SGOTM 16 - U'nu'sual S'us'pec'ts

neilmeister said:

2E loses a lot of forests, and gains a lot of water tiles. It has at least 6.
1SE settles on a forest, but it gets at least 3 more forests than 2E, and only has 4 water tiles.

But this is the reason I like moving NE, because if there is another resource up there then 2E suddenly becomes more attractive.

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One thing that concerns me about moving 2E is that there aren't a lot of production tiles visible other than the grass hill to the south. That could be addressed with the Moai, I suppose. (Edit: and if we went for MC early, we could build workshops.)

Moai and workshops are not a good "early production" strategy.

ChrisShaffer said:

Moai and workshops are not a good "early production" strategy.

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True, but I was thinking more long term. It (i.e. 2E) doesn't look like a great Bureaucracy capital. We would have to rely on the whip for production early on.

Its great to be back into the swing of things. While mapmaking is fun, especially for the sgotm, i did miss playing.

Hello to all my old and new teammates.

I have generated a spreadsheet for micromanagement planning purposes. It can be found here.

Anyone can view it through the link, but I need to grant permission if you would like to edit. Please PM me your email if you want editing privileges. I have already added Chris and Neil to the list.

So what is our primary goal? Am I right to think that fastest to Future Tech is the linchpin of the game?

Random thoughts on general strategy:

Almost certainly, one of our victory conditions will be Conquest or Domination. Given that we need to tech to Future Tech, Spaceship seems like a good choice for the other.

I agree with Revent that GLH + Colossus could support our expansion and put us in a good position to pursue Domination/Spaceship. A lot will depend on the AI and map. Several of the goals, such as obtaining holy shrines or corporate HQs might be accomplished by city capture (Legendary cities lose their legendary status if you capture them, correct?). On the other hand, stockpiling Great People might be a good safety measure. We could. for example, found all or some the corporate HQs the turn before victory, if we don't want to deal with the maintenance issues.

We might want to add "The Power of Sushi" to our reference list.

As regards the warrior, I'd move him to the hill. It gives the most possible information, even if we are thinking 2E or that ways for settling. So my vote is 1SE onto the grass hill.

Settling

We don't have much information yet on what else is out there, but 2E will give minimum 8 forests to chop, but it seems to be full of plains tiles, so low yields for farms or cottages, which is what our cap will be building with so many river tiles. I believe that the tile N/NE of the settler (or 8,7 using the numpad system) is a hill I can definitely see grey under the fog.

SIP will give us 6 grassland farms three of which we can farm for early growth with later conversions to cottages. It will also give us 2 (probably 3, see above) hills allowing for decent production. And 10 forests for worker/settler chops (I've become increasingly convinced that they are by far the best investments for early chops from the capital). I also think we'll have one strategic resource inside the BFC, unless the map start is heavily edited, meaning hopefully copper or iron on one of the unforested hills.

1SE I will not comment on until I see more tiles, there are too many of that BFC fogged.

Going coastal, the best bet is probably settling on the warrior. It would make for a solid second city (with fish and corn it could be a GP farm) but I don't think it is a good enough site for a capital, too brown and no river.

VCs

Space and cultural here. We'll either have to go late with the cultural or sandbag it for a good long while (otherwise we'll overshoot a cultural victory and be nowhere near the space victory).

As regards some of the other conditions, war will be a lot easier than working directly on them, e.g. why invest the hammers and beakers in religious production when we can just invest them in army, capture them and be better off for the space race too.

The three corporate hqs should be IMO; Sid's, Civilised Jewellers (both for culture) and either Mining Inc. or Alum Co. (whichever is best for the space race). We should aim to self found these and spread aggressively.

Religious/Diplo leader will simply be a matter of population which should definitely be doable for the UN, maybe not for AP (as it has to be religious).

More thoughts anon.

Another possibility is eventually moving the capital if we go 2E. 2E has good food but low hammer (fixed by Moai somewhat). 2E to get a weaker capital at start but strong possibility of getting GLH and Colossus then moving capital towards lands full of (current) riverside jungle will be helpful. After all, we are looking at a long game, so moving the capital to more optimal positions is reasonable.

We are going to have to do naval invasions if we go for domination or conquest which can be tedious and a lot more difficult than a normal war. Another option is get rid of all AI on our hemisphere. With all that land to ourself, it leads itself to a space race, diplomatic victory. Cultural victory can be annoying to obtain, because getting 3 cities to LC is pretty annoying. Capitals tend to get to L status by the time future tech is reached anyway. Plus, our reliance on GA's should be minimal/next to none. However, never having used corps, these could make the game a lot easier. Getting a hold of the resources also should be easy as we want buildings such as Rock N Roll and Hollywood for culture anyway. (Trade off spares of hits to get the resources)

Sushi, Jewelers and Creative Constructions seem to be the stronger corps to have here. We want to keep research as high as possible so avoiding using the culture slider will have to be offset by these. Plus, it meets the 3 corps requirements.

Some random generations, the maximum possible we get from the three corps:
Civilized Jewelers: 10-9-8-10-10-11-11-9-10-5-9
Creative Constructions:34-34-33-31-34-32-32
Sushi-50-51-34-44-50-54-37-38


Opinions on these generations:
Jewelers give us the most culture per resource at 4. Taking the mean of the data gives us 9.3, so assuming we get 9 resources on the map, the maximum raw culture we can get is 36. The resources are fairly easy to obtain via trade and often groups of clustered resources are found. They are almost equal in number normally on each hemisphere.

Creative at an average of 33 resources per map gives a total max raw culture of 99. These are more abundant by a large margin BUT at the same time, obtaining these resources via trade can be very expensive and will normally cost you an arm and leg (and sometimes even that isn't enough!) If we are to have our own continent, it can be safe to assume that we should have access to at least 15 resources which will give us 45 raw culture.

Sushi: I will not give an average on this because the result are a lot more varied and therefore taking an average will not have much meaning. The amount of sushi resources is related to the perimeter of the land so more islands generally means more sushi. Not knowing how good this map will be, I think it will be safe to work with the minimum we have of 34 which gives us lots of food (for specialists + sistine which we should be getting) as well as 64 raw culture; let's say we can get at maximum 20 resources which is 40 culture. Clearly Sushi is the most powerful of these resources and the resources are fairly cheap to obtain via trade. It's abundance on either side depends once again on the perimeter so we are in luck if we have lots of islands.

Of course, the 36 culture from Jewelers is very small in comparison, but (36+45+40)=121. 121+100% with FS + 150% from 3 cathedrals + 50% from broadcast tower = 363 culture per turn just from corps!

We do have to be careful not to accidentally win the game before there is a future tech. We will also need to be prepared to squash any AI that builds a spaceship or goes for culture. And we want to be sure we don't accidentally dominate while squashing such an AI. This is going to be tricky.

Any idea how we should plan to get enough espionage points for the required steal? Which tech should we target for the steal?

I am sure that the map will have Mansa to challenge us for space and undoubtedly we will face Hatty & Pericles who will go for culture. Stopping the culture VC's will surely provide us with the extra shrines we need (we will probably build the confucian shrine) and maybe even the requirement to conquer an AI.

Completely agree with Chris that this is essentially a race to future tech 1, and things could get tricky near the end trying to not win too early.

2 Simultaneous Victories
Its hard to imagine one of the victories not being Space. Most space victories only just get to future techs before the ship lands.
Religous can be ruled out completely, and same with Diplo. Just way too random.
Domination can be tricky to time, but fits well with required conquests, shrines and stopping other vc's.
Conquest will nerf our tech rate, so that it will delay future techs. It should be ruled out.
Culture is the easiest to time, and is nicely aligned with the requirement to have 2 legendary cities. Might as well make it 3. Sushi with Sistines/Caste/Cathedrals should give our best cities 1000 cpt.

So, I think nearly every team will do either Domination or Space, with Culture as the easy to time and control kicker.

Espionage
Iron Working is the most logical, but it obviously depends on what we find on the map.

By the time Astro & Physics are researched we will have hopefully left the AI for dead and have a large tech lead. Also, by the time those techs are around, the AI have woken up to the power of espionage.

I would think that a couple of courthouses will give us enough espionage to steal IW.
Prefer not build the Great Wall, but if we are isolated we might have to anyway.

Here is a first attempt at a test save to muck around with. I didn't incorporate Neil's opponent suggestions, but I think I matched the starting position fairly well.

1. Thanks for the test game Trystero! I'm going to have some goes to get used to both the lower than normal difficulty and the late game. I very rarely make it to corps, which I think are going to be huge in this game.

2. I think space and culture are the two best victory conditions as they're both easy to get given how late the game is going to go and they're both relatively easy to time. My current leaning is to bottle until Renaissance, pray for horses, and then take over our hemisphere in as few turns as possible. This will allow us to take out an AI and capture some holy cities hopefully with a shrine (the game is going to go on so long, I'm not worried about popping some GPs of our own to build the remaining shrines we need). After taking over the hemisphere we shoot for the stars. We'll be able to take our time and get the corps we need. My inclination is for sushi, mining, and creative. But I don't really know much about the others.

3. Stealing IW is definitely the most logical since I very much agree with Neil that stealing the other two is not a good idea as this map and our plan for space will probably require that we research both astro and physics ourselves -- waiting for the AI can be annoying.

4. I like the idea of building the GLH for the merchant to bulb metal casting with. This becomes especially powerful if we find some gold/silver/gems for the happy boost.

5. I still favor settling 2E. The hammers will come from the chop and the whip and we'll move the capital at some point. We can wait and see what the warrior shows us before deciding of course.

6. Thorough scouting will be key. I always underscout in my offline games. We should really try not to fall into that trap in this game as I'm sure KCD has done some tricky stuff that will reward people who scout.

Hi All,
Checking in. Good discussion.

It looks like folks agree that the Future Tech 1 will be the limiting factor. So is it safe to assume that we want to time the VCs to match completion of FT1?

And it appears the likely choices would be Space, and Cult or Dom. I have a question on the Space/Cult combo. Isn't it usually the choice that that the way to achieve a cult victory requires running the slider at 100% , if so does that conflict with getting to FT1 ASAP?

What is the fastest we could reach Future Tech 1? Say for the sake of argument it is 1800 AD. Stopping tech at music and running the culture slider at 100% is the best way to get a fast culture victory in, say, 1200 AD. Perhaps playing to 1800 AD means that we have 600 extra years to accumulate the culture required, so perhaps a cultural victory in 1800 AD doesn't require running the slider at 100% culture? Maybe a cultural victory in 1800 AD powered by Sid's Sushi doesn't require much extra culture at all? I dunno, but it might help a lot for us to figure out what the earliest Future Tech 1 we could get, and then think backwards from there to the other victory conditions.

Here is another test game: http://gesserit.net/sgotm16/shafferc%20BC-4000.CivBeyondSwordSave

Is everyone comfortable with Dropbox? Maybe we could share files that way?

Agreed. Future tech 1 should time well with a sushi/sistines culture game. If you have these 2, then simply powering through the tech tree with scientist specialists will generate lots of culture.

edit: and don't forget, one of the requirements is to have 2 Legendary cities. To do this we are going to go close to a Culture victory anyway.

I wish to recant.

I tried the test games, and if the map is anything like them then moving the Warrior NE seems pointless. It only reveals 2 tiles, 1 of which would be in all of the current settling spots BFC's anyway.

Moving to the hill reveals a lot of tiles that would be outside our preferred spots BFC's and would make the settling debate much clearer I believe... and I am also coming around to thinking that long term we might want to be riverside. A levee would be so powerful with 12 known river tiles when SIP.

edit: oh, and another thing. We are Creative & Industrious, and our UB is the Salon, an observatory that gives a free artist. Culture should not be a problem or a hindrance methinks.

Another thought. Riverside capitals are always probably the best. That said, long game as this is, we should focus not on getting the perfect capital spot right now - instead, aiming on settling a city that will get us through this first age, while we cast about for the place we REALLY want our palace to sit.

Agreed, but even if we move the palace, Paris will always be a dynamite city.

...and I know how devious mapmakers can be, with all that forest surrounding us, we don't know what we would be moving away from. You would have to assume that a lot of teams will SIP (unless the mapmaker does something really obvious like start you on a FP next to PH Stone/Marble), therefore it would have to be a reasonable starting position. If its not there will be much muttering amongst the teams (are you reading this kcd )

Dammit its hard waiting for the start save to fog gaze.