SGOTM 02 - Short Straw

Welcome to your C_IV SGOTM 2 Team Thread. Please use it for all internal team communication, turn logs and discussions. Subscribe to it to receive notifications, and do not visit the other team threads for this game until you have finished. Please also subscribe to the Maintenance Thread for this game, where teams and staff may post non-spoiler information of general interest.

This game will be played in Civ4, patched to v1.61.

You are cast in the role of Tokugawa, mighty leader of the Japanese. Tokugawa's brother has left the island city of Kyoto to avenge the death of his wife and only son. He has travelled to a distant land without finding their murderer. So the brother of Tokugawa will settle and found a new Japanese colony, and the Japanese have sworn to conquer the rest of civilization in order to hunt down and destroy their enemy.

The game is on a Standard size fractal map, modified as only Gyathaar knows how, at Epic speed. All victory conditions are enabled, but the laurels for this contest will be awarded to the fastest teams to achieve a Conquest victory. The number of AI rivals has not yet been revealed. It will be played using version 1.61 of Civ4 with locked modified assets.

Individual start files for all teams will be available on the SGOTM Progress and Results Page at midnight, server local time, at the start of August 8th.

Here's the start position.


Map Parameters
Playable Civ - Tokugawa of Japan
World size - Standard
Difficulty - Monarch
Landform - Fractal, hand modified
Game Speed - Epic
AI Aggression - YES!
Barbarians - Raging!!

Please visit the following link to ensure that you are adequately prepared:
Civ4 SGOTM reference thread

Notes:

A. ONLY Civilization IV v1.61 is supported for this SGOTM. All teams will compete for up to four awards - the Gold, Silver and Bronze Laurels for the fastest finishes, and the Wooden Spoons for the lowest scoring finisher.

B. All teams must play the sponsored variant - victory will be awarded for the fastest victory by Conquest.

C. All saved game files uploaded to the server are parsed through software that extracts and archives data about your save, including reload count for each turn set.

I'm sure you'll enjoy this game

Hi Guys! I can't believe we got everyone back (minus VM) for another SGOTM. I hope everyone has been doing OK during the break. This looks like a really interesting start, and we have to pull off a conquest victory to boot. Should be quite a fun game. I'll brush up on my fast conquest victories and post some thoughts before we start next week. I'm thinking A'AA's write up in the first GOTM06 spoiler may be a good place to start. It was a fractal map and he turned in a heck of a good time. In the mean time, post your thoughts on strategy, order of play, or whatever.

Anyway, welcome back and let the begin!

Yeah! It's great to see everyone back. I went ahead and tried my best to develop a practice game. I hope others find it useful too.

I thought a practice game might help us develop a strategy since this is such an unconventional start with 1) Kyoto in such a weird place, 2) aggressive AI and 3) raging barbs.

Hopefully a few practice games will tell us exactly how raging the barbs are and how aggressive the AI is.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads12/SGOTM2_Practice_3_epic_BC-4000.Civ4SavedGame

Hi all,

Mushroomshirt...thanks for the set-up. I will play a few starts, tonight.

I will take Grog's suggestion and read the GOTM6 write-up. I will be away from my computer this weekend, so I will check back in Sunday or Monday night.

Later...Leo

Everyone needs to play through the start of Mushroom's game. I did not realize how much the start will effect this game. Your capital is on the other side of the world so city maintenance is huge. The capital is almost useless. You cannot expand due to costs, but you cannot do a palace jump until you have 4 cities. Research is very slow due to costs. Of course, you have the raging barbs...don't forget that.

This game will be very, very interesting.

I took a brief look at your game ms. Thanks for doing that. Wow, this is going to be an interesting game. Lmtoops is right, Osaka will cost us 6gpt in maintenance from the start, as well as each new city we build on the continent. We'll definitely want to get 2 more cities and jump the palace to the main continent as soon as possible. Otherwise our research will be down to 0% in no time. I also didn't realize until 8 turns in that Kyoto (the island city) was the capital, so Osaka won't expand culturally until we build a culture building there. That makes the spot where the settler is standing much less attractive because we won't be able to pick up that rice for quite some time.

2N might be a nice spot as it give us the rice immediately, though 1NW would let us work the floodplain (3f,1c) and pick up the rice&fish after expansion. If we moved the warrior 1E onto the hill and the settler 1 NW, we'd be able to see almost the entire fat cross of either of those locations and decide if moving the settler farther is warranted. Either of those spots is off the river, but unless we spot something on the first turn, that may be the lesser of the 2 evils.

Research wise, I believe we may want to go for mysticism first. Wherever we put Osaka, it's going to be very hard to put everything we need within 8 tiles, so we'll need to get it expanded quickly. Mining->BW will be pretty important also, if for nothing else than pop-rushing in Kyoto. And pottery for cottages. Agriculture seems fairly low priority for initial techs in my eyes (since we can get the fish.)

Long term, I think getting Samurai out conquering quickly and getting to Astronomy ASAP will be critical. There's a chance a fractal map could be a 'pangea' but it seems to be fairly uncommon so I think the safer bet is to assume we'll need Astro to conquer everyone.

I'll try and play the test game some more this weekend and see how bad the raging barbs and aggressive AI's will be.

Hi everyone. Its great to see the team back together!

I'm going to be on vacation next week and RL has been pretty busy lately. I'll try the test game as soon as I can. I think we will need a very clear path for research to deal with the barbs and what I assume will be a painfully slow research rate at the start of the game.

I'm curious, is the 6gpt consistent with a map that wraps or no wrapping? We won't know from scouting due to the barbs but expanding west may be a bit better if the world does wrap. (After the capital expands we may want to whip a boat if we can get to the mainland without caravels). I guess that early axes for barb busting and lots of commerce will be critical. Do we want to prioritize agriculture, pottery, and BW? I will try the start focussing on those techs and see what happens. Hopefully I won't be slaughtered before I get axes.

Hello, Good to see everyone back. It looks like we will come in 4th place for SGOTM 01. Pretty good for our first time! I am looking forward to a battle this game. In SGOTM 01, I never had the opportunity; we were always regrouping or massing arms during my turns.

Mushroomshirt, thank you for the sample game. I will play awhile this weekend and post any thoughts.

Some administrivia: I am packing up the wife & kids and going on a road trip next week. I will not be able to play until the 23rd at the earliest. Please place me towards the end of, or last in, the rotation. Any thoughts on mixing up the order from last time?

I'm going to play my broken record one last time for each team:

First post in this thread said:

Please also subscribe to the Maintenance Thread for this game, where teams and staff may post non-spoiler information of general interest.

Click to expand...

Anything I post there will NOT be repeated individually in every team thread. You may even find some useful information there now

AlanH said:

Originally Posted by First post in this thread, first paragraph
Please also subscribe to the Maintenance Thread for this game, where teams and staff may post non-spoiler information of general interest.

Click to expand...

Thanks! I had totally missed the fact there was a new maintenance thread. I guess after you've seen too many (S)GOTM starts you just sort of go to the pertinent datapoints without reading the whole thing.

The most important thing I saw there was a confirmation that Osaka will cost us 7gpt in maintenance, which is actually slightly worse than in mushroomshirt's practice game.

llib_rm said:

Any thoughts on mixing up the order from last time?

Click to expand...

I was thinking about just reversing the roster, making ungy first and me last. No need to get overly complex. We can adjust as needed for absences. So it would look something like this:

ungy
llib_rm*
RobertTheBruce
Danthor
Lmtoops
Mushroomshirt
Grogs

* - Absent until 23 Aug; add in once he's back and up to speed

As for turn length, I was thinking 20/10/10 for the first/second/third rotation. That's 280 turns, or 1340 AD. Hopefully we'll win before then.

Grogs said:

The most important thing I saw there was a confirmation that Osaka will cost us 7gpt in maintenance, which is actually slightly worse than in mushroomshirt's practice game.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I was going to point out that I just kind of winged it with the location of Kyoto & that since distance is important the 6gpt maintenance will not be exact. I'm glad that other teams were counting pixels, not me!

Glad people seem to be finding the practice game useful.

Glad to have you all back--I think we did very well last game especially for a first try as a team.

Mushroomshirt thanks for the practice start-haven't had time to check it out yet.

I read the CFR and Peanut threads from the last game and a few strategy threads and thought I'd share a few things:

both teams have some strong players whose posts are worth reading--on CFR Akots and Lexor and Peanut Daviddesj, Malekithe, Ainwood.
A good MM strategy thread is Zombie's--I think MM is worth it in this type of game. The thread is long but the meat of it is his first page.

1. Binary research--is a bit better to either research 100% or 0%. So keep research 0 until enough gold to get to tech.

2. Whipping is stronger than I was giving it credit for--makes sense in cities with food bonus tiles to whip consistently vs. work mines. Especially with a bug (described in detail in Zombie69's MM thread.)

A couple of other general ideas--I think it makes sense to pause during a turnset if something major comes up and open up for comments for a day if possible. Both those teams seemed to do that.

As far as this game goes--my first thought is that we don't need to settle in a hurry. Since we will pretty much tank our research when we settle, I think its important to look for a better spot--getting a gold would be huge. If we need 4 cities for a palace jump we need some commerce as that means 3 cities with distance penalty.

So I think run a few test games (and keep track of when animals show up)and plan on looking around a bit would be my vote.

This looks like a very interesting challange and I'm looking forward to playing with you all again

ungy said:

As far as this game goes--my first thought is that we don't need to settle in a hurry. Since we will pretty much tank our research when we settle, I think its important to look for a better spot--getting a gold would be huge. If we need 4 cities for a palace jump we need some commerce as that means 3 cities with distance penalty.

So I think run a few test games (and keep track of when animals show up)and plan on looking around a bit would be my vote.

This looks like a very interesting challange and I'm looking forward to playing with you all again

Click to expand...

I was thinking the same thing about settling. If we can figure out when animals show up we can send our settler due west and settle a turn or two before the first animal shows up. This could reduce our maintenance costs (if we are lucky and are on a pangea or large E-W continent) when we are forced to settle. We'll also have the benefit of a 2-movement unit (settler) doing some scouting.

Personally, I am a domination player primarily. I have never won a conquest victory at all - so I will be trodding new ground. My favorite example of a fast conquest victory comes from deluche's GOTM 3 fastest win. Coincidentally, this is a Tokugawa game on monarch. Deluche eschewed any infrastructure with the exception of courthouses and barracks and won the game primarily with horse archers. I dug up a link to that save game. Unfortunately there are no spoilers.

link to saved game

Link to GOTM3 Results

However it is on a map that doesn't require astronomy - I doubt we will be so lucky on this map.

EDIT: I guess it is hyperbole to say I have never won a conquest victory. I actually forgot about GOTM 5. In any case I'm not very good at it since I came in 102nd.

I am constantly amazed at the lightening conquests and dom that some of the good players have in the GOTM. One thing that is consistent is that they have a clear idea of what tech they need to win and they go no further. They will have basically just courthouses and build units, units, units. I generally have:
1) too much builder in me and
2) not the confidence to know what will be enough tech
3) generally a little too cautious on the attack--more likely to have too much force than not enough.

Also in my solo games I generally play only to win, and quit if victory is assured. So I have little experience in a "fast" game.

As for aggressive AI, I have not played with it but my guess is they will be more likely to DOW us than usual. Should not affect the very early game at all.

Have to try a few starts to see how the barbs play--my guess is that we will want bw fairly early and if no copper easy then archery. An important question on the barbs is if raging means earlier barbs or just more barbs.

I'm happy to take the first go--actually works out pretty well for me as I've got a few trips planned later in the month. One idea we could consider is to leave the turn count a little flexible--so if things look busy we could do less and if quiet do a little more. Or leave it as is but break a few turns early if you come to a decision point.

mushroomshirt said:

However it is on a map that doesn't require astronomy - I doubt we will be so lucky on this map.

Click to expand...

I seem to remember a GOTM fractal map--the Mongol one was all one continent if I'm remembering right. I didn't finish that one--actually was on a reasonable game but got a bit bored with it and just never finished.

ungy said:

I seem to remember a GOTM fractal map--the Mongol one was all one continent if I'm remembering right. I didn't finish that one--actually was on a reasonable game but got a bit bored with it and just never finished.

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Yep - just to pat myself on the back I actually came in 14th on that one. My highest finish to date.

Ainwood has made some comments about being a warmonger & it makes sense since everything since GOTM1 has not required astronomy (can't speak for GOTM 9 yet). The fractal map you're referring to had low water level - a common trait for civ IV GOTMs.

If you regenerate a bunch of fractal maps and open them with the world builder (I had to to create the practice game) you see that you never know what you are going to get. Also this fractal map is custom build by Gyathaar - so I'm sure he has something sneaky planned.

I'm not sure how this should affect our initial tech path. BW 1st makes sense to me for slavery and for axemen if we can find copper. I have never been a big fan of researching archery - I like chariots better anyway for taking out barb axemen before they can pillage. Maybe we should go animal husbandry if there is no nearby copper?

I guess the real questions are:
1. what is our tech path if we don't need astronomy?
2. what is our tech path if we do need astronomy?

They will probably be the same for a while until maybe after alphabet, so we have some time to figure it out.

Yep - just to pat myself on the back I actually came in 14th on that one. My highest finish to date.

Click to expand...

Hehe, that was a weird one for me. I scored pretty high (20th) even though I had quite a slow (1795) domination victory. I think it's because I put so much effort into building infrastructure and had a really high base score as a result. That's actually *my* kind of game, conquer the world and build everything while I'm doing it. I've only done one fast conquest and it was in an SG. 3 of my 4 GOTM victories were peaceful (2 SS & 1 Diplo) so I'm pretty far back score-wise.

Re: fractal maps - I fired up 15 fractal maps to see what sort of land masses I would get. I got 1 continent 6 times, 2 5 times, 3 3 times, and 4 once, so 40% were non-astronomy maps. I think we'll just have to guess one way or the other. As far as research, we'll need machinery either way (for Samurai) so with luck we'll have a good idea of whether or not we'll need Astro by the time we get there.

For the practice game, here's a suggestion: Everyone who wants to play 100 turns and post up your 50 and 100 turn (2500 and 1000 BC) saves. That way, rather than just hearing someone say 'we ought to do this' everyone can see firsthand what results that particular opening strategy will produce. Also, if everyone will take note of when they see the first animal, the first human barbs, and when wonders (if any) are finished, we'll have a general idea of what to expect on that front.

I do find the idea of moving the settler around for a few turns while Kyoto does 100% research strangely appealing, though I wouldn't go too long, only far enough to find a really good spot, since we'll need to get cranking on those defenders/fog-busters before the barbs show up. I've never played with raging barbs before, but I'm suspecting that as big of a pain as they will be to us, they'll help hold the AI's in check for a while by forcing them to build more archers when they would normally build a settler/worker.

Hi everyone, I'm here at last. I wasn't aware this thread had been opened since I don't check these forums very often, unless I get the automated emails.

I'd like to go 2nd as I'm more of a builder and *hate* warring.

I've never win Domination or Conquest victory, only Cultural, Diplo and Space Race, but I disable that one most of the time (and of course Time).

Hello, I just played the sample game a few times. Wow, raging barbs are something to contend with. Perhaps if copper was available I would have faired better. In three game, two palace jumps came in AD. The other game was a loss to barbs.

Some misc notes/thoughts:
1) Building Stonehedge is possible in the capitol using citizen specialists and whipping. Even if we get beat to it, the extra gold will help.

2) BW/Slavery and high food saved my arse by whipping up units to fend off the barbs.

3) Fog busting help reduce the number of barbs. I was using warriors most of the time since I had no metals for axemen. The barb bonus is substantial. Many of my fog busters got killed first off thus generating more barbs in the new fog. For centuries I was doing nothing but building warriors to fend off barbs. They appear to have significant advantage. I once had a combat II axeman die attacking a barb archer.

4) We better have some villages/towns up & running before city #4 gets created.; the (-21 gpt) will hit your budget hard.