SGOTM 21 - Plastic Ducks

Doshin · Feb 15, 2015

Updated test file. Food, hammers, and cities are good. There are small commerce discrepancies, and I haven't edited the map to reflect the land or AI outside our borders.

If loading a BUFFY file in game causes your copy of Civ to crash, as it does with mine, exit to the main menu and load from there.

Duckweed · Feb 15, 2015

Ran a test to T73 until settle the 6th city, in the same time we are likely to complete CoL if we are free from attack.

Spoiler :

There are several issues need to be confirmed

Shall we complete CoL if safe? Researching Construction ourselves requires Masonry.
The location of 6th city?
The location of 7th city?

In the same time, take time to think about which path we are going to adapt next, although we have not arrived the cross road yet.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13689034&postcount=512

Doshin · Feb 16, 2015

I wonder if we should bulb to Astronomy via Education? 3 Great Scientists would be needed: 1 for Education, 1 for Printing Press, 1 for Astronomy itself. Since this is less of a beeline, the GSs could come from Libraries rather than Caste System, and staying in Slavery lets us produce economic infrastructure and Catapults.

CoLs is fine with me, since our research is a million miles ahead of the AI, and it is really hard to trade for this without Mansa. The free Missionary could be used as an explorer or to start spreading a religion.

I'm not sure about the exact city spots, but the order for me would be: (1) Corn; (2/3) Horse; (2/3/4) northern Fish; (3/4) Whale/Fish. A hidden NE resource might change this.

I'd like to settle the Horse after we have checked for food to the west of the mountains. If there is nothing there, we might consider sharing Sparta's Cow. We will likely need another Warrior for scouting.

Northern Fish will need a WB to grow, so its timing depends on Worker availability (8 Worker turns for a WB and Granary) or whipping a WB in advance in the Corn site.

Whale/Fish depends upon the movement of the Galley.

In your test, you skip finishing the Farm 2N1W of Athens. Is this better than finishing this? At the very least, it will offer +1F on T67, +1H on T68, and the extra food on T67 lets us work an additional tile on T70 (24/28F, whipped to 24/24F, letting us regrow to size 3 on the turn the Settler completes).

I don't think the Warrior 3W1N of Sparta needs to leave our culture.

kossin · Feb 16, 2015

Ugh.

If reaching Fission/Industrialism is the "easiest" goal in mapmaker's mind, I don't want to know what #2 and #3 are.

Taking over our continent makes sense, but we need to plan the economy also. GM trade missions would be heavily helpful. And capturing GLH if possible......

FWIW, I'd try to set up a buying of the rest of the hints at a later date as I mentioned in post #10.

BSPollux · Feb 16, 2015

Did I use the word "easy"?

Yamps · Feb 16, 2015

If we're going to fight some catapult wars, then CoL-> CS doesn't help us much.

We could keep research at 0% CoL and then switch to Masonry -> Construction or Archery, depending on the situation. We might get Masonry in trade somewhat later, but even if we don't, it's not a big deal.

Duckweed · Feb 16, 2015

Doshin said:
I wonder if we should bulb to Astronomy via Education? 3 Great Scientists would be needed: 1 for Education, 1 for Printing Press, 1 for Astronomy itself. Since this is less of a beeline, the GSs could come from Libraries rather than Caste System, and staying in Slavery lets us produce economic infrastructure and Catapults.

This is basically the traditional route.

CoLs is fine with me, since our research is a million miles ahead of the AI, and it is really hard to trade for this without Mansa. The free Missionary could be used as an explorer or to start spreading a religion.

I'm not sure about the exact city spots, but the order for me would be: (1) Corn; (2/3) Horse; (2/3/4) northern Fish; (3/4) Whale/Fish. A hidden NE resource might change this.

I'd like to settle the Horse after we have checked for food to the west of the mountains. If there is nothing there, we might consider sharing Sparta's Cow. We will likely need another Warrior for scouting.

Northern Fish will need a WB to grow, so its timing depends on Worker availability (8 Worker turns for a WB and Granary) or whipping a WB in advance in the Corn site.

Whale/Fish depends upon the movement of the Galley.

The problem of settling the horse site is safety, worker force and lack of visible food. 2 workers is going to be stuck on the Corn site for long time, so the only free worker is the one currently in Fur site. Moreover, we need to save 1 settler for Iron site, although I think a Iron is likely to be inside our culture already, but there's still possibility it could locate somewhere in the northeast corner, that why I don't want to settle the North Fish site before knowing the Iron site. The only exception is that we find a important resource like Marble/Stone on the last 2 NE tiles. Then the 7th or maybe 6th city should go there. The good thing of settling the Fish/Whale site as 7th city is that it does not need any worker, completely safe and it can use the WB from Sparta immediately.

In your test, you skip finishing the Farm 2N1W of Athens. Is this better than finishing this? At the very least, it will offer +1F on T67, +1H on T68, and the extra food on T67 lets us work an additional tile on T70 (24/28F, whipped to 24/24F, letting us regrow to size 3 on the turn the Settler completes).

Good point, I have not noted the farm only needs 1 turn to finish.

I don't think the Warrior 3W1N of Sparta needs to leave our culture.

I intend to send this warrior to scout the horse site.

Duckweed · Feb 16, 2015

Yamps said:
If we're going to fight some catapult wars, then CoL-> CS doesn't help us much.

We could keep research at 0% CoL and then switch to Masonry -> Construction or Archery, depending on the situation. We might get Masonry in trade somewhat later, but even if we don't, it's not a big deal.

The problems are

we don't have any strategic resources now, especially Iron.
Most Cities are not ready to produce military units yet, only capital is ready.

Duckweed · Feb 16, 2015

BSPollux said:
Did I use the word "easy"?

TBH, the tasks from Liz and Izzy is nothing compared with the task from Cathy. I have expected balanced tasks from three girls so that players need to think about how to compromise among them to achieve the best result. Liz's task is just a natural side product to complete Cathy's task.

BSPollux · Feb 16, 2015

Duckweed said:
TBH, the tasks from Liz and Izzy is nothing compared with the task from Cathy. I have expected balanced tasks from three girls so that players need to think about how to compromise among them to achieve the best result. Liz's task is just a natural side product to complete Cathy's task.

Do you think the other teams "expect" the same?
And are you sure none of Cathy's are easier to achieve?

Yamps · Feb 16, 2015

Duckweed said:
The problems are

we don't have any strategic resources now, especially Iron.

Most Cities are not ready to produce military units yet, only capital is ready.

The main question is do we want it or not. In the next 10 turns or so our cities could be ready for some cat whipping. We could start with those and follow up with metal units when we trade for IW. Most importantly, if that's the strategic direction that we want to take, CoL is of zero use for quite some time.

Duckweed · Feb 16, 2015

Yamps said:
The main question is do we want it or not. In the next 10 turns or so our cities could be ready for some cat whipping. We could start with those and follow up with metal units when we trade for IW. Most importantly, if that's the strategic direction that we want to take, CoL is of zero use for quite some time.

If you take a careful look at my T73 screenshot, you will see that the 2 issues that I mentioned won't be solved in 10 turns. We are not ready to produce military units before T80~85. If unlucky and could not trade IW, the waiting time would be longer unless the team will agree to research IW as well.

CoL is something that is difficult to trade and required to research CS (looks like most of us want to go this route).

Duckweed · Feb 16, 2015

BSPollux said:
Do you think the other teams "expect" the same?
And are you sure none of Cathy's are easier to achieve?

It's your design, so we can only guess and design the strategy to be as flexible as possible for different results. As you can see, if all the tasks do not require going deeply into the tech tree, our strategy will be at least 10 turns ahead of who think it's a beaker race from the beginning. Even it turns out to be a beaker race, we can still switch our direction with merely 1~2 loss in the final result.

I have not said that I don't want to see Cathy's other tasks. OTOH, I said this

Duckweed said:
We should take a look at Izzy's and Cathy's other tasks when we capture enough workers. GPs are quite tense now since we need to plan for at least 2~3 golden ages and should find a marble resource for Taj. I think we still need fast Astro+Eng to capture cities as soon as possible.

The problem of doing that is the cost of learning more tasks is too costly and I don't think Cathy's other tasks would cost much less turns than tasks #1. I still have faith on your judgement of those tasks.

Yamps · Feb 16, 2015

I'm not saying we shouldn't research CoL eventually, but if we are to follow up with army whipping then it's not imediately useful. CS also isn't that strong on this map. CoL would have its use for trading, but we only really need IW right now and we could give Math to get it.

Does it matter if we get Construction too soon? We could still research CoL after that. If we are not going for Caste, then there's no time pressure for CoL while there could be for Construction if we go the other way around.

Basically, I think we have to choose our strategy at this point. If we are continuing with the original plan towards Astronomy, then CoL is fine. If on the other hand we plan to go towards Civil Service, we should also revisit the GLH issue. There's no guarantee we'd get some reachable AI to build it for us which increases the value of self buulding it. It would also go along nicely with additional cities on our own continent that we could capture with catapults.

Doshin · Feb 16, 2015

Duckweed said:
The problem of settling the horse site is safety, worker force and lack of visible food. 2 workers is going to be stuck on the Corn site for long time, so the only free worker is the one currently in Fur site. Moreover, we need to save 1 settler for Iron site, although I think a Iron is likely to be inside our culture already, but there's still possibility it could locate somewhere in the northeast corner, that why I don't want to settle the North Fish site before knowing the Iron site. The only exception is that we find a important resource like Marble/Stone on the last 2 NE tiles. Then the 7th or maybe 6th city should go there. The good thing of settling the Fish/Whale site as 7th city is that it does not need any worker, completely safe and it can use the WB from Sparta immediately.

Fish/Whale means waiting for the Galley to reach the south. Looking at the screenshots, that will be ~T80. I think we can produce 3 more Settlers in that time, although I haven't tested that far.

I think Corn as #1 is indisputable. Northern Fish vs. Horse depends upon Worker availability, so at the moment Northern Fish > Horse.

Whether Horse > Whale/Fish (or vice versa) depends upon whether Horse has another source of food, and how quickly the Thebes Worker can reach this.

None of these cities, apart from Corn, are incredibly strong or essential sites. So IW or hidden resources in the east will affect things.

----

@Yamps

CoLs is needed for an Engineering/Astronomy bulb path, or a CS/Education/Astronomy research/bulb path. Without Mansa, we will not be able to trade for this tech, as one AI will research it, found the religion, and all the others will ignore it for a very long time.

If we won't build any Catapults in the next 15 turns, there is no reason to hurry to Construction. To declare war against Willem, we will need to gift 2–4 Workers, and at the moment we have 2 in total who cannot be spared (e.g. aside from chops and resource tiles, we have zero roads). CoLs is not needed soon, but at least offers the benefit of a free Missionary.

The only other tech that appeals to me right now is Metal Casting, for Forges.

edit: if we want to reconsider the GLH, then we can do so when City #6 or #7 is produced, unless we want to perform an about face and build it in our capital.

Duckweed · Feb 16, 2015

Yamps said:
I'm not saying we shouldn't research CoL eventually, but if we are to follow up with army whipping then it's not imediately useful. CS also isn't that strong on this map. CoL would have its use for trading, but we only really need IW right now and we could give Math to get it.

Does it matter if we get Construction too soon? We could still research CoL after that. If we are not going for Caste, then there's no time pressure for CoL while there could be for Construction if we go the other way around.

Basically, I think we have to choose our strategy at this point. If we are continuing with the original plan towards Astronomy, then CoL is fine. If on the other hand we plan to go towards Civil Service, we should also revisit the GLH issue. There's no guarantee we'd get some reachable AI to build it for us which increases the value of self buulding it. It would also go along nicely with additional cities on our own continent that we could capture with catapults.

CoL gives religion, if we end with requiring 1 GPriest, then an extra religion helps. Moreover, don't underestimate CS, even with our commerce poor capital, it could easily offers ~20 :commerce:

at the time we get it. It's not too late to lay down some cottages now. Switch to both Monarchy and bureaucracy saves 1 turn of anarchy as well.

Doshin said:
Fish/Whale means waiting for the Galley to reach the south. Looking at the screenshots, that will be ~T80. I think we can produce 3 more Settlers in that time, although I haven't tested that far.

I think Corn as #1 is indisputable. Northern Fish vs. Horse depends upon Worker availability, so at the moment Northern Fish > Horse.

Whether Horse > Whale/Fish (or vice versa) depends upon whether Horse has another source of food, and how quickly the Thebes Worker can reach this.

None of these cities, apart from Corn, are incredibly strong or essential sites. So IW or hidden resources in the east will affect things.

I plan to play 3 turns to reveal the last 2 tiles first.

Still, I don't feel the north Fish is better than the Fish/whale site. The time difference is 3 turns, north @T78 and South @T81, but the South has better growth due to the instance access to Fish and 2 Whales. It's hard to spare the 2 workers from Corn site in short time since it will grow quite fast with the chopped granary.

Doshin · Feb 16, 2015

@BSPollux

Spoiler :

BSPollux said:
Do you think the other teams "expect" the same?
And are you sure none of Cathy's are easier to achieve?

The announcement thread reads:

Deckhand said:
You need to fulfill only one task for each lady, but some will be easier than others and some may need a long time to finish. So you better get to know them early. It is very well possible that some of these tasks may become impossible to fulfill during the game, by your actions or those of others. But there is at least one way to win each heart that can't be blocked. Obviously, it won't be the fastest or easiest.

Deckhand said:
The three tasks for each ruler have a number on our list (Isabella#1, Isabella#2, etc). If you are buying some, tell us which one you want. We will sort them by what we think is the order in which they can be fulfilled. This is a human judgment thing though, as the tasks are very different and not all of them are easily sortable that way. Just assume that "discover Future Tech" would have a higher number than "build Stonehenge".

Does this still hold?

I take it to mean the following:

The #1 task is the earliest that can be fulfilled in a normal game of Civ IV, although it will not always be the easiest. Accordingly, Isabella #1 can be fulfilled relatively early (build Stonehenge/TO and research Writing + Music), but is not easy, because all teams need to win the game ASAP and using Great People is an integral part of that endeavor.

Since an Immortal game can be won with Classical and Medieval units, but Catherine #1 requires Physics, Combustion, and Industrialism (2 Industrial techs, 1 Modern), this is already very late.

If Catherine #1 is a "late," but "easy" objective (once we are there), then Catherine #2 and Catherine #3 should involve going (roughly) as far, or further, into the tech tree.

Given that is the limiting factor in almost any game of Civ, would you still stand by your original ordering:

Deckhand said:
We will sort them by what we think is the order in which they can be fulfilled.

Yamps · Feb 16, 2015

Doshin said:
@Yamps

CoLs is needed for an Engineering/Astronomy bulb path, or a CS/Education/Astronomy research/bulb path. Without Mansa, we will not be able to trade for this tech, as one AI will research it, found the religion, and all the others will ignore it for a very long time.

Yep, I think we all know this.

If we won't build any Catapults in the next 15 turns, there is no reason to hurry to Construction. To declare war against Willem, we will need to gift 2–4 Workers, and at the moment we have 2 in total who cannot be spared (e.g. aside from chops and resource tiles, we have zero roads). CoLs is not needed soon, but at least offers the benefit of a free Missionary.

Note that the underlined statement is false. We don't have to give him anything, we could roll over him and then at some later point give some workers to his last city. We'd only need +1 from him, which is easy since we started at +3. This is practically begging for an early war against him. We could then roll over his last city and retrieve our workers. In my view, this is the best way to get to know all tasks, the only question is when.

The only other tech that appeals to me right now is Metal Casting, for Forges.

I'd say there are more important builds right now than forges

edit: if we want to reconsider the GLH, then we can do so when City #6 or #7 is produced, unless we want to perform an about face and build it in our capital.

If we're serious about it, it would have to be Masonry next and GLH in the capital.

_____

Yamps · Feb 16, 2015

Btw, while we're ranting about game design... :mischief:

You need to fulfill only one task for each lady, but some will be easier than others and some may need a long time to finish. So you better get to know them early. It is very well possible that some of these tasks may become impossible to fulfill during the game, by your actions or those of others. But there is at least one way to win each heart that can't be blocked. Obviously, it won't be the fastest or easiest.

You need to fulfill only one task for each ruler.
You can only fulfill a task you know of. If you buy info and realize you already finished a task it won't count. If you are 'half way done' but the last piece is still missing that's OK, as long as you know about the task when you finish it. Example: The task demands you do A, B and C. You already did A and B when you learn about it. Doing C now will count as successfully ending that task.

How is it that any of the first tier tasks could ever get obsoleted by accident? It's not like we'd give 3 GP on our own, or that we'd make a 50XP ship. Also, there's no way any team would reach the modern age without getting to know the first task. Really, there should have been at least one first tier task that would have been urgent to know so that it wouldn't be possible to accomplish it if we don't know it early. This way, there's no real penalty for waiting to get to know first tasks. Just punishment for those that go about learning something that supposedly could become impossible later on.

But anyway, other teams will get sucked into that thinking too.

Doshin · Feb 16, 2015

Yamps, if you are serious about an early Catapult war, then you could run a test to show that beelining Construction will be faster than going to CoL (or any other tech) first. You would need to overcome the difficulties Duckweed outlines in posts #528 and #532.

If it is faster, we could then weigh the benefits of declaring X turns sooner with the costs of delayed exploration, a later CS, earlier unit maintenance, etc. When a team disagrees on strategy, tests or mathematical arguments are best to point the way forward.

FWIW, I was in the minority in arguing that Catapults > HArchers in SGOTM 18, against the majority opinion of my team, and tests showed this to be better.

Not trying to be confrontational.

I'm always happy to try to follow the strongest path, whatever that may be.

SGOTM 21 - Plastic Ducks

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