SGOTM 01 - Peanut

[DaviddesJ]

I'm fine with Animal Husbandry, Pottery, Writing, Alphabet. Although there won't necessarily be so much available to trade for when we do get Alphabet---sometimes rushing for it so quickly just leaves you with an unproductive tech and nothing to trade for and you still end up researching basic stuff, which it would have been better to have earlier. So I'm also happy to divert along the way for Hunting or Mining, if it turns out to be important for an improvement.

If we're working the floodplains, then it's 11 turns to grow to size 2, during which we generate 22 hammers, which is basically a warrior. (Unit cost at Epic is 1.5x, right?) Then, at size 2, we generate 6 surplus/turn, which is 15 turns for a worker. That's 26 turns, compared to 18 turns if we do worker-first at size 1 and 5 surplus/turn.

Those 8 turns mean we get the Cow/Pasture 8 turns sooner, which is +24 production. Plus our worker starts the next improvement 8 turns sooner, and the one after that, etc. Against that, it will take 29 turns for us to reach size 2, which means we're losing 1 surplus/turn for 29-11 = 16 turns. Pretty clear that the worker is better. (Unless the extra warrior would have gotten us a good hut. But huts can be bad....)

 

[ainwood]

I'm keen to keep the discussion going, depending on what resources we find (eg - whats over the hills in the fog).

 

[civ_steve]

OK, I'll start us off, and flip a mental coin about the Worker/Warrior as first build. In SGOTM3 we usually did 20 turns for turnset 1, then 10 turns per set after that. Not sure what works well for CIV SG, so I'll aim for somewhere around 15-20. Back shortly (I hope).

 

[civ_steve]

OK, first turn set is in!

4000 BC - the game starts! 223 commerce needed for Animal Husbandry, so if it takes longer than 30 turns, I may as well build Warrior first!
Settler SW - mostly Forest, a couple of Hills revealed
Warrior N - Floodplains and hills as far as the eye can see ... about 1 tile

3970 BC
Found Thebes - ah ah! Rice and Stone are added to the resources we will have access to once culture expands!
hmm - Worker in 18, and AH in 18 - sounds like a match!
vs Grow in 11, Worker in 15, 8 turns delay to get Cow pasturized
Go with Worker first
Warrior N - a 2nd cow is revealed, 3 spaces North of Thebes

3940 BC
Warrior NE, on to hill; Coast up ahead, and appears to be Coast on other side of Mountains

3910 BC
Warrior NW

3880 BC
Warrior N (hills on Coast - nothing to see out at sea)

3850 BC
Borders of Thebes expand - (4 cpt); it appears we are on a peninsula, near the tip; Fish can be seen
Warrior NW - another Cow, and tundra; about as far North as I care to go

3820 BC
Warrior West - forests

3790 BC
Warrior SW - at this point, nothing more to see until reach other side of capital

3760 BC
Warrior W

3730 BC
Warrior S

3700 BC
Warrior S

3670 BC
Warrior SW

3640 BC
Warrior SW

3610 BC
Warrior W - another River ... and Lions (I was wondering if we were all alone!)
I'm in forest, so if they approach, I'll fortify.

(IBT - Lions do approach, over river)

3580 BC
Fortify Warrior in Forest (should be 55% defensive benefit)

(IBT - Lions attack, and we beat them into Lion paste with our clubs)

3550 BC
Warrior is 1.6 strength; I'll pause a couple of turns to get him up to strength

3520 BC
still healing

3490 BC
Full strength - SW; River looks short

3460 BC
Warrior SW - Hills, and more impassible mountains

(IBT - we're not alone! We meet a scout from Catherine of the Russians
We agree not to cut off each other's heads)

3430 BC

Animal Husbandry is learned, on to Pottery next
Worker is finished, and moved to Cows; start on Warrior next.
Alright! We have Horses to the North!
Warrior SW

(IBT some Lions show up to the East)

3400 BC
Warrior SE
Worker starts the Pasture - 6 turns

end of log

I'm attaching a screenshot of our empire from 10,000 feet. Horses to the North, several Cows around, Russian Scout to the West, Lions to the East. Our Warrior is SSW of the Russian Scout (under part of the blue screen).

From our earlier discussion, I don't think the Russian scout is a threat, but our capital is undefended right now. If there's any concern at all, we could work a 2 Hammer forest and get a Warrior out in half the time, at the cost of growth.

Worker is developing the Cow. We started on Pottery. Not sure how many people will be on the starting landmass, but it seems likely we will need ships to achieve Domination (unless there's some thin connections around - possible, but we'll know more with scouting.

That's about it, here is our save from the Results Page:

3400 BC Save

It does show you the log from your turn set when you upload it; here is that log:



Here is your Session Turn Log from 4000 BC to 3400 BC:


Turn 1, 3970 BC: Thebes has been founded.

Turn 4, 3880 BC: The borders of Thebes have expanded!

Turn 14, 3580 BC: Barbarian's Lion (2.00) vs Peanut's Warrior (3.40)
Turn 14, 3580 BC: Combat Odds: 3.6%
Turn 14, 3580 BC: (Animal Combat: +20%)
Turn 14, 3580 BC: (Plot Defense: +50%)
Turn 14, 3580 BC: Barbarian's Lion is hit for 25 (75/100HP)
Turn 14, 3580 BC: Peanut's Warrior is hit for 15 (85/100HP)
Turn 14, 3580 BC: Barbarian's Lion is hit for 25 (50/100HP)
Turn 14, 3580 BC: Peanut's Warrior is hit for 15 (70/100HP)
Turn 14, 3580 BC: Barbarian's Lion is hit for 25 (25/100HP)
Turn 14, 3580 BC: Barbarian's Lion is hit for 25 (0/100HP)
Turn 14, 3580 BC: Peanut's Warrior has defeated Barbarian's Lion!

Turn 18, 3460 BC: You have discovered Animal Husbandry!

You may wish to copy and paste this into your turn set post to use as a report framework.

Here is the player order - I just added DaviddesJ to the list:

civ_steve - Just Played
ainwood <=== You're UP
MailMan - on deck
Keith Larson
PaulK
DaviddesJ

ainwood - over to you!

To everybody, please post any discussion regarding near or far term strategy. And if anybody would like to set up a city dot map to guide our future settlements, please be my guest!

 

[Paulk]

Good Job Steve. As far as technologies go, once pottery is discovered should we continue with writing-alphabet or should we possibly go for masonry and try to build an early wonder? I would like to go for masonry and attempt to build pyramids for the early civics and the engineer but would really like to hear your guys opinions. Attempting to build wonders is dangerous and can waste production that can be used to conquer Catherine and those damn incas. Once our worker has completed the pasture, farming the rice seems to be a good option. The other possibility would be to spam cottages on the floodplains which has its own distinct advantages. Also what is our capital's specialty going to be? Commerce/production highbred, GP/Wonder factory? (specialization very important, but I don't need to tell you guys) The second city should be to grab the horses and be a great production city (on the grassland/river or plains/river.) Finally has any religions been discovered yet? Would going for a religion be the most beneficial option? Let&#8217;s please discuss this as the early game is incredibly important and I would really like to learn what the experts do.
Paul

 

[Keith Larson]

Good turn set Steve! I like the coastal plains tile NW of Thebes. This will give us 1 fish, 2 cows and 1 horse. I would like to work the rice before starting cottages. IMO growth and health are more important than commerce in the early game. I love using the whip! As for Techs my vote is to continue on the writing-alphabet line. I have found that when you bee line to alphabet you usally have someone to trade writing and pottery to. If however, you slow down and pick up some other techs you may still be the only one with alphabet, but you have nothing else to trade because by then the AI has pottery, writing and any techs you slowed down to research. Besides our worker will have his hands full with more important work than connecting stone to Thebes.

 

[DaviddesJ]

3970 BC
Found Thebes - ah ah! Rice and Stone are added to the resources we will have access to once culture expands!
hmm - Worker in 18, and AH in 18 - sounds like a match!

Duh, my math was way off. Sorry---I haven't been playing Civ4 much and I'm pretty busy with other stuff.

If we have Stone, then we should seriously think about Pyramids. We don't have to do it, but we should think about it.

More later. I suggest we wait at least 24 hours before continuing to give people (including me) time to comment on overall strategy.

 

[DaviddesJ]

There's no reason to farm the rice for quite some time (until we need the health and can connect it). The farmed rice, without irrigation, is only 4f, which is less than a farmed floodplain at 4f 1c.

Next improvement should probably be one farm along the river, then some cottages. If we finish the farm before Pottery, then we might build some roads that we will need eventually. You can micromanage road construction to build a "partial road" if you're waiting around for a turn or two with nothing to do. (Indeed, we could have gotten a free "partial road" while moving our first worker from the capital to the cows, so we're already off the optimal development path. )

I'm not worried about defense. Once the cows come online we'll have plenty of hammers. Of course we will try to start on a Granary soon after Pottery.

It's not even clear that we need any farms. We're going to hit our size limit pretty fast. I'll work out some calculations later.

 

[civ_steve]

Thanks, guys!

(Indeed, we could have gotten a free "partial road" while moving our first worker from the capital to the cows, so we're already off the optimal development path. )

Very good point, and one of the reasons I'm glad you're on the Team, DaviddesJ! I've only played 2 complete games, so details like this are well received.

I thought about Farming a Floodplains to increase growth, initially. OTOH, we will have pretty fast growth as it is, and we do want to get Cottages going. We have a couple of health resources identified, but no Luxuries yet, so Happiness will be a hard limit soon.

On the sound of it, Keith's suggestion for city #2 looks good. And we expand naturally after 8 turns, so we don't have to build any buildings to get the extended resources.

Looking forward to more discussion. With Catherine available for trade, I feel better about researching to Alphabet. A 3d AI (non-Incan, please) would be even better.

On a personal note, I will be out of touch Monday, back home Tuesday, then out again Wednesday through Saturday evening, so I will have little interaction for the next week.

 

[DaviddesJ]

Just to elaborate on the "partial road". Suppose (as in our case) you want to build an improvement at distance 2 from your current worker position. What you do is move the worker one space, then choose "build road". Then re-select the worker and choose "cancel improvement" (the red X). Then, next turn, you'll be able to move the worker the second space, and start the improvement there at the same time as you would otherwise have. And, whenever you later build a road in the intermediate space, you'll take one turn less to do it.

In fact, we could have built a "partial farm" on the floodplain we moved through to get to the cow (since we already have Agriculture), which would be even better than a "partial road". Then we could return to that after the pasture, and complete a farm there one turn sooner.

 

[ainwood]

OK - posting a 'got it'.

Note that its about 9:30 am on sunday morning here. I can either play later this afternoon (ie in the next 8 hours or so) or leave it until monday evening.

Sounds like the preference is for a bit more discussion - so my current plan is to play in about 32 hours from the post timestamp.

 

[civ_steve]

DaviddesJ - just to clarify, you would give the Worker an action (Road, or Farm), and in the same turn, cancel the action, correct? If I understand the turn workings, if you were to press enter and complete the turn first, the Worker might use the next turn as well before the action could be cancelled. (?)

 

[MailMan]

I think that we took the right path with the worker first. there is a lot of work for him to do.
I would use him next to farm a FP. I agree with KL that food is very important. I also like to use the whip in the early game and our city is great for whipping with all that food and health problems.

Later on we will have 3 possible configuration to the capital:
1. commerce - we could have even 12 towns with some mines to boost production a bit.
2. GP farm - each farmed FP can sustain 1 GP so with the rice and cows we may have 7-8 GP working in the city.
3. production - we have 4 hills + cows and some trees. I can see about 20 base hammers and later on with some workshops about 30-40 base hammers

I am thinking about either option #1 or option #2 (I really would like to try #2 - but I am not sure it is the best).

Near future plans:
crank 3-4 warriors until we reach size 3 and than produce a settler and a second worker.
I really like the plain spot with the 4 resources KL mentioned but a full dot-map should be best.
Regarding research - we might want to pick up sailing to pass the mountain barrier to the east.

DaviddesJ - just to clarify, you would give the Worker an action (Road, or Farm), and in the same turn, cancel the action, correct? If I understand the turn workings, if you were to press enter and complete the turn first, the Worker might use the next turn as well before the action could be cancelled. (?)

This is correct

 

[DaviddesJ]

DaviddesJ - just to clarify, you would give the Worker an action (Road, or Farm), and in the same turn, cancel the action, correct?

Yes, exactly. When you give the order to the worker, it will be automatically deselected in favor of the next unit, so you have to explicitly reselect it (just click on it) to cancel the order. You want to do that the same turn because if you wait until next turn the worker might (especially if you're not careful) perform another turn of improvement before you get around to changing its orders. This can't happen if you cancel the order before ending the previous turn.

If you haven't done this before, you might just start up a test game (with a random map---it doesn't really matter) and play around with doing it a few times until you're comfortable with it.

 

[DaviddesJ]

2. GP farm - each farmed FP can sustain 1 GP so with the rice and cows we may have 7-8 GP working in the city.

It's going to be a long, long, long time before you have 7 GP! We haven't seen any luxuries yet, but maybe you can stack lots of troops here under Hereditary Rule for happiness. But you're going to need roughly +10 health from where we are now. This seems a long ways off. There's also a difficult tradeoff in terms of population growth---if you're running a lot of GP (for the short-term benefits), then you're not growing your population to have more in the longer term.

Let's not forget that we're supposed to be playing for fast domination. I assume that we're going to have to cross oceans, so basically the speed at which we can dominate is going to be constrained by how fast we can get Astronomy. That suggests to me at least one big science city, and this is an obvious location. My inclination is to try to get at least one Great Scientist pretty early (for the Academy) but otherwise to build lots of cottages here.

On the other hand, if we want to get a settler out as quickly as possible, farms will help with that. And if we do that, we're also going to need a second worker pretty soon---we have a lot of tiles to improve.

But before any of this planning, we really need to make a decision about the Pyramids (and wonders in general). E.g., if we're in Representation (vs Hereditary Rule), then, at least for the early game, I think we're going to want many cottages and just a couple of GPs (which the flood plains, cows, and rice will support without extra farms), because we just aren't going to have enough happiness for working all of the floodplains with farms on them.

I'm pretty interested in figuring out whether there's a good 2nd or 3rd city location for building the Pyramids in. I'd be glad to get a Great Engineer, but it's going to be hard if we're going for an early Academy.

There are lots of different issues here---sorry for the disorganized nature of all this.

 

[ainwood]

Re the people suggesting slavery - when should we prioritise bronze working? At the moment, we're looking at the other half of the tech tree. With lots of FPs, I think we can get to writing and have two scientists working on a GS for an academy, and still maintain a growth rate.

 

[Paulk]

About city locations... It seems like we're going to place our second city on the costal plains. So does that mean we're going to eventually want to build a second city on the costal destert square by the most northern mountain? Also would it be wasteful to try to build in the area east of Thebes?

With improvements to the capital so we want to build one or two farm on the floodplains for early growth and settler/worker production then switch to cottages for fps? So how large are we going to grow Thebes until we start pumping out settlers/workers (can someone do calculations to figure the most productive route)? If wanted to have a really commerece city we could have 15 cottages, 1 mine, 1 quarry, 1 pasture, 1 farm, and 1 lake (and still have 1-3 specialists).
Paulk

 

[DaviddesJ]

About city locations... It seems like we're going to place our second city on the costal plains. So does that mean we're going to eventually want to build a second city on the costal destert square by the most northern mountain? Also would it be wasteful to try to build in the area east of Thebes?

It's unlikely to be a good idea to build on the desert spaces without access to fresh water, because the health situation in that city (with no forests, lots of floodplains, and no fresh water bonus) will be pretty awful. I'm not sure where to build. On the desert hill 4E of Thebes is one possibility. On the floodplains 4E 2N is another possibility. The floodplains 4N 3E of Thebes is a very good site, with horses, cows, fresh water, several floodplains, and coast access. But it conflicts somewhat with the idea of building on the other coast, 4N 1W of Thebes.

If wanted to have a really commerece city we could have 15 cottages, 1 mine, 1 quarry, 1 pasture, 1 farm, and 1 lake (and still have 1-3 specialists).

Again, we're not playing a space race. We're trying to dominate the world in 1300 AD (or whatever). Our cities aren't ever going to get that big.

 

[DaviddesJ]

OK, I thought about this some more. I still see cottages as more important than farms. Eventually we're going to reach size 5, and even with 2 Great Scientists (after Library), we're going to have positive food with 2 GS + Cows + 2 Floodplains (that's 11 food for 5 people). Or GS + Stone + Cows + 2 Floodplains is the same. We're going to want to be working a couple of floodplains/cottages, so we might as well start them as soon as possible so they get big.

However, we have 12 more worker turns before we can even start cottaging, and we can finish the cow pasture in 5 turns, and build a farm in 8 more turns, for 13 total. So I think it certainly makes sense to delay the first cottage by just 1 turn, in exchange for getting a farm to work right away.

My suggestion is that we build the farm NE of the cows, across the river. That way, if we eventually build a city to the east, we might swap the farm across to the new city (when our capital doesn't need the growth anyway).

After that, we can either stay on the east of the river to build cottages (on the theory that that gives us the flexibility to swap them to a new city later), or we can build cottages on the west of the river (on the theory that we might eventually want to build farms on the east). I lean toward the former.

 

[DaviddesJ]

Hey, here's another, completely different idea. Suppose we start building a settler as soon as we reach size 2. I think this gets us the settler 6 turns earlier than if we wait to grow to size 3. We put the settler near the horses and connect them up quickly. Then we build War Chariots and blitz Catherine.

If we want to go this way, I think we should finish the second warrior and then start prebuilding a barracks. When we reach size 2, switch from barracks to settler. The worker builds one farm and then maybe one cottage or the rice farm (just for future value---we won't be working it for a while), then some roads that we'll need to connect the two rivers, and the horses to the river. When the settler is done, switch back to barracks while we hook up the horses. When we found the city, the worker is ready to build a pasture on the horses. Hopefully, finish the barracks around the time we connect horses, start pumping out war chariots, and attack.

(The barracks is not even that important, I think---it's just that we can build it if we don't have anything better to do. I'd actually also be fine with just building a granary, skipping the barracks, and attacking with unpromoted War Chariots.)

Does this appeal to anyone? I think it could be pretty effective. Perhaps we should chop even more forests than I'm saying---the faster we get the War Chariots out, the sooner we can attack, plus the less prepared she will be.

Plus I like the idea of using our UU. If we don't build War Chariots fairly early, we may never bother with them.

Of course, the peaceful route is fine, too.

(Edit: deleted silly comments about chopping forests without BW.)