Dr kossin #27

Welcome to Dr kossin #27.

Dr is an acronym for Daily Round. Yes, I mean to get in an update every day to the games I will be playing. Of course there might be some days where I can only play a little or not at all, but I will make up for it those other days when I do have extra time on my hands.

Since the 21st edition of this series, the difficulty level has been cranked all the way up to Deity. I'm not at the point where I can win every game thrown at me on Deity level... I probably can't even win every game thrown at me on Immortal but it is getting a bit boring. My goal is now to achieve competitive skills on this level which should hopefully help me improve more.

You, the reader, can help me achieve this goal by pointing out where I got astray, give suggestions on how to proceed, use complex abstract mathematical analysis to argue, curse at me or anything that you may like. Please note that you must respect the Terms of Service of CFC in any case

You may shadow this game and post it here if you please, but I kindly request that you put it in spoiler tags and that anyone reading the report abstain from using information found there to help me out.

Should you want more clarification about something I've done, just ask for it and I will try to answer as best as I can.

Enough talk, on to the game.

Dr kossin #27​

Round 1 Slow opening
Round 2 BoxedCultured in
Round 3 Sheer AI Stupidity
Round 4a The end of a war
Round 4b The end of another war

Game settings
Deity
Normal Speed
Fractal
No Events
No Huts
BTS 3.19 with BUG 4.3 in CustomAssets and BULL 1.1
Everything else is normal.

A special thanks to lymond who provided the map.

The leader, this time, is:


Please refer to the Japan Civ IV wiki for more information on this leader/nation.

The start:


Looks like a good start, too bad those are only clams however. There also appears to be a flood plain NNE of the settler. This looks like a good hybrid city, with food for specialists and plenty of river tiles for cottages. Unfortunately coastal starts are usually a bit slower since workboats take a while to produce and are subsequently lost. It might be interesting to go worker first with Ag>Mining>NW. The worker won't have any idle turns as Toku starts with The Wheel but there'll be a bunch of unimproved tiles for a while. I think settling first will give a better idea of how feasible that can be.
With what appears to be several hills with forests/jungles, aggressive warriors should be able to handle barbs but we'll see I suppose. Archery is a bit of a dead end and costs a bunch of beakers initially. All those forests can be used for perhaps a wonder or otherwise expansion.

SIP is pretty obvious I think but wb first of worker first hmm...

Workboat! Need commerce!

The corn is not irrigated so working clams is better. Worker after boat. Research Mining>BW

Boat first, then worker. Question is, what then? More boats? How quick do you want to get those clams boated up?

Emperor Peter said:

The corn is not irrigated so working clams is better. Worker after boat. Research Mining>BW

Click to expand...

If you go worker after boat, do you then go boat> settler? I'm guessing the city is at Pop 2 when the first boat is built.

I can understand your reluctance to go for Archery, with the No Huts setting. Since I play with huts on, the extra investment put into Archery is usually inexpensive compared to the benefit it provides.

When you get your 2nd city, barbarian attacks will be more fierce, so you will need to be ready to defend your cities by then. In the interest of avoiding the situation of settling two defenseless cities, you may want to focus on building up your seafood resources now so that when the territory has been mapped completely, you can expand very quickly with good troops to protect your cities.

Archery can be a choice but it's too early to say.

If I play this map, I'll start with Mining=>BW and Fish boat=>Worker. The first worker will be built at the same time when BW is finished. Then chop one more fish boat or two (one for clam another for scouting if the birth place is isolated.). Chop the first settler when cap is 4 pop.

If the map is crowed, Hunting=>Archery is probably not needed. If neighbors are far away, take Archery and in this case Agriculture is too good to skip.

dingding said:

Archery can be a choice but it's too early to say.

If I play this map, I'll start with Mining=>BW and Fish boat=>Worker. The first worker will be built at the same time when BW is finished. Then chop one more fish boat or two (one for clam another for scouting if the birth place is isolated.). Chop the first settler when cap is 4 pop.

If the map is crowed, Hunting=>Archery is probably not needed. If neighbors are far away, take Archery and in this case Agriculture is too good to skip.

Click to expand...

I agree with this plan. There are too many forests near the capital to delay BW. But every additional forest means one more tile that cannot be a Horse or Copper...which means greater likelihood that you will need Archery to defend your cities.

Basically you need at least to see city cross to decide. Maybe he got 3pigs in fog.

Overall i'd go worker first. Close call but not having plain hill forest makes boat first a bit worse. [Unririgated corn and clams, imo, are pretty equal and fog shows unforested hills to be improved on mining.]

But that is just me. I am in general afraid to start with boats as these often cause delay in development...

dingding said:

If I play this map, I'll start with Mining=>BW and Fish boat=>Worker. The first worker will be built at the same time when BW is finished. Then chop one more fish boat or two (one for clam another for scouting if the birth place is isolated.). Chop the first settler when cap is 4 pop.

Click to expand...

I'm glad to see this opening being supported here. I used the exact same one in the current EC Willem game, but also whipped the settler after chops. It felt pretty strong, so I'd say go for it.

Soirana said:

But that is just me. I am in general afraid to start with boats as these often cause delay in development...

Click to expand...

My BTS doesn't work at the moment so I can't try the game. According to what we can see now:

1) If Agri=>Mining=>BW and Worker=>Workboat. t15 Worker. t22 cap = 2 pop.
2) If Mining=>Bw and Workboat=>Worker. t11 cap=2pop. t13 Workboat. t25 Worker.

Considering in Option 2 we can chop trees immediately with the first worker, in fact Option 2 is no worse in production and much better in commerce. (got one clam and the second in t29) 2 commerce from clams is crucial for Toku I reckon.

Moreover, in this kind of environment (much jungle), the biggest limit to expansion is usually Bar rather than hammers. To gain 2 commerce from clam and to beeline Archery is worth trying. (It depends how far they neighbors are as well of course)

These are the hardest to determine. If it were irrigated/riverside corn, then worker first is obvious. But the wb-first crowd is tough to manage. You'd work the 1/2 while building the wb, right?

1/2 means the tile with 1F2H?

If building workboat as the first unit, there are several choices. My principle is that the cap should grow to 2 pop when finish the boat. Options are:

1) Work on 2/1 tile till pop 2, t11 pop=2. Then two pops work on 1/2. t13 Workboat .
2) Work on 3/0 tile t6, t7 work on 1/2. t8 pop = 2. Then two pops work on 1/2. t12 Workboat.

The micro depends on the tiles as well.

I'm interested in those two bfc tiles that we can't see yet that don't appear to have trees. Could there be another resource 2N1E of the settler that might strengthen the case for worker first?

I just posted at the end of #26 how you should do tokug next hehe

Just finished a game with him myself actually and although he is crap in terms of economic help, drafted rifles are killer with all those free promos. Hope to see them getting some good exercise here.

Coastal starts always irritate me a bit, I'm never sure quite how to time the wb/workboat production for optimum growth. Always seems slower than straight land worker-first start.

dingding said:

My BTS doesn't work at the moment so I can't try the game. According to what we can see now:

1) If Agri=>Mining=>BW and Worker=>Workboat. t15 Worker. t22 cap = 2 pop.
2) If Mining=>Bw and Workboat=>Worker. t11 cap=2pop. t13 Workboat. t25 Worker.

Considering in Option 2 we can chop trees immediately with the first worker, in fact Option 2 is no worse in production and much better in commerce. (got one clam and the second in t29) 2 commerce from clams is crucial for Toku I reckon.

Moreover, in this kind of environment (much jungle), the biggest limit to expansion is usually Bar rather than hammers. To gain 2 commerce from clam and to beeline Archery is worth trying. (It depends how far they neighbors are as well of course)

Click to expand...

A - you are incalculating fact that 2n1e is most likely FP? [which means one extra coin while growing on worker [which gets worked longer than building workboat]]
B- saying that chopping beats mines hammer wise is not exactly correct. Trees are not unlimited resource.

I don't normally post, but I have done a lot of reading on these boards, which has improved my game to the point where I win less than half the time on immortal level. Kossin's inspired me to start getting my hat handed to me at the deity level, so I thought I'd shadow this one and post my progress along the way

Advice is greatly appreciated, but please remember spoiler tags, I've played a few turns here and I don't want to spoil Kossin's game

I don't know where to go from here, but I would bet you have some strategic resource in your BFC. Don't you start with at least one due to the map generator/balancer? I would bet Iron or Horses

@Soirana:

Welcome to Civfanatics JensenUVA!