SGOTM 15 - Misfit Gypsy Nuts

AlanH

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Welcome to SG15! Let's have some fun.

Link to the RULES for playing as a member of this team.

The starting screen shot

The roster order on 04/16

Conquistador63 = on deck
Ronnie1 = in the hole
sleepless = waiting
McArine = waiting
adrianj = waiting
Grifftavian = just played
Ozbenno = skipped by request
da_Vinci = UP NOW

mc-red = AWOL
 
Reserved
 
Reserved...
 
Reserved....
 
Reporting for duty! :salute:

For reference, I'm USA Eastern Time Zone (UTC - 5:00).

FWIW, attached is a Test Game I made. Probably nothing like the real map, but the starting area should be correct, so it may be useful for trying out some initial moves.
 
Anyone have any early thoughts on VC?

With everything on the table, I would think we need to look seriously at Conquest and Domination. No Vassals....????

Settling options????
 
Hi all

Initial thoughts.

VC.
Religious is usually the fastest and cheesiest, but the requirement to stay Hindu forever is definitely a problem.
Between Conquest and Domination, IMO the latter is obviously faster with no vassals and no city razing.
I'm still waiting for a SGOTM setup which gets Culture as the fastest overall VC, but not sure if this time has already arrived. :confused:
From the game introduction (shipwreck etc etc), I think that is possible that we are isolated, maybe even requiring Astro. That could favor Culture, but still the top teams would get their dominations earlier.

Initial moves
If we send warrior to the corn, he can check for additional resources to the W. If there is nothing interesting there, by moving settler 1E we keep the visible resources + the floodplains still settling t0.
Another tempting possibility is to settle on top of the marble (or stone) for the 3 hammers in the city center, keeping corn and FP in BFC (we won't be able to work those until the border pop, though).
 
Religious is usually the fastest and cheesiest, but the requirement to stay Hindu forever is definitely a problem.
I'm not sure I understand why staying Hindu forever is a problem for Religious Victory, could you please explain? Is it because we would have a harder time getting Open Borders Treaties with AI Civs who have adopted a different religion?

As I see it, if we go for Religious Victory while staying Hindu, we would have to bee-line Theology and build The Apostolic Palace ourselves, rather than letting someone else build it and then adopting their religion. Then we would need to spread Hinduism to the AI Civs, which would probably make Optics & Caravels a priority. Spreading Hinduism could be a problem if we do have an isolated start.

Between Conquest and Domination, IMO the latter is obviously faster with no vassals and no city razing.
Agree, but I suspect there is a good possibility we will need Astronomy to get a Domination Victory.

I'm still waiting for a SGOTM setup which gets Culture as the fastest overall VC, but not sure if this time has already arrived.
From the game introduction (shipwreck etc etc), I think that is possible that we are isolated, maybe even requiring Astro. That could favor Culture, but still the top teams would get their dominations earlier.
If we do have an isolated start, getting other religions to spread to us (in order to build Temples/Cathedrals) could be a problem.

Do we want to consider trying to found most of the Religions ourselves?

That would solve the problem of getting other religions spread to our cities for a Cultural Victory, and we might be able to better control the spread of those religions if we went for a Religious Victory.

Given that we will have early access to Stone & Marble, should we consider having our second or third city attempt to build both Stonehenge & The Oracle, setting up a Great Prophet city in order to light bulb the techs that found other Religions?

Initial moves
If we send warrior to the corn, he can check for additional resources to the W. If there is nothing interesting there, by moving settler 1E we keep the visible resources + the floodplains still settling t0.
Another tempting possibility is to settle on top of the marble (or stone) for the 3 hammers in the city center, keeping corn and FP in BFC (we won't be able to work those until the border pop, though).
Pretty much what I was thinking. IMO, move the Warrior 1 SW (into the forest) to look at the immediate west of the river, then move him 1 SE (onto the Marble Hill) to look at the immediate south of the river.

Given that we need to found Hinduism, I believe that we need to found our Capitol on T0, either on the FP or 1E as C63 describes above. The earliest we could settle on the Stone is T1, and the earliest we could settle on the Marble would be T2. The extra hammers in the city square would be a nice bonus, but are we sure we want to take a chance on letting Hinduism get founded by an AI Civ?
 
:wavey:
Signing in; haven't had a chance to look through the initial thoughts yet but will tomorrow.

Edit:
My time zone for the record is UK

Edit2:
On settling t0
What its trying to say is that you don't want to take any risk in founding it, and you should start immediately. It is a binary event.

As long as you found Hinduism, revolt, and stay Hindu for the rest of the game (that means no Free Religion btw), then you can do it when you please... but it would be foolish to delay. This does not mean that you have to settle on turn 0, it just means don't faff about. :)

To make it very clear: you cannot conquer the city that founded Hindu to fulfill this requirement, it must be founded in a city you settle.
 
Here as well, looking forward to another game :).

More thoughts later when I have more of a look at the start. Think its pretty certain our first tech should be Poly though.. :)
 
Given that we need to found Hinduism, I believe that we need to found our Capitol on T0, either on the FP or 1E as C63 describes above. The earliest we could settle on the Stone is T1, and the earliest we could settle on the Marble would be T2.
We can get the settler to ANY of those three tiles on T0. Settling T0 1E of the start or settling T1 on the Stone or Marble. There has to be another river to the north also because the Stone is riverside.

....take a chance on letting Hinduism get founded by an AI Civ?
If I were a betting man, I would bet we are the ONLY civ starting with Mysticism. The "randomness" of another civ starting with Myst and teching Poly out of the gate was surely eliminated. That being said, I fully believe it HAS to be our first tech.

The placement of the forests is not accidental either!

My guess is that there has been some sort of trade off set up in the local map. Settling in place or 1E grabs both quarry resources immediately, but settling on either of those quarries benefits hammers for sure and maybe an additional resource. I think I like the Marble hill location because of the extra riverside grass hill that is visible.
 
Hi All. Checking in, finally.

I've recently bought a new computer, so I'm hoping for a fun, new, lag free (or at least severely reduced) Civ4 experience. It's windows 7 though, so I'll try to get a few BUFFY BtS games under my belt before committing to playing any turnsets, in case I discover it's not working as it should. (Simply installing it was a headache!)
 
If I were a betting man, I would bet we are the ONLY civ starting with Mysticism.
I think that's a safe bet.
The "randomness" of another civ starting with Myst and teching Poly out of the gate was surely eliminated. That being said, I fully believe it HAS to be our first tech.
Just to put it out there, how does the team feel about a really early GAMBLE on researching Agri before Poly? If it works out we have a decent head start on teams that didn't take the risk. If it fails... well, at least we can view the other threads a lot sooner! :mischief:

Regarding VC, I would *love* to take a peaceful Culture, Diplo or Space approach. Maybe No Vassals, No City Razing, City Flip after Conquest, etc, nerf the warring approaches enough to make these actually feasible? It's also Normal speed, another setting that I think favours late game victories more than warring/religion.

No Vassals, Aggressive leaders and the religion requirement slightly hinder the diplo, but with enough Relationship engineering through spies anything is possible really.

No tech brokering isn't great for the space game option... or is it? It means we can't on-sell techs we've bought, but if we are tech leader then we can happily trade them out. In which case this option is GOOD for us as it prevents the AI selling them off. At least that is my understanding of the option.

Cultural VC I think would be fun. That's because my idea of fun is to micromanage things, which is exactly what a fast Cultural victory would need :cool:

Edited to Add: Settling options: If we settle on a riverside marble hill, do we get a capital with 2:food:,3:hammers:,2:commerce:? Or is it 1:commerce: like a normal city? If it's 2, then we wouldn't really be putting ourselves in danger of missing Poly due to the wasted turn. I'm actually quite a big fan of settling ON the stone or marble. An immediate +2:hammers: in the city tile could be awesome. If we think this is a good idea, then our question is then which one: stone or marble? I would think Marble, as keeping the Stone as a workable tile is more valuable (1:hammers: > 2:commerce:). It's also guaranteed riverside.

Edit2:
Given that we need to found Hinduism, I believe that we need to found our Capitol on T0, either on the FP or 1E as C63 describes above. The earliest we could settle on the Stone is T1, and the earliest we could settle on the Marble would be T2. The extra hammers in the city square would be a nice bonus, but are we sure we want to take a chance on letting Hinduism get founded by an AI Civ?
Settling on marble is still T1, not T2. Rivers only affect movement via roads. Our settler can still cross the river and climb the hill in 1 turn.
 
Edited to Add: Settling options: If we settle on a riverside marble hill, do we get a capital with 2,3,2? Or is it 1 like a normal city?
Quick WB test reveals founding on Marble gives 2/3/1 = normal city for the :commerce:. :(

Starting with AG is a definite huge risk....maybe worth it though if we feel really bold!
 
I disagree with anything but poly first as we could have still have a religious AI as there are random personalities and with a commerce start and emperor bonuses could cut things fine.

I think warrior NE is worthy of consideration well. Settler to Marble seems almost a no-brainer so anything that would disabuse us of this notion would be useful information. NE seems better than NW as there are more river tiles likely to the east of stone as the visible grassland hill West of stone is not riverside. Also, we defog a tile that will be in the BFC of the city 1S of start but not in the BFC of the Marble hill centered city. 1S gets three green non riverside tiles so once if we decide move settler to marble hill we can still choose to settle 1S of original spot on T1 if we don't like what we see from the hill.

EDIT:
I also agree with Ronnie that those symmetrically placed forests are not just there by accident but not sure how to add that to my thinking on the start.
 
Don't forget, we have been advised in the Maintenance thread that the starting screenshot is out of date. We shouldn't get too carried away with fog gazing just yet. Hopefully this doesn't also change whether the stone is riverside - I would assume not.

Poly first is certainly the most "sensible" thing to do. I'm pretty much in agreement - I don't particularly like the idea that we could be out so early and have 3-4 months of no SGOTM!

The symmetrical forests prevent us from moving the settler on diagonals toward the stone or marble. So perhaps the mapmaker is already hinting that settling on stone or marble is a smart move, but he doesn't want us getting any extra information while we travel there.
 
Hi Ozbenno good to see you again :)
Adrianj thanks for forest explanation and that makes me like NE on warrior all the more as the map maker is setting up a decision between settler to stone or to marble perhaps.
Also, whilst still too early (may be semi-isolated with vikings and/or Ragnar) to make a VC choice I like the suggestion of culture VC by Conquistador and Adrianj sounds like fun, and also the suggestion of going for religions; especially Judaism and Christianity as we have marble for the Mandir's and stone for the Synagogues and Cathedrals.
No myst for the AI => easy run on oracle and/or henge?
EDIT:
:thanx: for the test map Grifftavian.
 
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