Enders Game 1: The Training Game Competition - Team 1

[Speaker]

I know what you mean about feeling hemmed in. I felt the same thing. We need to expand here and fast, and as soon as we get a granary done, we will do that. I think we are all on the same page when I say that we should choose the start that gives us the most flexibility in diplomacy, since all seem pretty good on the city level. With that, I am going to choose my own start, since we have the most technology and the most money in the bank, AND it will let us best avoid spoiler information. The only tribe that we know about that I hadn't found is the English, but we have a scout headed toward them in the west anyways. We will take our time with him, stepping onto hills or mountains if they are there, but will continue west and will probably find them in the next 10 turns. That is what I would have done anyways. Other than that, I will leave you guys on your own. I will let you each go twice before I go (since we are using my turn here). Here is the turn order:

Grimjack
Orbit
SHard
Infoman
Speaker (on the bench)

And here is the file. Good luck Grimjack! 24/48 rules start now.

PS- This is not to say that any of your starts wouldn't have been fine because they were all quite good. But this one will help us out the best toward our goal of learning diplomacy.

 

[SHard]

Good luck Grimjack! I haven't really got time to post my own dotmap, but I think your red dot is in a very good position and should probably be our second city. With the floodplain nearby it can possibly build workers? Obviously it wouldn't build them non-stop so maybe also military units, I am not sure. Continue with the exploration and trade obviously and once again good luck!

 

[Speaker]

One piece of advice: Specialization works very well. It would work very well if you could get our second city in a shield-rich area and build warriors and get our third city in a food-rich area and build workers, while our capital continues to build settlers. Your choice, of course.

 

[Grimjack]

Specialization seems to have been the key in most of the very successful SGs lately.

I will see what I can do. If I hear nothing else, I will let Moscow go on settler duty, and found first city on my proposed red dot. Second city probably near a lux, as I do not like to pay for something I can have for free.

Grimjack

A 'See it'. WIll 'Get it' in a couple of hours after I have work.

 

[Grimjack]

3050BC(0) Spend some time familiarizing myself with the map, checking city for MM opportunities. ( Not that I was expecting

to find any ) No trading opportunities either.

IBT: Quiet so you can hear a needle fall.

3000BC(1) Scout heading northwards climbs a mountain, and sees some orange smoke in the distance. Could it be another trieb ?

The suspence is killing the audience.

IBT: Chinese found a second city right north of our scout. He is not amused by possibly having to trek all around.

2950(2) Decide to disguise ourselves as AIs, and boldly trek right through the claimed territories. Our northwards scout

finds London, a miserable and foggy size 1 city. Londoners are knowledgable in some areas where our soothsayers have been

negligent. Alphabet,Wheel and Mysticism do the english know, while they DONT know Masonry and Warrior code. Not wishing to

give Lizzy a two for one deal, I trade Wheel for Masonry and 40 gold. I am hoping I can use WHeel to get enough money that I

can get alphabeth from LIzzy as well. I discover that Chinese has acquired Mysticism since last turn. Hmm. I get Mysticism

and 10 gold ( all he had ) for Wheel. Great, now we are only down ALphabet. Ragnar has 33 gold in his coffers, lets get them.

I get his 33 gold for Mysticims, but I cannot get even a 1 gpt from him. Sigh, not even 60 gold and Warrior Code can get

Lizzy to part with ALphabeth. While I can squeeze 10 gold out of Cleopatra for Mysticism, I do nto think Lizzy will mchange

her mind. I also cannot get any gpt from Cleopatra, so she does not get Mysticism. Fairly certain it is worth more than 9

gold even at fifth.
Also, there seems to be little point running a 20 turn minimum on Alphabet, since it is out there. Consider changing to Iron,

Poly or HOrseback instead. I thus switch to Iron working. We have some militaristic civs close by, but Poly is worthles for

anything but trade, and Horseback is mainly useful if we are about to fight.

IBT: Road finishes. Worker set to mine. Moscow grows.

2900BC(3) We have horses near by. They will be claimed in due time by growth of borders, or new cities.
I move our scouts out of the territories they had violated. No new techs about. Newly finished road allows us to get away

with not raising lux tax.

IBT: Nada

2850BC(4) Scout Scout Scout. Warrior code just went down in worth for Lizzy. Sell it for 25 just to make something. All the

rest Ais are too poor to afford anything. We are up wheel on most, and Mysticism on Cleo.

IBT: Moscow finish Granary and is set to settler. Settler is due in five, and Moscow grows in two. I set Moscow for growth in

five as well, since I would lose Granary bonus food when going down from size 7.

2800BC(5) SCouting and Looking for deals Ragnra is now up to four cities.

2710BC(6) MOre scouting.

2670BC(7) Our most western scouts spot someone who calls himself the Ottomans. He doesn't have money, nor does he have many

techs. He does not even have pottery. Since he only has 10 gold, he still wont have any techs. Ack, Egyptians must have met

some backwards but rich tribe, as they now have both Wheel and Mysticism, and some money besides. Should have traded them

Mysticism for her 14 gold last turn. Time to divert a scout and see if we can find this goldmine of an AI. Wheel is now

spread around. I am wondering if I should have sold it for a pittance. I am hesitant to sell techs for 10 gold though. In a

sneaky move I picked up in an SG I followed, I GIFT Ottomans 15 gold. Then I trade them Mysticism for their now 25 gold. And

they get to polite.

IBT: Settler completes, Moscow goes to size 5, and we set it for worker. We will need a worker or two to keep up. I take a

chance and sends out our settler unescorted towards red dot. I will look forward to settling this city, as our economy will

pick up tremendously.

2590BC(8) None of the other cities have picked up Alphabet yet, but it is only a matter of time. I will not buy at expensive

seconds. Still think I did right in switching research though. Lux lowered to 30%

IBT: Nada

2550BC(9) Scouting. ONe scout heads back east, in order to find the contact Egypt must have made there somewhere.

IBT: MOscow completes worker, and is set to settler. Worker is sent to road and Mine wheat, since there will be a citizen on

that square during the next hundred turns or so.

2550BC(10) Settler reaches red dot. It says settler in five, but it is really settler in four, as we will get extra shields

when Moscow grows,Ragnar has discovered Iron working.He does not want to sell it for anything though. Ha has not sold it to

the AIs eitrher.




Save: http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/EG1-Team1-2510BC.zip

 

[Speaker]

@Grimjack: Looks good upon first glance. In-depth comments to come. We are now fully into expansion mode. Before Orbit goes, everyone should take this blank map and create a dotmap. Save it as "EG1-Team1-Yourname-Dotmap.jpg" and post it back here. As soon as everyone posts their dotmap and we come to a consensus, then Orbit's 24/48 will begin.

 

[SHard]

EDIT: Picture is uploaded now

Ok here is my attempt at a dotmap. Comments below.

City placement is a real weakness for me so I am pleased we are doing exercises like these.



Notice my slight paranoia when it comes to citiy radiuses overlapping. I am not a fan of ICS and generally will spread cities four tiles apart (CxxxC).

Brown Dot - Moscow
Black Dot - Next City

My reasons for placement:

Purple Dot - Placed on the hill so as not to waste too much grassland. It is on freshwater which is a bonus and has good production in the two bonus grasslands nearby. The hills won't be used until later and so maybe this isn't our strongest site.

Green Dot - Ok the green dot is where it is so that it can share the wheat with Moscow. If Moscow becomes a settler factory however we may not be able to share the wheat with the green dot. It's on the coast, but not on freshwater. If it was shunted one tile North it would be on the river but IMHO too close to Moscow. I think if this were able to share the wheat it would be my #1 choice as a possible worker factory as it has two bonus grasslands within its range.

Dark Blue Dot - On the forest, maybe we could found on plains and save the forest for a chop? I actually I am undecided as to how much use the 10 shields from a forest chop actually are and I thought where it was it could use the bonus grassland tile that it will share with the green dot. It could go closer to Moscow but I like it on the coast.

Red Dot - I wanted this 4 tiles maximum from the black dot. I know it would better on jungle than on forest from the point of view of the free clearance of the tile but I don't want it that far away. Obviously the wheat is the main motivation for this city and I wanted it within its non-expanded borders. On the coast also.

Teal Dot - In close to Moscow so as to maximise the amount of decent tiles it can use. I did not want to land it out in the middle of the jungle. It is on freshwater which is good.

Yellow Dot - On the jungle and on the coast. It will have some grassland to work early on until that jungle is cleared and it claims those horses for us once and for all.

Light Blue Dot - Just really there to acknowledge we want to get those spices. On freshwater, but could perhaps afford to be shunted inwards so it was closer to other cities. The overlap won't really affect it.

 

[Speaker]

Comments for Grimjack: Overall a VERY good turn. Masterful trading (with the exception of one possible mistake) and excellent city management. You have left us in good shape.

Decide to disguise ourselves as AIs, and boldly trek right through the claimed territories.

Bravo! Non-military units can move through AI territory without any problem. They may or may not ask you to leave on turn one, but will not bother you again. Any negative attitude they develop as a result will be gone as soon as you move the unit out of their territory if not sooner.

Our northwards scout finds London, a miserable and foggy size 1 city.

Woah, how did you find the English.

Not wishing to give Lizzy a two for one deal, I trade Wheel for Masonry and 40 gold.

What were the other possible deals. Generally, you shouldn't worry about helping the AI, especially at this early date. If they do not get Warrior Code from you, they will no doubt get it from someone else soon or they will quickly research it. More important is to make every deal you can to keep up. Getting 40 gold works well enough, however, in that it always helps to have a healthy treasury early to buy tech.

I get his 33 gold for Mysticims, but I cannot get even a 1 gpt from him.

If the AI is running no budget surplus (which they usually are in the early game), they have no gpt to trade. You shouldn't expect to get gpt from the AI until the Medieval Age.

Fairly certain it is worth more than 9 gold even at fifth.

This is often a tough decision, since the AI rarely pays market value in the early going, but you did well here.

Also, there seems to be little point running a 20 turn minimum on Alphabet, since it is out there. Consider changing to Iron, Poly or HOrseback instead. I thus switch to Iron working. We have some militaristic civs close by, but Poly is worthles for anything but trade, and Horseback is mainly useful if we are about to fight.

Bravo again! Don't feel bad wasting the beakers already spent on Alphabet (especially since there were so few beakers invested anyways). I might have chosen Poly instead of Iron Working because IW will definitely be widespread in 40 turns while Poly may not, but at this point, I don't know if any research project will finish.

Warrior code just went down in worth for Lizzy. Sell it for 25 just to make something.

Very astute diplomacy. This is necessary to win on Emperor and moreso Deity.

All the rest Ais are too poor to afford anything.

When you control most of the world's money, you can slow down the tech race. Isn't it nice?

I set Moscow for growth in five as well, since I would lose Granary bonus food when going down from size 7.

No! This is a common misconception about granaries. When a size 7 city builds a settler and drops to size 5, it maintains a half-filled foodbox. To confirm this, even though I know it to be true, I made a simple scenario and it is definitely true. If you are talking about more food being kept than half the box, and avoided growing Moscow so the luxury tax could be kept down, then good move.

In a sneaky move I picked up in an SG I followed, I GIFT Ottomans 15 gold. Then I trade them Mysticism for their now 25 gold. And they get to polite.

Credit goes to the sneaky Cartouche Bee here. He performed this move in the defunct CF2 and impressed all of us involved with the game. If I recall correctly, however, he decided that the effects were not permanent, but a better attitude in the short term can't hurt...

Moscow goes to size 5, and we set it for worker. We will need a worker or two to keep up.

Very good! I think we should probably alternate between settlers and workers, especially considering the huge amount of jungle we have to clear. Let's make sure that we move the workers from Moscow to our next city site as soon as these two roads finish. Moscow does not need any more irrigation or mines to produce a settler every 4 turns and a worker every 2 turns, so let's not waste worker turns on tile improvements we do not need. This is directed at everyone by the way, not just Grimjack.

I will not buy at expensive seconds.

Very smart. We are in no rush to buy Alphabet.

Ragnar has discovered Iron working.He does not want to sell it for anything though. Ha has not sold it to the AIs eitrher.

Don't worry, he will. IW is prioritized by the AI, so our research probably should have gone to Polytheism. It would not be a bad move to switch it now.

 

[Grimjack]

quote:Not wishing to give Lizzy a two for one deal, I trade Wheel for Masonry and 40 gold.


What were the other possible deals. Generally, you shouldn't worry about helping the AI, especially at this early date. If they do not get Warrior Code from you, they will no doubt get it from someone else soon or they will quickly research it. More important is to make every deal you can to keep up. Getting 40 gold works well enough, however, in that it always helps to have a healthy treasury early to buy tech.

The other deals was whatever tech I wanted from Lizzy for both of ours. She would also include 10 coins, all she had. Still only one tech though.


quote:I set Moscow for growth in five as well, since I would lose Granary bonus food when going down from size 7.


No! This is a common misconception about granaries. When a size 7 city builds a settler and drops to size 5, it maintains a half-filled foodbox. To confirm this, even though I know it to be true, I made a simple scenario and it is definitely true. If you are talking about more food being kept than half the box, and avoided growing Moscow so the luxury tax could be kept down, then good move.

Ahh, ok. I thought we would lose the granary food when we went from 7 to 5. Then I lost us 3 coins. Sorry about that. ( some food and shields too, but they would have been lost anyway. )

I will see what I can do about a dotmap.

Grimjack

 

[Grimjack]

I will see if I can post a dotmap later when I get home.

For now, My proposed dotmap, in words would be:


In order of priority,
Red first, for a shield heavy producer. Then LIght blue dots. Either horses if we want to go military, or Luxes if we want to get ourselves money. My proposal would be horses first, as it would be realatively simple to get this city profuctive. After this Luxes, as we then would have the worker force needed to connect them in short order. It depends somewhat on AIs though. We do NOT want to let AIs snag the luxes in the jungle.

And Finally the grey dots, to complete the circle.

After this, I suggest we aim for Ragnars lands. They would look much better in Chinese Baby blue.

Grimjack

 

[SHard]

Hehe, I had the same problem with uploads Grimjack. It turned out the image was bigger than 3MB. This may be your problem also. To fix this just reduce the size of the image by cutting off the meaingless pieces of land which do not affect your dotmap. This should bring it below 3MB. Hope this helps

 

[Speaker]

Yikes, a 2.4mb file! My 28.8 modem (I don't know know how my parents can live like this. I'll be back on cable in a few days) takes forever to download. The dotmap I made was only 224kb and the original blank map was only 201kb. Any idea why yours is so big SHard?

 

[SHard]

I don't know why it was so big Speaker. I made it in paint and it doesn't give an option to quality of image. I re-did the dotmap in Photoshop and it came out at a cool 82kb. I hope that is kinder to your modem. It actually looks better done on Photoshop anyway.

 

[Speaker]

@ SHard and Grimjack: Thanks so much for your avid participation so far.

@ Orbit and Infoman: I hate to be blunt, but I am becoming a little disappointed in you for not posting a word in several days. It is bad sucession game ettiquette to be so absent without explanation, and especially so since this is a training game. How do you expect to get better if you are not participating in the discussion and excercises. Further, you are holding back the progress of your teammates because I cannot comment on their dotmaps until you either post yours or at least say that you are not going to post one. Training Games require a lot of your time and effort, and if you are too busy to make the commitment, please say so now. Phew, rant aside, hoping to hear from you soon...

 

[Bam-Bam]

lurker's comment:

@SHard--for your HUGE map file, was it saved as a bitmap vice jpeg? That makes a huge diff in the file size, and AFAIK, paint defaults to bitmaps.

[lurk]

 

[Speaker]

*Sigh* I don't know what to do here. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'd hate to drop two players, but what can I do if they refuse to check in and at least say what they are up to?

 

[Orbit]

Sorry, my computer has been giving me trouble the last few days. I'll post a dotmap later tonight. I'm sorry for slowing this down.

Edit: Here's my dotmap.
Note: The small dots next to the main city dots are alternate city placements

1. Blue- An obvious choice, even for me. It'll be a major shield-production city, no-brainer for our second city.

2. Red- This should be our third city. Looks to be a good shield coastal city, with only two tiles of overlap.
--2a. Pink dot. Less overlap with our second city, but gains a tile of overlap (BG Tile) of our capital. Fewer shields.

3. Green- Three spices, mountains, hills, and a BG. Once the jungle is cleared out, it'll be a great city.
--3a. That isn't a dot; I changed my mind on the dot after I placed it, and had to do that because of MSpaint lack of editing


4. Teal- Not a great city, but it's still good. Wheat, a hill, and hopefully a few BG under the jungle.
--4a, Orange, after reviewing the dotmap I made, this spot would be better for a city, it loses the wheat, but it gains so much more.

5. Pink- Once again, once the jungle is cleared out, it'll be a productive city. Plus, there are 3 gems in the unexplored area, and if IIRC, we can grab one with this city.
-- 5a We could steal all three gems here, but we'll lose two hills in "lost territory".

6. Yellow- Very low on the scale, this'll probably be a post-war with the Vikings city.

I'm sorry I couldn't post this early.

 

[Grimjack]

So, all three of us agree on at least two city-sites.

1) Next city to be founded where settler is now,

and one city to be founded in the forest on our south coast.

Would be interesting to see what Speaker says about the northern/eastern parts of the land

Grimjack

( If we have four players, we can continue. Maybe you have a standby. Ultimately, it is your decision SPeaker, since it is you who has offered to spend your valuable time helping us to hopefully become better players. )

 

[SHard]

Originally posted by Bam-Bam
lurker's comment:

@SHard--for your HUGE map file, was it saved as a bitmap vice jpeg? That makes a huge diff in the file size, and AFAIK, paint defaults to bitmaps.

[lurk]

lurker's comment:

Ah, this could possibly be the reason. I saved it as a .jpg, but paint does have an obsession with bitmaps.

Originally posted by Grimjack
Would be interesting to see what Speaker says about the northern/eastern parts of the land

Yep, and also what he thinks of me squeezing in another city to the east of Moscow to try and share the wheat. It has 6 tiles of overlap with Moscow, but I don't think this is a huge problem.

 

[Speaker]

@ Infoman: I am sorry Infoman, but with only two posts in a week, and a failure to participate in either of my two exercises without giving explanation, I am going to be forced to drop you from the game. Sorry.