.jpg

Looks to me as though we are on a peninsula with water to the east, north and west. I don't think that moving very far is going to help? However, I have been known to be wrong... :mischief:

And since we have a riverside right where we are I say to all the God's chillen "drop your burdens where you stand and await the rapture"

And with an ocean view to send Galleys full of troops to conquer?
:lol: :lol: :lol:

Mining the Pigs is looking pretty good right now! May have to add Pottery to the list of needed techs to build a few cottages. :D

I wonder how big this island is going to be?? :rolleyes:

How about moving the settler 1NW and looking around, then move the scout again to view all other possible ocean resources to the west that would be encompassed within a city site that included the pig hill? If the ocean is rich (most likely for a city site two tiles west of the start or even on the forest 1NW), then waiting a turn to settle should prove provident. If not, then we probably go back and reluctantly settle in place. I like the risk/reward ratio, because the start position is poor indeed and there are numerous black ocean squares within possible city sites. Moreover, if it is a penninsula, as leif suggests, then we will have no way to ever take advantage of most of those potential ocean resources if we settle in place.

Hope everyone on the team will consider this and post.

I think we should make the move CP suggests. At Monarch, I think we can afford to look. It surely cannot hurt given this start. Especially since it'll be Christmas before we get Calender from our Barb allies... :rolleyes:

How about moving the settler 1NW and looking around, then move the scout again to view all other possible ocean resources to the west that would be encompassed within a city site that included the pig hill? If the ocean is rich (most likely for a city site two tiles west of the start or even on the forest 1NW), then waiting a turn to settle should prove provident. If not, then we probably go back and reluctantly settle in place. I like the risk/reward ratio, because the start position is poor indeed and there are numerous black ocean squares within possible city sites. Moreover, if it is a penninsula, as leif suggests, then we will have no way to ever take advantage of most of those potential ocean resources if we settle in place.

Hope everyone on the team will consider this and post.

Noramlly I don't like losing a turn, but in this case I think you are right. With a peninsula like that, the only way we are ever going to be able to put the sea tiles in the black up north in a city fat cross is now in the first city. If there are sea resources there, we can use them well in the early turns for re-growing population after whipping. We can't use the bananas or the dye like that! Christmas before we get calendar from babrs lief? Which year?

I think CP is right, it's worth the turn to move the settler 1 NW to look at the sea tiles and see. The worst is that we just move right back again and settle one turn late. The best is that we might find a couple of good sea resources up there that will give us some oppertunities.

I am going to make the settler move as suggested and post some new pictures.

And here is the view from the cheap seats. Better to move back I think - no fishy fishy here.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/37083/Civ4ScreenShot0000.JPG

And the Save (http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/37083/Temujin_BC-4000B.Civ4SavedGame)

And with an ocean view to send Galleys full of troops to conquer?

Yes, coastal is important I think. We'll need some early production in coastal cities to get those galleys rolloing out.

Mining the Pigs is looking pretty good right now! May have to add Pottery to the list of needed techs to build a few cottages. :D

Yes and yes. Pottery will not come from the barbs before T100. I'd like to start on a cottage or two before then. AS for mining the pigs, the lack of other hills does make that desirable doesn't it? ;) I'm very keen to see what metals pop up where...

As I don't see any ocean resources, I'd go back and settle where we started.

Another thing. This starts out with us at war with everyone. I'd like to build a defender for our city to prevent the stray archer or warrior wandering into our capital. Also, in my test games, the worker, worker, settler start didn't work well due to there being nothing for the workers to do....Maybe build order warrior, worker settler?

@Gator - didn't know if you would like a spot in the roster? :)


I'm not quite sure yet. Work is still keeping me way too busy to play. I'm going to try to download the newest patch and mods tonight, so I can atleast open up the save files and review the game.

I am going to make the settler move as suggested and post some new pictures.

And here is the view from the cheap seats. Better to move back I think - no fishy fishy here.

Rats. Oh well, it was worth checking I think. I don't think missing the dye, and wasting a forest is worth getting a couple of extra sea tiles in the fat cross if there's no resource in them.

Don't settle the city until the scout is moved. There are several sea tiles still obscured that would be available from a city site 1SW of the present settler position. If nothing shows up, then let's settle in the starting position.

Hope we are going to follow the pregame discussion initiated by Frederiksberg and come to a posted, agreed-upon, tentative plan before the man with the mouse proceeds. I'm now thinking Agriculture (to farm the bananas), Mining, BW, and then AH, but haven't thought it through and don't plan to until I know what the scout does, or does not, find.

I have to disagree with rrau . . . until we have good reason to think another civ is nearby, a warrior is entirely superfluous for a long time. Between the scout and the barbs, we should know in plenty of time to react. When we have the bananas farmed (and can get the pigs mined in time), then we are probably better off beginning a barracks while we expand to size two.

Regarding useful activities for the workers . . . there will be riverine tiles to farm, but this is something we need to consider.

@rrau - the report and fixes of your computer upgrading issues made my upgrade go very smooth tonight. I ran into the dll issue and avoided the double mod location thanks to you and Brother Bede. I was able to open and look at the current save file.

Scout moves SW and then SE? Then another screenie? That should give us the best view of our situation.

Then I think we can best discuss what we're facing and what we think our tech path should be. I swear Gyathaar placed those Calender required resources there to keep us away from the metals for a while? :lol: :lol: :lol:

So, I think the metal are probably what we need to seek?

I also don't think we need an immediate Warrior. I would be very surprised to find someone close enough to us to do any fast damage, and the Barbs are our buds. :D And a civ would need a Galley to ship anything close across the water. Agriculture is looking pretty good at the moment. ;)

Thanks Brother Bede. :goodjob:

I believe to view all possible ocean resource squares of interest the scout needs to move due west first.

Yes, I see your point. To move SW would miss at least one ocean tile.

Due to a cock up in my installation I won't be able to move scoutie until tonight. Will get it done though.

You get rrau fixed up and then you blink out!! :rolleyes:

I read your post in the other thread. Warlords depends upon Vanilla's assets.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

No problem, really. I have been sort of waiting to hear from Frederiksberg anyway.

Good luck getting it all sorted out...

No problem, really. I have been sort of waiting to hear from Frederiksberg anyway.

Good luck getting it all sorted out...

Frederiksberg is probably still either in denial about the end of his holiday, or sleeping off the effects of what he drank on the flight home... :p

Edit: Yes, I AM jealous!

You get rrau fixed up and then you blink out!! :rolleyes:

I read your post in the other thread. Warlords depends upon Vanilla's assets.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

No problem, really. I have been sort of waiting to hear from Frederiksberg anyway.

Good luck getting it all sorted out...

I never should have even tried the dual install. I do this sort of thing for a living (Applications Support) and sorting out this sort of problem is my bread and butter, but between Microsoft and Firaxis I have really screwed the pooch on this one. I am within an ace of formatting the hard drive and starting all over with Win2K!!! At least it's a little more straightfoward when it comes to moving files around to strange places. Vista has so many places to hide user level configuration files that I have gone blind looking for them.

Glad you are willing to wait for F'berg to reappear as it is going to take a whiile yet to get this all sorted out.

Woohooo!! I just did something I haven't done since November. I actually played some CIV!!!! It was only the first 100 turns of Leif's test game, but better than not playing at all.

Settled in place and decided to see how many techs I could gain. Got 10 researched through the combined efforts, with only 1 coming in way unexpectedly early. As you all know the first tech we select is the same tech that the Barbs select. So as it nears completion I'd switch to another tech and let the Barb finish it. This in turn determined what the Barb researched next. We'd co-research again until close to the end and then I'd switch again. Using this method I completed:

Mining 3430BC
Hunting 3310
Archery 2980 (came in way too early - 2nd tier tech)
Agriculture 2590
Fishing 2500
Wheel 2380
Animal Husb. 2260
Sailing 1360
Mason 1210
Myst 1090 (never selected - completed on on)
HBR is due in 28 turns

Wasn't sure if a 2nd city would help and didn't see a good city spot, so I built a settler but never used it. So this was all done with 1 city at max science.

Leif's game gave 9 techs, but we were at complete mercy of the Barbs for when and what was researched.

Frederiksberg is probably still either in denial about the end of his holiday, or sleeping off the effects of what he drank on the flight home... :p

Edit: Yes, I AM jealous!

I have a day off Friday so my holiday has not ended yet. I was lucky and got an upgrade to business class on my way home so I had the best selection of liquors and in moderate amounts. Unfortunately I fell asleep on my couch and now I don't feel tired even though it's almost 2 AM here in Denmark :shifty:.

I have read most of our thread now. A few comments:

One thing I noticed last game is you guys apparently have time to discuss strategy in the middle of my workday and by the time I'd gotten home in the evening, the strategy would be already be agreed upon. I have a very busy day and can't really log on to discuss during the day even though I have access - most times I work through lunch, too, catching up on paperwork.

By the time I'd be able to post, there didn't seem to be anything left to post about.

I realize that lack of time can be a problem :) . I'm really interested to hear everyones point of view also if it's only a short comment. And as I explained in my previous post I think it's really good when the mouse holder (the person who's up) posts a summary of his/her intentions before playing.

I would like to propose that we build in an extra 24 hours to our turn sets. It would look like this:

24 hours to post a "Got it"
24 hours to post an outline of what the mouse holder thinks should happen in the turn set and time for us to check in with that outline.
72 hours to actually play the turn set.

I know I rely a lot on what the player before writes in an After Action Report and any recommendations they may have. In addition, I like to read what others think, so during the first 24 hours, waiting for a "Got it", we can post our ideas about the upcoming turn set. This would give the next player a chance to think about what we have written before posting a brief outline.

Lastly, I know that I can concentrate well knowing what objectives I hope to accomplish or what goals we are working towards as a team. I get into trouble when something happens that I am not sure about. I think we should all be able to stop, save and post to ask others about what we have encountered. I know that, through discussion, I often find gems that work out better than if I was left to my own devices.

This all sounds good to me. I think the most important thing is that we have a good discussion before each turn set and that the mouse holder is participating very actively in this discussion.

I found a few posts in the pre-game discussion thread that looked interesting:

barbs get free beakers every turn in techs that is known by at least 1 civ (it can be rounded down to 0 beakers thou).. when all civs know a tech, they get 3% of the beaker cost every turn.

This explains how the barbs get beakers. I think that the best way to use the barb beakers is to go deep in the tech tree leaving as many early techs for the barbs as possible. Going for Mining - BW sounds good to me and after that maybe Agriculture and AH to farm the bananas and pasture the pigs. Getting to Pottery reasonably soon also has some merit to get those half priced Granaries.

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.

This was posted by Klarius before he joined Murky Waters and I think he is a pretty reliable source for getting info from the code. I think this is very useful information because it means that tech trade is not available - at least in the early game. And maybe more important is that open borders and trade routes will also be hard to come by. Barbs picking up WW points doesn't sound nice so making peace with some of the civs does make sense - particularly those that are out of reach in the beginning.

Welcome back Frederiksberg! :wavey:
Didn't hear from you so I assumed you found your way alright! :lol: :lol: :lol:
Hope you had a great vacation in the mid-west. :)

After many trips over the ocean, I'd say that going to Europe is the toughest to recover from. I had always attempted to remain awake the day of my arrival and then try to fall back into the normal sleep and wake times. It is hard the first couple of days. When my family came over, my son was 6 months old (1991), and it took him nearly six months to get used to the time change. There was a lot of crying going on at 2 AM, I remember that!! :cry: :crazyeye: :rolleyes:

In test games, I was able to line up trades with some of the other civs. Didn't actually execute them as the program would have crashed because I didn't have the mod at the time. I think it has as much to do with how much a tech is valued by the AI. I seem to recall that many were willing to trade for Alphabet, as long as we had made peace with them before Alphabet was discovered. Iron Working was another fairly valuable trade. :mischief:

Once we make peace with a Civ, it hamstrings the Barbs as they are also at peace with that civ, so no more losing units in enemy territory. I think it is a balance between how much pillaging slows down our rivals versus the accumulation of War Weariness. Not sure what the balance is yet, but I think making fairly early peace with civs too far away to attack immediately can't hurt.

Once at peace, it will be interesting to see if the AI go after Barb cities or not. :hmm:

I think Gator's method of teching is very interesting, using the Barb beakers to our advantage. Hadn't thought of that approach. However, I think we need to divert some and head for BW for sure. I like Fred's approach of looking to tech deep into the tree. The question is how soon we will get there given our immediate needs. I think the critical techs are Bronze Working (especially if we find copper), Sailing, Agriculture, Pottery, and then up towards Alphabet. If no copper, then IW too. I really think we need to put an early hurt on as many civs as we can.

Thus far, I'd say that the discussion has been fairly lively. Hope we can maintain it. :goodjob:

"This all sounds good to me. I think the most important thing is that we have a good discussion before each turn set and that the mouse holder is participating very actively in this discussion."

Absolutely.

"Going for Mining - BW sounds good to me and after that maybe Agriculture and AH to farm the bananas and pasture the pigs. Getting to Pottery reasonably soon also has some merit to get those half priced Granaries."

If we have to settle on the starting tile, I'm thinking tentatively Agri, Mining, BW, and then AH; moreover, I'm more than tentative about mining the pigs. Interested to hear your arguments.



"As you all know the first tech we select is the same tech that the Barbs select."

I, for one, did not know this and it seems important; also, I am curious where that info was available. How fast and reliable is barb research? Can we know the approximate number of turns it will take for the barbs to complete what we start and do much of the work on?

"Barbs picking up WW points doesn't sound nice so making peace with some of the civs does make sense - particularly those that are out of reach in the beginning."

Are the barbs likely to inflict so much damage on any civ that it will be worth the WW points we receive? I'm thinking it will almost always be wise to get peace ASAP (and break it only when we are ready to conquer or possibly to pillage), but I haven't played this scenario at all. I'd like to know if those who have played it have seen meaningful damage done by the barbs. In regular games, I get the impression that the barbs usually do more harm than good to my prospects by allowing other civ units to gain experience points. That, combined with ww, makes peace appear pretty appealing.

"As you all know the first tech we select is the same tech that the Barbs select."

I, for one, did not know this and it seems important; also, I am curious where that info was available. How fast and reliable is barb research? Can we know the approximate number of turns it will take for the barbs to complete what we start and do much of the work on?

In the test games I played, the barbs were accumulating beakers on several techs at once. This would be due to the thing that Gyaathar mentioned, not that they are actually "studying" anything as such. Barb research generally is rather slow. We can afford to let them get us some first tier techs, and their small contributions to other techs will help us, but it's certainly not like another civ studying for us. Having the barbs on our team will simply be like making the techs a little cheaper, or having that extra library or two around to ramp up research a little.


"Barbs picking up WW points doesn't sound nice so making peace with some of the civs does make sense - particularly those that are out of reach in the beginning."

Are the barbs likely to inflict so much damage on any civ that it will be worth the WW points we receive? I'm thinking it will almost always be wise to get peace ASAP (and break it only when we are ready to conquer or possibly to pillage), but I haven't played this scenario at all. I'd like to know if those who have played it have seen meaningful damage done by the barbs. In regular games, I get the impression that the barbs usually do more harm than good to my prospects by allowing other civ units to gain experience points. That, combined with ww, makes peace appear pretty appealing.

In the practice games I played to T100, the barbs did very little real damage. In one game a barb swordman jumped on a settler/archer stack of Cyrus and killed it, and in the other game I saw a barbarian archer plunder a gold mine belonging to Asoka, but most of the time they just wandered in circles, and gave the other civs' units experience. Not playing past T100 doesn't give me a great picture mind you...

In an archapelago game we might find that barbarian cities pop up on islands that don't have civs on them ,and actually get to develop quite well. I wonder what effect this will have on barb teching?

If we have to settle on the starting tile, I'm thinking tentatively Agri, Mining, BW, and then AH; moreover, I'm more than tentative about mining the pigs. Interested to hear your arguments.
With the dearth of hammers in the starting location, I think mining the pigs may be necessary.

Are the barbs likely to inflict so much damage on any civ that it will be worth the WW points we receive? I'm thinking it will almost always be wise to get peace ASAP (and break it only when we are ready to conquer or possibly to pillage), but I haven't played this scenario at all. I'd like to know if those who have played it have seen meaningful damage done by the barbs. In regular games, I get the impression that the barbs usually do more harm than good to my prospects by allowing other civ units to gain experience points. That, combined with ww, makes peace appear pretty appealing.
I wouldn't say that they have done a lot of damage. I have watched them take out a Gold Mine and pillage mined metals, even take out many of the improvements in a city's cross, if they were Axes or Swords. I was watching for them to take out a city or two, but that never happened.

Welcome back Frederiksberg! :wavey:

I second that :)


After many trips over the ocean, I'd say that going to Europe is the toughest to recover from. I had always attempted to remain awake the day of my arrival and then try to fall back into the normal sleep and wake times. It is hard the first couple of days. When my family came over, my son was 6 months old (1991), and it took him nearly six months to get used to the time change. There was a lot of crying going on at 2 AM, I remember that!! :cry: :crazyeye: :rolleyes:

Crying at 2AM? Who? You or your son? :D I have 5 children, and I've travelled to varioius parts of the globe with them. I know what taking babies and toddlers to different time zones is all about. Even when the kid is not crying at 2AM, and instead is happily chirping and playing and singing to himself at 2AM, it's not that great...


Once at peace, it will be interesting to see if the AI go after Barb cities or not. :hmm:

I would have thought that if a civ is at peace with the barbs, they won't attack them?


I think the critical techs are Bronze Working (especially if we find copper), Sailing, Agriculture, Pottery, and then up towards Alphabet. If no copper, then IW too. I really think we need to put an early hurt on as many civs as we can.

Yes, and if we don't have copper, IW should be a priority therafter. Let's see what happens!

Crying at 2AM? Who? You or your son? :D I have 5 children, and I've travelled to varioius parts of the globe with them. I know what taking babies and toddlers to different time zones is all about. Even when the kid is not crying at 2AM, and instead is happily chirping and playing and singing to himself at 2AM, it's not that great...
Yes, you make a good point there! :lol: :lol: :lol:

Five of them heh! God bless you MP!! :bowdown: :please: :trouble:

I believe to view all possible ocean resource squares of interest the scout needs to move due west first.

Yes, I see your point. To move SW would miss at least one ocean tile.

Sammy Scout moved as suggested and here are the results

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/37083/Civ4ScreenShot0001.JPG

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/37083/Civ4ScreenShot0002.JPG

Jungle and woods to the south - looks like Iron Working is more of a priority.

Settler has not been moved.

Here is the save for the foggazers (http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/37083/Temujin_BC-3970A.Civ4SavedGame)

Just a sidenote this has been the longest evening of mu life trying to get this game to work. Trying to do a dual install so I could play a HoF 2.08 game in another SG has been a nightmare. In between Microsoft and Firaxis I have been whipsawed from pillar to post......Speaking professionally Vista has some real nice security features, speaking as a Civ player I wish the whole thing would just go away.

@rrau - please PM me if your game freezes the first time you move a unit.

Well, we have one ocean tile in the northwest that we can't see but only one blue circle shows, so I don't think there is anything there? :hmm:

Looks like we're back to the original starting spot to settle. That would make Agriculture a priority, followed by Mining and Bronze. I also think we should mine the Pigs, as CP has suggested, after we Irrigate the Bananas.

Once we get Fishing, I would like to build a Fishing Boat and have a look at that land across the straight to the east of our starting location. Scout to the southeast, see if the jungles stretch to our south as well as our southwest?

Start producing a Worker and perhaps a second one as there will be many worker tasks to the south for a second city, although we need Iron Working to do a lot of it. Unless we find some good land to the east, then we need Sailing and will surely need a second worker.

Looks like settling in the original spot is the way to go. This will probably be a very challenging game with this not so great placement of our capital and all the jungle to the south.

Welcome back Frederiksberg!
Didn't hear from you so I assumed you found your way alright!
Hope you had a great vacation in the mid-west.

Thank you :) . I actually managed to win a little money at the poker table although 40$ is not a lot :lol:. But then there are the free drinks on top :D. Lake Michigan was impressive - it sure is big and with lots of good beaches along the eastern shore. Chicago was also a nice surprise - it seems to be well planned with great architecture. And you don't need a car to explore the the inner city - restaurants, shopping and entertainment is within walking distance.

If we have to settle on the starting tile, I'm thinking tentatively Agri, Mining, BW, and then AH; moreover, I'm more than tentative about mining the pigs. Interested to hear your arguments.

Mining the pigs is a good idea in the short term if we want to postpone researching AH. In the longer term converting the mine to a pasture should be better because the tile will yield 2F3H with a mine and 5F1H with a pasture i.e. we get 3 food in exchange for 2 hammers. 3 food will cause the city to grow in around 11-12 turns depending on initial size and by whipping this pop we gain 42 hammers (or is it 45?). Anyway we get around 4 hammers per turn this way compared to only two hammers per turn with the mine. And with a (half priced) granary things are even more favorable because the city regrows faster.

I think there are still a few unclear points about how the barbs tech. The post by Gyathaar states that the barbs get free beakers for every tech known by other civs. Does that include techs where we don't have the prerequisite techs? Could we for instance get beakers for Archery without knowing Hunting? And does the barbs have any other means of research than this?

In test games, I was able to line up trades with some of the other civs. Didn't actually execute them as the program would have crashed because I didn't have the mod at the time. I think it has as much to do with how much a tech is valued by the AI. I seem to recall that many were willing to trade for Alphabet, as long as we had made peace with them before Alphabet was discovered. Iron Working was another fairly valuable trade.

This is a very important point! Which civs will be willing to trade and which are not. The post by Klarius suggested that trading was close to impossible but it seems not to be the case. Would be very nice to know in advance which civs we can use as trading partners and which civs we should attack early.

I suppose that conquest or domination are the VC's we are aiming for - they should certainly be faster to achieve than space race and most probably also faster than cultural.

I hope to get BtS tomorrow and then I will start patching and maybe play with the test game.

Do you have to have BTS to make this game run properly?

Well, Bede did not move the scout due west. It probably makes little difference, but if players are not going to proceed as discussed, then we're not taking Frederiksberg seriously, not playing as a team.

It's arguable that it would be best to move the settler 1SW, hope for an ocean resource, but plan to settle there anyway.

Do you have to have BTS to make this game run properly?
No, you can update to the latest version through your game menu, click advanced and then check for updates.

HOWEVER, if you are playing any Warlords games requiring the HOF mod (like WOTM11), you will no longer be able to play as the assets change in the Vanilla update. Bede could probably explain it better. Also, there is a new DirectX version 9.0c that should be installed as well. Details are located in this thread. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=232115)

It's arguable that it would be best to move the settler 1SW, hope for an ocean resource, but plan to settle there anyway.
Interesting idea. We gain more ocean tiles but lose at least one river tile that we could use for commerce later. The other advantage to the original spot, I think, is that we should be able to see some of that land to the east when our borders expand.

Well, Bede did not move the scout due west. It probably makes little difference, but if players are not going to proceed as discussed, then we're not taking Frederiksberg seriously, not playing as a team.

It's arguable that it would be best to move the settler 1SW, hope for an ocean resource, but plan to settle there anyway.

Let's not be so prickly ;) Sammy did move 1W and uncovered as much fog as he could in that direction, then moved 1SW to see what he could see. He could have gone 1N after the 1W but that would have been retracing the ground and he would have missed all those juicy cottage grounds to the south. (Not that we can do anything about that at the moment)

As to settling 1SW of the current position look carefully at the yields on the plots to the west and NW of that point. More low gold ocean than in the original position we lose the commercial potential of the riversides and the dyes.

I am still in favor of the original settling spot, otherwise too much is lost in commercial potential. We won't have bananas until 10 turns out, but we won't know how to water them anyway.

F-berg has put the mining the pig debate in its proper context. I would have been more favorably inclined to pig mining if the resulting yield were 3f3h, but at only 2f3h I think the extra worker effort isn't worth it as we would want to convert the mine to a pasture post haste on learning Animal Husbandry and Will the Workman or his colleagues may have better things to do at that point.

My proposal for a research path goes like this Agriculture for Banana Yogurt, then Mining and Bronze Working. Odds are the barbarians will pick up Hunting and we then have the two prereq for Animal Husbandry which should help overcome the team research premium. We will also have a leg up on resource identification.

So that's the way I will set up as soon as I get some Yeas or Nays.

Move settler back to original spot, research AGRI then move on to Mining.

And train a worker first as I don't think he will run out of things to do once we have Agriculture as there are a lot of riversides to water so we can apply the 2pop whip with some abandon..

Are we going to go worker, worker, settler? With a fishing boat thrown in when we get fishing to do some exploring?

"Mining the pigs is a good idea in the short term if we want to postpone researching AH. In the longer term converting the mine to a pasture should be better because the tile will yield 2F3H with a mine and 5F1H with a pasture i.e. we get 3 food in exchange for 2 hammers. 3 food will cause the city to grow in around 11-12 turns depending on initial size and by whipping this pop we gain 42 hammers (or is it 45?). Anyway we get around 4 hammers per turn this way compared to only two hammers per turn with the mine. And with a (half priced) granary things are even more favorable because the city regrows faster."

That's well argued. Once our capital approaches the happiness limit, we have a granary, at least two settlers have been produced (probably the only way to go if we are on an island), and we've gotten a library built and need to run two scientists to get an academy (assuming we need Astronomy on this map), then it's clear we are better off with the pigs pastured at that point. The question for me is whether it will be wise to do it earlier.

MY argument is that pasturing is not the best approach during the very early game. We are going to postpone AH a bit -- I agree that it should probably be the fourth tech researched -- and thus we will be learning Mining well before AH. Our production should probably be worker, worker, settler (with some turns on a barracks thrown in as we let our city expand to size two once the bananas are farmed) and after that it's likely that another settler and another worker will be priorities (not sure how useful an exploring fishing boat will be, given our barb scouts).

Slavery is extremely powerful, but it's incompatible with producing workers and settlers, since slavery requires city growth and their production prohibits it (except, of course, for chopping). So slavery will not be very useful initially, and that means there is little initial advantage of pastured pigs over mined pigs. Moreover, we can get the pigs mined quickly and use them (along with chopping) to get our first several units out long before we will be able to pasture the pigs.

I think it will be worth the extra worker turns to switch it over, because getting cities up and running early is crtitical. There's a bit more, but that's the essence of my argument, and I've been called to dinner.

With such limited resources is happiness going to be an issue with the whip (will our pop regrow too fast)? AG may still be the better choice, since it looks like we want population and have few tiles to mine.

I think there are still a few unclear points about how the barbs tech. The post by Gyathaar states that the barbs get free beakers for every tech known by other civs. Does that include techs where we don't have the prerequisite techs? Could we for instance get beakers for Archery without knowing Hunting? And does the barbs have any other means of research than this?

In Leif's and both of MP's test games Archery was discovered prior to Hunting. In my test game, I let the Barb's accumulation of free beakers completely research Myst for me. In the test games you could check the tech tree and see the free beakers as they accumulated against various techs and it also designated 1 specific tech that the barb was "researching" and that counter went down 1 every turn. That 2nd type of research was what I used in my test game to have the barbs finish up learning the tech for me while I moved on to the next tech.

It was really immaterial and if the tech is important you are better off finishing it yourself. I would switch at 2 or 3 turns left and it would take the barbs sometimes up to 10 more turns.

You'll get a feel for it real quick when you look at a test game.

Do you have to have BTS to make this game run properly?
No, you can update to the latest version through your game menu, click advanced and then check for updates.


That is how I updated mine. Through the game, then added the HOF mod. Works fine.

In Leif's and both of MP's test games Archery was discovered prior to Hunting.

A critical point, which answers Frederiksberg's question I think?


You'll get a feel for it real quick when you look at a test game.

It's probably only going to take you a half hour or so if you don't care too much for managing the city, or exactly how well you go. Just move the scout around (or not!) and keep hitting enter so you get to where the barbs start accumulating beakers. Then each turn click on the tech bar at the top of the screen and hover the cursur over each tech icon and see how the accumulated beakers are changing.

The barbs get archery so fast I think becuase at Monarch ALL the AI's start with archers...

I am still in favor of the original settling spot,

I agree. There's a slight chance of a sea resource in the one tile to the west we can't see, but overall I still like the original spot better.

On the subject of mining the pigs, I'm no expert... It seems that if worker(s) we have early are not flat out with a list of important jobs, mining the pigs is good, because as CP says, early on when we're not whipping much because we don't have the population yet, the mine is better especially if we've been farming along the river - as long as the worker building the mine has not been kept from something else important it could have been doing...? (like chopping a worker/settler for example?)


My proposal for a research path goes like this Agriculture for Banana Yogurt, then Mining and Bronze Working. Odds are the barbarians will pick up Hunting and we then have the two prereq for Animal Husbandry which should help overcome the team research premium. We will also have a leg up on resource identification.

Ag, Mining, BW sounds good to me. Maybe AH after that. We'll need to look to where the copper is. If none within reach, IW should get pushed up the list somewhere.


And train a worker first as I don't think he will run out of things to do once we have Agriculture as there are a lot of riversides to water so we can apply the 2pop whip with some abandon..

As long as we don't have unhappy problems because the population is regrowing faster than the unhappies disappear. I've never been very heavy handed with the whip, so I'm not quite sure where the limits are here in how hard we can push it.

Worker first is probably best. I never in my civ playing built a second worker straight after the first, but maybe I'm about to learn something? I'd be nervous about city defense, but again, maybe I'm about to learn something? It occurs to me that not building a military unit until after the barbs give us archery will mean we don't have to build a warrior at all, which pleases me. I find warriors to be not very useful creatures...

Edit: Unles the warriors are quechuas!

Gator, your clarification on barb teching is much appreciated.

"With such limited resources is happiness going to be an issue with the whip (will our pop regrow too fast)?"

Happiness will be an issue that we'll have to deal with, because to achieve a fast military victory we'll have to use the whip extensively.

"AG may still be the better choice, since it looks like we want population and have few tiles to mine."

I don't think anyone is suggesting that Agriculture shouldn't be the first tech researched.

"I find warriors to be not very useful creatures..."

In this game, I would anticipate that warriors will only be useful as cheap MPs.

"as long as the worker building the mine has not been kept from something else important it could have been doing...? (like chopping a worker/settler for example?)"

I'm pretty sure that the first worker will be able to farm the bananas and mine (or, at least, begin to mine) the pigs before BW is researched and chopping is possible, but I haven't actually tried it.

Let's not be so prickly ;) Sammy did move 1W and uncovered as much fog as he could in that direction, then moved 1SW to see what he could see.

Check out your post #79. The scout was positioned due east of the bananas. If he moved due west from there he could not have ended up where he is now. Did you by chance alter his position in the process of getting the game up and running?

As to settling 1SW of the current position look carefully at the yields on the plots to the west and NW of that point. More low gold ocean than in the original position we lose the commercial potential of the riversides and the dyes.

I am still in favor of the original settling spot, otherwise too much is lost in commercial potential. We won't have bananas until 10 turns out, but we won't know how to water them anyway.

Yes, probably the better of two poor choices.

F-berg has put the mining the pig debate in its proper context. I would have been more favorably inclined to pig mining if the resulting yield were 3f3h, but at only 2f3h I think the extra worker effort isn't worth it as we would want to convert the mine to a pasture post haste on learning Animal Husbandry and Will the Workman or his colleagues may have better things to do at that point.

Hope you'll consider my argument above. We would not need to pasture the mine immediately after researching AH, because there would be only 1f to gain until we finish early multiple worker and settler production and start using the whip extensively. This is not a clear cut choice. Hope everyone on the team casts a vote.

My proposal for a research path goes like this Agriculture for Banana Yogurt, then Mining and Bronze Working. Odds are the barbarians will pick up Hunting and we then have the two prereq for Animal Husbandry which should help overcome the team research premium. We will also have a leg up on resource identification.
Move settler back to original spot, research AGRI then move on to Mining.

Agreed

And train a worker first as I don't think he will run out of things to do once we have Agriculture as there are a lot of riversides to water so we can apply the 2pop whip with some abandon..

Can't use it with abandon if we want (as I do) to produce settlers and workers as fast as possible, because we'd have to grow the city first and repeatedly.

CP is right. Sorry for the lapse. I can plead OS frustration for my inattention.

You are thinking much farther ahead than I am at the moment as I don't yet fully grasp the implications of the "settlers and workers as fast as possible" tactic. I continue to believe that identifying resource locations before committing to a settler is preferable which means the first settler doesn't start until after Bronze Working, at least. And with the dearth of hammers at home using the axe to produce settlers and workers seems almost counterproductive.

Sorry I've been missing a bit. RL is biting, if you will.

I started another test game last night. I modified the save I made previously to update it to what we know so far, adding the Bananas. The purpose of the game was to help answer MP's and Fred's questions about who might trade with us. Because of a number of things, I have not gotten far enough to answer that question yet.

However, I think it is worth it to mine the Pig Hill. A summary:
Research has been:
Agriculture (said 18 turns but took 16 as Barbs helped).
Mining (said 12 turns but took 11)
Bronze Working (said 27 turns, took 27 turns)
Animal Husbandry (said 14 turns and took 12 turns, one of which was revolt to Slavery)

Production:
Worker, Worker, Work Boat and Settler.
Mining the Pig Hill gives +2F,+3H and no commerce. Irrigating the Bananas gives +4 Food, +1 Commerce. So it is a bit more advantageous to use the mined Pigs than the irrigated Bananas. Of course, I irrigated before mining.

If we plan to use the starting city to pump out Workers, I think it is more advantageous to mine the Pigs first, go directly to Mining.

In this particular case, there is no Copper on our island, nor horses. So we are researching Sailing as a nearby island has Copper.

How do we want the turn sets to work? We have played 40 to start and then 20 for a while. Shall we start with 30 and then go to 15 or 10?

I think we need a bit more discussion on build order. Perhaps Bede should play until the first Worker pops and mines the Pigs? By then we should be able to see if there are any city sites available we would like to try for and what our next build should be? So instead of specifying a certain number of turns, we could go by goals and achieving those goals?

Based upon my recent test, I think we should consider researching Mining directly and then Bronze Working. First build is a Worker, perhaps followed by another. We should also be able to see where our Barb allies recon and what that holds for us.

I am a firm believer in early commerce and early food so would prefer to follow the Agriculture then Mining path. Added gold and food is worth the loss of the hammer from the pig mining project.

CP is right. Sorry for the lapse. I can plead OS frustration for my inattention.

Understood.

You are thinking much farther ahead than I am at the moment as I don't yet fully grasp the implications of the "settlers and workers as fast as possible" tactic. I continue to believe that identifying resource locations before committing to a settler is preferable which means the first settler doesn't start until after Bronze Working, at least.

I don't think our positions are incompatible. If we produce two workers and then a settler (as I advocate) -- pausing briefly once the bananas are farmed and the pigs mined (or about to be) to partially build a barracks while the city expands to size two -- then I don't think we will get the settler out before BW and with AH in sight (depending on barb help). You can see how it goes and adjust in two ways: hold off on chopping for the settler and farm another riverine tile; and go for a third worker (can't get enough of them early on epic). The implications of settler and workers ASAP are simply the dynamics of geometric progressions: the sooner a second (and third) city is founded and developed, the faster your civilization becomes powerful: however, I certainly agree that locating resources (or even knowing that they don't exist) is a highly desirable before settling a second city.