[BTS] Shadow Game - Charlemange, Monarch

[Stibi-shimi]

Hello all,

I've been on this forum for a bit trying to brush up my skills. I've looked at shadow games and some let's plays and gained a lot of competency from my earlier play style (that is, relative competence). I win pretty consistently on Price and win sometimes on Monarch - so I'm low on the totem pole in this crowd. I come to you in all humility.

The issue I have with looking at shadow games or watching let's plays is that I would like some finer understandings of, in particular, empire management. Anyway, my weaknesses will be apparent as we go along and I'm looking forward to tips if anyone could share them.

My preferred goal is a domination victory.
- no huts
- no vassals
- tech trading allowed
- Buffy 3.19

Charlemange
Protective/Imperialistic
Landschnecks (6 +100% melee and mounted)
Rathaus -75% maintenance


Turn 0

Spoiler :

An interesting start. We've got a lot of food and plains hills for good productivity, but not soon. Possibility of GLH, Colossus later? What do we think about Maoi statues? Might need those coins to make up for a lack of river riles.

SIP might be forced since the adjacent PH has sheeps and its the only land food, and any other hill spot is more than one move away.

An argument against SIP is that I don't believe there will be any productive resources within reach of the capital city. I'm not sure if that's a big deal or not.

Sending Scout 1NE to check out some more coast. 1NW exposes less land; 1E misses revealing coastal foods; 1SE also exposes fewer tiles before no hill vantage.

For techs, we have myst and hunting. Hunting allows me to start on AH right away, which is possible for the sheeps. I know that fishboats is generally frowned on at the very beginning of a game, but I wonder if all this coast might make it worth it. If I SIP, AH will be done in 13 turns. A worker would pop in 15.


My thinking on turn 1:
SIP
Scout 1NE
Produce worker (15)
Research AH (13)

 

[Pangaea]

Kind of a rough start. You don't start with Fishing, so no workboats in T0, and a PH sheep is only 3 improved. Not much to brag about. So how do you start here?

The scout can only move 1 tile due to his surroundings. Think the best may be to move 1E (one tile east), to get a view on the land there. From fog gazing, I'm seeing more coast north, and possibly tundra. It's a little tempting to settle 1E, despite totally wasting a turn, just to get a little more inland, since there is no food in those tiles to the west anyway. But it may be better to simply settle in place instead, and thereby 'save' a turn.

You can start off by going directly AH (because you have Hunting), but I'm not entirely sure that is the best tbh, since the food is still pretty crap. I'm frankly leaning more towards starting with a warrior, teching Fishing, and then building workboats when you are able to. It's only 4 a piece, but maybe still better. A possible worker can't really do anything here anyway. You need Mining first for that hill, and then there are only forests, and then mentioned sheep.

A workboat will still take 10 turns, so maybe I'm in the wrong here. seafood starts are hard. It's rarely straightforward what one should do, like for comfortable inland capitals with corn or something like that.

Otherwise, I suppose start with a worker and going AH, then Mining->BW after that. Mine the green hill when you can. Then chop or whip out two workboats. I'll let the others conclude what is best. It may be the worker thing tbh

 

[jnebbe]

Tricky start for sure

I'd move scout 1E, NE isn't great since you can see you're close to tundra. Definitely don't commit to a tech until T5, maybe you'll find some more food or meet someone with fishing which would be nice.

I think I'd go fishing first, warrior->work boat->work boat, could maybe grow to size 4 quickly and then whip out a worker and have him chop out a settler with IMP?

I'd prob SIP or on the sheep. Improved sheep is still 6 yield which is not bad, have no idea if it's worth sacrificing that to get both workboats out sooner. I don't like settling 1E just for more land tiles but I'm not a very good player so what do I know

 

[Stibi-shimi]

I'm glad that this is a tricky start, I think I'll learn something from how it contrasts with other starts.

Here's some final thoughts on SIP vs. 1E:
- SIP might be good because turns will be scarce with this resource set up. Why waste one turn when you're already down turns for non-immediately accessible resources?
- However, do you think that there's a chance that one of the grasslands to the east will have a horse?

 

[Pangaea]

- However, do you think that there's a chance that one of the grasslands to the east will have a horse?

That is always possible, but it's probably not worth the gamble to be honest, nor the wasted turn. Hopefully you can find a better spot for your capital at some point anyway, and then this will be a good production location.

 

[5tephen]

I'd be tempted to reroll a better start! Especially with Charlemagne.

If you're playing the map:

From the screenshot, is that a floodplain 2E of the clams? Scout SE and reassess? I know Pangaea thinks differently and he's a better player than me but I'd consider gambling on wandering the settler inland a bit.

Regarding SIP. Agree warrior first whilst tech fishing as nil for worker to do. Problem is workboat would be 10 turns after fishing and worker would be 12 turns after workboat. Probably another 3 turns to grow to size 2. Mining sheep, working clams and chopping I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume 1st settler produced turn 37 with only 1 worker, warrior and scout, 1 remaining forest and 1 half decent improved tile. Pasture sheep is probably worse as no bronze working and therefore no chops. Second city circa turn 40 with no tile sharing is slow going...

[Edit] Which map script is it?

 

[Stibi-shimi]

[Edit] Preemptive analysis that didn't consider some mentioned strats. I'm going to revisit it in the morning so consider the below just brainstorming.

Which map script

I actually don't know how to find out what map script it is. Could you lmk and I'll tell you.

Spoiler :

Moved Scout 1E, found no new resources.
SIPed.

What's the plan?
1) We could go Fishing->AH->Mining
2) We could go AH->Fishing->Mining
3) We could go AH->Mining->Fishing
followed by BW

Option 1 would prioritize getting the boats out, but it mismatches the timing of popping the techs with popping the boats and workers. Getting fishing first doesn't matter if we're going to build a worker first, who then has to wait for AH to finish in order to do anything. Alternatively, building a warrior for the six turns it takes to tech fishing, then switching to a boat that will take around 10 turns to pop and we have our first boats at 16, population 2, about 7 turns for another boat, but then doing the worker in several turns - and we're sacrificing food opportunity cost of having a worker that can build the pasture immediately after teching AH and then grow while producing the boats.

Option 2 seems the best, even though the worker will have downtime during fishing and mining research.

Option 3, we produce warriors while researching mining, creating an opportunity cost where we aren't growing with boats.

This gets all hills improved before turn 40. But no settler

Meanwhile, the scout goes SE to mingle.

I haven't played these turns yet; I'll wait for input on the plan.

 

[Pangaea]

What's the plan?
1) We could go Fishing->AH->Mining
2) We could go AH->Fishing->Mining
3) We could go AH->Mining->Fishing
followed by BW

Option 2 seems the best, even though the worker will have downtime during fishing and mining research.

Fishing starts are tricky, and this one is extra finicky because there is a lousy sheep and nothing else for a worker to do. Slow to get out workboats, but at least it's 4 , and you don't really need a worker anyway (he has nothing useful to do until BW). But let's see how the different options pan out.

These screenshots are from T27. I parked the scout on the hill 1E so as to not look at the land (and save time), and the images are from the city screen, which reveal as little as possible of the surroundings. T27 simply because that is when both sea food was improved with the "Fishing first" start, and then I compared with what the others got.

Spoiler :

I went Fishing->Mining->BW tho, because AH is really a waste here. And I selected Stonehenge instead of a warrior. He would just start to degrade anyway, and with Stonehenge we eventually get some failgold.

Fishing->Mining->BW

AH->Fishing->Mining

AH->Mining->Fishing

I'd say Fishing first is superior. Already a size bigger, and it will be stronger moving forward too. BW is online, and it can whip a settler at size 4 in decent time. Worker can be out in time for AH, but to be honest, I'm more tempted to get out a warrior or two while growing, and then whip the settler at size 4. Put overflow in the worker. A PH sheep simply isn't much to write home about, and I'm not even sure we should pick that after BW. Maybe if there is real AH food elsewhere.

But back to the images. AH->Fishing means the worker can't do anything after the sheep until Mining is done. And even then, improving a green mine isn't that excellent in the early game. Will at least get out a workboat a little faster. Can also do the brown hill first, but those kinda suck in general. Does get the crab improved by T27.

AH->Mining->Fishing is kinda awful. No real food improved so far into the game, and if working the mine the city won't grow for a good while.

 

[5tephen]

Nice solution Pangaea.

Double workboat is nicer than my suggested plan - 2 more tile improvements and 1 more remaining forest seems worth the settler delay (assuming you're not already in slavery, it looks like settler on turn 41.)

Would have been inelegant but my assumption for warrior first would have involved stalling growth on the plains hill to avoid degredation of warrior hammers - 1 scout only for defence, fogbusting and exploration seems awkward but I can't remember when barbarians enter borders on monarch... Might find capital has been captured before first settler on deity .

@Stibi-shimi Not at a PC but I think F8 and settings is the right menu to see map size, number of opponents, map script, etc.

 

[coanda]

I'm going to push back on the wonders you were thinking about. Even with Moai Statues and Colossus, your non-seafood non-financial tiles are going to be lower value than working either of the seafood, the sheep, grass cottages (you can drop down a few and grow them up, and they'll pretty quickly be more useful than coast), and specialists while you have happy cap and surplus food for them. So until that city is something like size-11 or 12, it will probably be working a grand total of two water tiles.

Moai statues would cost you 250 hammers to generate 2 hammers per turn; 125 turns to pay itself off. That's awful. Even if you get stone, it's still awful at 60+ turns to pay itself off. If you get stone and are in Bureaucracy (and haven't moved your capital - something you may end up thinking about doing depending on the land you find), 40+ turns to pay itself off which is still poor. While there's still vacant land to fill you could set up a brand-new city for about 200 hammers total investment and be getting much better than 2 hammers per turn almost immediately.

Colossus is similar. As you are not financial, you're not going to be terribly interested in working coastal tiles in most of your cities unless they have resources. If you've got a very coastal empire, you might have 7 or 8 water tiles you're working by mid-game. Colossus would add 7 or 8 commerce... but instead you could just get the failgold from that wonder or build wealth directly to have 250 gold up-front. It's not terrible, but it's not exactly a fantastic return on investment. Filling your land and maybe taking land from AIs is going to be a higher priority, and by the time you're done with that and in a peaceful consolidation phase Colossus is probably gone.

Great Lighthouse is the exception. If you can get a couple island cities (and from the looks of things you probably can here), it's potentially +4 commerce per coastal city. A half-dozen coastal cities (even if some of them aren't even working any water tiles) can make that very worthwhile if you have a quick way of building it.

Regarding the opening, no matter what I do on seafood-only starts (and this is almost a seafood-only start, since plains sheep is not great) I feel like I made a mistake. I'd probably lean towards getting some workboats out faster since you don't have that many forests to chop - particularly not when SIP eats one of them.

 

[krikav]

What's the plan?
1) We could go Fishing->AH->Mining
2) We could go AH->Fishing->Mining
3) We could go AH->Mining->Fishing

Now, I always seem to get timings wrong when advicing, techs come in much faster on your selected difficulty than I'm used to.
But with that disclaimer away.

I would rule out option 2 & 3 right away. Going AH (which is extremly expensive) for a lone brown hilled sheep is not something I would ever do.
It would land you i a economic hole, and the worker would get depression from lack of useful work and that would spread to the player. Not good!
You don't have to commit to tech until T5 though, so if scouting prior to that reveals 3-4 grassland piggies for future cities.. well, maybe AH then.
In fact... I would much much rather have that tile mined, than to place a pasture on it. That would give me a sweet 1F4H tile, which is really good with imperialistic charly who gets hammer bonuses from building settlers (which he doesn't when building on food).
So I would rule out AH for a long time ahead.

If fishing first,I think I would start by growing on a warrior on a 2F1H tile, then once fishing is in swap build to workboat and then finishing the workboat on two 1F2H tiles.
But it could be, that there is some fourth option, that involves mining first, worker first, and then perhaps getting a faster workboat out with the mined sheep.


Settler at pop3, with 1seafood+mined sheep+mined grassland hill gives you 2F+8H, which with imp bonus turns into 2F16H giving you a 100/18 = 5.555 Turn worker.
5*18= 90, 6*18=108, so a 5 turn settler if you get 10 overflow somehow (seems unlikely), and a 6 turn settler if not.

City spots without further scouting are possible 3N of capital, and 2E of the clams. Both would be insta-connected w/o the need for neither the wheel nor sailing which helps alot.
And they better be connected with charly and his godawful starting techs.

 

[krikav]

Regardning the wonders, @coanda is speaking alot of truth about both moai and colossus.
Moai in itself is almost never good. The only reason I build it in about 10-25% of my games is because I have stone, and it's a nice way to self-failgold. And to do that I need to finish them in some city, and the greatest consideration for where they end up has more to do with how efficient that city can finish them, rather than what hammers they eventually give.
Sometimes you have a city with multiple seafoods and perhaps a few lakes too, and then it can be rather nice, but probably only with stone, and probably only after quite some failgold is invested in them from other cities.

Colossus is a wonder I rather not think about... Every time I try to put hammers into it for failgold, the AIs either build it just before I have finished the forge and are about to land some overflow and some chops into it.
Ooooor they stubbornly refuse to ever build it, leaving me in a annoying limbo
It's quite cheap though, and on other difficulties I would probably consider building it in some city that should generate GPeople and would benefit from the passive points.

GLH on your current map here could be very viable, or awful.
In any case, it's going to be a hard build, and a risky one too. You don't need sailing and you don't need masonry, and you DO need alot of other techs like bw/writing.
Capital could do decently building it though, lots of mines and there is also the possibility to get a finishing overflow from 3pop whipping a settler with 1-9 hammers invested.

 

[krikav]

To add to @Pangeas nice collection of starts!

Spoiler T27 attempt mining->fish :

The worker has completed and have climbed the sheep-hill. We have 4 turns before the sheep is mined, once it's mined we get 5 hammes per turn.
Working a 1F2H tile for four turns gets us to 12H which isn't 15 and doesn't help a turn extra.
Working a 2F1H tile for four turns gets us to 8H which isn't 10 and would even delay workboat a turn.
Mixing tiles is best, working 2F1H for 2 turns, and 1F2H for 2 turns, ending up at 10H invested in workboat at the start of turn 19 when mine is completed.

As such.

Not entierly sold on two workboats tbh. I didn't scout with the scout, but if I did, that would probably have revealed some nice spots I would want to settle. So settler at pop3 with only the sheep+green hill+crabs is good.
Then I would have had some warriors ready before starting settler build too.

 

[Stibi-shimi]

Good morning all,

I'm loving this discussion. The tough start is really churning the brain trust.

Thank you @krikav for the wonder discussion.

I just went to Turn 5 here. Again, my conventional wisdom has been challenged that you should do AH quickly and improve your tiles as fast as possible. Skipping AH altogether and going for BW to chop - and then mining the sheep? Very exciting, and I see how it makes sense here.

For the map script, we're on Standard Pangea.

Spoiler map script :

I jumped out on some hills and met Ragnar, and now am scouting along the coast.

I invested in a warrior first, then I will switch to boats before the warrior is completed and right after I get fishing tech. I didn't think too hard about @pangea's suggestion to put the hammers into Stonehenge for the fail gold, so that's not ruled out.

The production plan is a boat first. After that I will actually stop and we'll talk about whether we want a second one, or do a settler straight out.
The tech plan is Fishing->Mining->BW and then we'll look at the map.

A slow update of only a handful of moves, but it's morning and your responses are very finely tuned and a lot to think through.

Spoiler :

 

[coanda]

This terrain is all rather "ugh" so far, and Ragnar is kind of a headache as a neighbor. Warmonger, backstabs neighbors even at Pleased status, doesn't like tech trading, makes a bunch of units. He is at least one of the more religious AIs in the game, so if you adopt the same religion as him you've got a decent shot at getting him to Friendly status, but still not someone I'm happy to see next door when I start up a game.

This is the sort of start where I'd already be thinking about the "flip the table over" solution of whipping a bunch of Ancient-era units and beating the nearest AI to death so I'd have his land, hopefully better than mine.

 

[Stibi-shimi]

Turn 6 - Found some piggies there near the clams.

Spoiler :

When the settler goes out I'd imagine it's going to go on that bay SE of the Capital. If it goes on the grass adjacent clams, then it can immediately share clams, and you have the forest to chop. If you settle on the forest, then you lose it but get pigs in the first ring, likely around the time that we get AH to pasture sheeps as well.

I also want to add that I'm going very slow, and would like advice if you have any about, say, which tiles to work, or to which tiles exactly to move the scout, because I'm not totally adept at some of the micro aspects. Many shadow games that I see on here deal mostly with grand strategy, and so I'm often lost as to why a workshop should go here or a cottage should go there.

 

[Stibi-shimi]

Here is turn 21, because BW and second boats will pop in 6, and that puts us at the 27 we've all settled on. If that's too many turns we'll go back.

Spoiler :

Basically taking Pangea's advice about going fishing->mining->BW. I think I might be a turn behind him on getting the fishboats out, somehow.

No worker; 1 boat, 1 warrior actually. My production queue was Warrior, interrupted->Boat->complete warrior->Boat(6)

It seems not-less-bad than the other 27 turn starts above because BW also pops, we have two fish boats.

The tiles we're working seems right to me. Max hammers to get a, FB out to whip a settler, use overflow for the worker.

On the large scale, I've sent the scout looking for other civs while the warrior is going to go up north to scout and then try to get the settler down to the opposite shore of that bay.

 

[krikav]

It's unfortunate that you lose the forest, but I think that settling there, and getting piggies in first ring is the way to go.
I would only go for 1 workboat as it now.
Would still mine the sheep though.


Grow to pop2 with 2F1H while building workboat, finish the workboat with two 1F2H tiles.
Then finish the warrior, and perhaps put some hammers into SH for failgold, to reach pop3.
Then start a settler at pop3, working Crabs+Mined sheep+mined grassland.

 

[krikav]

Your plan sounds good too, taking advantage of IMP even more with a early whip of the settler.