SGOTM 08 - Smurkz

Sounds good. Although just to be extra safe about taking extra movement to cross the river, perhaps it should be worker3 (on the river square) that embarks instead of worker2 from the plains hill immediately to the W of worker3. (Or am I confused?) Shouldn't matter either way, but I don't entirely understand river crossings prior to Engineering and am therefore paranoid

River crossing pre-Eng costs a aditional extra movement point.......

It does matter the other way. I originally had it listed as #3 embarking, but he can't reach the galley. #2 won't cross any rivers.

Btw, we don't actually need the Clams netted until turn 67. We need to work it on turn 66 too, but 3F+5F is enough for 66-67. Getting 5F on both turns just means we'll attract an angry guy one turn earlier down the line, costing us those two food again. And if I count correctly, the WB could move along the north coast of that island and still net the clams on 67 - right?

Actually, I'll change that again. We don't need the clams connected until turn 68, when the new town needs them, since 3F+3F will be enough too for the capitol. So do what exploration is needed and net the clams after.

Is there anything more we need to discuss before rolo plays on? Is everyone happy with the plan? I'm always nervous when there are no differing opinions...

I'll not play before 7 PM GTM of tomorrow, so feel free to make some more discussion

If rolo is confident he can follow the plan, I say "Release the hounds!"

Yes, that galley plan looks correct to me.

I'll play in half a hour. Me and Niklas are avaliable in the MSN service

May the RNG smile upon you for any random events.

I assume you'll promote our exploring warrior to Woodsman II if the barbs cooperate? What's our long range plan for him if he's lucky enough to make it back home alive? I have a soft spot for Woodsman III because of its healing powers and love to use a Great General to add Medic promos on top of that. By the way, my recent experience indicates that a unit can only receive XPs from one Great General; in other words, you can bump up the XPs on a unit by 20 using a GG, but any further XPs have to be earned the hard way. Can anyone confirm that? And as a reminder, a Warlord can be upgraded without any cost in gold, and you don't lose any XPs from that upgrade. We have a long way to go before our first GG, though--victories against barbs count, don't they?

Feel free to toss me, but I only played 2 turns....

I forgot to whip the settler at the right time ( the game now is at turn 64, one turn later of what it should be )and Niklas, after giving me a deserved reprimend, asked me to pause the game for damage control.

Like i said, feel free to toss some tar and feathers on me

Warning: this is not going to be a nice post. If you (meaning everyone) don't feel like reading it, don't. But I would appreciate if you do. I should stress that this is not directed towards rolo per se - he already had his share on MSN...

I'm really not in a good mood right now, for obvious reasons. I guess you might say it's just a game, I shouldn't care so much, but the simple fact is that I do. I spend a lot of time on this game, probably a lot more than I should. I literally spend hours worrying over how to optimize our play. I do it because I think it's a lot of fun - but that quickly turns to just as much frustration in situations like this.

Everyone can screw up. I've done it myself in many a past game and I will probably do it again. That's part of playing, something we have to live with. But there's a difference between screwing up by making a stupid move, and just being plain careless and sloppy. This was the third time. Each of them can be excused, and I really don't want to single anyone out, but taken together it's just not fun. Every time it happens it takes away some of my enthusiasm and enjoyment for this game.

We are not a team of deity level players. We can be up there, as we proved last game, but then we really need to do the best we possibly ever can. Making spreadsheets to optimize play is a large part of that, and I gladly spend the time to do it. So why is it so hard to pay attention?

If the team feels that spreadsheets are overkill, that it's no fun, that we should just play on as we would a "normal" game, please say so. As de facto team leader I push the kind of playing style I enjoy, which means optimizing everything as much as it possibly can be done, agonizing over every little detail, and then playing carefully and meticulously to that plan. I realize though that this is not everyone's cup of tea, and if the team doesn't like to play that way then who am I to say what's right? But if that's the case, then I sure won't spend hours on end doing optimizations that won't be followed.

So I guess I'd like to hear from you what you all think about this. Should we "just play", have some quick fun, and end in the middle of the pack? Or should we all try to do our best, really our best, and end as high up as we can? Be advised that if you answer the latter, I will hold you to that. Pre-turnset plans, as per Smurkz tradition, will be the first part of it.

Ok, rant off for this time. I'd like to stress again that this is not directed against rolo specifically, he just happened to break the camel's back. His was a pretty bad screw-up with far-reaching consequences, but I could have written a similar (though probably a lot less acrid) post earlier too. Now I'll go blow some heads off in Crysis or something, and won't look back to this game until tomorrow, hopefully with a cooler head. If anyone wants to have a look at a new spreadsheet for the situation at hand, I've attached the latest version pre-screwup.

Niklas, I very much appreciate the effort you've been putting into the plans and think it's vital for the early game. Once we've got 5 or 6 cities it'll probably become too much trouble (except in a couple core cities?), but by then our strategic vision will be more important. Right now, though, tactics really matter and every turn counts.

I think most of the problem is that we (apart from Niklas and maybe Renata) have trouble translating the spreadsheet into actions. That's certainly true for me, which I is why I wrote out every step in words I could understand before I played. (If it makes anyone feel better, I made a goof too, but was able to correct a worker movement error with no harm.) Looking at previous SGOTM teams' threads, most of them write out those plans before they play and I think we need to adopt that practice, too. There will still be mistakes, but it helps. By the way, Rolo's test games have been extremely helpful, and optimized plans would probably not be possible without them.

As for our current situation, it may well be that it won't affect the Pyramids' completion date, which is my main worry. The settler was due to pop out a little before we needed him so we have some slack there, and Niklas can probably get the 3rd worker out in time without too much damage to other plans, although we've definitely lost some production. The GLib may be delayed, but I'm not very worried about losing that race to the AI. Perhaps this is an opportunity to produce an axe (or 2?) sooner, which might turn out to be a very good thing.

Eh, gotta run now.

Cannot say anything on the in-game situation right now, even if it is pretty clear that it is bad, but nothing that should make us stop playing. We'll need to be even more creative, for sure.

Also we need to have some more eyes and I'll try to take my share of that even if it is clear I cannot have more than 3 or 4 sessions a week. Having Niklas involved really more than the rest of us is NOT good team-wise (was already the case last game, even if we avoid the crisis). Let's table it and contain the situation before rolo plays (tomorrow night I'll have some time).

To me, while I was a young Smurkzer, pre-turnset plan (words, per turn) were the way you'd play. Not fun but enlightening. I'd do that, and I'll do that. They are easier than spreadsheets at the begenning.

A new day, a new sun, fresh thoughts.

Pre-play turnset plans are now on again. We used to have them, in fact we were probably the team that invented them back in the Civ3 games, and the main reason we let off of them is spelled spreadsheets. A spreadsheet really encompasses most of what you would give in a turnset plan, and in SGOTM06 several plans were of the form "follow the spreadsheet in post #xyz", for the town part anyway. This was accentuated in SGOTM07 even more since we only had one town, and the spreadsheet was an accurate account of our play all until the very end. So for this game I just kept on in the same mindset, not considering that not everyone found the spreadsheets as obvious as I do.

I realize (now if nothing else) that reading these spreadsheets is not obvious to everyone. I would expect you to have the wherewithal to realize that you don't fully understand it though, and do something to ensure that you know what to do. Like Xc did when writing it all out in words. But from now on we need to ensure that's the case, so pre-play turnset plans will be required to contain a textual representation of the important tile shifts, build switches, slider changes etc. I'll put up an example/template later for all of us to follow.

One other side of it though, some of us have no problem reading the sheets and some of us do. What's the difference between us? It's not like those of us who can read them are somehow more clever than the rest. Nay, it's obvious that the difference is that those of us who are active in creating the sheets are also the ones who have no problem reading them. Renata didn't understand the sheets in the beginning of last game, until she tried her hand at it herself. Now she does it with the same ease that me and Chris do (the sheet we're using now is Chris' invention, though extended a bit by me). So I would like to strongly encourage the rest of you too to get your hands dirty with the sheets. You don't need to put down the hours I do, just try your hand at it, that's all I ask. Learning by doing. (Xc, couldn't you install OpenOffice? I'm using it for these sheets on one of my computers, it has some quirks but it's definitely good enough for our purposes here.) Sure, like Xc says the role of sheets will be diminished as the game progresses and we expand, but as evidenced by SGOTM06 we will need it for key towns in key situations throughout. In this game I expect it will be most important towards the end, when we want to pop GPs from several towns and need to optimize that sequence.

Ok, all that about administration. I had a look at the game, and it's not quite as bad as I feared. We're up to 37 hammers on the Settler, which means we can whip it this turn and still get the Worker from the overflow (rolo tried to tell me that last night but I wasn't in the mood to listen). So we'll have the worker one turn late, and we'll basically have lost one turn's production, but there should be no risk for either Pyramids or Great Library. Both worker plan and capitol plan need total remakes though.

Glad to hear things aren't too bad. Yes, I have OpenOffice on my work linux machine and installed it on my Mac last week. The printing controls don't work properly, but it's good enough to get by. The PC doesn't have it, but since my time on that is so limited it probably doesn't matter. I'll work on learning how to edit the spreadsheets, but it'll be slow going.

Actually, the spreadsheets aren't too bad. The capitol section is pretty clear now, and if we add starts (in addition to completions) then the worker and other city sections would be good, too. This might be too much detail to include in the spreadsheets, but listing both absolute and relative worker positions would help (e.g., Worker1 to plains hill2 = move 1W2N). Also, is there any way we can label or name the workers in the game to keep them straight? I'd also like to see info regarding the research slider for every turn. It doesn't have to be in the spreadsheet, but maybe add some kind of reminder to each turn's text description so we don't forget. We should also have a link to recent screenshots to better understand the worker moves (without the danger of opening the save and moving something by mistake).

While the spreadsheet is being revisited, I'm nervous about the first axe only arriving at turn 75. And/or spit out a quick scout to go on the galley with the worker? If it's really difficult to get the whip timing to work out, maybe spend more time running scientists to get an academy sooner? (Yes, I know there are lots of things it would be nice to have that we can't afford for awhile, but those are on the top of my personal wish list.)

Rolo already renamed our workers for us in game.

Your other suggestions regarding the sheets are good, shouldn't be too hard to implement. But the suggestions you have for builds are mutually exclusive...

Turns out there was an error in the old sheet with the calculation for overflow into the worker, which should have been a lot higher than calculated. Because of that, the new sheet looks very much like the old (erroneous) sheet did - not because we haven't lost any shields, but because we counted too few before. But we've lost surprisingly few shields on this mistake actually. Calculations say we lose only 9 shields, from the lower tradeoff on food-for-settlers than food-for-whipping, mostly because we don't drop to size 4 and can thus work the hill for more turns than before.

Here's an attempt at a new sheet. I'd like to ask you all to look this over, since it's always easy to make a mistake when updating an old sheet. Basically we get the settler one turn later (no big deal), the worker one turn later (will have to update the worker plan for that, suggestions welcome) and everything else as we planned it before.



The yellow-marked cell is an anomaly, I deliberately set it to the wrong number to get all the overflow calculations and production correct for that turn ([1.25*7] = 8). It's needed since the sheet doesn't take into account that the +25% bonus is only applied to base hammers and not excess food.

Looks good to me, assuming you've left the capital build after turn 87 deliberately vague. Seems like it might be best to have worker1 wait on the ivory road to pick up the slack for delayed worker3 on the river square pre-chops. Worker2 could then delay his galley trip to make sure the hills are mined in time for Hari (or we could use the whip to get the Pyramids out on time). We'll get Lit a few turns before the marble is ready regardless--maybe we'll want to build a 4th worker to help out on that. Another worker would also help speed up building cottages, etc. down the road, and we're going to have a lot of jungle to chop at some point. But plenty of time to decide.

We should add some comments in our turnset plans about diplomatic and trade responses, such as checking on resource tradability (or will the autoadvisor take care of that?), what to do if Shaka demands something (give it, I assume), whether or not to immediately offer open borders with new civs (yes, I assume), etc...

Here's what I suggest for worker turns. Basically I do what Xc suggests, waiting with the ivory road until later. This means the second pHill mine will be 2 turns later than what Hari needs - but as it turns out that's just in time to make 501 hammers on turn 86. Worker #2 is left untouched, so the marble will be online at the same time as before.



Please check for correctness.

Xc, what makes you say we'll have Lit before Marble? I'm expecting Lit around turn 91 at best, but my projections are very vague. I'd love to be wrong there.

checking the plan it sounds good to me.
Just make sure to cancel worker actions BEFORE the end of the turn though, missing them would be messy