SGOTM 15 - Kakumeika

OB vote comes up on t105 with OB granted on t106. We will need 3 settler/missionary
"stacks" ready to head out. Axes will need to protect the one pair that goes thru Hammu (because of the Shaka war--prolly should ask for peace). The other two pairs can go thru Toku.

We need to pray that there is still unsettled land. I'm concerned we are too slow, but I'm optimistic we will find something open.

By the next vote (t116) we should have open borders with 4 civs!

Note: Using the AP to assign a city back to us (for re-gifting) is going to be a problem. We will get "you voted against us" penalties.

WastinTime said:

Note: Using the AP to assign a city back to us (for re-gifting) is going to be a problem. We will get "you voted against us" penalties.

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The "You voted for us" bonus decays rapidly. I'm guessing the "You voted against us" penalty decays just as quickly, but I have no personal experience with this penalty. If this is the case, we need not be concerned unless we are somewhat close to a RL DV.

Sun Tzu Wu

getting a settler safely to Hammy's lands while at war will be tricky. We definitely will need another galley. Unless we want to risk a single axe's protection.

I doubt we will have to use a vote to get back a city. The city will revolt and return to us most likely. So I doubt we need to worry about the diplo penalties. We may want to consider bringing up the vote to reassign a city to us and then vote against it (to get the diplo benefits if no other useful AP votes are available).

We will not get the option to vote to take over city we gift to Hammy if it is far from any of our culture.

WastinTime said:

We have to drop off the settler/missionary before we get peace. There is no way to get a boat over there during peacetime.

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We have to get the boat over there before peace, but we don't have to drop them off first since there is neutral territory over there.

WastinTime said:

Have PigsGems build a 2nd Galley.

I prefer to work the marble tile 2 turns while building a granary in Crabsville.

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I did look at the tile micro now that Hinduism spread and forest chops are coming in. Continuing to work the crabs at size 1 worked out about one hammer better (i.e. equal food) by the time we grow to size 3, ignoring any commerce&maintenance effects. I'll double check before any play.

mabraham. Are you going to put out a new PPP for the remainder? I think we have to get all those temples, archers, monasteries out of there and re-focus on the big picture.

WastinTime said:

mabraham. Are you going to put out a new PPP for the remainder? I think we have to get all those temples, archers, monasteries out of there and re-focus on the big picture.

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Yes, I have started working on that. It's a pity we didn't manage to focus on the needs of using the AP sooner, but I guess we were hoping for some random spread somewhere.

Am trying to look at the AP code so that we really know what is necessary for the various relevant missions (peace with brethren, war on infidel, OB, city gift... any others?)

WastinTime said:

mabraham. Are you going to put out a new PPP for the remainder? I think we have to get all those temples, archers, monasteries out of there and re-focus on the big picture.

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I hear what you are saying, but I think we are on the right track and have played this right. I think we need to have a balanced civilization, which we do. A standard HoF religious game is extremely unbalanced and is a sprint to theology, the AP, diplomacy and religious spread sacrificing an economy, expansion and mid-game research. We may need to take down all or some of Hatty-, Genghi- or Shakagawa to get access to the rest of the world.

shulec said:

Mapmaker

I can see Neilmeister being very devious on this one. I know he has played an extensive number of standard religious victory games for the HoF. STW is the religious victory master, WastinTime and I have a strong background with these victories too. I think it is plain to see that this game will be nothing like those AP sprints. I can see Neilmeister trying to setup the game in such a way that the religious victory could be the most difficult.

How would I do this?

I would make 8 Tokugawa's and give them their own nation. (i.e. Toku from England, Toku from Spain, Toku from Russia, etc.) I doubt there will be anything like this as diplo would be an unfair nightmare, e.g. Toku requests that you cancel all deals with Toku! Well... which Toku is that? This could be worked around by naming them all something other than Toku, but still keeping them as Toku.

As an alternative, I would choose several religious zealouts. They can easily have mysticism swapped out for another starting tech by the mapmaker. Does anyone know who the zealots are? Is this defined by "flavor" (Dan)? And do they all start with monotheism and have theology as their favorite tech? The zealots will likely be nearby to be pissed at us for running a different state religion.

Additionally, having AI with polar peaceweights . The psychopaths and cupcakes will have several wars and diplo tension would make things difficult.

I would separate a flat map with water and require Astronomy. I would also start us far from the water and require cities be taken to get a coastal city to build Naval transports. Note that the story says: "the voyage home is a long and treacherous one. He is of course caught at sea by vikings."

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I wasn't far off on the Gawa's, I fear that I am not far off on the coastal city requirement. Only it looks like Neilmiester may have found a way to landlock our coastal cities, requiring we have to forcefully take coastal cities to unlock the rest of the world.

shulec said:

We may need to take down all or some of Hatty-, Genghi- or Shakagawa to get access to the rest of the world.

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This is my thought exactly, but I fear that if a team pulled off a turn75 AP with OB on turn 85, then they would have found plenty of open land to settle a critical coastal city and completely avoid the take-down that we may be required to do.

Who knows though, maybe there is only one tile that has access to what we assume is another lake area, and that tile has a castle, etc. Our stronger infrastructure might help us make up time.

Neil could have been really mean and only given us one Toku neighbor, but he gave us a gift....with 3 members we unlock the OB vote, and we didn't take full advantage of that gift.

I'm signing off until morning (~9 hours). Since I'm up next, I've been planning my turnset, and I'd like to get a chance to comment on the final 95-100 PPP, but you probably weren't planning on playing sooner than that anyway.

Yeah nothing happening soon. Can't work out this AP OB thing. No point spamming out Hindu cities if we get no benefit because there's no other full members.

OK lessons from the code. Some information is found in the XML in GameInfo/CIV4VoteInfo.xml, but its mostly code-logic.

All resolutions require at least 3 members of any type. Resident election is not a resolution.

My reading of the code is that Open borders is only available if a full member team lacks OB with another full member team. This agrees with the AP guide I mentioned previously. I don't know how to reconcile that with DanF's test game experience in post #1674.


The code seems clear. If the possible resolution is for open borders, then it is invalid when bOpenWithEveryone is true. bOpenWithEveryone is true by default, and can only become false if two full members lack OB with each other.

War on the infidels can't be declared on a full member, can't be declared on anyone who is already at war with all the full members (which doesn't seem to agree with my memory of what we did to Ragnar last SGOTM, unless Liz was a full member), and can't be declared on someone who is not already at war with a full member.

Bleah my head hurts. Gonna go do something easy, like world peace.

From testing with our test game, I can confirm DanF's observation that OB only needs us and 2 voting members that lack OB with us.... @$%& but at least I know how to plan for that!

OK here's a partial completed PPP. I think it will
a) get Toku's gift hindu city to him before he can re-DOW
b) get Hammu's liberated Hindu city before the hoped-for OB-resolution
c) get the island city settled
d) not rape too much population
e) not be too vulnerable to any boats or units hammu might have (but WastinTime will have to judge on the fly how to manage things, with a few turns of flex up his sleeve)
f) maybe get tech out of hammu for peace before gifting him the city... depending if he loses units some time

Diplo
Even if we have war success (e.g. galley kill), don't bother getting peace with Hamm or Shaka without them giving us stuff, unless they show up and look really scary
We're already gifting deer and marble to Toku for 12 turns of the needed 50. Gift him stone, pigs and crabs (we can afford that, and have cows coming in in 2 turns) since our whipping makes it fairly easy to dodge health caps. This will give +1 shared resources about T104 for possible Pleased status in the future.
Be prepared to gift small techs to newly-met AIs for big immediate diplo benefit. Apparently a Theology gift is acceptable if nothing else will do. I assume an MC gift is not acceptable.
Consider accepting a demand Toku makes.

Tech
t96-8 100% IW
t99 0% Construction (don't have enough cash to finish Compass anyway, so don't get involved in tech debate this turn set)

Toku-city settler building in cowtown
t97 moves 3e
t98 founds, converted to hinduism, gets gifted to toku

toku-city missionary
t96 moves toward toku gift site
t98 converts before gift

Delhi
t96 whip settler, work gmine
t97 start temple, gmine (temple pays off its base hammers in about 9 turns, so looks good to me given the huge unknowns we have)
t98 start monastery, grow, work gfarm gmine
t99 new gfarm available, work 2gfarm

DeerGold
t96 start settler, gfarm 3gmine
t99 2-pop whip, 2gmine
t100 done settler, start missionary, 2gfarm
t101 done missionary, start archer (or whatever)

Sheeptown
Keep building monastery, add corn when available

Cowtown
t96 finish settler work gmine
t97 start spy, work gfarm
t98 finish spy, start settler work 2gmine

pigsgems
t96 switch to galley, 2gfarm (deergold is happy to give one up!)
t97 2-pop whip galley
t98 finish galley, named Raft, resume trireme, work gfarm
t99 finish trireme, named Dreadnought, start temple (happiness is a serious concern here now, Amundsen might have to serve as MP T101)

crabsville
t96 keep working crabs (it works out slightly better than switching to marble to accelerate granary)

fritz
t96 done
t97-8 road 1w of deergold
t99 move to 1s2e of deergold
t100-2 chop

eiffel
t96 done
t97 move 1nw and mine and wake
t98-100 move 1ne and chop

hoover
t96 done
t97-88 move 1sw and road
t99 farm 1N of delhi
t100 head east somewhere (road to gift city for espionage mission?)

karl

Cook
t96 move to 2W of DeerGold
t100 load onto Raft
t102 offload from Raft to defend settler
t103 defend as necessary, maybe load back onto Raft, maybe threaten a Hammu city

ferry
t96 done
t97 move 1e, load settler from delhi, FIND A WORKER TO SEND ALONG, move 1w
t98 move 1w, 1sw unload settler and worker NEED TO CHOOSE CITY SITE - NE of corn?
t99 1ne, 1n
t100 1n and wait
t101 load missionary, move 2nw, maybe pack another unit so we can threaten another hammu city
t102 move 2nw, unload missionary

Hammu settler
t100 load into Raft
t101/2 offload from Raft
t102/3 found gift city

Hammu missionary
t101 load onto Ferry
t102 offload Ferry next to gift city
t103 convert gift city

raft
t98 move 2NW
t99 move 1nw and wait
t100 load settler from DeerGold and Cook, move 2NW unless it looks scary for some reason, and if so duck under dreadnought
t101 move 2NW and maybe unload
t102/3 land units on settling site (whatever it will be)

dreadnought
t99 move 2NW
t100 move 2NW providing cover for galleys as necessary

Argo
come back if he'll be on station near Nippur by T101 or so, otherwise keep going

Magellan
finish loop of island, remain if seafood discovered, head for Crabsville safety otherwise

Island axeman
Bust fog 1N of lake

Sneaky
Find Toku's last city, find potential gift city sites in gap between Toku and neighbour (Hatse?). Don't bother much about scouting fresh water lake coastline.

Forest axes
Taunt Hammu creatively

Every turn
check if some AI will give us peace with them giving us some stuff
look for AI culture on globe view
save game
record corn tile culture
check tile micro, including which city gets shared tiles
kill Hammu or Shaka scouts if they appear
kill Hammu or Shaka boats
turn on show AI moves so stuff gets seen
watch for AI build-up via power ratios
laugh at Toku build-up
check if horses seen, so a spear is needed for NW front, and build same in DeerGold
look for Toku having Construction (easy once we have Maths)

Stopping points
new contact with AI from spy, boats or them finding us
don't bother stopping if a barb galley appears somewhere, but consider whipping the next trireme to cope with it
disaster on hammu/shaka front
toku DOW

It seems to be another side effect of number of players = number of teams + 1 ...

That's how it happens in my test game: there are 10 players (IDs 0...9) and 9 alive real teams (IDs 0...8) -> the dummy team with ID=9 doesn't have a player ... and therefore becomes a Full Member of the AP although not being alive (the isAlive()-check is missing in CvTeam::isFullMember() which then defaults to true) ... kind of buggy.

Maybe it is different in the real game and Neilmeister found a solution to prevent this effect. But I cannot think of any such way at the moment and suspect it will work just like that in the SGOTM too and the OB-vote will pop up.

Ideally I could play in the morning in 14 hours from this post, but could perhaps do so later in the day depending on the state of discussion.

What about bringing out lead exploring trireme back for escort duty? It can keep an eye out for Zulu units and Hamaragawa's units heading toward our landing site.

shulec said:

What about bringing out lead exploring trireme back for escort duty? It can keep an eye out for Zulu units and Hamaragawa's units heading toward our landing site.

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I'm happy to do that, though I'm not sure it makes it in time to deal with a hypothetical galley leaving Babylon this turn. The original purpose of the trireme was to scout Hammu and beyond, and make AI contacts. The latter is superseded, and scouting can happen with any unit once we have our hoped-for OB. So finding a new purpose is quite reasonable, IMO. After all, Argo is likely to hit impenetrable Toku-culture somewhere on the coast eventually.

DanF5771 said:

It seems to be another side effect of number of players = number of teams + 1 ...

That's how it happens in my test game: there are 10 players (IDs 0...9) and 9 alive real teams (IDs 0...8) -> the dummy team with ID=9 doesn't have a player ... and therefore becomes a Full Member of the AP although not being alive (the isAlive()-check is missing in CvTeam::isFullMember() which then defaults to true) ... kind of buggy.

Maybe it is different in the real game and Neilmeister found a solution to prevent this effect. But I cannot think of any such way at the moment and suspect it will work just like that in the SGOTM too and the OB-vote will pop up.

Click to expand...

A missing isAlive() could be a contributing factor, but only if a non-existent team calls that member function. I don't see any evidence that a numeric playerID is used as a numeric teamID in the code snippet I posted above, and that would be the only way that the difference in the size of the set of players and the size of the set of teams could have an effect. Never mind that in C++ they should have been using a proper container & non-numeric iterator, or at least different enums for numeric IDs... Still, it's nice to think that a bug might be working for us, for a change!