SGOTM 02 - VQ Red

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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

Some strategy discussion, guys! Make sure we beat those "Blackies" in terms of the number of posts!!!!

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Toku is Agressive and Organized, starts with fishing and mining.

Settling in place seems like a bad idea, which is one tile away from coast. I would suggest moving one tile NW to get the fish and rice. With two food resources, it will be a good site.

With Fishing, I guess the best start would be to start with Work Boat, and learn Hunting (for scouts), while building warrior.

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Concur with moving 1NW. Also unlocks that floodplain, so 3 bonus food tiles.

Just as well there's good commerce potential at the new city - I wonder what the upkeep will be from Kyoto.

Raging barbies! (Archery?).

Question: what do we do with the trees? Only 1 visible hill so they are providing valuable production; on the other hand they will be surrounding the city (not good for defense).

Hmmm. One further thought: Kyoto is the capital, right? So that means we are going to get hammered for distance upkeep for every city we found on this side of the world?

Ok, I'm going to start with random thoughts:

Hmmm. One further thought: Kyoto is the capital, right? So that means we are going to get hammered for distance upkeep for every city we found on this side of the world?

Click to expand...

1) YES! That was my first thought when I saw this map... as soon as settle the second city, we're going to get hit with city maintenance costs... and it's going to drop our research rate immediatly. (Unless TPTB give us some gold, which I doubt...)

2) Kyoto is going to have a grand total of 2 hammers production. Until we get to slavery, we basically can't build anything. However, with all the food, we can the hell out of it.

3) When we settle city #2, we have no way to generate culture for it until we can build an obelisk. (or move the Palace!)

4) Moving 1 NW looks like a good idea. I would not want to chop too many trees here, because there is only one hill to mine. We will want to have as much production possible here.

To me, all this makes for quite a handicap at the start. I think we really need to weigh our options for research... We can either go for mysticiam for an obelisk, or bronze working to get slavery.

Other thoughts?

Hello people!

Nice to let me join your SGTOM2-Team. If I screw up you can always pick on Cosmichail for letting me in.

This start is something out of the ordinary.

Kyoto is our capital but by no means our main city. But I think we still can get some good things out of it. Commerce is quite obvious, that’s all you can get from the sea.
can get a lot of production. So BW should definitely be prioritised.

Our second city (Tokyo) will only have its original 8 tiles to work with from the start. So you have to think differently from a regular game. I think we should move our warrior SW to see what we can get there. If we don’t have anything special to our west I believe settling NW is a good move. FP is great for growth, equal to unirrigated rice, and some commerce. Four grassland forests give us some production. All in all it’s a decent city without worker improvements.

Maybe we can whip Stonehenge in Kyoto for in Tokyo? Raging Barb will give us some extra time in building Henge. If we research mining-BW->mysticism I believe we can get it.

The safest way to go is probably to go for hunting->archery-mining->BW. Archers makes a huge difference against raging barbs, although our free combat1 will help a bit.

Re the Kyoto, once we get bureacracy, we could shift the palace to somewhere else to reduce upkeep. But that is a tad far away.

Concur on saving the trees.

Re: rage barbies: those who played in VQ08 would have some expereince on Emperor rage barbs, so archery is almost a definite need by 2800BC (when barbs starts to appear). So I agree on Hunting -> Archery -> Mining -> BW -> argiculture (for rice)

Just so that we know who is on whioh team (I was a bit confused and had to double check to ensure I don't post on the wrong thread )

Maquis -- Red Leader
GreyFox
Scowler -- Red Scribe (I'll teach you to blame me)
Codeman
armstrong
Krockel

Welcome, Krockel! As for Codeman, think I have played with you before. But also, welcome!

GreyFox said:

So I agree on Hunting -> Archery -> Mining -> BW -> argiculture (for rice)

Click to expand...

Can't farm the rice unless we get those borders popped. So Mysticism would be more useful, I think - or were you planning to farm the FP?

Oh, right, we are not the capital, so there won't be free culture pop

That means the fish has to wait too .... Damned!

Totally wasting our starting tech of fishing ... am I the only one who is starting to hate the moderators?

SO we have to rethink the strategy ... may be we should settle closer to the rice, move 1NW then 1 NE, moving us 2N to settler beside the rice. Then we go Argiculture (worker first) followed by hunting archery mining BW.

Another strategy is not to settle first, there by saving us the distanc ecost, and wanders around with our settler and warrior until we find a better spot?

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GreyFox said:

SO we have to rethink the strategy ... may be we should settle closer to the rice, move 1NW then 1 NE, moving us 2N to settler beside the rice. Then we go Argiculture (worker first) followed by hunting archery mining BW.

Click to expand...

Farm rice will give 4/0/0, farm FP will give 4/0/1. So I think it's better to settle nere FP then rice. We get both if we settle 1N and concerning just the initial 8 tiles for a city we also have a hill there, so that's quite nice. We miss the fish though.

Man it's tricky to settle when boarder won't pop by default.
We either can get a good placement in the short term or in the long term, but to get both at once seams to be harder.

GreyFox said:

Another strategy is not to settle first, there by saving us the distanc ecost, and wanders around with our settler and warrior until we find a better spot?

Click to expand...

I like that idea. It would be real nice to find a plain hill to settle on for extra production and defence. To bad we don't have a scout though

I was thinking of the idea not to settle immediatly also. Just to be sure, would it be better to research with only one city (Kyoto) and keep the slider to 100%, or found City #2 and have the slider drop to 80% (or maybe 70%)?

Would the second city add some beakers to offset the reduced research rate?


I'm thinking of building a simulation in worldbuilder later tonight to see what the differences are in settling vs walking the settler around...

(I'm assuming this is ok, since people create "test starts" in the normal GOTM all the time!)

lurker's comment:

Maquis said:

I'm assuming this is ok, since people create "test starts" in the normal GOTM all the time!

Click to expand...

You did that in SGOTM1 and it was ok back then.

dot is reporting as the official lurker and think tank initiator for team VQ Red. I hereby declare that I will not view any other team thread of the current SGOTM2 - unless VQ Red is done with it. In what way ever ...


##### ##### Some thinking ##### #####

AlanH said:

All victory conditions are enabled, but the laurels for this contest will be awarded to the fastest teams to achieve a Conquest victory.

Click to expand...

Whatever you plan: Keep this in mind!

Scowler said:

One further thought: Kyoto is the capital, right? So that means we are going to get hammered for distance upkeep for every city we found on this side of the world?

Click to expand...

Maquis said:

YES! That was my first thought when I saw this map... as soon as settle the second city, we're going to get hit with city maintenance costs... and it's going to drop our research rate immediatly. (Unless TPTB give us some gold, which I doubt...)

Click to expand...

GreyFox said:

Another strategy is not to settle first, there by saving us the distanc ecost, and wanders around with our settler and warrior until we find a better spot?

Click to expand...

Krockel said:

I like that idea. It would be real nice to find a plain hill to settle on for extra production and defence. To bad we don't have a scout though

Click to expand...

What about using the settler as a scout for 4 to 6 turns. Usually animals don't appear on the first turns. At least I've never found that. So you will have about half a dozen of turns with 100% and you'll have time to find a really good settling point. ###
The big danger is that meeting another civ early might be your sudden death since the AI is set to aggressive.

Researchwise I'd go for BW immediately. Maybe even try to get that before settling Tokyo? Otherwise it might take a lot of turns more. IIRC it's pretty expensive to research it as tech#1.

As for Kyoto ... you'll need to whip four work boats first. And currently ... and therefore always ... they'll take some 23 turns to come out of the dock. My guess is that you'll be busy with whipping the work boats until - let's say - 2000BC?!. ... Oh ... and what are you gonna do about your ? Health shall not be the problem there. But happiness is something else.

As for moving the units. If you're deciding on 'scouting' I'd say settler 1NW-1SW and warrior 1E.

Maquis said:

Would the second city add some beakers to offset the reduced research rate?

Click to expand...

I'd assume yes. But as for how much ... Gold or silver might be of quite some help. And therefore you might want to scout with your settler and warrior. But you'll be able to enlighten us after your workbuilder job, Maquis .

Krockel said:

Man it's tricky to settle when boarder won't pop by default.

Click to expand...

Yeah that's making me feel a bit uneasy, too. But the main question might be what you really need to have inside the nine tiles of Tokyo. Some river and maybe some precious metal would do the trick researchwise. Another opportunity would be to settle at a side where Tokyo will become an early production powerhouse. Like with building barracks, hooking up some copper and going after the first other civ right away.

But that is all to be seen once the save is up. As for now ... we don't even know the number of AI civs, do we? I'd say do some of brainstorming and discussing until the save is up. By then let everybody have a close look at it. Oh ... maybe a second look at it? - OK. - Now let's do some of brainstorming and discussing .

So these are my 2 . Hope you like having me as a lurker.

Regards, .

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EDIT: Tokugawa starts with fishing and the wheel. So this would make my choice of BW first redundant. That would be too risky ... methinx.

Welcome dot!

Good, we have an official lurker.

But, damn: VQ Black is already at page 2, and one other team is already at page 3!!!! We have to buck up guys!

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I concur with coming up a with test game ... we did that in SGOTM1 too. All we nee dto find out is the distance cost? How much is it if we settler Tokyo so far away? Problem is how to estimate accurately the relative position between Kyoto and our settler. You can try to do it from the minimap, but its kind of fuzzy (since minimaps scale deynamically). However, since on the minimap, the white dot can be seen clearly as a suare, it suggest that the current scale of the minimap is quite large, so I think actually Kyoto and the settler is not that far away.

We have to settle at a place where at the maximum, at size 2, we could recover back the distance cost. Else, wandering a bit might be more useful.

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Ok, here's what I played around with WB... I created a replica of Kyoto, and have the warrior/settler pair at what I think is an approximate distance.

Assuming I'm fairly close in the settler placement, we'd get -3 maintenance cost when founding the second city. This would cause our research rate to go down to 90% in my test. Assuming we start with Hunting, it'd take one extra turn of research to get it.

I think that we need to get Mysticism early, as we'll want to start generating culture ASAP. Unless we move the settler around a bit, we'd need it to take advantage of any resources.

It goes without saying, it'd be nice to find a luxury resource nearby...


Here's the save I made in worldbuilder... and yes, I SUCK at making rivers...

Thanks for that, Maquis. That was useful in getting some practical idea of the situation. But bloody hell, I hope we have better luck in the actual game - Bismarck, Asoka, Peter, and Genghis all within spitting distance!!
(Oh, and you forgot the raging barbies... )

Some more random thoughts:

It's difficult to judge, but I think you've been optimistic regarding the distance between Kyoto and [Tokyo]. I did a worst-case scenario, placing Kyoto as far away as possible, and it looked more like what is on the picture at the top. That gave us -9 (!!!) maintenance when founding [Tokyo], increasing to -11 after growing to size 2. I don't think things will be quite that bad here, but I suspect that we won't gain a turn on research if we found right away as is the case with your version.

(BTW, I also found out that building just one more city in this "worst case" would completely cripple us, taking us to -7gpt at 0% science... The good news is that you are allowed to keep a single garrison unit in each city, even if the rest of your units have disappeared on strike... )

So the big question is: do we settle right away or not? I must admit I'm very tempted by the idea of scouting briefly (until Hunting is ready in 8 turns) to check out the surrounding area. But that has very obvious dangers, of course. Not just the animals (which, as dot pointed out, should leave us alone for the first 6-8 turns), but also the tempting goodie huts. In a test game I popped one with the settler and got... 3 barb warriors! Fortunately I still had a movement point left and was able to outrun them, but they were still a nuisance that affected the founding location later. Just something to bear in mind

I'm also worried about the lack of production at the starting site. From Maquis' save we managed to get an archer ready just in time for the barb assault, but there wasn't much time to spare. Somewhere with better production would be nice - I'd definitely prefer to concentrate on production rather than food (at least 'til BW is in, which will be quite a while...). And given that BW will take a long time, I agree that Mysticism should be collected sooner rather than later.

... ... ... Yes ... ... ...

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Edit:

Could you upload your save scowler ... to let us see what you've been playing around with?

And where are armstrong and Krockel Codeman. They didn't report to your teamthread yet ... ... You haven't lost them on your way from Kyoto to this continent ... did ya?

Maquis, I agree with scowler, seems like your test-map is too close.

This is cropped from the posted image of the official game:



This is from the test game you created:



Way too close I think.

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I expanded the minimap from the official save, assuming the square dot to be one tile (I think it should be), here is what I get:



That is like 30 tiles away
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I would suggest, if we want to move the settler for scouting instead of settling immediately, that we move the settler westward, so that we close the gap between Kyoto and Tokyo.