SGOTM 15 - One Short Straw

Sounds good.

The demographics screen should give us a good indication of who the other leaders are.
We already know there are no charismatic ones; when they revolt on t2 (unless they're already Buddhist), we'll see how many are spiritual.
Good luck, Mitchum!

OK. I'll give the rest of the team two hours to comment before proceeding... Or do I have to wait the full 24 hours?

Mitchum said:

Exploration will be as LC suggested: SW -> SE -> along the SE coast to explore the deer site.

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Remember that when exploring the Coast, you don't have to hug the Coast. You can actually move toward it, move inland, then move back to the Coast and still reveal the same amount of water squares in most geographical layouts.

The reason is that you can see 2 squares across water... it's similar to how after having walked on a Hills square that is not adjacent to any Forests, you will get to see everything in a 2-square radius, such that when you move away from that Hills square into a flat piece of land, you won't reveal anything new for that turn.

Similarly, if you fully hug the Coast, there can be "wasted overlap" of revealed areas.

Maybe play around a bit with a test game of walking toward the coast and away from the coast to see what I mean... there are exception cases that you'll get a feel for if you practice a bit, such that if there is a corner of land you probably want to explore the corner even if doing so means hugging the coast for a little while.

Mitchum said:

Take screen shots of the F8 Victories and F9 Demographics and F9 Top 5 Cities screens each turn.

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I wouldn't mind both. I honestly don't have the patience to load up a lot of saved games nor do I have the confidence that I'm not going to misclick when looking at an older saved game. For me, the screenshots are nice to see.

However, if ZPV or LC (or whomever can read their minds about what info is missing from the screenshots) is willing to fully analyze the saved games and report back, I'm okay with not seeing the screenshots, if that makes sense to you.

If anyone was going to disagree with the PPP, it would have been Dhoomstriker... With approval from 5/7 of the team, I'll go ahead and play. I will save the game each turn and I will explore the coast as Dhoomstriker suggested.

Hug the coast if feasible, that is, if it doesn't mean several extra turns, which I doubt it will if this is the round (convex) island it appears to be. It's good to know if there is land accessible by the second cultural expansion.

No hurry to play on if we defog something significant.

Good luck!!!

What Dhoomstriker is saying that if you go coast -> inland -> coast, you find the same coastal information as coast -> coast -> coast but get additional inland information with the one inland hop. Obviously, it depends on the lay of the land and whether the coast is straight, concave or convex. But if you look ahead and fog gaze, you can usually figure it out. In any event, I will fully explore the coast.

@magnusmarcus:

Please don't hesitate to comment or ask about anything that occurs to you. What might seem like the most trivial or unimportant detail can be critical to a turnset. Even if no one responds to your comment, it's all grist for the mill and in my experience over 12 SGs, everything counts. For example, if you're confused about someone's post, there might be a good reason.

OK. I played until T6. When our borders popped, we see gems to the west. We also met Tokugawa on this turn. He came from the east.

Do I continue to explore the deer or do I double back to explore the gems site (and the crabs along the way)?

Turn 7 is the first turn where you could move next to a lion or bear, Mitchum. Just a little reminder.
edit: xpost. Ooh. Tokugawa of the what? Gems!? And what a lovely spot for the cows.
Talk about a decision to make! My gut feeling is we'll need to grow and build a warrior anyway, and that can explore the gems area and definitely be in place to fogbust/escort the settler. We might be able to justify building the settler at size 1 if there's food by the gems, but we can't get the warrior there in time, so I think we just have to swallow our exploring decisions and make the most of what we can see.

LowtherCastle said:

@magnusmarcus:

Please don't hesitate to comment or ask about anything that occurs to you. What might seem like the most trivial or unimportant detail can be critical to a turnset. Even if no one responds to your comment, it's all grist for the mill and in my experience over 12 SGs, everything counts. For example, if you're confused about someone's post, there might be a good reason.

Click to expand...

I'm just trying not to get lost in the coversation

I wonder, Toku must be relatively close. Maybe in worker-stealing (or even rushing) range.

Shall we stop for a day and think this over? I do't have any more time today, myself...

Plus, by now there must be more data to analyze, in terms of creative civs and who knows what else.

Pausing is good for me. Attached are the saves. No pausing was used...

Regarding Toku, if his scout beelined us, the furthest he could be is 12 tiles or so, right? That's definitely in rush range. Maybe Mysticism -> Agriculture -> BW is in order. If we don't have copper, we can settle city #2 to claim it. Although, it's possible that Neil was really mean to us and Toku has all of the hidden strategic resources on our island...

A worker steal or ten would be awesome. I can't remember if stolen workers become fast workers...

One of the other civs started with an extra settler, and has founded a city with it.
And Neil's done something funny with our rivals' culture. We can't trust the land area to tell us how many are Creative or Spiritual. We can tell that of the five civs with water adjacent to their capital, only one looks really coastal.

If we keep going east, we can't really gain immediately by my suggestion of popping toward and away from the Coast, since we'd still want to move E GFor, SE GHFor, due to the square to the east of the GHFor being a Coast square. So, as Mitchum says, it depends upon fog-gazing the geography. On the plus side, with the visibility of those Hills by Toku's Scout, we actually already see inland and thus won't really be missing out much by hugging the Coast for at least a couple of turns.


So... Marble + Fish + 3 Grassland Hills squares by settling on the Plains square on which our Warrior is standing. Of course, with that square being the only Plains square in a wide radius, perhaps it contains our Horse/Copper Resource; hmmmm. At least if it does contain such a thing, then we'd get +1 Hammer in the City's Centre by settling on said square.


There's also Marble + Crab + 3 Grassland Hills squares if it turns out that the Fish has another Food Resource that we want to partner it up with for a Great Person Farm.


Toku makes it already hard to get Open Borders... with all of these Peaks and Toku, I wonder if all of the AIs will be on "the other side" of wherever Toku's borders block off that definitely-intentionally-drawn line of Peaks.

I would not be too surprised to find the map a Pangaea-like one (with one or two Astronomy-only-reachable AIs) with all of the AIs hidden behind Toku toward the area where, on our mini-map, our original starting location was positioned.


Settling NE of the Deer would at least pick up the Cow, which will probably otherwise go unused. We'd use up a Grassland Forest to settle NE of the Deer but at least we'd be on that River (which appears to end all-too abrutly).

However, settling at such a location would make for a pretty bad Legendary City. The Fish + Marble location would be an acceptable Legendary City although it would have been a lot nicer to have a second Food Resource there.

That's interesting. I didn't really want isolation.

We should really keep an eye on his espionage spending now, and try to figure out if he meets others.

Rushing Toku early is painful. Worker-stealing might be fun...

Gems are a red herring, I guess. We'll probably wanna try to grab land east of our location. Settler at size 1 doesn't appeal anyway, so an extra warrior will help.

ZPV said:

And Neil's done something funny with our rivals' culture. We can't trust the land area to tell us how many are Creative or Spiritual.

Click to expand...

I tested border expansion using Mitch's test save and checked the REAL SAVE.

• All AIs revolt to Buddhism on T1, not T0. That explains why the Mahabodhi grew his land to 21 tiles on T1.
• All AIs increase their happiness from Buddhism on T2, whether they're spritual or not. (No help there.)
• From the Demo screens, borders expanded on T3 and T4.
• Toku has 5 on us and 24 in 6t = 4cpt.
• A castle gives +25% and +1cpt, possibly explaining both Toku's and .
• No leader started with 6 = no charismatic leaders

Based on all that, I put together these possibilities for the T3 and T4 border expansions. Of course, it's possible that Neil did something other than provide some or all AIs with a castle. I believe it's also possible that he changed the XML in the mod so that all of their cities start with walls and/or castles, right? So we'll want to check TOku's capital and second cities, if possible, to verify these two hypotheses.

Conclusions:
No charismatic leaders (Demo happiness)
No SPI+CRE leaders (=Hatty)
At least two leaders that are CRE or SPI (T3 expansion)

So we could easily have 2+ creative leaders, the rest anything but CRE, SPI and CHA, with all capitals equipped with walls and castles.

ZPV said:

We can tell that of the five civs with water adjacent to their capital, only one looks really coastal.

Click to expand...

How did you conclude this?

.

Is Toku Buddhist? How could he get to 24c with 4cpt and a revolt?

Does rushing Toku interfere with plans to go for an AP victory? We need him at Friendly to bribe him to convert to Christianity, so when he rushes the AP with our GE, the AP is Christian.

Toku attitude toward us:
Note that unless we're both ranked in the lower half scorewise, when we switch to Hinduism, Toku will become Annoyed with us, which greatly increases the likelihood he'll DoW us. This may play a serious role in the early game.