man named jed

Event7:
Man named Jed
Prereq: 1 Scout or Explorer AND Oil (not revealed) AND unit (i.e. the scout or explorer) on this plot
Obsolete: None
Active/Weight: 75/5000
Result:
1.Nothing
2.you pay 10 gold and Oil is revealed

Click to expand...

has anyone ever gotten this? for bonus points, have you ever spammed explorers and left them standing around to get this? comments on likelihood and appearance of event 7?

that would be cool, if you realized that you didn't have oil, so you went for the event and got lucky.

I've had this event twice. The first one was really early into the game too, like 3000 BC when I had left my scout healing in a jungle tile which incidentally had Oil.

It was handy knowing every oil source on the map that early into the game. All in all it's a nice event to reward those of us who lock modified assets to avoid finding out where strategic resources lie.

I wouldn't go as far as spamming scouts just to get this event, though, but instead consider it as a minor stroke of luck if it happens.

@ JFleme: so it reveals oil, it doesn't create a new oil resource?

Correct, it just reveals it. In the short run, the oil is worth an extra hammer. And obviously, it helps your planning in the long run. And it lets you get oil without scientific method (losing your parthenon, great library, and monesteries)--just go straight to combustion.

I've had it once. Pretty good for long-term planning.

Once I've had this, again I got lucky as well, just had a scout fog busting on a jungle tile.

Oil can or does appear in Desert tiles (duh), Grassland (just completely random) and sea tiles, (Sea Scouts), or even Ice tiles (Probably get eaten by a polar bear).

Just luck when you strike it, great if you do, but wouldn't plan my game around getting it.

Maybe if you have a city that's bored, and a big stretch of desert/tundra, build a ton of scouts to plant one on each tile.

if i understand the active/weight values correctly, then 75/5000 means that in 75% of my games, this event can occur. plus, doesn't 5000 mean that it is rather highly weighted? i don't totally understand what the weight does. but

ori: There is a chance (era specific)... per turn for any event to occur. [T]he chance for a specific event to occur is dependent on the combined weights of all currently allowed events.

Click to expand...

the classical era has a 2% per turn, and the next two eras have a 4% per turn chance of any event occurring.

so what i want to know from the math whizzes is: saying that i have convinced myself that this event is in my game and that it will occur as long as i pick the right tile to stand on for long enough, how many turns should i rest a scout to be 50% sure there is no oil in that spot.

in other words, say that i went into world-builder and looked at the map and found the oil resources. then, i parked a scout there. how many turns would i have to leave him there before there is, like, this oil pop half-life.

i'm trying to work this out as i go, so it might not make sense. the renaissance era has a 4% per turn of triggering some event. so to me, i would guess that after a scout stands on a hidden oil resource, there is a 52% chance of revealing that oil after 13 turns. does that math make any practical sense? i'm just estimating. but does anybody have experiments that could attest to something like this?

anyway, if i start with hunting, i usually build another scout straight away. then i might pop another one from a hut. the point is, if for any reason if have 3 scouts hanging around for hundreds of game turns, i could put them to some use. UWHabs suggested using lots of scouts to artificially stimulate this event, but i think that you might already have plenty of scout turns in normal game if you target your oil surveys. i micromanage so much that i think of these things.

opinions on my maths?

The exact calculation depends on the other possible random events that were included at the beginning of the game, and on those random events that you have the prereqs for.

But let's say that you know for sure that Man Named Jed is a possible event (no way to know this until it happens), that you park your scout on oil, and that the sum of the iWeights for the other eligible events is 3000. When a random event occurs, the chance of it being Man Named Jed is 5/8. In the classical era, there is a 2% chance of a random event occuring each turn. So there would be a 1.25% chance of Man Named Jed occuring each turn. We want to know what value of t makes (1 - .0125)^t < 0.5. The answer is 56.

I will generally build a few scouts and let them auto explore inside enemy lands once witing comes around. They often meet a dire fate.

Now I will micro them and park them on any desert tiles I may have when they are finished.

This also gives exploreres a new purpose. I wonder what else they can find?

ShannonCT: We want to know what value of t makes (1 - .0125)^t < 0.5. The answer is 56.

Click to expand...

you passed logarithms, didn't you

does that mean there is a 23 turn oil-pop half life during the medieval/renaissance period? i would think that, after then, the event has been made irrelevant.

z0wb13 said:

you passed logarithms, didn't you

does that mean there is a 23 turn oil-pop half life during the medieval/renaissance period? i would think that, after then, the event has been made irrelevant.

Click to expand...

Double the probability, halve the half-life. 56/2 = 28. But there may be more eligible events as the game goes on...

Seems like an okay event. Nothing that I'd go out of my way to get (like ur saying). It's a good bet that if I'm going to be trying for a space race, cultural, or late diplo victory that I'll be going for SciMeth ASAP to be sure and secure it (for defense while I finish winning ). No need for early knowledge. Usually oil will pop in some remote ice bound location. Galley with Settler and 2 of my best defenders plopped right on top of it will do fine.

But If I'm going for domination/conquest/time (God forbid), it won't matter. If I don't already have oil within my borders by the time SciMeth comes along, you can bet that well before combustion I'll be conquesting to get it .

ShannonCT said:

Double the probability, halve the half-life. 56/2 = 28. But there may be more eligible events as the game goes on...

Click to expand...

i see what your saying. can you tell that i didn't pass logarithms? thanks for the insights.

I wonder if anyone knows what the "typical" total of all the event weights is likely to be. There are a lot of events out there.

I was happy the one time I got this, but I'm absolutely sure that this isn't something that's worth fishing for. The job of a scout is to find huts, explore terrain, and meet neighbors. Once he's done all that he can do, he isn't even worth keeping around if you're over your free unit limit--and if you aren't, you don't have enough workers

The only thing I will say is that this event reinforces the wisdom of keeping a small cache of gold in your treasury to deal with trees burning down and other randomness.

the isn't even worth keeping around if you're over your free unit limit--and if you aren't, you don't have enough workers

Click to expand...

Workers have a unit cost? Are you sure? I've never noticed my economy being affected when I spam dozens of workers to get my (newly conquered) cities maxed out fast as possible. You might be right, since I've never deleted a worker. I thought only units with a base strength cost money to maintain.

@Blitz: Yeppers.

I love workers. And I REALLY love taking advantage of AI stupidity and stealing workers with woodman units parked outside enemy cities. But sometimes I steal so many that I can't afford them and I have to execute them upon capture.

It's really only an issue early on. Eventually, my population grows enough (and I'm not terribly militaristic in the midgame) that I don't have unit costs. And even if I did, a worker producing needed infrastructure is worth 1 gpt once your economy is solid. But a scout on a wild goose chase probably isn't.

huh. Thanks for the info. I never knew that!

It looks like most events have a Weight of 50-200, with a few 20s and a few a bit higher. Events that require unusual prereqs tend to be 500-1000. A Man Named Jed is way overboard with its 5000- if you qualify for it you probably have about a 50/50 chance or better of getting it any turn when you get an event.
(By 'unusual prereqs' I mean things like having a scout on one of the rare squares that has oil, or having a war have just been declared or ended, or having a city ruins in your culture.)

i like the idea of playing for an event- or at least hoping. keep up the posts - good info.