SGOTM 02 - Xteam

[AlanH]

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

[rrau]

Signing in

[DJMGator13]

Me too. I'll send out pm's anyway.

I just played 25 turns in our practice game, we're handling the barb rush much better in the 2nd go around.

[leif erikson]

Hi, I'm here as well.

Welcome to rrau and grahamiam. Nice to have you aboard.

A note, I received a PM from The Capt. He left on vacation today and will be gone for a week and a half. He will return a week from Sunday, the 12th of August.

[rrau]

Do you think we will have enough food to make the capital into GP city? Sorry for the duplicate posts. I guess I tried to make them right before the forum went down for maintenance

[leif erikson]

That's OK rrau, we like the spam count!!

Just thought I would post Redbad's spoiler thread comments from our trial game succession game thread.

Redbad wrote:
As I’m not likely to join in the start of SGOTM2, I’ll post some thoughts now.

copper
It is hard to imagine that SGOTM2 will be so unforgiving to have and raging barbs and no nearby copper. There's little fun in SGOTMs when half the teams are wiped out within say 70 turns. Likely Gyathaar will anticipate that the teams will either start for archery or for bronze. And the teams that do neither will have Kyoto on its island as a refuge.

As our test shows it is even questionable if teams can utilise a copper source in time if it is located outside the starting area. We have to take extra care here as the city we’re to found isn’t our capitol. So it will not have a free source of culture. The leader traits don’t provide culture neither and we most likely won’t aim for an early religion. Getting a workable fat cross will require an obelisk?

A source of copper popping up under Kyoto will give teams who loose their mainland town a chance to make landfall again (providing that the mainland can be reached with galleys). But it will not benefit our second city, for it has no trade route to Kyoto early on. Therefore I do expect a source copper near our settler. On the assumption there is indeed copper, it would be a shame if we settle on top of it. The only places we can be sure won’t contain copper are the floodplain and the rice. I don’t think we should settle either.

research
My recommendation would be: mining -> bronze. After that is dependant on if and where there’s copper. When copper is available we could do a 2-pointed spearhead: on the one hand research towards bureaucracy/astronomy and the other hand warlike expansion. Warlike expansion has many advantages over autonomic expansion: AI cities have improved gardens, they often come with workers, it adds to our military xp. We should however raze the cities that add little, as they will only burden our economy. As our goal is conquest, research is important and population/territory is not.

Kyoto
As mentioned earlier it is quite possible Kyoto is meant as an insurance against untimely extermination. As we don’t intend to be driven of the mainland, the question is how to utilise Kyoto. The city can’t do much commerce and very little production. It can however do a lot of food. That means building settlers/workers or turn it into a rushing centre. Either way we need 4 nets for the fish and the crabs. As it’s not very likely we want many settlers or workers the question will be: What to rush? We can decide to rush an army. As Kyoto will most likely have no copper/iron/horse on its own and rushing archers isn’t desirable, wanting to rush an army would mean getting an coastal connection through the fog and having our second city with coastal connection also. Alternative could be that there’s copper/iron/horse present close by, which can be connected by founding 1 other city.
In stead of rushing an army we could rush a wonder like the Oracle. In case we can’t reach the mainland from Kyoto by using galleys then wonder rushing is one the few useful things we could do with Kyoto.

[grahamiam]

checking in

[leif erikson]

Again, welcome Grahamiam.

I was thinking about the effect of distance from the capital and maintenance costs and what that will do to our economy. We are essentially building an empire with an extended distance between it and our capital. So Redbad's comments regarding cities to keep if they help and dumping those that will be a burden are right on.

I also think research should be Mining and then Brone Working. If we can get early Copper, we will be further ahead in this game of Conquest.

On settler location, it would be nice to settle on a hill, but that fresh water is real tempting. Also, I don't think we should settle on that FP tile, too valuable as a cottage.

[WillowBrook]

Lurker Willow checking in!

I'll be watching this thread only, but don't expect much intelligent advice, as I have never actually played Civ IV (and don't own a computer that could).

With that disclaimer, I wonder if moving the capital at some point would be a good idea to reduce maintenance costs. Not really early on, but sometime down the road.

[grahamiam]

Originally Posted by leif erikson

On settler location, it would be nice to settle on a hill, but that fresh water is real tempting. Also, I don't think we should settle on that FP tile, too valuable as a cottage.

the grass hill? what benefit is that other than defensive? No extra hammers unless it's a plains hill (which it isn't). Possible sites are NW (plains, coastal, gets rice, FP, and fish-ocean in fat cross) and S or SW. Other than the NW spot, we really have no idea if the other spots are better/worse. We also don't know what's to the E, so moving the warrior SE or SW as a starting move seems viable. Then maybe post a pic before settling so we can discuss some more?

[leif erikson]

Originally Posted by grahamiam

the grass hill? what benefit is that other than defensive? No extra hammers unless it's a plains hill (which it isn't). Possible sites are NW (plains, coastal, gets rice, FP, and fish-ocean in fat cross) and S or SW. Other than the NW spot, we really have no idea if the other spots are better/worse. We also don't know what's to the E, so moving the warrior SE or SW as a starting move seems viable. Then maybe post a pic before settling so we can discuss some more?

No, you're correct that the grass hill would only provide a defensive benefit and that isn't enough justification to use it. I also think you're right that we should move the warrior first and make a screenie.

It looks to me, and I'm a terrible fog gazer btw, that the coast continues along our red border to the south? So, settling NW would lose the river? However we would get fish and rice. The best chance at seeing something then is Warrior SE or, if we want to consider settling NW, to the hill and see what is on the other side of the rice.

[grahamiam]

yep, NW loses the river (no gold there) and it's associated health benefit (which isn't really a problem since you get the fish as compensation). It also puts a lot more water into our fatcross, which, imho, is a bit more of a problem.

The FP looks totally out of place, like it was added by the MM to make the choice of staying put more difficult, or maybe to push us to move.

Is fractal pangea, arch, continents?

[leif erikson]

Originally Posted by grahamiam

yep, NW loses the river (no gold there) and it's associated health benefit (which isn't really a problem since you get the fish as compensation). It also puts a lot more water into our fatcross, which, imho, is a bit more of a problem.

If we can, I'd like to stay with the river if possible. Especially if we find Copper near the river and can connect it without roads. I also don't want too much ocean water in our fat cross, if we cna help it.

Originally Posted by grahamiam

The FP looks totally out of place, like it was added by the MM to make the choice of staying put more difficult, or maybe to push us to move.

I think this is typical of fractal maps, although I wouldn't put it past Gyathaar to add it just for our consideration. They generally have all sorts of mixed terrain, at least as far as I have experienced playing trial games.

Originally Posted by grahamiam

Is fractal pangea, arch, continents?

To answer this, I did 5 tests of new games with Fractal Maps and entered World Builder instead of playing them. The maps we mostly continent maps, as the image attached below shows. In one case, it was one very large, almost pangea, continent with a much smaller one off to one side.

I have a feeling Gyathaar used a Fractal Map to cover his tracks on map type and has modified it to suit our needs. Iirc, last game, someone checked the details of the game and got the map type from there.

Anyway, they are mostly continents type maps.

[rrau]

Remember we won't get automatic border expansion with this city. Maybe a move to put more of the hill in the inner 9? It almost looks like there's more of them to the east. But then we lose the river commerce and freshwater bonus.

That or we'll have to divert research to build a cheap oblisk. I don't know if that's feasible or not before the barbs start coming and we need to have defenses in place. If it wasn't raging barbs, I'd not even suggest it moving away from the river. It still doesn't seem quite worth the loss of the long term benefits on the river but I thought I'd toss it out for consideration.

[Gyathaar]

Originally Posted by leif erikson

I have a feeling Gyathaar used a Fractal Map to cover his tracks on map type and has modified it to suit our needs. Iirc, last game, someone checked the details of the game and got the map type from there.

No they didnt.. map type last time was listed as SGOTM01 I believe (it was also a modified fractal btw.. but I didnt specify it that time since it was made before factal map script was made available to the public )
I also edit the map settings so they may or may not be the correct ones that show up

[leif erikson]

Originally Posted by Gyathaar

No they didnt.. map type last time was listed as SGOTM01 I believe (it was also a modified fractal btw.. but I didnt specify it that time since it was made before factal map script was made available to the public )
I also edit the map settings so they may or may not be the correct ones that show up

You're so mean!!

[leif erikson]

Originally Posted by rrau

Remember we won't get automatic border expansion with this city. Maybe a move to put more of the hill in the inner 9? It almost looks like there's more of them to the east. But then we lose the river commerce and freshwater bonus.

The border expansion is a good point. Have to think about that some.
I think if we can find some wooded hills out a ways to supprt our warriors in defensive positions, we can hold out until the Barb Axes start appearing. In test games, that has been about 500BC. Once the Axes show, we'd better have something up our sleeves or we're going to end up in our capital.

Originally Posted by rrau

That or we'll have to divert research to build a cheap oblisk. I don't know if that's feasible or not before the barbs start coming and we need to have defenses in place. If it wasn't raging barbs, I'd not even suggest it moving away from the river. It still doesn't seem quite worth the loss of the long term benefits on the river but I thought I'd toss it out for consideration.

What route we take up the research tree is a very important consideration. How much risk are we willing to take? What objectives do we hope to achieve?

[grahamiam]

Remember we won't get automatic border expansion with this city. Maybe a move to put more of the hill in the inner 9? It almost looks like there's more of them to the east. But then we lose the river commerce and freshwater bonus.

we will definitely get a border expansion, it's the capitol with the palace which generates 2cpt. Oblisks may be nice for a 2nd city, but not right now.

imho, stick to the original plan (mining-> BW). If no copper, then we pause and rethink what we want to research. It'll most likely be dependant on terrain.

[leif erikson]

Originally Posted by grahamiam

we will definitely get a border expansion, it's the capitol with the palace which generates 2cpt. Oblisks may be nice for a 2nd city, but not right now.

Our settler represents our second city. Kyoto is on the island with the Crabs and Fish.

Which does bring up another point, what do we want to do with Kyoto? Lots of food and 2 Hammers. Surrounded by ocean tiles, no commerce connection until Astronomy? Looks like we'll need Bronze Working to have Slavery and pop rushes. We'll need 4 Work Boats for sure, but prolly not all at once? Great Person factory, as suggested by rrau I believe?

[grahamiam]

crap, you're right GP factory and/or pop rushing wonder city I guess?