Shooting the Moon tips

azzaman333 said:

It's not that STP is in a bad spot, but given that we have Archery and Animal Husbandry, the key tiles on the hill city are workable.

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This is true, I was probably biased when giving my assesement, since I allready had taken into consideration that hunting and AH that early was a mistake.
If one takes into consideration that AH and archers are at hand, that hill looks much better.

MyOtherName said:

No offense to him, but he did not do a logical assessment. He did some combination of heuristic reasoning and rationalizing.

A logical assessment would compare and contrast alternatives.


That's not the gain. The gain is:

• Faster worker
• A couple extra food early
• Earlier commerce
• Much Earlier Bronze Working (which translates into earlier chopping, faster expansion)
• You can start diverting to settlers/workers earlier (size 2, rather than 3)
• You effectively have an extra citizen, since one isn't devoted to the rice.
• (consequence of the previous point Full early-game potential from tiles reached at size 5 rather than 6.

The cost:

• 1 overall potential
• The capital will not be able to share the flood plains
• The capital will may require grassland farms when it's time to grow. (It might be good to just work mined grassland hills or grassland cottages -- I haven't run the numbers)
• You're pretty much locked into a rapid expansion plan over the very short term

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Yes. What he said.

The settling on rice is related to the double gems and the golds in the north. Due to the extra commerce and mining start, you CAN afford to expand rapidly.

Furthermore, you're Joao. So expanding is very hammer-efficient.

MyOtherName said:

No offense to him, but he did not do a logical assessment. He did some combination of heuristic reasoning and rationalizing.

A logical assessment would compare and contrast alternatives.


That's not the gain. The gain is:

• Faster worker
• A couple extra food early
• Earlier commerce
• Much Earlier Bronze Working (which translates into earlier chopping, faster expansion)
• You can start diverting to settlers/workers earlier (size 2, rather than 3)
• You effectively have an extra citizen, since one isn't devoted to the rice.
• (consequence of the previous point Full early-game potential from tiles reached at size 5 rather than 6.

The cost:

• 1 overall potential
• The capital will not be able to share the flood plains
• The capital will may require grassland farms when it's time to grow. (It might be good to just work mined grassland hills or grassland cottages -- I haven't run the numbers)
• You're pretty much locked into a rapid expansion plan over the very short term

Click to expand...

Not to nitpick but your analysis overvalues the yield for settling on a food resource (+1 rather than 2).

I looked for a relevant war academy article to be 100% certain.
Your gains to costs are too short term, and skewed towards the advantages side. With gems our happy cap is 6, correct? With farmed rice we give ourselves considerable growth potential which will catch up and surpass the settled rice approach. A much smaller point is that by settling on the rice you sacrifice the commerce bonus you would have received for it being riverside.

TheWilltoAct said:

Not to nitpick but your analysis overvalues the yield for settling on a food resource (+1 rather than 2).

I looked for a relevant war academy article to be 100% certain.

Spoiler :

Comprehensive Guide to Terrain, Improvements, Resources, and City Placement

Your gains to costs are too short term, and skewed towards the advantages side. With gems our happy cap is 6, correct? With farmed rice we give ourselves considerable growth potential which will catch up and surpass the settled rice approach. A much smaller point is that by settling on the rice you sacrifice the commerce bonus you would have received for it being riverside.

Click to expand...

Yes,, but NOT settling on the rice means one less city than what you would have from settling on the rice.

It's a snowball effect. One extra food, and BW first means faster cities and faster axes.

Marathon/Huge is surprisingly about succeeding in very short-term goals in the early game so that you're in a good position when it's time to war in the middle ages.

I gave it a try, but it's surprisingly tricky to do right I think. So, maybe I just wasn't doing it right. Anyway, here's my conclusions.

Settling on rice is faster in this particular case. It was so much faster that I got the second gems hooked up almost as fast as the farm had in the non-settle case. By the second screenshot (c. turn 90), I had a third worker. Wow! Sounds a lot better! So, I took a second look at what was happening. My conclusion is that the results are seriously skewed because I was working the cow tile. Oops.

Without that, I'm pretty sure that settling on the rice would've been a big mistake. I'll run the alternative again but without the cow next time as that did not inform the decision to settle on rice.

One other thing the alternative test taught me was just how expensive roads can be. If you're building more than two segments, they take up more time than an improvement (three road segments require at 18 turns, probably more like 20 turns, depending on terrain whereas a farm is 15 turns). Chopping is much more effective for cutting down the time it takes to build a city at 10 turns/ forest (9 for chopping, 1 for moving).

Chopping will drastically decrease the time until the settler pops out and can let the settler move two spaces. It's especially good for IMP leaders. Still, I suspect that bringing in the cows would work out better still. Forests are so fleeting.

Huh? What?

Based on what you wrote, it sounds like settling on the rice is much better than not settling on the rice. What does the cows have to do with anything? You got your second city faster, you got your gems up faster. Mooooo?

You shouldn't even have AH until much, much later.

And I'm glad you're enjoying an early BW at Marathon. It helps significantly, if you have the commerce to support it.

And don't worry about the forests. On huge/large maps, you have craploads of forests.

Alright, I've given it a go, but this time I WB'ed the cows into spices or something. Just for the sake of comparison. Here's the screenshot:

For convenience, here's the first version.

As you can see, my cap is larger (thanks to building the settler through chops only until it was almost finished), but I only made three improvements (not counting the fish) instead of four. I also was unsure of what techs to go for, so I followed basically the same things as I did last time. If I weren't trying to compare the two starts, I would've done things a little differently.

While it's hard to say whether the original will catch up once I get BW, so far at least, BW first is looking like the winner.

Oh, drat. Going through the original game again, I realized that I actually do have horses nearby. Well, anyway, what does everybody think? Should I shoulder on with the original?

TheWilltoAct said:

Not to nitpick but your analysis overvalues the yield for settling on a food resource (+1 rather than 2).

Click to expand...

Settle on grassland + work farmed rice = 7 (5 surplus)
Settle on rice + work farmed grassland = 6 (4 surplus)

The potential difference is only one .

You see a 2 difference because you're comparing apples to oranges -- a plan where you grow a citizen to work the rice versus a plan where you don't grow that citizen.

Of course, that is a relevant comparison, since that's precisely the "standard" quick expand does versus the accelerated plan MarigoldRan proposes.

Marigold's plan would be terrible if, rather than the greatly accelerated expansion he suggests, he instead proposed growing to size 3 and getting agriculture first -- I'm pretty sure the initial food boost would not overcome overall loss of food in that situation.

With gems our happy cap is 6, correct? With farmed rice we give ourselves considerable growth potential which will catch up and surpass the settled rice approach.

Click to expand...

If your plan is to "grow to the happy cap then churn out settlers/workers", then yes, settling on the rice is a bad idea. But nobody is proposing doing that after settling on the rice.

Whether grow to happy cap then expand will surpass very rapid expansion is not so clear, I think. I was under the impression the general forum consensus these days is that expanding quickly is better than waiting for the happy cap. (although, several years ago, general opinion was the other way)

A much smaller point is that by settling on the rice you sacrifice the commerce bonus you would have received for it being riverside.

Click to expand...

You sacrifice that commerce no matter what riverside tile you settle on. The only way settling on the rice will change how much commerce you bring in at the desired max size is if it means you decide to grow one size smaller, or you decide to work an extra non-riverside mine instead of a riverside farm or cottage.

Of course, do note that the rapid expansion plan gets a big commerce boost from getting the gems earlier along with picking up the gold sooner.

Continue on the new one and expand rapidly.

That way, at the least you'd have learned how to play excellent starts on Deity.

And start spamming axes.

Um the Muse said:

Alright, I've given it a go, but this time I WB'ed the cows into spices or something. Just for the sake of comparison. Here's the screenshot:

Click to expand...

Try it again, but don't give up chopping & expanding so soon. If you're going to try rapid expansion, you shouldn't do it so half-heartedly!

If a goal would help, try to get the following as soon as you possibly can:

• 4 cities
• 5 workers
• Working both golds
• Working the bronze
• Working the fish
• Trade routes between your cities

Maybe even some cottages should be on this list.

You probably should be even more ambitious than this, though.

Not fair to compare a playthrough where you went hunting and AH, with the accelerated version.
For a fair comparisson, you should probably have gone for BW earlier in the original version.


Nice that you guys are creative, and finding alternative paths, keep up the good work!

Thanks for stating your argument so clearly MyOtherName.

I still can't see 1 having a significant impact on our start though. We are indeed comparing apples to oranges and I don't think farmed grassland is a compelling option. If we had farmed the rice we could be cottaging, which would put us in a different place altogether.

MyOtherName said:

Try it again, but don't give up chopping & expanding so soon. If you're going to try rapid expansion, you shouldn't do it so half-heartedly!

If a goal would help, try to get the following as soon as you possibly can:

• 4 cities
• 5 workers
• Working both golds
• Working the bronze
• Working the fish
• Trade routes between your cities

Maybe even some cottages should be on this list.

You probably should be even more ambitious than this, though.

Click to expand...

What would be a good deadline for this? I was chopping almost continously since getting BW (I only paused to mine the copper and was planning on building a road there), but I really should use slavery for two pop whipping a worker. The problem, as I saw it is that my regrowth rate is atrocious without a food resource, but I'd rather work the gems so I really prefer whipping at size 5.

Is working the fourth gold really that high of a priority?

krikav said:

Not fair to compare a playthrough where you went hunting and AH, with the accelerated version.
For a fair comparisson, you should probably have gone for BW earlier in the original version.


Nice that you guys are creative, and finding alternative paths, keep up the good work!

Click to expand...

Krikav, you're right about the fact that I should've gone BW given that I ended up not using AH. If I had though, I think that it would've been a fair comparison because I would then be comparing two different philosophies.

TheWilltoAct said:

Thanks for stating your argument so clearly MyOtherName.

I still can't see 1 having a significant impact on our start though. We are indeed comparing apples to oranges and I don't think farmed grassland is a compelling option. If we had farmed the rice we could be cottaging, which would put us in a different place altogether.

Click to expand...

An extra food does make a difference. The difference between X total food and X+1 food has a bigger impact than from X+1 to X+2 (law of diminishing returns).

That said, if your point is that you can choose to skip agri for now even without settling the rice, that sounds valid to me. After all, the citizen can work the rice, getting +3 food surplus just like the settle on rice option. Then, when a mine becomes available, I can switch to it. Surely, the accelerated research plus chopping can make up for the temporary loss in food?

If you're planning to spam settlers and workers from your capital, your first two population points in the capital should be the gems. Your third population point should be a mined hill.

In other words, if you don't settle on the rice, the rice won't help you until much, much later in the game.

In which case, I'd rather take the earlier advantages of settling on the rice.

And yes, you'll need the gold for expansion. On larger maps, expansion is directly tied to commerce (since you don't have to compete with the AI for space. Your constraint is your research slider).

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I tend to skip lines when I argue. But they're there!

Having the third population work a mined hill makes a lot of sense if you're making nothing but workers and/ or settlers. However, I think that farmed and irrigated rice will pay out more production, assuming slavery for any other builds at size 2. Eventually, rice could pay off in terms of higher production by allowing me to work more hills (although this looks like a bureaucratic capital to me).

Also, your post didn't address my idea that you could decide to work the rice until you reach size two, then switch off the rice (instead of growing on the rice to size 3). That will get you just as much food as settling on the rice until you grow to size two. Then this plan loses food compared to yours until size 3. Suddenly, my plan would overtake yours quickly.

So, your plan works if and only if you plan on staying at size three for extended periods of time. Another key difference is that I plan on having a granary by that time.

In fact, that's what I did. I'll do the write-up tomorrow afternoon/ evening. I'll be interested to see what you think

To be honest, I'm kind of jealous. I've been looking for a start like this for a while- river gems with rice to settle on.