Try1 - The Newbies!

[Trynthlas]

SG Try1 - T3h NeW8i3s

Series guidelines/rules: (most borrowed from other games I've read)

• We will use the 24/48 rule: When your turn is up, you have 24 hours from the time the save is posted to claim it with a 'got it' - you then have 48 hours from that post to play your round and post your report. If you can't make this deadline, please request a skip within the first 24 hours.
• Round lengths will be based on game speed, and will be posted with the starting info for the game (in general will do a 15/10 turn round for normal speed games: 15 turns in peace, 10 turns during war or if it is declared)
• Reports should be detailed! Take lots of screenshots and post lots of turn-by-turn commentary. Auto-log (if you use it) is not acceptable as a report.
• Major game decisions (war/peace declarations, religion swaps, city placement, etc) should be arrived at via group consensus.
  1. If the group disagrees with you on a decision, either change their minds or do what the group wants. Going against the group on something like this gets you booted from the roster.
  2. Similarly, overruling techs or city builds is rude and should be done via consensus, barring an emergency.
  4. In extraordinary situations, sometimes an opportunity presents itself that the group didn't foresee. In these cases, it is considered best to stop your round and present the situation to the group before continuing.
• Major wars shouldn't be declared without a team consensus. Clear phony wars to gain diplomatic favor are ok. Example of this is when you declare war on an AI on another continent or a last place civ. A war of opportunity to grab one or two cities from an AI getting trashed is OK.
• No worker automation. Don't be lazy.
• Don't use the city managers to choose what tiles are worked or what gets built. Micro-management is good! (note: this can be loosened a little for tiles only if the empire grows very large and we do not want/need to MM every city)
• Try to use great people quickly, unless we have a specific reason for keeping them around.
• Round summaries should be new replies, to set off the thread notification.
• Please save at an end-of-turn so that the next person can start by just pressing enter (obvious exception if you stopped your round early for something important)
• No World-Builder!!!!

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Game Setup:

Spoiler:

(I went with 11 total civs, so us +10 others on a large size map)

And we meet ...ourself!

Spoiler:

Traits are Charismatic and Industrious. Fast forges and 50% increased wonder production, plus lots of extra happy faces and faster-promoting units. Sounds good to me!


The starting location:





Roster:
----------
Trynthlas
endymion
Rince
Darth Meanie
Mitchifer
Carneios
LordKoros


***Roster full***

Rounds will occur in this setup:
Round 1 - 40 turns
Round 2 - 30 turns
Round 3 - 20 turns
All rounds after 3 - 15 turns
* obvious exceptions are as noted in the guidelines.

[pholkhero]

lurker's comment:
Not a sign-up (though i would if RL would've let me!), but I just LOVE some of those rules

[Mitchifer]

And I'm in. Looking forward to my first SG.

Sorry to hear about your computer, but glad to see you're back up and running.

For future reference, I'm going to go ahead and post the days that I'll be on alert, so we can schedule around them.

For November:
20th-22nd
26th-28th

[Trynthlas]

Ok Mitchifer, thanks for the heads-up on the dates Also the good news is that my issues were just the router, thankfully not the PC *whew*!

Pholk - yeah I know Just took the ones that I liked and made the most sense for a well-done SG.

note: Updating initial post to show how the rounds will go.


Edit: Should also mention that I will likely not be able to play any rounds from Dec. 22 - Jan 6 or so. Christmas with my family, then I'm getting married on the 29th, and after that will be on the honeymoon. Definitely not going to be playing civ there, hah!

[endymion]

Hi guys i was hoping that i could participate too. if the game is full its to bad. i made a post in the thread u started earlyer im quite active on the forums(althoug u may not see me cause i only loggin when i post). i hope that i can join the game cause it looks interesting.

[Rince]

I would like to join. I'm a Noble player trying to move to Prince. I already played two SG.

What version are we going to play? BtS 3.13 with Bhruic's patch?

Rince

[Carneios]

I'll join, what better first SG to have then one called "the newbies"

[Trynthlas]

endymion - nope, not full You're in.

Rince - yes indeed. 3.13 with Bhuric's updates.

Carneios- I thought it was appropriate

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Let's go ahead and discuss starting strategy. We need a tech path, whether to settle in place (after moving the warrior to reveal a bit more land), and initial builds.


My take:
I think we should jump on Mining -> Bronze Working since we have a ton of forest around us. From there, it somewhat depends on the resources available to us, but there's two early paths I like for us (since we don't start with Mysticism):
Path 1 (depends on stone/marble nearby): Mining -> BW -> Masonry -> Mysticism -> Polytheism -> Priesthood -> (stick OR here if nobody's got Judaism) -> Animal Husbandry -> Pottery
Path 2 : Mining -> BW -> Animal Husbandry -> Pottery -> Hunting -> Archery -> head to OR (req. Mysticism, Poly, Masonry)

If there's horses available we can stick Riding in there somewhere, but they won't be that important until we have a targ...err, neighbor

Warrior should move 1 SE onto the hill to see what's nearby and unless it's something really neato, I think settling in place is good.

[LordKoros]

I've been lurking around these SG boards waiting for a game just like this one. Would love a chance to actively participate. This would be my first SG game though I have read and followed a number of other SG - they're fantastic teaching tools. So if you are still adding players count me in!

I am currently playing DeGaulle in a solo small map game and I have been having fun hoarding as many wonders as I can get so I think this might be a long term strategy for this game as well. Looks like in my game that I'm headed for a culture victory and that's fine with me as the weakest part of my civ skills is in the war-dept. Agree about your possible tech list. Mining>BW>AH (need the pasture and want horses)>Myst or Masonry if stone/marble nearby> and then see what the world looks like.

[Trynthlas]

You're in, LordKoros

I agree that we should take advantage of our leader trait to build the wonders we want. However, we have to be careful to not get too wonder-happy, as I did that in a single-player prince game as Isabella...I got 3 cities early on, with great resources (stone AND marble) and started grabbing all the wonders - well i got them, but in the meantime my neighbors REX-ed themselves all around me and I wasn't able to expand...plus, I was unable to war effectively with any of them, as they all belonged to my religion and the AP kept ending wars (and if I defied, -5 happiness hurts like hell).

Economy issues are what I usually run into, especially after early expansion to keep the AI from grabbing all the land I want. A current Earth-18-civs game I'm playing as Catherine (cossack nerf makes me sad) I got 4 cities up early and then stomped all over Frederick, then had to go after Louis to open up my culture borders, then was losing so much per turn that I basically had to keep warring to fund any research at all (took out Isabella and Julius next). Still had issues, even after building courthouses, so I smacked Alexander around until he would capitulate to me - then went on a crusade to liberate the holy city of Hinduism (which happened to be the religion of the entire world minus North/South Americas - which nobody knew about yet anyway). Finally after some war against Saladin I captured Mecca and *boom* ...instant gold and my research is back up to 70%.

Just a few digressions and musings...

[endymion]

I personally think we should hookup the cows asap what is gonna be the building que? me thinks warrior-worker-warrior-setler-worker-warrior-warrior-worker settler and let it grow to happy cap

[Trynthlas]

For the build queue, I think we should start out with Worker -> Worker -> Settler -> Warrior

Why? Well, we won't have barbarians raging into our borders for several millenia yet, and I prefer to use our initial warrior to roam in a circle around our starting city to find the next spot and be ready to escort the settler to it. Two workers means that we will be able to chop the settler really quickly (they can build roads and a mine before that point).

Our city will not grow quickly enough to be at 2 pop by the time we finished a warrior if we started with one, so I see no reason to do so.

[Darth Meanie]

Drat! I was too late to sign up. I would be an alternate, but I can only play on weekends, so I would not have much of a chance to play anyways.

I'll lurk rabidly though, and give my two cents whenever I can.

[Trynthlas]

Darth, I have no objection to you being on the roster, as you posted in the other thread Hop on board and give us your input on the plan!


Also, assuming the rest of the team doesn't have an objection, we can make the second round be Darth's, as it will likely be played this weekend. (I was planning on playing the first set )

[Darth Meanie]

For build order, I say build warrior until you hit size two, if you can, micromanage it to the same turn as a warrior is finished, then go for a worker. I would also say since AG lets us go to AH, and cow is easily the best non-strategic resource next to gems and gold to start with AH > Mining > BW. I tend not to think that far in advance from the very beginning, or you lose options.

On forest chopping, you don't tend to start that until you are in a war or a wonder race, it's unwieldy to start teching from there. BW is very important to get though. This city, w/ some farms and some mines will make a good production center. Two rivers?? Levee all the way.

For terrain, go straight for the cows, then farm the flood plain, then build a mine or two on the plains hills. That would make about 12 production at pop 4!

[endymion]

then i would propose to build 1 worker the setler the warrior worker cause 2 workers and then a setler will keep us on low pop for a very long time and i think once we have bronze we can whip some more settlers or workers

[Trynthlas]

Hm, well I tend to not worry about keeping the first city small pop for some time, as it pays off later. This article goes into the details of it.

Unless we have a second food resource in the BFC, I don't like to count on whipping for getting out the settlers.

[Darth Meanie]

@ Trynthlas:Hm, well I tend to not worry about keeping the first city small pop for some time, as it pays off later.

IMHO, when you build workers and settler first you your expansion because you're stuck at pop 1. I only build workers from the start when we have plenty of workable tiles, and without AH, BW, or mining we can only improve the flood plain tile from the get-go. A warrior start would allow us to hit pop 2 and research AH, Mining, and BW so we can use him. As I mentioned in my previous post, Cow Pasture + Flood Plain Farm + 2 Plains hills mines = 11 hammers @ pop 4 w/ surplus food.

Edit: Also, Slavery will not be too effective in this capital, I do not see any other places in the BFC that might have food special resources, so a whipping economy for workers and settlers is a big no-no

[Trynthlas]

I agree, we may want to put AH earlier in the tech list, however I think Mining -> BW first is critical. I guarantee we will get our second and third cities quicker if we build a worker first. BW should be approx. halfway done by the time we get our first worker, who can then mine a plains hill until it is - then the chopping commences to get worker and settler. Before I started reading around on CivFanatics (esp. the article I linked to) I would always do exactly what you are suggesting, so I understand the logic - however, the math (and my experience with the worker-worker-settler or worker-settler-worker chain) doesn't lie.

Farming the flood plain is really a waste, we should plan on building a cottage there instead. I do agree - we will not have enough food to make whipping reliable. We may use it once or twice to push the city back under the happy limit, but we don't have mega-food to use for lots of whipping.

Let me propose this as a compromise: Worker -> Warriors (until pop 2) -> chop settler -> worker

For research, I am strongly in favor of Mining -> BW. AH can follow BW if we want to get the cows hooked up soon, but doing it first is not the way to go.

[Carneios]

I'm going to cast my vote for Trynthlas' tech and unit build order (although the only reason i like getting BW early is because i like my wars )