Foundation and Empire #3

[VoiceOfUnreason]

I'm still experimenting with the Foundation approach; this time, trying with Tokugawa.

The upsides: Toku's traits really suck - which means that they don't distort the game in any useful direction. Also, aggressive/pro means that early game units get their first interesting promotion sooner; that may or may not mean much -- I hadn't focused much on promotions in the earlier games because I think it's not too important.

The miserable starting techs eliminate one of the easy decisions; and make an interesting problem for animal starts. Fishing makes Worker first a bit less automatic.

From my point of view, the main downside is Samurai - which tends to make Tokugawa's mid game a bit monochromatic -- kill ALL the neighbors. On the other hand, I generally tie off the position before Civil Service anyway.

We're still seeing new players struggling with Noble, and under questioning we find that they spend and awful lot of time and energy on things that aren't winning. So this is an attempt at stripping away all the things we do that aren't winning.

The lessons within are expected to be simple, and generally applicable. In particular, a lot of "important" elements of the game mechanics are going to be completely ignored, because they are a distraction from the basic approach. Also, simple matters of technique may or may not get much attention - it depends on the kinds of questions that are raised.


The Plan for this game is Land, which offers a straightforward sequence of objectives

1) Claim more than our fair share of good land
2) Claim a neighbor's fair share of good land
3) Claim all of the good land we can reach
4) Win.


Settings
Difficulty: Noble
Speed: Normal
Map: Continents
Huts: Disabled
Events: Disabled

Leader: Tokugawa/Japan



The SAVE.

First checkpoint is at Turn 0.
Second checkpoint is at Turn 14
Third checkpoint is at Turn 30
Fourth checkpoint is at Turn 50
Fifth checkpoint is at Turn 70

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

As usual - settle in place and get on with it.

YUCK. OK, this isn't "bugged cow" bad, but dry rice and a bunch of plantation resources is not my idea of a good time. If we can get to Calendar in good shape, we'll get a real lift, but until then, much of the early game is going to feel a bit later than usual.

OK, first to make something of this capital. In the early going, this is going to be pretty food poor, with just the dry rice for grains. Farming the sugar will help a little bit. After that, we can get some mines up.

• Agriculture
• Mining
• Bronze Working
• Animal Husbandry

The usual deck of techs. Animal Husbandry doesn't offer much in the way of secondary benefits, so with no animals in view that probably belongs on the bottom of the pile. No need to lock in a decision yet -- we'll have 14 turns of exploring in before we need to make that choice.

The warrior's first job is to find us another city; preferably one with some food. The north of the map looks to be coastal, with jungle to the southwest and south east. That patch of jungle in the north west makes me a little bit nervous, as that seems like a hint that we're really in the middle of the jungle belt, which could make early city locations difficult.

Given that we already have fishing, I suppose correct technique would be to explore clockwise, starting with the northern shore. I actually chose to go the other direction -- on the grounds that I wanted the warrior to end up on the part of the map where I was going next.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

Hmm, alright I'll show the scrubs how it's done. If I don't win by early ADs I will call it a 100% loss.

EDIT: CONTINENTS@#?!@?@! FUUUUUUUUUUU! Oh and it's the wrong save bro. I'm getting some Roosey save.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

it's the wrong save bro. I'm getting some Roosey save.

Fixed, thanks -- of course, the correct save is still continents.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

Continents makes me sad.

 

[ahcos]

Weak earlygame city, kickass midgame after CS and Calendar. I'll follow with interest.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

It's a fine early spot. You have a bunch of green riverside spots for cottages, a couple hills, and 2 4 food tiles.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

The scene from turn fourteen. It hasn't changed much, but the neighborhood so far is better than I feared.



Research into Mining is now complete. The first two goals; Food (such as it is) and Production (ditto) have been addressed. So the next problem to consider is defense.

In isolation, there are really three options, Animal Husbandry + Wheel for Chariots; Bronze Working for Axes, or Hunting + Archery for Archers.

I can't remember the last time I saw a position where Archery first made sense. The upside is that Archery is a sure thing: archers are cheap defensive units that require no resources. The downside is that Archery is a dead end tech, and really contributes nothing to your civilizations expansion.

With an animal already in the fat cross, AH makes sense. With lots of trees or good food, Bronze Working makes sense.

Here, I feel its almost a coin toss; the food supply is thin enough that whipping doesn't seem to provide its usual leverage (maybe this is enough - I haven't really calculated). There are cows in a likely spot for an early city, but both techs should be done in plenty of time. When in doubt, I go with Bronze Working - it's so massively overpowered, and I prefer to catch the anarchy in an under developed city.

The worker will be ready next turn. His somewhat sorry task list is to farm the sugar (this tile first for the +1 ), then farm the rice, then mine the riverside hill. Three chores normally runs about 15 turns - here it will be longer than that because of the farms and the travel distances.

In exploring, I'm about half way around - I've taken a bit of an extra detour in the south west to get a better picture for what's going on around the corn, since that yellow square is one of my candidates for city #2.

Why there? Primarily, I'm trying to make up for the lack of power in the capital. Corn plus three green hills make a fine secondary production city, so I can turn the capital toward its destiny (commerce) a little bit sooner.

The nice thing about yellow square is that all the tiles it needs are free - as soon as the city is placed there are three green hills within reach, and a 4th becomes available on turn 51 - the white dots are all in play when Kyoto pops its borders.

No commitment yet - there may be better news to the east.

I'm also poking around the white square, looking for a good location for the cows and gold. Again, I'm looking to help make up for the missing production in the capital, so I'm leaning toward a position that brings in the hills to the east for more power, rather than trying to put the gold in the first ring as well. If there were another food special here, I'd pull the gold in. I'm somewhat discouraged from moving west by the brown iles over there, which means that I'm not noticing the brown tiles to the south east

A position I do not consider is 1N of the gold. The extra sugar would be nice, eventually, but I don't want to wait 17 turns for the cows.

Oh look - X marks the stone! Plays for the stone would be a lot more tempting with some production in the capital. And chasing early wonders is not part of the Foundation. But in a more flexible game, it might be worth a short delay in general exploration to look for a good placement in that region.

With these tiles in the capital, I'm looking at a settler at size 3, which gives me time to squeeze out one warrior to patrol.

Third checkpoint is at T30.

 

[Keilah]

settle 1nw of the cows and 1n of the corn, timely border pops as Japan are always a pain in the arse. And you really want access to the food+gold ASAP. There are plenty of hills for the gold/cow city regardless of where you place it.

I'd probably get pottery before BW & AH, the corn city can go farm, cottage, cottage to start. If you insist on a more standard line then get BW -> pottery -> AH. With a few roads and AGG warriors, defense isn't as much a hassle as you suggest.

 

[vranasm]

up to Monarch the barbs threat is delayed a lot. I would opt to go TW->pottery and cottage those dyes tiles.

It's one thing that could be useful for noble players, a lot of them don't realize that calendar resources could be improved by other useful things before calendar kicks in. Cottaging dyes is one of favorite tricks in this regard... they are basically financial cottages even without financial.

agree with keilah moving the gold city 1W to work gold 1st ring... that's yet another thing a lot of players neglect when playing non-creative leaders... you really need to maximize output of your 1st ring.

 

[krikav]

Thank you for your continious effort VoU!

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

settle 1nw of the cows and 1n of the corn, timely border pops as Japan are always a pain in the arse. And you really want access to the food+gold ASAP. There are plenty of hills for the gold/cow city regardless of where you place it.

I'd probably get pottery before BW & AH, the corn city can go farm, cottage, cottage to start. If you insist on a more standard line then get BW -> pottery -> AH. With a few roads and AGG warriors, defense isn't as much a hassle as you suggest.

One of the problems I'm generally facing with this effort are correctly categorizing which plays are in bounds and out of bounds. In essence, I'm playing a variant here, to demonstrate that Noble is readily overcome by understanding a (1) few (2) simple ideas that can be (3) generally applied.

This is made harder by the fact that I'm still trying to define the variant -- determining which few simple ideas I ought to be emphasizing here.

For example - Toku's warriors make some things easier, but I want to avoid bending away from the main ideas in response to that, because aggressive warriors are not generally available. This is somewhat akin to the problems of Creative, or Spiritual, distorting the main line (though obviously not to the same degree).

The Pottery shuffle is a bit harder - my gut is that's the kind of thing that belongs in the next level guide: how to adapt from the main line to suit your circumstances.

Unless, of course, my definition of the plan is the wrong one -- instead of trying to locate both resources, I should emphasize that one is sufficient.

I've a similar issue with Mysticism -- keep it simple argues for including it, "that which can wait, must wait" argues for removing it wherever possible. Emphasizing first ring settling and food swaps increases how often it can wait, but I'm having a harder time calling those ideas "fundamental".

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Here's a picture of how things look on T30. The initial ring of exploration is complete; a second warrior has been trained (a little bit late, actually, because I wasn't paying attention to the micro ), and work on a settler has begun. The worker is finishing up a mine, and then will be available to chop and road.



Starting in the north - the rule "a city for every food resource" will eventually demand a city at white dot, and at one of the yellow dots. Those cities need to come later, because they are slow - I need a border pop and a workboat each just to get them started.

The dyes to the east offer a similar problem - there's no good way to feed them. About the best I can manage is a dot that steals the sugar from the capital -- which is already a bit soft on food. Spice plantations will help some, but I have to expect that this capital will have less production than most.

Bronze Working revealed Copper near the corn, which is nice. That's going to be my first city - again, trying to make up for the lack of power in the capital. The original blue dot would be fine. Blue square would make for a nice mega city, actually - cows, corn, copper.... I'm going to decide against that location for two reasons; I want the cows for the gold anyway, and the blue square needs a border pop to reach either food.

So my settler is bound for the white X, where I'll get corn and copper right away, and then get three more hills to play with.

The warriors are moving into position to ensure that the settler has a clear path to the white X. From there, I'll swing one west (to figure out if I need to adjust Gold + Cow) which is probably city #3, and one to get a better look at the ivory and find a candidate location for city #4.

I'm staying on the main research line (AH before Pottery), on the grounds that I'll be pushing another settler out of the capital, before cottaging everything. A sound alternative to consider would be to shift the capital to commerce now (Pottery first), then run Animal Husbandry while training a settler from white X.

Next checkpoint at T50.

 

[Bonesy]

Great stuff Voice. Keep it up.

 

[Um the Muse]

Instead of cottaging the Calendar resources, why not farm them? That fits the "food is life" lema and keeps the tech path simple. It also lets you whip as needed or give up food resources after you get a granary.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Instead of cottaging the Calendar resources, why not farm them? That fits the "food is life" lema and keeps the tech path simple. It also lets you whip as needed or give up food resources after you get a granary.

In one of the earlier editions, I outlined the basic plan for tile improvements, which was cottages on flat and green. So I've already been feeling guilty anticipating that certain riverside grassland tiles need a farm on them to irrigate the dry rice and dry corn.

Additionally, I'm additionally biased toward cottages because my feeling is that they require less work than farming (eg, specialist management, whipping, etc).

On the other hand, if I were going to be truly disciplined about the rules, then I shouldn't have farmed the sugar. Sugar is somewhat weird, in that sugar plantations are "farms" with an extra coin on them, but maybe that's a cop out.

Shrug - more reasons that this is a work in progress, rather than a strategy article.

 

[CreeDakota]

The mantra 'keep it simple' is a good one.

Farming calender resources rather than farming a basic grassland tile until you get the tech I think is an easier 'rule' than trying to learn when to farm them, when to cottage them, and when to ignore them.

Personally Japan's starting techsa and traits strike me as a great setup for very early cottage growing if you have the correct capital and here you do. But I suppose that is a complicated 'prince and above' strategy though?

Overlap settlement at the dyes to grow capital cottages looks like a good idea.

 

[Um the Muse]

Alright, I can see that. Some early commerce might not be a bad plan anyway.

What are you using to edit your maps? Is that an in-game tool/ mod?

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

What are you using to edit your maps? Is that an in-game tool/ mod?

Snagit v9.1, which puts me one version behind the curve. I picked it up as an easy way to get good screen captures for internal documentation; but the editing tools are decent for the screenshots the game takes too.

I was noticing that I'd like to have an annotation layer - this strategy layer but specifically for telling the story. If I were working on this project 6 years ago, I might have tried to write one.

One of the things I really found myself itching to do is switch into worldbuiilder view to show what's actually going on in the fog of war. What I think that means I'm after is a spectator mode. That's probably easier to write than an annotation layer.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

The mantra 'keep it simple' is a good one.

Farming calender resources rather than farming a basic grassland tile until you get the tech I think is an easier 'rule' than trying to learn when to farm them, when to cottage them, and when to ignore them.

Well, I was actually leaning toward "cottage them all", rather than "farm them all" - though as I noticed earlier, farming the sugar sort of ruins that. Either I need to be more disciplined, or I need to corrupt the rule to "farm the resources that give food, cottage the resources that give commerce".

"Work your best tiles" says that we should prefer the dyes to the empty riverside tiles. "Don't work unimproved tiles" says we need to drop something there. I don't want to abandon either of those guidelines, so I need to compromise somewhere else.