Catherine of Russia - Who wants to Play?

[Harv]

Meanwhile in the other continent, I do not know how civilizations are chosen. I assume it is choose civilization, then choose leader. If that is the case, I believe......

40% probability the Celts are in the game. After that, there is a list of 9 more civilizations:
America
Sioux
Persia
Zulu
Greeks (Alexander)
Inca
Spain
Aztecs
Holy Roman Empire

The charismatic leader is either the Celts, or American, or Cyrus of Persia. So maybe the distribution is:

3/7 - Celts
2/7 - America
2/7 - Persia

 

[Fippy]

Point taken, but it's a bit pointless calculation cos your move was net+
Other things matter early.

 

[Jellybug]

"You kind of know, when you meet Napoleon [editor's note: JC and Ragnar] turn five that you're not going to be building a whole lot of universities in the game" - Lain

 

[Harv]

"You kind of know, when you meet Napoleon [editor's note: JC and Ragnar] turn five that you're not going to be building a whole lot of universities in the game" - Lain

This is exactly what happened when in my last game with Perikles, except we built tons of universities, because I am still a shameless building spammer.

We had a continent with Napoleon and Genghis Khan and I still have not developed a diplomacy game.

 

[Jellybug]

it's such a tantalizing start, near marble, godly bureau site. until you find out you're about to get eiffel towered by ancient jingos

 

[Harv]

it's such a tantalizing start, near marble, godly bureau site. until you find out you're about to get eiffel towered by ancient jingos

Eiffel Towered by ancient gigolos?

Okay, we're up to Turn 25. We got Bronze Working, but no Copper anywhere. We explored a little bit more, then secured what will be our second city.

Spoiler :

Questions:
Where exactly is this second city going to go?
What should we do with the Scout? The Warrior is going to light the way to this second city site.
What do we research now? I have Animal Husbandry, because roads are not important right now, and we should look for horsies.
I was planning to mine the hill sheep. It is still a good tile, but if we are going Animal Husbandry next, there might be a better option.
Chopping might be one of these options.

I think that's it for now.

 

[dankok8]

I may make a quick run at this map tonight if I get the chance. I saw the neighbours but didn't check any images so don't know the land etc.

 

[lymond]

"eiffel towered"....my eyes are watering

ah..anyway...as my laughing fit finally abates, I'd say AH is definitely the way to go....Settle next city back where you started for tile sharage.

I think I 2 popped the first settler

 

[Harv]

Okay, after building the sheep-mine, I decided the next two Warriors will be chopped as we grow Moscow to Size 4. So far this game, my history of making great calculations has been downright terrible. Meanwhile, on Turn 32, we founded St. Petersburg.

Spoiler :

What was Gummy warning me about making sure the Imperialistic Romans don't steal the Flood-Plains from us? Do we get any closer than that?!

Now, let's see if we can steal yet another city site from the Romans!

I am thinking about building the Worker in St. Petersburg first, because we will need Workers and we are not building one in Moscow. My current plan for Moscow is Warrior on Turn 34, Chopped Warrior on Turn 35, Whip the Settler on Turn 36.

We might have Animal Husbandry on Turn 36 if I figured it out correctly, and my history of that has been terrible this game.

 

[dankok8]

Quickly played to turn 75 (1000 BC). Very sloppy tempted to reload and go at it again but I'll try and push on. In pretty good position regardless.

Spoiler :

I SIP went Agri then AH then saw Horses in the BFC. Caesar is damn close so I figured I'd hit him with a Chariot rush before he can get Praets. If I stifle him I only gotta deal with Ragnar and that will be a fight to the death anyway. Hard to reason with that damn psycho although he founded Judaism so if I switch there's hope. After I went BW, Wheel, Pottery. BW to chop and whip, Wheel to connect Horses and Pottery for cottages. Capital built Worker, Warrior, Settler, Settler, Warrior, Worker, then chop Barracks and Chariots in an infinite loop...

Settled two cities one south to get Pigs and Gems other East to grab Corn and Sheep and tons of forests. However totally neglected barb defense around other two cities and my Pigs pasture got pillaged by a barb archer. That's inexcusable. After my Chariots built by a combo of chops and whips killed some barbs for XP, I saw poor Caesar in 1200 BC only had Archers still. If he had Praets I would have gone after Ragnar instead but he's more far away. No Copper anywhere on the map thus far and I don't have IW but don't think he has Iron. Went at his capital with 9 fast boys and took it with 1 loss.

Since I built so many Chariots and he has nothing better than Archers I can take one more city SW then take peace, come back with 8-10 cities later and Catapults and finish him off and have a ton of land to build a huge empire and power that to any kind of win. If I played more prudently could have been much better. Ragnar could derail me but with so much land to expand I doubt he'll be so set on wiping me out just yet.

Also realized that my southern city can't trade by river because I don't have Sailing. Very very sloppy.. I'm mad at myself LOL.

 

[lymond]

You don't seem to be aware of the 0% - 100% guideline.. Don't run slider at X% , run 0% research until you have enough gold to fund tech, once you hit deficit research. You need just 1 turn of that for AH.

In my view, mining the Sheep was not a good move here in expectation of AH. You basically spent those turns improving a tile that will very soon be replaced. Turns better spent having chopped forests. (All that might be different if one were to forgo AH for a while)

I do not like the new city building a worker first here. City should focus on growth for now.. build warrior there. Moscow very strong right now for workers settlers. When Moscow hits size 4 look to have Petes take corn for a while. You can balance sharing of this food as needed.

Rome did about the same thing as in my game. Went very different for JB.

 

[Jellybug]

I finished. Was a fun map.

Spoiler Spoilers :

Dom in 1852. The other continent is a barrel of monkeys.

 

[Harv]

Horsey, Horsey!
to Turn 37

I actually had to run through the scenario a few times, because I have not figured out the various combinations of chops and whips and Imperialism. I eventually went with chopping the next settler. I believe this means we get the settler on Turn 39 instead of Turn 37. I figured at Turn 37, I was going to end up with so much overflow, I would be forced to grow back with a Barracks, investing quite a few hammers in the early game. I would prefer to have more warriors.

The option for a two-pop whip is still open for a worker or settler. The idea of a two-pop whip on a worker has some more appeal right now, because we are working forest tiles right now.

Slider - I was planning to run the slider at 50%, then realized that I do not get to Animal Husbandry in 4 turns that way. It was going to take 5 turns. I also figured if I run the slider at 50% and the commerce count is even, then it works out the same. 12 commerce, 6 to treasury, net 4; 6 to science. Anyway, this was an easy fix. I just changed the slider back to 0 for one turn, exactly as you said.

Sheep mine - The sheep mine is 1f4h, compared to a pasture at 3f2h1c. While the sheep mine is up, we are trading 2f1c for 2h. With St. Petersburg running the dry corn, Moscow has a food surplus of 5 running the wet corn and sheep farm. It would have a food surplus of 7 with a sheep pasture. So I thought with a limited happy cap, we would be converting food into hammers. As a bonus, while we are producing settlers, the sheep mine is 1f6h, compared to 3f3h1c, so we trade 2f1c for 3h.

I will try to count the hammers I got from the sheep mine at two hammers per turn worked. I think I need 25 hammers to justify it, five worker turns at 5 hammers per worker turn, four turns per forest chop at 20 hammers per forest chop.


Here is the world so far.

Spoiler :

Settler versus Worker - I have a question. Animal Husbandry or no, should a Worker have been the next build instead of the Settler? I was planning to grab the desert tile to the north. It gets corn and pigs and closes off the east coast for us, where we have two spots for a city. I wanted to send the scout over to investigate the coast further and make sure I am not orphaning seafood resources that way.

Whatever the answer is to that question, a Worker should be next. We needed a worker a few turns ago.

The current turn is 37. We get the settler on Turn 39. If we ship the Worker, we get that on Turn 41. It is going to take a while for us to get to the Wheel. I stopped the game right here, because we researched Animal Husbandry, revealed the location of the Horse, and verify the wheel is next. We need it for Pottery, and we need Pottery for Granaries and Cottages.

The fourth city will be to the south, claiming the pigs and the gems, whenever we get around to iron working. This will leave a space for the Vikings with some very interesting bottlenecks. It also leaves that area to the west by the wheat to the Romans, but I do not believe we can claim that just yet. There is a bear lurking in that area. It drove our warrior around Lake Baikal in the Siberian Jungle, where we defeated a Panther and got enough exp for the Woodsman promotion. That might give us a decent advantage over a bear if we are defending a jungle hill.

After the fourth city, we will be broke until we can get some cities connected and cottages growing.

Added:
Hmm, I don't think a lake in the middle of a jungle would be crystal clear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal

 

[Harv]

I finished. Was a fun map.

Wow, that was fast! Hopefully I can get this map done in a month or so!

 

[lymond]

Trust me, once you hit deficit research the moment you settle your second city, you need to go with 0% or 100% for a bulk of the early game. We call it binary research and this has been explained and explored for many years. First off, there is a rounding issue in the game. Check your GPT vs. BPT at 0% and 10% research and you will clearly see what I mean. Later on in the game with beakers modifiers and stuff this disappears and you can play with things a bit, but generally you will always "acquire" the gold you need to fund a tech.

Second, binary is great at the time you start building libraries and the point the techs become more expensive. Basically hold a tech as a placeholder like Aesths, maybe Alpha or Maths..depends on difficulty really. Aeths is a common ploy on IMM+ for trading. Then you create a bank a gold to then run slider when libraries are in or at least a library or two.

Third, it helps fund expansion early.

Tad complex at first, but you get a feel for this the more you play and practice.

Later you have ways to get chunks of gold via Currency and the options it provides, plus fail gold. The intent is always to run research at 100% if one can.

Anyway, your logic at 50% or some X% is not sound since you are basically losing gold that you were not aware of previously.

 

[Jellybug]

@Harv re: JC settling in your face: I forgot to screencap the settler party slinking away but I just beat him to the spices. It was lucky... I was going for the corn share myself but the scout saw them coming so I audibled to the west. The idea was to protect the eventual capital with that buffer city without the buffer city being utter trash, but he wound up settling right on my border shortly after the save I posted anyway, meaning the new capital was exposed despite my efforts

@lymond I haven't seen the Nevsky film, would you recommend it? Burnt By the Sun and Stalker are absolute wallops. And there's a little movie called Courier that I simply adore, basically the closest thing the Soviets made to a stoner comedy.

 

[5tephen]

@Harv
How about 1W of the desert instead? You lose a grass tile and gain desert but pigs in first ring of culture meaning you can use them straight away and don't risk losing them to cultural pressure from the Romans if he settles on your border. In the long term you lose tundra and plains from your BFC too.
Later on you could put a city 1S3E of the dry corn and share the corn +/- sheep whilst developing culture and work boat for the fish.

I'm far from the best player so don't do what I suggest if you think otherwise or someone else disagrees!

I like 1N1E of southern pigs for city 4 but this won't be great if jungle grows on the pigs - is there a way of stopping jungle growing on pigs whilst it's outside cultural boundaries and cannot be pastured?

It's be good to know what's SE of Moscow if you have enough units to safely scout and fogbust.

 

[Harv]

I’m looking at a few things. Does anybody know how much progress Moscow has towards that settler?

I know it will finish in two turns, with that chop. I was thinking about whipping a worker in front of the settler. That delays the settler by one turn, but we get a worker sooner.

Then I still don’t know what to do with all that overflow. A third worker at size 2?

We still don’t have The Wheel, let alone Pottery, so there is only so much work to do. Pasturing that mine is on the list.

Added:
Going way back to Lymond’s idea of chopping the settler at size 2, it looks like we could have founded St. Petersburg on Turn 30 instead of Turn 32. I got fixed on the idea of 17 hammers per turn towards a settler at size 3.

 

[dankok8]

Binary research either 100% or 0% is kind of a must in the early game. Say your empire makes 67 commerce. You run 50% science slider. 50% of 67 is 33.5 but the game rounds down to 33 (fair IMO since you don't make the full 34) but the end result is that you get 33 beakers and 33 gold from 67 commerce so you lose one commerce. Mind you one commerce is not a huge deal but over 100 turns you could lose 50-100 commerce this way which could be as much as a couple of turns of research or a couple of extra turns of covering your expenses because gold pays for city maintenance, unit cost, unit supply, civics costs, inflation.

Another important thing is the difference between commerce and gold. Took me a while to understand that. Commerce is made by cottages, trade routes etc. and this is the total income your civ makes before it's put through the slider. Gold is what comes out of the slider (in the early game basically everything you don't put at science comes out as gold; later you also have espionage and culture). Note that gold you earn from trades or from holy shrines doesn't go through the slider and just adds to your bottom line. Science specialists add beakers without going through the slider which is why it's imperative to have Writing if your economy completely crashes so you can run scientists and make beakers even at 0% research. So while shrines and trade income don't generate extra beakers because their input doesn't go through the slider they increase your gold so you can afford to run up your slider. But generally speaking how far up you run your slider doesn't indicate how well you're doing. If your empire is making 1000 commerce at turn 200 and you run 50% science that's 500 beakers and a lot better than an empire that is making 500 commerce and running at 80% science because that's 400 beakers. That's why land is power and you should be willing to take on maintenance costs as long as you know how to mitigate them to an extent because once you fix your economy your large empire will research better than your small empire ever could. And of course a large empire with dominate in production. There are exceptions like building cities on other landmasses because they just cost an insane amount due to colonial maintenance etc. Notice that late in the game the rounding leading to loss of one beaker is not a big deal because techs cost in thousands of beakers so it's too insignificant to worry about so it's ok to run the slider at any %.

 

[Harv]

In the case I showed, my commerce was at 12, so 50% of that is 6 and there is no rounding issue. When I get home, I will run a two-turn experiment.

0% followed by 100% will yield 12 gold, less 4 in expenses for a net of 8. The science investment is 0, followed by 12 and I think that totals 1 and 18 for 19.

Two turns at 50% will give the same amount of gold. The 6 invested into science turns into 9 or 10? I will check.

My original thought was I could get AH four turns later, not five.