SGOTM 17 - Plastic Ducks

Welcome to your BtS SGOTM 17 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.

You can find the Game Details in the first post of the Maintenance Thread. If any changes occur in the game settings or rules, I shall post them in that thread, and edit that post.

Please wait until your team leader/administrator/scribe has reserved a couple of top posts in this thread for game admin information. Then post here to let your team know you have arrived.

Good luck, have fun ... and never trust a mapmaker

Welcome to SGOTM17!

Link to Succession GOTM Progress and Results


Opening
Grand Strategy

War on MM

War on Sury

War on QSH

War on Toku, Churchill & Peter (a few turns later)


Other interesting things

The biggest thread spammers: (brownie points to be given to the winner)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/misc.php?do=whoposted&t=488778

Various mechanics, courtesy of OSS
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=10234781&postcount=3

Early dates

The start

Summarized Team Rules
Read the various Rule threads.
Check your ini files so that autosave is set to every turn.
No reloads from previous point, ever!
No reading of other team threads. The best way to resist temptation is to use the Subscribed threads tool under quick links! Similarily, do not download other team saves.
When looking at the save, do not perform any irreversible action! You can't trade, whip or move units.
If the game crashes, stop and pm AlanH with details of what happened.
Wait for instructions.

Suggested:
Save often manually
Do stop if an opportunity becomes available or something goes wrong.
Pause the game before uploading/examining it.
When testing the game, make sure you're using the test game! Markers will be added here and there to help.
Let us know when you can't make a deadline or RL becomes busy.

A few notes of etiquette:

1. Active participation -- Your contribution to every set is important, even if it's a 'I agree'. Although everyone might have real life issues sometimes, it's courteous to notify the team of you absence.

2. Plan of playing -- The spirit of SG is to play the game following the consensus of the team decision. Therefore the player who is UP should post a clear plan for discussion. Guidelines have been posted for the contents of your plan in the next post. It might be that the team decides to head in a direction you were opposed to, it does not mean you are wrong but rather that the team believes the odds of winning are more likely with the decided approach.

3. Timing -- In the pre-thread we agreed to use the following as upper bounds for discussing, planning and playing the set. Since the game cannot last forever, it is important to respect these in order not to be rushed to finish the game later on.
-24 hours for 'got it' and pre-play-plan [0~24] - Make sure you can open the save before saying 'got it'.
-24 hours for discussion and first plan draft[0~48]
-24 hours for edits [24~72]
-24 hours to play [72~96]

Please keep in mind those are upper bounds, meaning if a consensus is reached before the time is fully elapsed, the set can proceed ahead.
Once again it would be greatly appreciated if you can warn the team, either in this thread or via pm, of your absences so that we do not have to wait for a consensus or skipping. You will be skipped if you cannot meet the time frame.

3a. Please include a report when you submit the save. You may submit your report later but it would be preferable to have it before the discussion on the next set starts.

4. Do not automate workers without first discussing with your team.

5. Do not use city governors without first discussing with your team. Or at least if you do, check cities every turn and remove the governor at the end of your round.

6. Do not leave units on goto orders that extend beyond your set of turns. If for some reason this happens, then be sure to inform your team as to what the unit(s) is/are going.

7. Finish all your discussed turns and upload the game saved at the END of the discussed part.

8. Respect your team mates, and demand their respect. Take care of your writing style, accept that people whose first language is not English will use English in a different way than you are used to. Disagree by all means, but don't make it personal, and don't take it personally.

9. SG's are team games. Be a good team member. Post your ideas, argue your corner and encourage and praise your team mates. Don't be afraid to post in your game thread. That is what it's for.

10. Have fun and QUACK!!!


There are 7 major parts to every set.

1. Pre-Play-Plan: see below.
2. Voting: everyone voices his opinion on the issues raised in 1.
3. Plan: see below.
4. Critique of the Plan: once the Plan is posted, players should try/read the plan and look for anything they'd like to change. This is where you must support your arguments!
5. Final Plan: tries to glue everything together.
6. Play the Set: see below.
7. Post the Report: see below

What is the Pre-Play-Plan?

The Pre-Play-Plan is to initiate the discussion on the diverging possibilities at the start of a set. This includes, but not limited to, EP focus, general city micro, general worker micro, general techs. Basically, make an idea of what you want to do with your 10/15 turns.

In the spoiler below are general ideas as to what you can cover with the pre-play-plan. Not everything needs to be discussed, only the obvious decision points.


What your plan should cover:

The plan must contain 2 detailed parts:


The team might at one point decide to slack on #2 once the game becomes well in hand.

How your set should go:

• Play according to the plan
• If something unexpected (or an opportunity) comes up, STOP AND CHECK WITH THE TEAM.
• If you have to adapt, do so!
• You can add markers in game during and at the end of your set. It's a lot easier on team members to figure where units are going.
• If something unexpected comes up, you can (and possibly should) stop and make a short report to the team so we can decide how to move ahead

~~~~

What your set report should cover:

• WHEOOHRN alerts and possible/likely targets
• GGs in distant lands and Great Engineers
• When to renegotiate trades
• What you were planning for the future
• How the plan worked out/didn't
• Anything unexpected

Another option is to turn on the auto-logging and upload the autolog file.

A few steps to ensure everyone can participate...

I'd recommend for everyone to install the latest BUFFY mod right now if it is not already done.

Once that is done, try loading this opening save from SGOTM13: http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/civ4sgotm13/Plastic_Ducks_SG013_BC4000_01.CivBeyondSwordSave

If you are successful, then you are set for this game. Please take time to quickly read through the administrative blahblah up in this thread, if not already done

If you can't load the game,

Remember to set your autosaves to every turn: My Games>BTS>Civilization4.ini

; The maximum number of autosaves kept in the directory before being deleted.
MaxAutoSaves = 50 Or whatever number you'd like here, just make sure it's larger than the number of turns of your set.

; Specify the number of turns between autoSaves. 0 means no autosave.
AutoSaveInterval = 1

Click to expand...

Also, no one gets to play before a plan has been accepted by the team. Early on, this might mean every mouse click you will do has been pre-established but by end game it will generally be very broad.

Finally, I'd recommend you save manually every turn as only manual saves are allowed to be loaded, and it can be useful for going back and seeing when an AI goes WHEOOHRN for example.

I'll start by saying that it is difficult to assess strategy without seeing the game. There are a lot of things that can be done to make this difficult, like having an AI start with already developed cities and more techs. Or having chokepoints guarded by barb cities with Rifles... so all-out war from T0 is very very unlikely.

That being said, we need to set up a good research center without GLH, Oracle and Pyramids. The good news is we won't have difficulty spamming early settlers or paying maintenance with the Rathaus.

For the great duck and glory!

Both The Big Lighthouse and the Pyramids are available at the classic start. Not saying we shall build them but forgoing them from get-go we shall not either. (Meh, doesn't sound like Yoda enough)

Interesting, I thought all ancient wonders were disabled. I really need to practice some classical starts...

So is the temple of Artemis but that I think we don't need for sure. The map is flat, so I am not sure to what degree the lighthouse would be useful, though.

Finally, the team threads are up!!!
Do y'all know what it means? It means that for the next 4 months I will not read another post from Sun Tsu Wu !!

Now, back to topic.

First of all, welcome to all our new members, I'm looking forward to a great game with all of you guys.

I've run a couple of Classical starts to prepare for this one, and here are some info I've gathered :

- Starting units :
As the screenshot shows, we start with a settler, a worker, a scout and an archer. This allows for faster and safer scouting, and the fact that we start with all starting worker techs brings a lot of flexibility to our start.
As for AIs, they start with a settler, 2 workers, 2 scouts and 4 archers. If I'm not mistaken, those are the typical units for an Ancient start at Immortal level, so the Classical start does not change anything. If that's the case, then it gives a slight advantage to the human player, which may explain why this game will be played at Immortal level.
EDIT : nevermind that, the AIs get one extra worker and Archer compared to an Ancient start, just like we do...

- Research :
We start with all the techs in the first 3 columns of the tech tree, plus Writing, minus HBR and the 3 religious techs. In a "true" classical start, the first 3 religions are randomly attributed at T5, but here the mapmaker made sure that the religious race will take place as usual.
One thing that becomes obvious when playing a classical start is that research is veeeeeeery slow. The classical/medieval techs are not "meant" to be researched with only 1 pop. As a result, it takes a dozen turns to research the religious techs, 30 turns for Alpha, IW, Maths, Aesth and Monarchy, and over 40 turns for Col or MC. Given our quite commerce poor start, this is already an optimistic estimate.
What I've found the most troubling is that the same goes for the AIs, meaning that they will also spend 40 turns to research Alpha, Monarchy, etc... And when they do, chances are there will not be many trades available, since we all start with the same techs.
Consequently, I have the feeling that we will have to rely on ourselves for quite a while, until the AIs catch up and have something to offer us.

- Wonders :
Stonehenge, TGW et Oracle are disabled. As bestsss pointed out, GLH and the Mids are available, but they will be hard to get as AIs are likely to prioritize them. Mids especially are even less attractive than ever without stone. However, I've found that getting GLH is still possible if we go all in right from the bat, even if some AIs start coastal. The reason being that AIs can't chop correctly!.... But are we willing to make such a commitment when we don't know squat about the map and settings?

- Grand strategy :
I tend to agree with koss here. There are an infinite number of possibilities for the mapmaker to make this harder on us, and hardly any way to guess.
So we can only focus on optimizing our start regardless. To this end, I see a number of possibilities for our capitol :
--SIP = 0 prod / max food. We already know that we have neither copper nor horse, and I have the feeling that the mapmaker could be evil enough to deprive us from Iron as well. I don't know if a pure whip factory could work here.
--1W = keeps the crabs, the 3F center tile from bananas, so that we don't have to prioritize Calendar, but it will make it harder to settle a good city in the East. Slightly better in terms of prod.
--2W = no food except the bananas, which forces us to beeline Calendar, and settled 1 turn later. The trade-off is those 7 forests
--2W1S = keeps both the bananas and the crabs, get access to a 2H tile right from the start for a faster WB, but settled one turn later, and may lose the Iron under the worker

Right now I'd probably go with 2W1S, but again testing will tell !!!
EDIT : to that end, I'm attaching a tentative test game. I just did that in 5 minutes, so it's pretty sloppy, but the starting area looks fine, and the tech situation is accurate as well, so that's all that matters for now. I messed up with Isabella so I had to manually "kill" her so we don't get any research bonus. As a result, only 5 AIs in this game, but it shoudn't matter. Finally, I used a Pangea with low sea level and flat wrap, because...why not?...

Have fun!

Thanks for the test game. I'll try out a few openings a bit later and report back.

Checking in.

I agree with kossin that there are so many variables right now that it is difficult to determine what factors will do most to limit our victory date. There are known knows, and then there are known unknowns, not to mention the dreaded unknown unknowns...

Regarding map size, Alan H has stated that the map contains approximately 1600 plots. Four normal map scripts come close to this: Inland Sea; Lakes; Mirror; Oasis (52 * 32 = 1664). An Oasis map lacks large bodies of water like the one we start next to. The sea in our screenshot is not inland. A Mirror map seems somewhat gimicky. Therefore, if I had to put money on it, I would bet that we are playing on some sort of (more or less) heavily modified Lakes script.

I suspect, but do not know, that starting on the coast is meant to mislead us. That is, everyone knows that the Oracle and GLH are overpowered in competitive formats. Since the Oracle is excluded by virtue of the advanced start, my guess is that the GLH, though immediately available, will be excluded by virtue of the map type. My reasoning might be circular though... (I think this is a Lakes script, I think the mapmaker wants to discourage a race to build the GLH, the GLH offers less on a Lakes map, therefore we should not build the GLH because this surely has to be a Lakes map.)

Our start has been deliberately gimped. We start with Agriculture, Mining, and Animal Husbandry, yet we have no resources to improve. Calendar is, I think, a low priority tech. Even an improved Clam offers little more than an irrigated Floodplains before we build a Lighthouse (and 30H + 60H works out more than the cost of an Imperialistic Settler).

Still, it is what it is. One "out there" suggestion, which I offer more as food for thought rather than with any real conviction: with so many exploratory units, we might be able to find a much better 1st city spot than the one we have been given. That is, if we are able to discover a Pigs or a Cow or a Wheat (etc.) within the first two turns, we can improve this immediately. I say 'first two turns' because we can also revolt into Slavery before settling the first city. This gives us one more turn in which to explore than we would with an ancient start.

Aside from that, early research will be slow due to the discrepancy between research capacity and tech costs. Having played a couple of Classical era starts, the AI seem to flock to the religious techs first (inc. Code of Laws) and Iron Working comes next. Mathematics usually works well for the human player, both for the enhanced chops and access to Currency.

Barbs can be troublesome. I'll leave you with a pic from a test game I played last night, when I was trying to get used to the advanced settings:

Quacking in! Home again

We are starting very close to the edge of the map
+ no barb from the east
- (assuming sip) our 3rd and subsequent culture rings are made useless eastwards

The minus point inclines me to move west, toward the center of the map and our opponents. Everyone needs to die and be impeded asap

Our capitol was weak last game:
- not a useful GP farm
- not an efficient bureaucracy capitol until late.

If we could define a preferred typography for Aachen (in line with a prospect grand strategy), it would help orientate our initial scouting.

By typography I mean: emphasize on
1. Production or 2. commerce.

SIP is 20F, 12C ,1H at size 4 after the nanas are improved aka in more than 50 turns

1W is 14F, 14C, 4H at size 4, which can be setup in >gasp test< ~25 turns?

In any case, the water tiles are the only commerce tiles in our immediate surroundings.

Do we require a hammer intensive capitol and can we pay the price with beakers?

An espionage economy would allow us to do so:

Capitol goes production high, beaker low.
Prioritize alphabet, setup a trap city
Steal techs, broker techs
...
profit?

My testing is on par with what has been posted so far: plenty of whip, not much commerce.
This spot is really weak for a capital, we were not even given 1 hill to work... I guess it's an incentive to move.

Alphabet as a first tech makes quite a bit of sense if we are able to meet several AIs to tech broker.

Gambling on COL can be a nice alternative.

Playing around with Bebekija's save (thanks ), this was the best I could manage with the current locations:

Settle on the Bananas:



2W1S of starting location:


I'm not set on this build order or researching Mathematics. If we keep this capital, I do wonder where our research is going to come from (there are a few options, but there doesn't seem much use in speculating right now).

soundjata said:

Gambling on COL can be a nice alternative.

Click to expand...

That's what I did in one of my tests, and though it provides a nice trading chip, I can think of no use for the religion (except if we're isolated, but we won't know from the start), and it's too early for the Rathaus.
Maths and Aest are, as usual, good trading chips as well, but if we intend to rely heavily on whipping, Monarchy should be our priority here. I mean with all those happy resources around us....

~~

Nice tests, Doshin ! My 2W1S test came out quite similar to yours, even though it looks like you whipped the WB, which I didn't. I hadn't even figured that we could switch to slavery on T0. It's nice, as it gives us a "free" turn of scouting/moving the settler.
Regarding scouting, I too would gladly settle elsewhere, but our possibilities appear limited : there's jungle in the North, Sea in the South, and a lot of forests West, which will prevent our scouts to reveal much. So it's very likely that we will not know anything more on T1. Then the question becomes, do we go wandering about with our settler ?
I'd rather not, but what we can do instead is focus our first city on the production of the first settler, for instance at pop 3, skipping the granary. This will give ~20 turns to our scouts to show us something good.

I'll test a bit in this direction and report back.

The exploration comes as top priority. We do not know the basic script yet. I'd agree w/ Doshin - lakes. If so, big lighthouse won't be useful.

The jungle north may have few gems, so iron working might be the 1st choice.
While CoL could be a good trade chip we don't even have an idea when someone will research the alphabet and even if it'd be willing to trade w/ us. We can skip researching first few turns and I guess that's a no-brainer here.

Lakes w/ lighthouse are not so terrible tiles to work and don't require worker turns.
Spy economy doesn't seem viable for race game, esp since we don't have the great wall, although 2 great spy from rathaus can contribute a lot of "breakers" but we depend on what the AIs are going to research which is way too difficult and unreliable to influence.

Checking in. Honored to be part of this team

As I'm a new member: team rules read and acknowledged. And last but not least: quack

As for my initial thoughts on this game:

Agree on the lakes map assumption. Therefore, I don't think we can profit too much from imperialistic settlers. Our main goal should be to damage and eliminate our neighbours as soon as possible. If the map had been modified so that we need Astro to deal with everyone, fine. But early agression, using our protective archers to steal workers and settlers and choke opponents should probably be the first goal. I also agree on IW first, don't think we have another choice unless we find copper or horse nearby.
I'd be fine with settling to the West. I think we want to be closer to our neighbours. Starting on the edge of the map is always a bit tricky.

We should also work towards a relatively early Feudalism.

Quacking in.

You guys covered everything that was on my mind.

Glad to see ya all and looking forward to this very competitive game.


Now, my mind needs to earn some money.

It seems that, without the obvious choices of Agriculture/Mining/AH/BW, we are totally lost when it comes to picking a first tech. So far Monarchy, Code of Laws, Mathematics, Alphabet, and Iron Working have all been mentioned as possibilities...

For the record, the current options available to us are:

Meditation: 117
Polytheism: 145
Monarchy: 438
Code of Laws: 511
Aesthetics: 438
Mathematics: 364
Alphabet: 438
Horseback Riding: 364
Iron Working: 292
Metal Casting: 657

If we run the slider from the beginning, we have five turns in which to decide upon a tech. The surrounding land/AI may well impact our decision making, but then again it might not. Who knows? Not running the slider gives us more options and time to think, but it will also slow any progress towards our first tech (= possible loss of broker deals, resources, tile improvements, buildings, units, etc.).

I'm probably stating the obvious with this, and I don't necessarily think that we need to discuss techs at length until the first five turns are up. But it's surely worth devoting some thought before these turns as to the short- and long-term benefits offered by particular tech paths. 30-40 turns per tech is a much bigger commitment than opting for (say) Fishing on a whim with an Ancient start.