Buce03 - Throwing Away the Crutches

[Bucephalus]

World size: Large
Landmass: Continents, 60% water
Climate: Wet
Temperature: Warm
Age: 5 billion years
No barbs
VC: SS (all VCs on)
Tribe: France
Opponents: Greece, Sumeria, Persia, Germany, Russia, Ottoman, Byzantine, Babylon, Korea, Maya, India.
Level: DG

Variant rules: None of the following allowed -

Armies;
Offensive arty;
Tax/Science farms;
Trading strategies that rely on disconnection of trade routes;
Resource connect/disconnect for mass upgrades;
Suicide boats;
Attaching renegotiated peace treaties to alliances;
Deliberately initiating a pre-build of a Wonder with the intention of switching it;
Combat settlers;
Anything else that contravenes the spirit of the variant.

 

[Bucephalus]

I set Mapfinder to find four starts with parameters of at least one grassland cow and five river tiles.
Of the four that came up, I would unhesitatingly vote for number one.

Your thoughts, guys?

 

[Calis]

lurkers comment:

one or three

What difficulty?

 

[Bucephalus]

lurkers comment:

one or three

What difficulty?

Demigod.

 

[Elephantium]

One is best, but three is pretty good. I'd be happy with either start.

 

[Bucephalus]

That's jungle to the north in number three.

 

[ThinkTank]

Start number one.

 

[Phaedo]

Yea, I guess number 1 is it. The gold in number 3 is nice, but the jungle would hurt us in the long run.

 

[Elephantium]

Jungle? What jungle? I thought that was a forest.

Silly graphics mods.

 

[Phaedo]

Right. I guess we need a roster and plans for the first 10 turns then.

It's hard to know where to explore before we settle in place. I guess a warrior build first makes sense. Do we want to research BW, WC or no research? We have played 0 research for so long I forget if it is even worth it at DG. I would like to get swords asap though, given the variant.

 

[Elephantium]

I like the idea of playing this as a loose 0% science game. I think this team is good enough at trading and pointy-stick research to make it work, and it DOES let us build up a lot of cash for at least part of the game. Besides, self-research at the start of the IA, beelining for RPs, is one of the crutches we're trying to avoid. Zero science fits nicely with that.

OTOH, early game research helps with the trade situation. Getting stuff like Lit or Currency first makes for GREAT trade bait.

Buce and TT - what do you guys think?

 

[CommandoBob]

Spamming to subscribe.

And to lighten things up a bit 'cos youse guys are sooo serious...

Spoiler :

 

[ThinkTank]

Zero science without tax farms is going to be tricky later in the game.

On another note, the AI never does 0% science AFAIK, so we could also consider this one of the crutches we need to throw away ...

I would favour no restriction on the science percentage. Or else a fixed slider at 50%.

 

[Elephantium]

@ CBob: Hey, watch it, buster! Fun is a serious business!

lol: at the crutches chart)

@ TT: What do you think of a generally zero science beginning, with plans to turn on research if zero science starts to cause problems?

I should also note that my "zero science" proposal allows (nay, even encourages) capturing the GLib.

Mostly, I'm just thinking: The AI gets a break on research at this level, so why not make that work for us by extorting techs from them?

 

[ThinkTank]

I think that at the start of the game, zero science causes problems, so we should turn it off immediately.

It is my experience that self-research in the AA really speeds things up, because even a failed slingshot will give you enough value to trade for a lot of AA techs. With a lot of contacts, normally CoL has good trading value, and so does philosophy (even if the slingshot fails it will have some value).

BTW, is going for the slingshot within the variant? If not, going for CoL then Literature will probably deliver most trade value.

 

[Bucephalus]

Right. I guess we need a roster

Does anyone have any preferences regarding the order?

I would like to get swords asap though, given the variant.

I think you may be failing to take the map parameters into consideration. 60% water on a large world is a lot of tiles to fill - I wouldn't expect to come under any pressure militarily until the MAs; neither would I expect us to need to expand at the point of a sword. I anticipate our wars will be resource driven.

Do we want to research BW, WC or no research? We have played 0 research for so long I forget if it is even worth it at DG.

I like the idea of playing this as a loose 0% science game. I think this team is good enough at trading and pointy-stick research to make it work, and it DOES let us build up a lot of cash for at least part of the game. Besides, self-research at the start of the IA, beelining for RPs, is one of the crutches we're trying to avoid. Zero science fits nicely with that.

OTOH, early game research helps with the trade situation. Getting stuff like Lit or Currency first makes for GREAT trade bait.

Buce and TT - what do you guys think?

Zero science without tax farms is going to be tricky later in the game.

On another note, the AI never does 0% science AFAIK, so we could also consider this one of the crutches we need to throw away ...

I would favour no restriction on the science percentage. Or else a fixed slider at 50%.

@ TT: What do you think of a generally zero science beginning, with plans to turn on research if zero science starts to cause problems?

I should also note that my "zero science" proposal allows (nay, even encourages) capturing the GLib.

Mostly, I'm just thinking: The AI gets a break on research at this level, so why not make that work for us by extorting techs from them?

I think that at the start of the game, zero science causes problems, so we should turn it off immediately.

It is my experience that self-research in the AA really speeds things up, because even a failed slingshot will give you enough value to trade for a lot of AA techs. With a lot of contacts, normally CoL has good trading value, and so does philosophy (even if the slingshot fails it will have some value).

BTW, is going for the slingshot within the variant? If not, going for CoL then Literature will probably deliver most trade value.

I agree with TT on this.

Early game zero-science is very much a niche strategy, IMO. 'Rage' was a classic example where - even if it wasn't the variant rule - it was optimum strategy. Consider, we had three towns before being boxed in. Three towns is not going to out-research DG opponents at the best of times, even less so when they have had more room to expand. We were further inhibited by the need to support an aggressive military expansion, so pointy-stick research fitted our needs perfectly. This map will not throw up the same criteria. Far from needing to expand aggressively, I wouldn't expect to even meet another tribe for two or three sets, and when we do I expect them to be sufficiently far away to make pointy-stick research impractical at that stage.

However, lack of early contacts cuts both ways, and I would anticipate the AI making a slow-ish start on research. This, along with us having Alphabet as a starting tech and Indusrious workers putting down roads in two turns, gives us an excellent shot at the Republic slingshot, particularly if we have a decent number of rivers in our core (and I expect that we will; settings of warm, wet, 5by tends to give large swathes of grassland with many rivers - precisely the reason I chose them).

I think our priorities lie in, a) getting a SF up and running (you've all clocked that the start has 4-turn SF potential, right?), and b) laying down a powerful core. The latter is central to our chances of winning this game because being without farms will really start to bite later in the game. We need to aim at becoming an economic powerhouse.

 

[TheOverseer714]

Subscibing. What spacing are you planning to use? Something like a CXXXC pattern? Another "crutch" that we humans use that the AI never uses is tight spacing, so I assume no ICS, and limiting CXXC spacing would be in the spirit of the rules.

 

[ThinkTank]

Given that we want to become an economic powerhouse, and we are on a large map, I think we may want to do a wider city spacing in our core than CxxC. I think at the least we want our core cities to eventually work the full 12 tiles. As we have no farms, and will have some expensive techs to research/buy in the industrial and modern age, we may even consider our core cities to have hospitals. We need to make up our mind now on this as it will determine our settling pattern in the core.

If we go for the no hospitals scenario we can settle CxxxC in say the X direction, CxxC in the Y direction; this gives each city 12 tiles, 1 for the city center, and 11 citizens (so 1 specialist):

xxxx xxxx
xcxx xcxx
xxxx xxxx
xxxx xxxx
xcxx xcxx
xxxx xxxx


Optimum is each city 13 tiles, 1 for the city center, and 12 citizens, this can be achieved like this:

Spoiler :

Question is, will we need hospitals?

Eidt: funny, this was a crosspost, as I started and finished my post before I saw Overseer's question ...

 

[Bucephalus]

Question is, will we need hospitals?

That's impressive work, TT - I'm very much in favour of that settling pattern.

With regard to hospitals, I'd say yes in many cases because there are always going to be a glut of cities that are not really contributing much in the way of shields, or their shields are surplus to requirements, in which which case it is a viable tactic to irrigate everything to support some much needed specialists.

 

[Bucephalus]

Subscibing. What spacing are you planning to use? Something like a CXXXC pattern? Another "crutch" that we humans use that the AI never uses is tight spacing, so I assume no ICS, and limiting CXXC spacing would be in the spirit of the rules.

I'm reluctant to go down the path of banning everything that the AI doesn't do well - where do we draw the line? Turn on the governor? Automate our workers? We won't be using ICS - banning farms negates that - but planning our city sites properly is just superior strategy, not a crutch.