SGOTM 15 - One Short Straw

Dhoomstriker said:

As for LC's bit about building Rivers in the World Builder... it is hard to build Rivers effectively in the World Builder.

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While we're waiting for the REAL SAVE, this post's helpful for basic river building in WB:

Sto said:

For the rivers , you can try to pratice like this at the beginning .
Begin to make your river segment by segment .

1 - left click on the tile where you want to make a segment of river . the segment of the river is always on south or east of the tile .

2 - left click on an adjacent tile of the first to choose direction .

3 - right click to disable river function .

4 - right click to erase the second part of river you don't want .

5 - restart for the next segment

Then , with more practice , you should make rivers quickly .

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As I recall, someone on Murky Waters once figured how to actually change the appearance of the rivers, fiddling around with left- and right-clicks, but for the life of me, I can't find that and also can't figure it out. But that's just stylistic appearances.

I might have some opinions on not starting a third settler and working multiple zero production tiles at T50.

SH was just a useful placeholder build for testing worker-first vs settler-first. I'm not really that crazy about it, so the discussion is moot. The reasons not to are the GP and the cost of Masonry. I actually think SH with stone is pretty awesome for eliminating monuments altogether at the cost of 60h (minus the 30h you'd spend on a monument in Bombay anyway).

I think we need to establish whether we wanna build settler first. Worker and settler seem roughly equivalent in both my and LC's tests so far. Is that right? We can do revised testing after T0, when we see the full BFC, but I honestly think it's too early to start planning stuff like the MC-GE gambit.

babybluepants said:

I might have some opinions on not starting a third settler and working multiple zero production tiles at T50.

SH was just a useful placeholder build for testing worker-first vs settler-first. I'm not really that crazy about it, so the discussion is moot. The reasons not to are the GP and the cost of Masonry. I actually think SH with stone is pretty awesome for eliminating monuments altogether at the cost of 60h (minus the 30h you'd spend on a monument in Bombay anyway).

I think we need to establish whether we wanna build settler first. Worker and settler seem roughly equivalent in both my and LC's tests so far. Is that right? We can do revised testing after T0, when we see the full BFC, but I honestly think it's too early to start planning stuff like the MC-GE gambit.

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Yes, I'm finding some variant of worker-grow-settler tempting, to let us explore enough to put a target date on religious/military victories. It needs the full BFC revealed, of course.

Settler-first vs Worker-first: So, what ends up being the ultimate difference anyway?

Is it the whole standard "Worker first is generally good" approach, such that starting a Worker first allows for spiralling benefits?

Is it also that Settler-first, while it delays the Worker actions, allows for us to have a second population point in another City and potentially also having a second Worker faster, allowing us to catch up on the lost Worker actions?


If those points sound relatively right, do we have a rough idea of when one approach catches up with the other? If yes, does it seem that they roughly balance each other out or does one approach have the possibility of pulling ahead again if executed a certain way (such as spamming extra Fast Workers) relative to the other approach?


Bombay only needs a Monument if Hinduism doesn't auto-spread to the City. If we build on both rocks, the Cities will be in such close proximity for this auto-spreading to be something that we can all but count on happening.

For me, the biggest draw of avoiding Stonehenge is making multiple AIs spend their non-Stone-enhanced Hammers on it.

Again, we don't have to avoid it completely--if Commerce will be our bottleneck and if we can spare some production, then we can simply build most of it for future Failure Gold. Unlike other Wonders, Stonehenge is one that is sure to be built by the AIs in the BCs, so it's not like building The Pyramids for Failure Gold and crying when 500 AD rolls by and you still haven't been able to cash in on your efforts (since Failure Gold only appears if an AI actually manages to complete a Wonder).

To me, it's that settler first needs to win outright in very early production. If it's roughly even after 50t, worker first is more flexible, as it lets us explore for better city sites and delay some decisions.

If there's good food in Bombay's second ring, would you really risk waiting for auto-spread? In my experience it's pretty unreliable.

Building SH for fail gold still requires researching Masonry, doesn't it?

I tend to agree. If settler first doesn't pull away from worker first, does it make sense to lock ourselves in to a possible sub-optimal second city site.

babybluepants said:

To me, it's that settler first needs to win outright in very early production. If it's roughly even after 50t, worker first is more flexible, as it lets us explore for better city sites and delay some decisions.

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Okay, I guess all that I can do is try it out myself and see how they compare.

For others' reference, here is a link to babybluepants' Test Saved game:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=10780468&postcount=193

babybluepants said:

If there's good food in Bombay's second ring, would you really risk waiting for auto-spread? In my experience it's pretty unreliable.

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Distance plays a major factor in auto-spreading; with the rock-built Cities being 4 squares away from each other, I'd be willing to wait. If we settle off of the second rock a bit further away, then it becomes more of a judgement call.

babybluepants said:

Building SH for fail gold still requires researching Masonry, doesn't it?

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Very true. However, there might not be as big of a rush on Masonry. If we need Masonry for The Oracle and if Stonehenge is only being built for Failure Gold, then we don't really care *THAT* much if by the time that we finally learn Masonry, it becomes too late to get any Failure Gold out of Stonehenge (there's always The Great Wall to replace it for Failure Gold, which is also a Wonder that can usually be counted on for going early).

Oh yeah, there's also the possibility of settling on top of the Corn. Settlers and Workers still get built faster-than-normal this way and we would get both rocks within our fat cross, meaning that we could send out second City's Settler out to get other Resources somewhere else...

Note that I'm not convinced of this approach at all unless our Warrior reveals an extra Food Resource by moving 1SW on turn 0 and even then I question such a move, but it is still an option.

Unless the map is pretty small, the chance of spread at 4 tiles' distance is 1/10 each turn.
(It depends on maxPlotDistance, so we won't know for sure yet.)

ZPV said:

Unless the map is pretty small, the chance of spread at 4 tiles' distance is 1/10 each turn.
(It depends on maxPlotDistance, so we won't know for sure yet.)

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With nine teams, that means one team is going to get really lucky...

Seeing as how most teams will start off going after Polytheism (I'm certain that a team or two will try and justify "fake teching it" for a turn and then going for Agriculture first), there is a greater chance than normal that some teams will get similar random numbers generated for them, meaning that there might actually be duplicates (i.e. not necessarily 9 unique "paths" to the first few turns post-Hinduism).

LowtherCastle said:

As I recall, someone on Murky Waters once figured how to actually change the appearance of the rivers

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Just build the River in the opposite direction.

For example, if you are building a River starting from one square and going toward squares to the right, instead start with one of the squares to the right and build it toward the left. You'll notice a difference in River pattern.

Depending upon which direction you build it and which squares you delete in which order, the River's appearance can change. That's what I meant when I said that it could be hard to build a River--it's easy enough to slap down some Rivers but it's harder to make them go exactly where you wanted them to go while still having them look pretty.

If you don't really care where they end up, then there's less of an issue with placing them.

I've opened up the save. There's some interesting stuff, for sure.

a) The river to the south stops at the bottom of the screenshot. It was definitely custom-made, Dhoom
b) It looks like there are 9 other civs, 2 in one team.
c) All 9 rivals have a city already; Buddhism has been founded and spread to each of them. The Mahabodhi has been built.

There are 1784 land tiles, but the population score component shows 0/1165
That means there are a lot of tiles which don't yield much food.

The map is Cylindrical, Tropical, Low Sea level.

I have a hunch the Buddhist holy city is unreachable.
If we go for a military victory, we'll need to avoid a Buddhist Apostolic Palace - that would be very painful.

Hm...


So that means some AI (or AI pair) starts with +9gpt and has met all other AIs, right? (But they have only met him?) That means some bat-out-of-hell teching for that team at least.


If the AP is Buddhist, we can lose the game to the AP election after we capture the first Buddhist city or when Buddhism spreads to our first city...


At least four AIs start landlocked, possibly as many as eight.



ZPV, since they all start with Buddhism and will probably all revolt to Buddhism this turn, how does that affect whether they try for Poly?

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1800 tiles!!! Ok, maybe domination's not the quickest after all...

Unless they have the Buddhist holy city, they'll switch to Hindu or Judaism as soon as they found them. I've done some testing with this in preparing one WOTM.

This game has the potential to have several teams lose, I think. Depends on how strong Neilmeister made the AI team /and the Buddhist. They could approach deity level.

What could he have done to make sure weaker teams win?

With a map this big, any team could build nine cities, turtle and go for a cultural victory. Probably build the AP too...

LowtherCastle said:

ZPV, since they all start with Buddhism and will probably all revolt to Buddhism this turn, how does that affect whether they try for Poly?

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My eyes have finally stopped moving from side to side, following those smileys.
It's not enough to give us the opportunity to go for Agriculture first.

LowtherCastle said:

This game has the potential to have several teams lose, I think. Depends on how strong Neilmeister made the AI team /and the Buddhist. They could approach deity level.

What could he have done to make sure weaker teams win?

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Maybe it's called The Missionary because we're all going to be f...

Does this change anything about our first move? If not, let's just focus on that so we can get on with making a test map and trying out this weird-a$$ scenario. I think we should move the warrior and see what he sees to the left or right. That means we have to decide whether to send him southward or northward, which means we plan to send our settler the other way, though that's flexible.

Based on our debate about worker or settler first, I assume we want to scout both rocks by T1.

The stone has at least 11 river tiles including city center. Marble has at least 9, inclusive. The stone location is also more centered with respect to the two river areas. That in addition to what we saw from the spoiler.

Neilmeister tried to make it obvious last time that the plains tile had a resource, though no one cared. I think this time he clearly put the fp under SIP to discourage that. Now he took some river tiles away from marble, so I assume he's encouraging us to settle on the stone. Of course, that could be a Trojan Horse, but I tend to doubt it.

BOth rocks have westerly hills that will quickly defog extra tiles. Furthermore, the warrior sees less on the Marble and on Marble1W than he sees from Marble1E or Marble2E.

So should we send the warrior SE, planning to send it S on T1?

Yes, I think settler to stone, warrior SSE on T1. I expect the two rocks to be roughly identical BFC's.