SGOTM 13 - Plastic Ducks

srad said:

About scouting:

Snaaty, BIC, kossin: green
Duckweed, srad: kossins yellow to the 'unknown hills'

Click to expand...

Considering the position of those hills (closer), the red route to western islands seems better. Also it's more efficient.

@others

Don't hesitate to vote when the active player is asking for votes. Even you consider yourself a dedicated lurker, Compromise.

I'll try to take a look at the northern island in a few hours to see how large it is.

Scouting for the hills on the west side is a lot safer as we have a better idea of the layout from what is visible... I'm still not really that good at the flying camera trick.

hey ducks, I'm lurking like a mad man in this thread. hope you don't mind!

Hope you like it!

Please, stay a while and listen </old man>

P.S. Duckweed, yes, I don't mind 1990s graphics

Duckweed, thanks for the call to comment. Looking back at my other posts here makes me . (Reviewing it, I think this one too... )

I tend to way(-way-way) overanalyze the very early game, my favorite part. I apologize in advance for the verbosity of this email. I'm mostly thinking out loud (in a post?), trying to make sure I understand what all of you seem to already know....

First, as I understand it, the situation is:

Turn 53 (now): wb ready to explore
T61: Settler boards galley
T62: Galley unloads settler on Fish/Stone island (on the visible hill, presumably)
T63: City2 is founded.

So, unless there's a better site, we have to have the wb on the Fish halfway through T63, i.e. adjacent to the Fish on T62.

General thoughts on health and borders:
- Capital's borders pop again on T76, which is just 13T after City 2 is founded.
- When the borders pop, both the Fish and the Crabs come in the capital's range.
- Therefore, even if we find a nice, Clam-fed site somewhere,
we can get additional health for the capital at the cost of a workboat (or two).

General thoughts on the map:
- Lots of ocean here, so hills will be a premium, especially if we want non-whip production. A 2-pop whip cycle from size 6->8 (for example) takes 99F over 15T. which is just one Fish resource (and the city center). With a granary, a single seafood is more than enough to grow back if you're not working much more than coast.
- Is it meaningful that Stone is visible from the second border pop in the capital whether one starts in place, on the corn, or on the stone hill (the 3 obvious locations?)

Exploration thoughts:
East:
- We can do a lot of exploring to the east of Fish/Stone with the galley/settler:
- Unload the settler on the hill on T62.
- Move the galley further east on T63 *before* settling. Maybe a better site if the now-visible Fish is in the 2nd ring? Or if on-Stone looks awesome?

North:
- I agree that north island has that tundra look.
- And that the island looks at least 5-tiles big, thus tough to circumnavigate.
- Kossin's fog-gazing doesn't make expanding north all that appealing.

West:
- Some possibly interesting islands with hills visible in Kossin's fog?

South: (judging from Kossin's flying-camera map in post 42
- Nothing directly south is interesting,
- But both southwest and southeast look like where we'll be naturally headed next,
- So we risk a long delay in exploring to the north and/or west if we don't look now.

If the workboat spends "too long" exploring, the cost is 3F/turn (if Fish). That's a 1T delay in city 2 getting to size 2 for either 1T or 2T delay in the workboat arrival. (0T delay = 35F after 7T; 1T delay = 37F after 8T; 2T delay = 34F after 8T)

I drew up a little map of how I'd explore, where workboat *ends* its moves on the turn numbers in red. It also shows galley movement and the settler drop.



The path can be shortened by starting west rather than north (so you end up on "55" at the end of T54 and don't scout N of the crab).

...Or by passing east of the Forest/Hill island so that you can end up on (or east) of "60" on T59 (maybe if west of crab looked interesting enough to explore, or if the western island is wider than 1 tile).

I'm useless after the mid-game because it's too exhausting for the detail I like to obsess over.

Sorry again for the probably-obvious and certainly-overlong post, and for adding an exploration option I haven't seen proposed yet.

Okay, that post was just waaay too long.

Compromise said:

Sorry again for the probably-obvious and certainly-overlong post, and for adding an exploration option I haven't seen proposed yet.

Click to expand...

On the contrary, your analysis is very much welcome and not so obvious to all of us at all ("us" including me, myself and my little finger).


@ Unloading the galley :
As I mentionned earlier, I'd have done so 2E of the Fish. The hill is a much better spot, since it gives sight of potential seafood on the other side of the landmass.

@ Capital's border pop :
"- Capital's borders pop again on T76, which is just 13T after City 2 is founded."
That is very relevant to the settling location. If we find a spot with 2 food/cool resources we can indeed afford to leave the seafood in the 2nd ring. Or at least consider doing so.

@ Scouting direction :
What's the phrase ? I used to be indecisive but now... I'm not quite sure.
[...]
Vote change : Kossin's red route is fine with.
(Thank you Duckweed for mentionning the colour explicitely, I only recalled the yellow route when I wrote my last post.)


@ "- Is it meaningful that Stone is visible from the second border pop in the capital whether one starts in place, on the corn, or on the stone hill (the 3 obvious locations?)"
Yep. All teams can think about building the Statues Moai in the capital asap to ensure their production. Now copper would be nice.
I'm not sure stone is relevant for anything else.
The Hanging Gardens and Oxford academy are the only other wonders that come to mind. The Pyramids are probably too hammer intensive.

@Snaaty
Hinduism is indeed still available. I doubt it will still be there after we get Mysticism but it'd be an interesting gamble, furthermore keeping the option of bulbing Astronomy easier as well as being a pre-requisite for Literature and Music.

@Compromise
That was an excellent post, don't be ashamed of length! It can be as long as you want! You raise an interesting issue which is where do we unload the galley's contents.

I see 2 possibilities:
- take settler and worker
- take settler and warrior ??? -> there are barbarians! Going back into our SGOTM11 thread, Bugg had barb warriors/archers appear as early as 2650BC. However as for barbs entering borders, it's more around 1400BC~1300BC from what I found in that thread. Also, if we take the warrior it gives us scouting opportunities whereas we don't need the worker for desert tiles presumably.

I agree to unload on the hill with the warrior/worker first. This will let us know if settling the stone is more interesting!

@North island
After viewing it in camera mode, it indeed appears to be quite larger than we anticipated at first, something I was unable to do from the 4000BC save. In fact, I am unsure but it seems as it is quite wide (maybe ~8 tiles or so)... therefore Snaaty's green route is impractical

If my red route becomes the favorite, I will go back to camera mode and try to ensure the route is possible so that srad doesn't have to alter things too much because of a stupid mistake from me

A good alternative to Snaaty's is Compromise's. As we said, there could be deer or something of that kind in the north.

Thanks guys.

I did use Kossin's red path as a basis for the one I suggested, I just tried to minimize backtracking. I see that I missed a land tile he noted though, so my previously proposed path wouldn't work.

I've copied Kossin's image below and added a proposal to it. I've adjusted my path (and his) with orange end-turn numbers and dots to show the inter-turn moves:



I don't see how we can scout the southernmost way-out-west-in-the-fog hill without backtracking (shown above with a blue dot). Maybe we should consider doing this? Since we are whipping it, a 1T or 2T delay in getting the galley means working 2 tiles (improved) in the capital instead of 1T delay in getting City 2 to whippable size (2).

Edit: there should have been 2 blue dots for the exploration of the other fog hill. We can move SW from "57" instead of S, so it's not a 100% backtrack.

Wow, finally managed to get on CFC today.

That route appears very interesting Compromise, I will look into further deciphering what's in the fog over in the west when I get home. It would probably give us the most and safest amount of information we can get now.

Uff, not lightning fast today.

Thanks for your detailed help Compromise! The orange number route looks really good! And at least for my part I didn't thought about all the details you mentioned.

As I will stop at the latest at t60 we will not yet have to decide if we load the worker or the warrior. I tend to load the warrior because if we loose the settler ....

I'll wait till the team gives the OK for starting the set.
Should I use the save attached to the thread or will the save be uploaded to the SGOTM Progress page?

Actually, there are 2 things:

- I will double check the route proposed by Compromise which seems like the mix of all proposed routes going west so far

- Duckweed needs to upload to the SGOTM server, and you need to play from that save [or I guess anyone could do it?]

Other than that, I think we will be set to go

kossin said:

Other than that, I think we will be set to go

Click to expand...

That sounds fine

Save uploaded to the server.

Compromise's orange route looks pretty good to me.

@srad Looking forward to something shiny.

compromise route

...

why i mentioned hindu wasent for getting the reli. it was more to know better when to expect mono + oracle to be built (which now might be really late and we might have indeed a shot on it)

-> usally oracle goes on normal speed like 10 turns after the mono reli is gone. its not a fixed formula, more like an experience, so dont nail me on a turn or two and its also not 100% sure (and im talking about deity turns here, normal speed and continent maps)

...

what else do we see in the demo screen:

1. seems so far like noone has external trade routes
2. land area of all ai is quite big

-> the ais all seem landbased (or only have a few costal tiles if costal... ...the glh guy at least should be costal, no?)
-> they have some space to expand into + dont connect via rives / seabased traderoutes
-> it will take some turns more, untill the glh guy starts to run away with his eco

so, it might be possible / needed that we load a landbased scout onto our galley pretty soon, to accelerate contact a little, going inland

Maybe a warrior on a galley in one direction and a fishing boat in the other if we don't want to spare two galleys?

Kossin, if you post an updated fog-guesstimate, I'd be happy to help verify the exploring wb route.

^^

Yes I'll do that in a few hours.

After further fog-gazing, I am sorry to inform that I made a mistake yesterday

That northwestern hill is actually 1 tile further west, meaning we can't do the move '56' on Compromise's route. However in any case it seems to be a lone hill tile so all is not lost.

I propose this alternative route that gets to see a bit around the stone location however. It is essentially the same as Compromise's but with the minor adjustment.



(-) we don't see the lone hill
(+) I am more certain this route is possible
(+) we see 2 more tiles around the stone, giving a more likely alternative settling location

I started editing the post #2 of the thread but I'll need to put some more time into it as well.

The latest route looks good. Without those hills to the west, things seem more isolated....

Incredibly small adjustment: the end of T60 should be 1S of its location, so 1W3S of the capital instead of 1W2S as shown above.

Also, question: I haven't used the flying camera trick before. From Kossin's screenshots, it seems like you see either hills or forests but not flatland (let alone resources). So it's still possible that there are flat islands not visible to the flying camera, right?

I suppose you'd be aware those in the normal way: by seeing coast (1F2C) instead of ocean (1F1C) tiles?

Also, a question about the AIs external trade routes (or lack thereof as deduced by Snaaty from the Demographics screen): Would they need open borders for those to be active?

I know that once we meet an AI, we can watch how our relative espionage points change to determine how many other AIs they know, but I'm not sure when the trade route info becomes helpful.

OK, at the latest I'll play in ~14h. WB will try to follow the slightly modified Compromise route.