QSC-c1 "Irritated Mao" game progress.

@Meldor,

> I was thinking like Charis, rather than view this as a must win
> competition, I think it is a perfect chance to try out those
> alternate openings and see were they lead. So for that reason
> free techs and free settlers don't bother me. Of course, I got
> none of those.

It's *because* I want to compare how this experimental opening does vs others that the settler pop is annoying. Yes it's "part of the game" but it invalidates any comparison. Tis like getting a super powerup pill that converts you from Emperor diff to Monarchy diff. I got bit again in the most recent Epic, looking forward to seeing how others did in Iroquois early domination, because I feel I did something slow/wrong at the start, but can't put my finger on just what. I was looking forward to comparing with other games. One of those others got a free settler and he finished hundreds of years before myself and another deity lvl player. His own comment was "this was the easiest and highest scoring Emperor game I've ever played". Mind you, the player did a great job of playing, and it's not his "choice" to pop a settler, nevertheless you get a game with Monarchy difficulty and Emperor scoring and AI pace when this happens.

APART from getting lucky on the settler, it looks like cracker had a VERY good opening here, and like you hit upon the settler-whacking strategy. What I won't get to see is how good his strategy is, after taking into account the effect of being at war for what he did, because that effect can't be separated in the QSC from the settler pop. In scientists or statistician's terms, such an extraordinary event breaks down an otherwise "controlled experimental design" and creates an "outlier". Real life has outliers of course, but I was viewing this more as a nice control experiment - which needs a "no city or settler from huts" flag.

Actually Meldor's game takes on increased interest for me as I do really want to see how well "whack settler pairs" works as an opening strategy. (I'm guessing pretty good, on Monarchy)

I hope it's clear I'm disappointed in the tainted comparison and not the final score. And if others don't view it as tainted but part of the game, that's fine, we just have a divergent opinion. In any case, it's a done deal, and we'll have fun with the rest of the game!

Charis

I have to agree with Charis, Meldor and Lee here - and will probably take note of my game vs their games, as opposed to Cracker's game with the free settler.

All are excellent players - it'll be interesting to see how much of an effect the free settler and English workers will have on Cracker's game vs the others.

I played one Deity game where I got an extra settler from a hut, and managed to keep up with the AI's expansion, despite their 40% production advantage.

Well I gotten a few free workers too - I just paid $25 for the privilege.

Mine will be a different comparision as I went the Space Race and massive tech trading route, including the classic research in different directions play.

I have played into the very early AD period, and I am dying to see where I wind up versus the early war play.

Or course, I can start to build riders

Originally posted by Charis
It's *because* I want to compare how this experimental opening does vs others that the settler pop is annoying. Yes it's "part of the game" but it invalidates any comparison.
..........
I hope it's clear I'm disappointed in the tainted comparison and not the final score........



Charis

Click to expand...

I think that is why we play with so many people. If this was just a comparison between 3 or 4 it would have a profound effect. If the amount of free tech out of the huts will have an effect. However, with 10 people playing, and only one or two having "extraordinary" luck, the rest can still be compared.

I would also olike to see this as an ongoing series of games, so that those outliers can be taken out. If we play three games like this, he won't get the same luck with the huts every time.

That said however, there is a legitimate strategy in when and how to pop the huts. One thing not mentioned here yet, is that I, unless forced to do so, I never pop a hut with a settler active or building. If a settler is building, I will switch to a temple or something else before I pop the hut and then switch back to the settler after the hut is popped. I also have been known to pop a hut that is close with the first worker, before the first warrior is built. I thought about doing that in this case, but I didn't find out about the hut until after the worker had moved onto the BG. Had I known right away, I would have wasted a few worker turns to pop it first. I have found that in that case all of the bad things are out of play and you have a fair chance of a free settler. This is espcially nice to do if the tile you want to work first is near the hut to start.

As for whacking the settler, the effect of this goes way beyond just buying a couple of workers from a civ. It is that free settler from the hut in reverse, and it puts that civ on a war footing while you do just enough to keep them occupied. The question to be answered here, does keeping them occupied put too much of a dent in your developement? I don't know how it will play out in this game, but I suspect I will get the chance to settle all of the area inside the choke points with little competition form the AIs, at least until they run out of space and start sending galleys.

Unlike others here, I have not played ahead, I willl probably do so tonight and tomorrow night, as I don't want even a small unintentional amount of cross pollination.

Lee, are you saying that had I popped that hut to the east of Beijing with the worker before the first warrior was built, I probably would not have gotten those three fierce barbarians?

(You remember I started my game over as my warrior popped that hut before the 10 turns and barbs came out, destroyed the warrior, the worker, and razed the city.)

Did having a warrior built (and /or popping the hut) increase the chances of barbarians instead of a settler coming out?

I have read - as you said - that if you are building a settler or have one then no settler will come out of the hut. I get that.

But what increases your chances of barbarians coming out?

stwils

Oops.

I meant to address the above post to Meldor, not Lee.

stwils

If you have no military built, you can not get barbs out of a hut. If I understand correctly, for those civs that are expansionist, scouts do not count as military as they have no attack/defense value. I will look for the thread that had the outcomes in it and post a link here.

This is from the good folks at 'Poly taken directly from a chat with the developers

On Goody Hut Discoveries
Here are the conditions:

Gold:
--The tile must not have any type of resource or luxury on it.

Maps:
--always available

Nothing:
--always available

Settler:
--Player must not have a settler (active or in production) or any unit with the Settle AI strategy.
--Player must have less cities than (TotalCities / NumActivePlayers).

Mercenaries (skilled warrior):
--There must be a unit available to the Barbarians as well as the player and that unit must be able to be built (or have been built) by some player in the game.

Tech:
--Player must still be in Ancient Times.

Barbarians:
--Player must not have Expansionist trait.
--There must not be a city within a 1-tile radius.
--The player must have at least 1 city.
--The player must have at least 1 military unit.
--The unit popping the hut must not have the "All Terrain As Roads" ability.

Click to expand...

Compiled Firaxian Comments on Undocumented Game Features

Expansionist civ will never pop barbarians whether they have military or not. Of course, that doesn't stop an AI warrior to pop barbarians from a hut by your scout

Using the above guide, popping the hut with a worker before your first military unit is built can only have these results:
Nothing - the worst result.
Maps - the next worst result, but will save same on early exploration, maybe.
Gold - better than maps, at least it can be used to buy tech or workers.
Tech - the next best thing to.....
Settler - the cream of the crop, this early means an easier game for you.

To me, you have a 3 out of 5 chance at something nice and a 4 out of 5 of something positive. All at the cost of 3 worker turns.

Thanks, all.

So just for fun, I think I will "replay" my opening 10 moves, not to submit or anything, but to see what happens if I move a worker to the goodie hut to the east at the beginning of the game.

stwils

OK. I just tried playing 3 times with letting the first worker pop the hut before the warrior was built.

Time#1 - worker popped hut and got 25 gold

Time#2- worker popped hut and got 25 gold

Time #3 - this time the worker built a road on the way but popped the hut before warrior was produced : got Ceremonial Burial.

I leave it to the experts among you to figure this out.

stwils

You can play around with which turn the worker pops the hut and get different results for each turn. However, unless the game was created with the option to preserve the RnG turned off, you will always get the same result from the same move sequence (popping the hut on the same turn). If the RnG preserve is off then you can save the game at that point and pop the hut repeatedly until you get the results you like. This is, of course, concidered cheating and is not allowed in any civ3 community.

The huts are totally random events tripped by the RnG.

There are some rules that govern the choices, as I mentioned earlier.

Sorry to have been out of pocket for several days.

A little Off topic but:

I have had some severe technical difficulties due to PTW testing for a friend of mine that manages software at the local Best Buy. They have had so many copies of GOTY and PTW returned by dissatisfied customers that they have pulled the product from the shelves. He had 17 copies that had been returned just in the 3 days before Thanksgiving, so he asked me to take a look at the discs just to see if the complaints were something unique.

I loaded PTW from one of the discs (even though I publically said that I recommended against buying it.) and just verified the non-functional status of most of the MP modes.

The unforeseen side effect was that loading the software seemed to have corrupted the compression algorithms in my standard Civ stuff because the save files took a 100x to 1000x jump in size. The turn transitions jumped from just a few seconds under normal conditions to almost 45 seconds after PTW was installed.

Like an idiot, I just assumed it was a designed in flaw with PTW like usual, so I played on. When I stopped to check what was causing the crap I found that the size of the autosave files had jumped to 134MB each!! Ouch!! Luckily I have two 80GB drives and a truckload of RAM.

Well, I've stripped the software and reinstalled, so everything is fixed, but I am left with a string of save files for this game that load like mud. The files compress down nicely in .zip files but in the unzipped state they load slower than anything I have ever seen. (you load slow also if you were as big as the video of wizrd of OZ.)

[rant on]What a bag-o-crap.[/rant off]

Back on topic:

I'll have the save files that have been uploaded so far analysed and summarized as soon as possible.

WT? My PTW save files are < 200K.

I wonder if the 1.04 and 1.14 patches are more critcal then I realized?

Hmm... as someone who didn't even get contact with AI civs that early, I, too, will be interested to see how 'early war' plays out. I have my next 30 turns, as well as the report, ready when cracker gives the ok to start the next round. I've tried building warrior + settler pairs as opposed to spear + settler pairs in the beginning of this game as compared to the handyandy game, and my expansion rate has benefited... although I'll still probably be behind the pack. As I've just started playing on Monarch with some success, I regard this as a learning experience, especially with this game's tech pace going so much faster than at Monarch level.

Cracker,

I think one of the patches fixed some problems with MP mode. You might check on that. I haven't tried anything but PBEM yet so can't say. I am too busy enjoying the rest of it.

Funny thing about PTW, one of the UUs that the boards said was going to be bad was the bezerker. Turns out it is almost too powerful for the AI to defend against.

....and now back to your regularly scheduled programming......

...especially with this game's tech pace going so much faster than at Monarch level.

Let me put this in perspective - I have played the game through to about 10AD. My tech level in the game is ahead of LK36 - DEITY - I had the middle ages earlier in this game at "monarchy".

I think the increased tech pace has a lot to due with the modified map, and the number of AI civs. This really makes a big difference in how fast the tech goes. I can't compare with deity, my true deity experience is nil but I can compare it to Epic 11 that had a large land mass, and 15 AI civs. Tech was screaming on that game too. It was a culuture game, which was difficult for me to win, my culture topped 179000 but I was never double the nearest civ. Off topic I know but it was a monarch game with very fast tech, very much like this.

I am interested in seeing exactly how the games match up. It is very early and it will be interesting to see how early dissions can effect the next rounds. ie to war or not to war, granary no granary, archers no archers, tech choices etc.

Hotrod

P.S. I have played to turn 50 but am reluctant to go past 60, may have to grab cracker's game at that point to see how I would handle getting an early settler and an early war.

Originally posted by LKendter
...especially with this game's tech pace going so much faster than at Monarch level.

Let me put this in perspective - I have played the game through to about 10AD. My tech level in the game is ahead of LK36 - DEITY - I had the middle ages earlier in this game at "monarchy".

Click to expand...

Sounds like a good Deity tech trainer, looks like space ship might be the quickest was to win on the map afterall.