SGOTM 09 - Murky Waters

Well, well. 6 opponents, 1400 land tiles and a neighbour.
From jesusin's trick I have found: The blue circle 2N1W is still there, even though it is not displayed, and there is also one on the barren hill 2E. Also several blue circles further south.
One can also deduce the height of the land from the "goto arrows". Is it OK to use this information? I don't know.
 
ZPV said:
One can also deduce the height of the land from the "goto arrows". Is it OK to use this information? I don't know.
Click to expand...
There are no rules against it and others can do it. Can we determine anything about coasts? Are we on an island? 1400 tiles is a lot, isn't it? Like lakes or plains or something, or what? EDIT: I guess it's not so much. Could be most any map, it looks like to me.
 
Erkon said:
2. 900 bpt * 9 turns = 8100 beakers. How many scientists does this represent? Shall we target a 3-GP GA, or a 4-GP GA?
4. Hmm, land units will be too slow. Perhaps if we galley-chained them to coastal cities, and worked inward? But that will require a huge amount of units if we want rapid conquest. I still prefer if we could expand peacefully until paratroopers. Also keep in mind that we settled non-optimal cities for the Sea Quest. We'll notice once we know the map.
Click to expand...
2. About 7+ GSes. And Taj Mahal is 469h/2 for marble, so that's cheap too.
4. Our first 12 cities were not non-optimal sea-quest cities. They came later.

Anyway, this is all food for thought. Hopefully we'll rapidly determine what sort of map we have. Maybe we'll have tons of food and forest, but no rivers. Maybe tons of rivers. Maybe AI close, maybe not. Maybe room to settle 12 nice cities, maybe not. Etc.
 
ZPV said:
Well, well. 6 opponents, 1400 land tiles and a neighbour.
From jesusin's trick I have found: The blue circle 2N1W is still there, even though it is not displayed, and there is also one on the barren hill 2E. Also several blue circles further south.
One can also deduce the height of the land from the "goto arrows". Is it OK to use this information? I don't know.
Click to expand...

1400 tiles seams too many for continents at least. This increases the chance to circumnavigate with airship.

Yes, it's ok to use that information. If anyone has questions about the rules and guidlelines, please ask here, or PM me and/or Alan. Don't ask in the maintenance thread.

Hmm, I never considered the hill 2E. Huge amount of food, three river forest tiles for preserves (+3 commerce), two hills. That's a kick-ass worker/settler pump if I've ever seen one. That's +13 food at size 3 :eek: We're talking massive REX. A worker/worker/settler stack in 10 turns at size 4. :eek::eek:

Man, we then have the choice 1S, 1NE and 2E. :cry:
 
LowtherCastle said:
There are no rules against it and others can do it. Can we determine anything about coasts? Are we on an island?
Click to expand...
Well, I think there is an island that will be visible once we explore the eastern coast. It is close enough to work hidden seafood, but not the visible fish.
There is a pair of mountains 4S of the settler, and settling 1S or 1NW would pick up a currently hidden hill.
Our landmass is quite large, as far as I can tell. (bigger than in klarius's test map)

edit: moving one turn shouldn't cost us anything. We revolt on the first turn in that case.
 
@Erkon. My first tests were on the forest next to the fish. 1E of the scout gives all that food and 3 hills, including 2 hills that can be windmills before bw.

Now I see what ZPV is doing. I'm picking up a lot of hills. There's also one to the NW that we would see if we moved the scout NW W. And there are a bunch to the south and west, if I'm not mistaken.

ZPV, do you think you could make a screen shot of the region and mark the various hills and mountains, as you see them? Along with any coasts. Btw, if you happen to screw up and let go of the settler, then you have to let us know and stop all communication with us until we have exposed any tiles you saw.
 
LowtherCastle said:
@Erkon. My first tests were on the forest next to the fish. 1E of the scout gives all that food and 3 hills, including 2 hills that can be windmills before bw.

Now I see what ZPV is doing. I'm picking up a lot of hills. There's also one to the NW that we would see if we moved the scout NW W. And there are a bunch to the south and west, if I'm not mistaken.

ZPV, do you think you could make a screen shot of the region and mark the various hills and mountains, as you see them? Along with any coasts. Btw, if you happen to screw up and let go of the settler, then you have to let us know and stop all communication with us until we have exposed any tiles you saw.
Click to expand...
I'm doing this with the game paused, so there is no risk accidentally moving the settler (I tested this before on a different game).
edit: I'll try to draw up some sort of map.
 
I finally got around to playing that test game, so now I am a little bit more prepared. Prepared for what? For making lots of statements based on too little fact, of course. ;)

I see a few different possible uses for our first city:

1. Research powerhouse under Bureaucracy with plenty of cottages.
2. Worker and settler factory with plenty of food
3. GP farm with plenty of food, forest preserves, and national park (I tried this in the test game and managed some 300+ gpp/t).

I am leaning a bit towards the settler factory, especially if there is lots of land to fill up. We should be able to combine this with the GP farm later if we don't find any better sites for that.
 
Here is the land, as best I can work out.

Spoiler :

Green = flatland
Blue = sea
Orange = hills
Purple = mountain
 

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Unbelievable! :eek:

If this really works then no foggy start will ever be the same. But I can't shake the feeling that this is on the "exploitive" side. Are you sure this is ok? Is there any limits, or could we map out the whole map this way? :hmm:
 
Gnejs said:
Unbelievable! :eek:

If this really works then no foggy start will ever be the same. But I can't shake the feeling that this is on the "exploitive" side. Are you sure this is ok? Is there any limits, or could we map out the whole map this way? :hmm:
Click to expand...
I'm a bit worried about this too. It definitely feels exploitative, which is why I asked before doing this and posting it (although I didn't state the full implications). Other teams can do this, and it isn't banned, but IMHO it should be.
Depending on what you all think, I can delete the map. I can't really delete the information it contains from my mind. I've spoilered it in case you don't want to see it.
Anyway it's reeeeeally boring, and I hope never to do it again.

edit: I'll send Denniz a PM, to see if there is a possibility of a fix in the next HOF mod. It shouldn't be too difficult, if the code for those "goto arrows" is available.

Normally, you can only map out tiles within a 10-15 tile radius of the starting position, but there is a bug in the software which occasionally lets you scroll outside these parameters, and one could theoretically find out the whole map this way.
 
Hey, throughout history, the spoils have gone to those who knew their geography best. So ZPV 'invented' radar. What of it? :lol:

EDIT: And jesusin. Actually, jesusin's technique is equally if not more useful.
 
LowtherCastle said:
Hey, throughout history, the spoils have gone to those who knew their geography best. So ZPV 'invented' radar. What of it? :lol:

EDIT: And jesusin. Actually, jesusin's technique is equally if not more useful.
Click to expand...

Well, at least one other team knows about jesusin's technique. Gosha190 posted about it in one of the GOTM pregame threads. So I don't feel so guilty about that one.
 
Erkon might as well pm AlanH, but I'm pretty sure the answer will be that it's one of those things that they can't monitor, so they can't ban it. Either they correct it with a mod or it just happens. That's how they handled the overflow bug long ago. Allowed till it became modded out. AlanH can decide if he wants to make an announcement about it.

But if Gosha knows about it, you know our comrades are all using it.
 
Gnejs said:
Unbelievable! :eek:

If this really works then no foggy start will ever be the same. But I can't shake the feeling that this is on the "exploitive" side. Are you sure this is ok? Is there any limits, or could we map out the whole map this way? :hmm:
Click to expand...

Of course we are exploiting a weird effect from the auto route function, but how would it be possible to enforce a rule that prevented the use of this? I will alert Alan and ask him to give his view on this feature. If needed, we will have to remove the screen shot to prevent this feature from spreading into the GOTM arena.

Meanwhile, I would like to present a candidate scenario, which we could use as a base for further discussion:

Move scout NW-SW, and if nothing important shows up, we settle on the hill 2E (and revolt as ZPV indicated). Then we us the capital to churn out workers + settlers and a few great people. Then we move the capital to a better place (if needed).

Note: 2E is better than E-NE since we gain three land tiles.

EDIT: NW-SW is better than NW-W as jesusin adviced.
 
Erkon said:
If needed, we will have to remove the screen shot to prevent this feature from spreading into the GOTM arena.
Click to expand...
It's never been the CFC policy to 'hide' bug or bug-like features. They're always announced publicly and discussed. If this hasn't already been covered it will be now.
 
Let's see, if no more resources anywhere in the fog, then we want to settle 2E.
So we should first move Scout NW-NW or NW-SW to see if there are other resources that make it inadvisable to go East.
 
Let's get one more opinion about the scout move before LC can do the move. Please notice that we have a four month deadline to stick to, and even if that deadline has been delayed previously, I suggest that we try to meet it this time :D

With ~120 days to play, and a win date around T170, we need to run a turn set every 6 days on average. We're not really in a hurry (yet), but there's not much margin to delay either :lol:

EDIT: I'm in contact with Alan so lets wait with any discussion about this feature until he has made his judgment.
 
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