CG7 - Diety Attempt!

[jack merchant]

I'd say play 15, but it's your SG I'm sorry to have been impatient, but I had to play the first turns anyway and my v1.14 should be as good as yours

(I started this afternoon my time; otherwise I wouldn't have had time to do the report and dotmap.)

Feel free to make adjustments to the dotmap as you like; it's a suggestion, not the gospel. However, if you're going to go with a southern dot as the third city, I'd take black over white (long live the dark side ! ) as it will be far quicker to get off the ground (bonus grasslaand over plains - no competition). The reason for the northern dots first is that we cannot count on getting those; however, we should be fairly sure of getting the peninsular dots. It's important to grab as much land as possible, even if it doesn't appear profitable at first. Who knows, light blue might be our FP !

Please monitor Beijing's happiness situation very closely, and don't let it grow to size 7 ! Seeing as it grows so fast, you'll need to check the slider almost every turn.

 

[cgannon64]

Originally posted by jack merchant
I'd say play 15, but it's your SG I'm sorry to have been impatient, but I had to play the first turns anyway and my v1.14 should be as good as yours

I'll play 15 to get to a nice round number, and from now on its 20 until they get too long.

Feel free to make adjustments to the dotmap as you like; it's a suggestion, not the gospel. However, if you're going to go with a southern dot as the third city, I'd take black over white (long live the dark side ! ) as it will be far quicker to get off the ground (bonus grasslaand over plains - no competition). The reason for the northern dots first is that we cannot count on getting those; however, we should be fairly sure of getting the peninsular dots. It's important to grab as much land as possible, even if it doesn't appear profitable at first. Who knows, light blue might be our FP !

Please monitor Beijing's happiness situation very closely, and don't let it grow to size 7 ! Seeing as it grows so fast, you'll need to check the slider almost every turn.

OK, you convinced me. My order, if I get this far, will probably be Light Blue, Black, and White, and then on from there. I know its importent to get some far out cities first, but its good to build up the core too.

(Oh, and I was suggesting White over Black because of the river but, after all, we're guarenteed both of them!)

Off to play now.

EDIT: My brother has a 10-page paper he left for the last day, so you can be guarenteed that he'll be on the PC all night. But...don't fear! I'm taking this as an opportunity to install Civ3, PTW, and 1.14 on my laptop. So, I'll be playing in like 40 minutes after I install all that stuff.

 

[cgannon64]

I have Civ3 and PTW installed on the laptop, but I'm having trouble getting PTW 1.14 patch, because the Firaxis website seems to only have 1.21.

Does anyone know where I can get US English 1.14 patch?

 

[Hygro]

why, on this site!

 

[cgannon64]

Originally posted by Hygro
why, on this site!

Yeah yeah, I just didn't want to dig up the News Archives for the mirror.

EDIT: Patched and playing.

 

[cgannon64]

Good turns except for the loss of a Settler. I feel so stupid!!!

[Inherited Turn] Seeing that Blue border up North really changed my mind about the city placement, Jack.

[2750 BC - Turn 1] I look at our tech situtation. Yikes. I have to get used to Diety!

[2710 BC - Turn 2] Settler built, Archer started. Settler/Warrior stack moves out.

[2670 BC - Turn 3] Beijing riots. I go into super-MM mode for Diety. Lux adjusted and Sci adjusted - we're doing 34 turns and +1gpt a turn. Ouch. Well, we only have one rioted city, so...

[2630 BC - Turn 4] A Pink border found in the NW! Beijing comes into peaceful order.

[2590 BC - Turn 5] Nothing much. Econ at 32 turns/+2gpt. Apparently Arabia saw us, and we have contact! They have Bronze, Wheel, Alphabet, and Cerimonial while Korea has the exact same techs! Argh...a middleman's nightmare!

[2550 BC - Turn 6] Archer->Settler in Beijing. Aw...damn it! I just noticed that one of our Warriors accidentally got caught up in the warrior/Settler stack. Damn it! He'll pop a hut and then come back...grr. My luck is bad today. He pops a deserted hut. A brown border seen to the East. Boy, we're in the center of the world, aren't we?

[2510 BC - Turn 7] We have contact with Russia; I guess they saw our Warrior. They have the same 4 techs as everyone else.

[2470 BC - Turn 8] Nothing much. Settler in 1.

[2430 BC - Turn 9] Settler->Worker in Beijing.

[2390 BC - Turn 10] A Barb Horse and Warrior move into range of our Settler/Archer. I must say, stacking them with Archers was a good idea! The Archer attacks and kills the Horse. We pop nothing, again, from a Barb Hut. Its better than Barbs, I guess. Shanghai (Light Blue dot) founded in the North. Wang wants 2gpt and 18g for Bronze Working, and I gladly accept. I'll be happy to get whatever techs we can at this point. We're researching Iron Working at 40 turns/2gpt.

[2350 BC - Turn 11] NOOO!!! A Barb comes out of the shadows and kills our Settler and our Worker!!! (The Archer moved to kill the Horse and left the Settler undefended) Beijing goes to Worker->Settler.

[2310 BC - Turn 12] Wow! Yellow and Green troops move into view. I contact the Zulu and the Celts. The Zulu have the usual tech while the Celts have Wheel and Burial while we have Masonry. Hmm...I sense opportunity! We get Burial and 25g for Masonry. We can't trade Burial to anyone, but then again, we couldn't trade Wheel either because everyone has it. The evil Barb camp is found.

[2270 BC - Turn 13] I attack the Barb Camp and lose.

[2230 BC - Turn 14] Nothing.

[2190 BC - Turn 15] Warrior->Spear in Shanghai. Settler->Spear in Beijing. The Settler moves South to the Black Dot.

[Final Notes] I think the prospect of Diety siked me out here, I really didn't play up to par. I should have retreated that Settler rather then left him open, NEVER would have done that. Anyway, some notes: Build on the Black Dot and I suggest the White Dot and Red Dot next. And, whatever you do, don't be stupid like me and lose a SETTLER!!!!!

I beleive Aggie is up. Here is the save:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/CG7_2190BC.sav

Hope you do better than I do.

 

[Shillen]

We're in really bad shape right now. That's what I get for not reading the forums yesterday. I don't agree with the order of founding of cities. That light blue dot is of little value and hurts us very badly early on. It took us way too long to get the second city online and it's not even a very valuable city. Flood plains cities are slow starters due to having no production capacity. I would have settled yellow dot first to use Beijing's cattle. Then red dot to claim the silks before Korea did. Then green dot to get the wines hooked up so we can lower lux. Then you could go for light blue, but I'd probably still go for black. We need to get those core cities up and going fast.

The archer idea sounds good to me. I actually haven't played a deity game where the barbs weren't sedentary or off. I do know they're very hard to deal with on emperor and even worse on deity. I've also observed the same behavior as speaker...you have to attack them or they'll just harrass you.

The very high food start is a mixed blessing which you seem to have noticed now. It's hard to prevent the city from growing too fast, and also produce escorts/military between settlers. You end up having to pay high lux tax early on too. I believe getting yellow dot online really quickly would have helped greatly with this though.

Techs, I don't like what we did with those. I've found researching pottery at max is just too slow on deity. I do it on emperor or lower, but on deity I leave science off during the opening turns (unless we have starting techs that allow us to research a second tier tech). An early granary isn't absolutely necessary, especially on deity where you aren't going to get many cities anyway (you need a lot of cities for the granary to pay off). Bronze working at max was just major . I would have kept research at 0 until we were able to research math or poly, then I would have gone for those. I'd suggest we turn science off right now. Researching a tech the AI already has at 10% is a huge waste. It's a devalued tech and researching at 40 turns isn't worth it.

Exploration. 4 warriors was a real waste. I assume you did that mostly to give time to finish pottery for a granary. Like I said I don't think a granary right away is worth it on deity, unless you start with pottery or trade for it early. Even with those 4 warriors we didn't get contacts fast enough. Most of the civ's contacted us, and had already traded techs around which makes it really hard to catch up. I don't see any black near our capital so it seems you explored around our area way too much. You should have sent a warrior due north, then another one due east. When the eastern one hit the coast it should have followed it north. I guess having 2 expansionist civ's on the map sure didn't help with beating the AI's to contacts.

I think this game might end up being a restart pretty soon. But we're definitely not out of it yet, so let's see what we can do. Btw do we have 7 opponents or 6?

 

[Aggie]

I should have said this yesterday evening (but I had a lot of PBEM's to play). I think that we should have settled close by first and later look for the other two dots.

Any disruption in the early Deity game can be killing. Even the riot of Beijng for one turn is something we hardly can afford. Let alone having a settler killed.

CG, don't feel bad and see this as a learning experience. Deity is really really difficult, even compared with Emperor. MM is very important and also you have to follow a certain way of playing more than at emperor.

But let's just play further as if nothing bad happened and see if we can get out of this. We did wonders in Hot3.

Jack Merchant: could you sent me the save of the starting position? Should we have to abandon this game, then I would like to play from the start for myself.

 

[jack merchant]

Didn't we build red dot first ? That was what I suggested, but I apparently misunderstood CG's last post before he played and didn't comment - sorry about that. Yellow dot over red dot first might indeed have been better, however red dot wouldn't have let us claim silks right away as was suggested. It needed a temple for those. I doubt that having the lux online earlier would have done us enough good to warrant changing the city build order.

I very much disagree with light blue dot being a waste - a flood plains city can just whip up stuff that is needed and claim territory whereas otherwise we would be boxed in earlier. Remember that we need enough cities for an FP to stay competitive. Also, you can bet that if we didn't claim the northern two cities first, the Koreans might found a city in range to actually steal red dot's silks (I have seen the AI do that often enough).

On the topic of a high food start -I could not disagree more. Sure it takes a higher lux tax to keep happy, but we still have us a superb settler factory in Beijing, particularly due to the granary. Sure it requires monitoring every other turn (it didn't riot on my turn), but that settler factory will/would have let us found the other cities much more quickly (my experience is that you overtake the non-granary growth rate by the third or fourth city). Having those other cities online earlier would improve our cities to the point where we could buy our way up back to something resembling parity. There is nothing unusual about being behind by as much as we seem to be this early in the game.

However, I agree with bronze working being a mistake. There was, at that point, no good choice available for tech research (there was no second-level tech availble to research at min sci yet). Alphabet @ min would have been better. We should now focus on buying alphabet or mysticism and go for min sci on mathematics/polytheism.

On the extra warrior and the direction of exploration being a mistake; I agree and pointed out as much in my turn report. I also pointed out why I built it. We might possibly have met Arabia earlier if I had sent the second warrior NW and that was on my part.

We are nowhere near out of this one yet - we have a good amount of land available for settlement (there is one less AI civ), and if we find a better way to deal with the barb menace, our settler factory will allow us to build more cities pretty quickly.

edit: @CG Don't feel too bad - you recognized your mistakes. Playing deity simply requires extreme care, and being behind by several techs is normal at this level. We'll just merrily fight on - the setup of this particular game is forgiving enough that losing that settler isn't the death blow it would otherwise have been. Just don't make a habit out of it However, I would say that you opened too many huts - on deity, the odds of getting anything good of those if you're not expansionist are rather poor.

 

[Shillen]

-Jack Merchant

(my experience is that you overtake the non-granary growth rate by the third or fourth city)

That's not true. There was a post in general discussions a while ago where someone posted an analysis of this. I doubt I could find it now but it was something like the 7th or 8th city where the granary started paying off. The 4th-6th is still playing catchup, because while you were building the granary you could have built 2 settlers. I think on a standard map in deity there just isn't enough land to grab. You did a good job if you get 8 cities total.

-Jack Merchant

I very much disagree with light blue dot being a waste - a flood plains city can just whip up stuff that is needed and claim territory whereas otherwise we would be boxed in earlier. Remember that we need enough cities for an FP to stay competitive. Also, you can bet that if we didn't claim the northern two cities first, the Koreans might found a city in range to actually steal red dot's silks (I have seen the AI do that often enough).

How does light blue dot make us less boxed in? We take longer to get our settler there, which causes us to get fewer cities overall. Don't doubt the AI will run down and put a city next to our core if we don't settle it fast enough. This actually hurts our chance of getting an FP because it slows down our city founding. I suggested red dot second, and I think that would have been plenty of time to get those silks before the Koreans. I don't disagree about the value of red dot, but the light blue city is pretty weak and I don't see anything warranting delaying our 2nd or 3rd city by that much.

And being this far behind is not normal. The AI's are not 4 techs ahead of us, they're more than 4 techs ahead of us. They have horseback riding at least since we've already encountered horsemen. We missed all the trade opportunities and we can't even buy any of the techs at 6th civ prices. I'm not saying it's impossible to still catch up, but I definitely wouldn't call this normal. But I think the main reason is 3 out of the 5 civ's we've met are expansionist. I bet they've been popping techs out of huts like crazy too.

-Jack Merchant

I doubt that having the lux online earlier would have done us enough good to warrant changing the city build order.

I assume you're talking about the wines city here? I would agree with you, if it didn't have great value other than picking up the luxury. It's also a core city right next to our capital that with a little irrigation will help get our military going quickly. Now if someone suggested running out and settling on top of the silks then I'd say yeah it's not worth doing, but the wines city is a different story.

I'm sorry if anything I've said sounds harsh. I'm not trying to put blame on anyone or anything. I'm just trying to discuss strategies that I believe we should have and should use. Hell I've definitely had my share of worse starts than this on deity. I'm not a veteran civ player or anything.

 

[Speaker]

[More hopefully helpful comments from a lurker]

An often overlooked benefit of an early granary is that your capital is in flux from size 7 to 5 and back or size 6 to 4 and back instead of size 3 to 1 and back. This lets you accumulate much more money, which lets you buy tech. It is also much more dificult to accumulate 30 shields from size 1 to 3 without growing to 4 in the process, and that would be a waste of time.

 

[Aggie]

@Shillen: JM and I had to explain why we said what we said last night. Our comments may have persuaded CG to choose a certain strategy. So we are had a different tone in our comments. We were not in a position to judge.

I agree with most of your comments and appreciate how you bring it up. In fact, I love the discussion about this, because that is the way to learn.

I must say that I didn't see the thread about the granaries at GD. However, from experience I can say that there's a lot of misinformation in that forum. This might have been a very useful thread, but now you know why I don't visit GD that much these days. It was the first time that I read serious arguments about not building the granary though.

 

[Shillen]

Who says it has to fluctuate between 1 and 3? You can fluctuate it between any 2 numbers you want it to. Also, going between 7 and 5 with a granary is very bad because when you reach size 7 your granary empties. So if you have a granary you have to be careful not to reach size 7 ever, that includes building a settler the same turn as hitting size 7. With a granary you pretty much always want to go between 4 and 6, because if you fluctuate at a lower number you won't produce enough shields to get a settler every 4 turns. While without a granary you could go between 3 and 5 and possibly keep the lux slider down 10% more. So whatever economical benefit you'd get with the granary is gone. Also the granary requires 1 gpt upkeep.

Also most of my experience comes from huge maps. On a huge map/deity game pottery is going to take 35-40 turns even at 100% the entire time. It took 22 turns in this game which isn't that bad. But on the other hand you don't get to build as many cities so it's harder to make the granary pay off. Even if I did research pottery I probably would have built a settler before a granary, to settle yellow dot. Then I would have started a granary in yellow dot as well after building a worker.

 

[jack merchant]

No worries about sounding harsh - your points are well-taken. We - to some extent - disagree, that's all I'm not a veteran deity player either, although I have won 2 games on it now (and I will claim my small share of the credit for Hot3 and LK43 when they are won ). But every game is different and there certainly was no shortage of in my turn.

I still disagree about the granary growth rate thing - the post you referred was about the growth rate in a different type of terrain. We now have a city that can pump out settlers every 4 turns, at least two turns faster than it could otherwise. Also, remember that there is one less AI civ, which leaves us with a little more terrain. However, if there had been an AI civ closer by, I would probably have dispensed with the granary.

(on reflection, catchup with granary is probably faster in a food-poor environment. With the granary though, we can slip in a worker or 2 in between without the growth rate being set back by too much. I am coming around to your way of thinking that dispensing with the granary might have been better)

Doing the math , we need 8 cities for an FP - the ring around our capital gives us 7. Which means that we did need at least one of the northern dots to be eligible for the FP. With the distance that still exists between us and the AI's, we don't get fewer cities because the settler took longer to get to light blue dot. I would have to look at the save to judge, though.

On the tech front, I don't know where the AIs are right now. Our first warrior went almost straight north and still took over 20 turns to make contact with anyone else. It's missing Arabia that hurts, but I can't tell how fast we could have met them. I doubt we could have met them fast enough from our starting position to get 'in between' them and the other AIs with their scouts and extra starting units running around. And yes, they probably popped a few huts. Our economy will improve as more cities are built. There is no rush to catch up - if we catch up by the time the competition for ToE heats up, I'll be happy enough .

On the city build order, I am beginning to think you may be right about white being a priority now. We should, in that case, divert the setttler from black to white and get those wines online and keep lux a notch lower.

 

[Shillen]

Well I found the post I was referring to, but I remembered it wrong. It was a 4 food surplus city and the granary payed off on the 5th settler. But it's also assuming you have pottery from the start of the game. The post is here. If you really want to read an in depth discussion about granaries then read the thread Bamspeedy links to, Why granaries don't work.

 

[Renata]

*edit* Got beat to the punch. I'll leave the last comment in, though.

<delurk>The funniest thing in that thread, though, is right at the end, with Shillen protesting that he's no deity player.

(I did the same thing, but with just one deity start to date, it's arguably still true!)

</delurk>

Renata

 

[Shillen]

-Jack Merchant

With the distance that still exists between us and the AI's, we don't get fewer cities because the settler took longer to get to light blue dot. I would have to look at the save to judge, though.

This depends on if we build all settlers from Beijing or if we build settlers in other cities. I figure if we settled yellow dot first like I suggested(with access to the cattle), that city would have been able to build 1 or 2 settlers. So therefore by settling light blue dot first it would slow down our city founding.

 

[Shillen]

-Renata

The funniest thing in that thread, though, is right at the end, with Shillen protesting that he's no deity player.

I wasn't at the time!

 

[jack merchant]

Not having pottery at the start of the game didn't slow down our granary, as I just used the Pyramids as a prebuild instead.

What I found interesting in those two threads ( thanks for the links, Renata and Shillen ! ) is that the growth rate trend appears to be in the direction of granaries being even more effective when there is more food around. However, it might go the other way again when there's an obscene amount of food around, such as, erm, 3 cattle. However, by MM'ing the city around, we can get the magic +5 food (below capacity for growth) but get a lot more production.

I'm going to look and see if we can get +7 food and 10 spt for settlers every three turns. (on further edit, we would have to let Beijing grow by far too much for this to be workable)

on edit, I totally forgot to take into account the possibility of building settlers from yellow dot That might change the equation, though I can't tell by how much.

 

[Aggie]

Shillen, could you please mention who you quote when you quote? There's a lot to read here and it's confusing when you don't.

Thanks.