SGOTM 02 - Murky Waters

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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

I guess we need to check in.

New Team 1:

Murky
Big Pig
cas
johnpaulcain
Mitiu Ioan
nfora
Riker

Should we try to come up with a cool sounding team name or just leave it as is?

New Team 1 would be too confusing, as we already have Team One. If you don't give me an alternative it'll be Murky

O.k. - any proposal for a new name ?

Something like "Courageous newcommers" ?

Regards all

Hi guys

Looking forward to gaming with you all. This is my first SGOTM, should be excellent.

A little background always help's otherwise we are all just usernames! I am 28, from Milton Keynes in England, married, like football and have just moved house so playing is really gonna upset the old wife!

That sounds like an advert in the dating section of the local newspaper!

With regard to the name we may want something we can use in future games. In case we really enjoy this that is!

OK, looking at the user names I reckon Big Pig has the coolest name. How about "Pig Raiders" or "Raiding Pig's"!

Sounds cool to me!

Checking In!

Hi everyone. It's a pity - I thought 'New Team 1' had quite a nice ring to it, but it seems Alan H was quite adamant about not using it (5 posts!!). I'm not sure about 'Courageous Newcomers' as: 1. We'll probably end up cowering in fear in the island city of Kyoto;, 2. If we manage to stick together to SGOTM 5 or so, we'll be 'Courageous Old-timers' If you want a pig name, 'Swine Fever' has a nice ring to it but I'm sure we can come up with a better and non-porcine name. 'Murky Waters' sounds pretty good too

Regarding the game, it looks like a complete pig of a start ('scuse the pun). I generated a test game which I'll try to post this evening (UK time); settling a new city immediately knocks the research rate to ~50% due to the astronomic maintenance costs, and of course being a 2nd city, it won't start expanding until we get some culture-producing buildings. And as for the barbs........ So, we need a good plan to start off the game - maybe delay settling until we get a few techs under our belt, or even try to move the settler and warrior nearer to Kyoto (trying to avoid too many raging bears on the way....)

And what's the deal with an unknown number of rivals?

Big Pig said:

It's a pity - I thought 'New Team 1' had quite a nice ring to it, but it seems Alan H was quite adamant about not using it (5 posts!!).

Click to expand...

Sorry about the "spam". The forums seem to have gone into overload while I was posting. I've deleted them.

Checking in!

"Murky Waters" doesn't sound too bad for a team name, as though our play style will be dark and mysterious (that should help hide some of my ).

I think moving our palace may be in order here, depending on the amount of land around the settler. Of course we could always just delete the settler and wait until Astronomy to settle anything… sort of an OCC without a good start for the first half of the game .

johnpaulcain said:

A little background always help's otherwise we are all just usernames!

Click to expand...

20 from New Brunswick Canada, Classics major and CS minor, finishing summer exams just a few days after the game starts!

Big Pig said:

Checking In!

Hi everyone. It's a pity - I thought 'New Team 1' had quite a nice ring to it, but it seems Alan H was quite adamant about not using it (5 posts!!). I'm not sure about 'Courageous Newcomers' as: 1. We'll probably end up cowering in fear in the island city of Kyoto;, 2. If we manage to stick together to SGOTM 5 or so, we'll be 'Courageous Old-timers' If you want a pig name, 'Swine Fever' has a nice ring to it but I'm sure we can come up with a better and non-porcine name. 'Murky Waters' sounds pretty good too

Regarding the game, it looks like a complete pig of a start ('scuse the pun). I generated a test game which I'll try to post this evening (UK time); settling a new city immediately knocks the research rate to ~50% due to the astronomic maintenance costs, and of course being a 2nd city, it won't start expanding until we get some culture-producing buildings. And as for the barbs........ So, we need a good plan to start off the game - maybe delay settling until we get a few techs under our belt, or even try to move the settler and warrior nearer to Kyoto (trying to avoid too many raging bears on the way....)

And what's the deal with an unknown number of rivals?

Click to expand...

Nice name ideas so far. What about Shogun Showdown or Dogs of War?

I would think that settling 1nw would be the best bet. This way you get the fish, which would be nice since Tokugawa starts with fishing. Note also that we have the organized trait which means settling should be ok. Also, since it's a wrap-around map, it's not really that far.

nfora said:

"Murky Waters" doesn't sound too bad for a team name, as though our play style will be dark and mysterious

Click to expand...

Unfathomable, anyway

nfora said:

I think moving our palace may be in order here, depending on the amount of land around the settler.

Click to expand...

Agreed - tho' I think that requires masonry and a lot of hammers

Murky said:

I would think that settling 1nw would be the best bet. This way you get the fish, which would be nice since Tokugawa starts with fishing.

Click to expand...

Yes, but it will take some time to expand to the fat cross. If we decide to settle immediately, maybe 2N would be better as that allows us access to the rice as soon as we know agriculture

Murky said:

we have the organized trait which means settling should be ok.

Click to expand...

That's what I thought too before I tried a practice game. Anyway, I'll try to post it tonight so you can see what you think

Don't forget that we can research pottery right away and those river tiles will help. We should also shoot for sailing early on to get the trade route income going. We're going to need to do some serious fog-busting though.

Yes, but it will take some time to expand to the fat cross. If we decide to settle immediately, maybe 2N would be better as that allows us access to the rice as soon as we know agriculture

Click to expand...

With raging barbs I don't think we can afford to wait another turn to settle.

Is there a way to tell just how far away the settler is from Kyoto without settling him and checking the maintenance? I can't think of one, and the tests I just ran show that we could have anything from a maintenance of 1 all the way up to 6 or 7 on a standard map, meaning we could hit as low as 40% science from the start. We can recover from it eventually, but if we're forced to 40% science pottery could take 45 turns to come in (it would go down as the cities grow, but still!).

I counted approx 9 tiles between the two cities. If we pop a goodie hut or two we should be good for getting pottery.

Goody huts might be a big 'if' in a hand modified Gyathaar creation!

I think Murky Waters sounds OK. Shall we agree on that so we can start concentrating on the good stuff?

Haven't paid too much attention to the start game yet, I will look tonight. Not sure why moving the palace is that much of a benefit in Civ IV(i.e corruption is gone)? Maybe someone can explain. I am aware of increased maintenance costs e.t.c but these are manageable, If we are going to do it at all it would be later as we need a very good start on Emperor, concentrating on moving the palace will be an unwanted distraction.

Just my thoughts, this is where I start taking a battering I feel!

Also we should always have the science sliders on 0% or 100% to avoid waste.

I just did some calculations based on the low quality minimap we see; calculations that probably have little to do with reality, but I'll let you all know what I've come up with.

The visible tiles around Kyoto (5 tiles vertically) make up about 1/6th of the minimap. A standard size fractal map I pulled up had close to 60 tiles horizontally total, rather than the 30 you would expect from the scale above. the two cities are about the height of the minimap apart (a bit more actually), so they would actually be around 60 tiles apart. On my test map that meant that the cities were actually about 32 tiles apart (in the opposite direction). Maintenance for the second city was 6gpt, breakeven point was 60% science with pottery in 23.

I'm not sure if all this really means anything, but the minimap actually looked fairly similar to the one we were given.

Murky said:

I counted approx 9 tiles between the two cities. If we pop a goodie hut or two we should be good for getting pottery.

Click to expand...

I agree with nfora. I make it roughly 30 tiles (the clear area on the world view map around Kyoto is 5 squares, so you can roughly work out how many 5-square blocks it is between there and the settler). That's a lot of maintenance and a big hit on the science. Also maintenance is going to be even higher for subsequent cities - unless we move the capital.

johnpaulcain said:

If we are going to do it at all it would be later as we need a very good start on Emperor.

Click to expand...

I think its Monarch - but that's still hard enough!!!

Big Pig said:

I agree with nfora.

Click to expand...

Although after re-reading his post, not his logic
Remember that before calendar you don't see the whole world map to scale - so there may be areas west of Kyoto and east of the settler that aren't shown on the mini-map

Big Pig said:

Although after re-reading his post, not his logic
Remember that before calendar you don't see the whole world map to scale - so there may be areas west of Kyoto and east of the settler that aren't shown on the mini-map

Click to expand...

I based the numbers on the distance east of Kyoto and west of the settler, not the other way around, and extrapolated what the other distance would be (it happens to be the shorter one). I only used one test map so I'm not sure if the sizes I had are relevant or not. I think that at least the inner distance between the settler and city should be to scale.... maybe?

Regardless I am fairly sure it's more than a 9 tile separation we have to worry about, and I think we should count on a sizeable maintenance cost.

It's definitely too early to decide whether moving the palace is worth it though, we will need to do some exploring first to see whether we will have enough cities around the settler to make it worth the hammers.