Mehmed Immortal Cookbook

[Dhoomstriker]

My votes

CivConVict = 3.5 points
+ The Great Lighthouse is almost in and will come at the same time as Writing. We also have the Coast explored to Gilgamesh
+ We have The Pyramids, and although we don't really need them built this early in order to get them for certain, it is nice to have them
+ We still have a lot of Forests remaining to us
+ We have the option to complete The Great Wall in 1 turn or to get a "free Hut" of 148 Gold from The Great Wall's Failure Gold
- We have a low number of Workers

Mitchum = 2 points
+ We have The Great Lighthouse
+ The Pyramids will come soon
+ We have a good number of Workers
+ We have two partially-completed Settlers in the queues to make proper use of The Great Lighthouse and we'll actually get the choice of where to place these Cities, strongly mitigating anyone's dislike of City locations, as you can pick where to put your Cities. In fact, we might see more variance in saves from the next turnset due to this fact, making for a good opportunity to learn how to better or worse play out the next turnset

nishant1911 = 1 point
+ The Great Lighthouse has been built and we have 4 Cities to use it
+ We have a reasonable shot at getting The Pyramids completed
+ Writing will come in soon for Foreign Trade Routes
+ We have a good number of Workers
- I'm not totally enthused about the 4th City's placement
- I can barely see a Forest in sight

 

[Damoklesz]

I have 2 questions, mainly because Grashopas save is so popular so I checked it again.

1: When do the AI usually gets the pyramids on immortal? I assumed that turn 85-90 would be too late. Was I wrong?

2: Why is the Colossus useful to us? We are not financial, so I don't really see us working a lot of coast tiles, except maybe in the future moai city. Plus astronomy might end up being important. I understand that researching metal casting is not a waste at all, because there are triremes, forges, and as far as I know it's a very decent tech to trade even on immortal. But I'm curious about what is the general opinion on the Colossus.

 

[DampRain]

@Damoklesz
Colossus makes you financial for coast, which is quite simply a huge benefit. It's like having an instant grassland village with lighthouse. Not to mention benefits of denying such a wonder to an AI.

It's highly variable on the situation, but I can't give any good numbers (someone else will I'm sure).

 

[learner gamer]

A number of great saves – and two standouts IMHO – made for a tough choice. In the end, I decided to take kossin up on the offer of splitting my 6.5 votes however I wished, in this case between just two saves.

3.5 votes: Dhoomstriker. Both the mids and GLH are almost finished. The combination of OB with Giggles, a WB for further exploration and three cities will soon send commerce higher, assuming GLH gets finished. A potential late Oracle presents a few very interesting options. An axe is already available to fend off barbs.

3 votes: Grashopa. Not easy to separate this from Dhoom’s save IMHO. The combination of cottages and, most importantly, a completed GLH gives it the best current tech pace. Chops will accelerate production of the mids in Edirne. (Question: will Edirne need a garrison before it can chop out the mids?) Great early exploration IMHO. No axe as yet but can build one to fend off barbs if needed.

If the consensus is that votes must remain distributed across three saves instead of just two as I have done (eg. to avoid scenarios such as one game getting all 6.5 votes), feel free to re-cast my votes as 3 Dhoomstriker, 2.5 Grashopa, 1 CivConVict.

@Grashopa & @Dhoomstriker: Thanks for your answers and feedback respectively.

@Dhoomstriker: I notice that you managed to secure OB with Giggles without writing (which means he must have it). IMHO, this is a very handy way of exploiting the fast teching pace of the immortal AI...but its effectiveness obviously depends on the willingness of the AI to tech an early writing. With that in mind, are there any immortal AI out there that you have found to be particularly willing or averse to teching early writing? Or is this something that you have found to vary much more game by game?

@Damoklesz:

Spoiler :

Funnily enough, I asked a similar question of Grashopa after putting together my second attempt at this start (posted as a non-voting shadow), when I decided to tech maths (rather than metal casting) with a view to leveraging the stone for The Hanging Gardens. Although it’s not exactly the same question you asked, you might find that looking at Grashopa’s reply (in post #77 on page 4 of this thread), which reasoned the choice of metal casting over maths by looking at The Colossus, offers some insight. Hope it helps.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

are there any immortal AI out there that you have found to be particularly willing or averse to teching early writing? Or is this something that you have found to vary much more game by game?

There do exist pre-defined preferences for each AI for each tech. Actually, I think that it works more like each tech falls into different categories and each AI has a pre-defined preference for certain categories. These categories are: Religion, Production, Gold, Science, Culture, Military, and Growth, which you may have seen in the XML or in a spreadsheet that outlines some of the XML code.

I don't have these values for BTS (maybe the only changes are for the new techs, I'm not sure), but for Vanilla, Writing has values of:
Science = 10
Culture = 6
Religion = 3
Gold = 2

Gilgamesh's Traits are Culture and Military, so it's not the highest tech on his list, but it's far from the lowest.

Then you have to factor in the fact that AIs calculate research differently than we do. They evaluate the value of each tech that they can research immediately or as far deep in the tech tree as within "3 techs from now." Each one gets a weighting.

Beyond the XML values, other factors can influence a tech's weighting. For example, a tech that where other players know the tech (for players that the AI has contact with) tends to get a higher rating than normal, since it is easier for said AI to research it, due to the way that you get a discount on researching a tech that someone else whom you have contact with already has researched.

It is clear that Gilgamesh was tempted to get Fishing early, given all of his visible Seafood (which we have seen from someone's save is his capital).

In my game, I beelined Pottery right after Fishing. Given that he has the same starting techs as us, he can research Pottery early on, just like we can. After having met me early, he would have had a bit of a discount on Pottery and thus was more likely to research it in this game than normal.

In this way, Writing was opened up early on and thus had more "chances" to be a more heavily weighted tech for Gilgamesh to reseach.

Another possibility is that an AI that Gilgamesh knows actually researched Writing first, which would have made it cheaper for Gilgamesh to research Writing and thus more attractive for Gilgamesh to research Writing.

It is even possible that by learning Pottery early, I got Gilgamesh to learn Pottery, which got another AI to learn Pottery, and THAT AI decided to go after Writing next, which then convinced Gilgamesh to go after Writing. Crazy, huh? Oh yeah, I seem to remember seeing in one of the saves that Gilgamesh was 2 turns away from Alphabet, so my game wasn't the only one where Gilgamesh picked up Writing.

Still, to keep things interesting, random values are thrown into the mix and are added to the weightings of the techs, so given a different set of random values, sometimes an AI will "zig left" and other times it will "zig right." This fact keeps the game interesting, because even if an AI is almost guaranteed to research a particular tech, they might choose not to do so. So, often it is more a "luck of the draw" than anything, but we can say that an AI that knows a tech's pre-requisite (such as Pottery for Writing or Bronze Working for Iron Working) is more likely to research said tech than if they don't know any of that tech's pre-requisites.

 

[cripp7]

Ok my votes, tough choices here as there are some good saves. It's interesting how different people play the same save!

3pts - Dhoomstiker
3 cities, GLH in 2, Mids in 5, Oracle shot, OB with Gilga, 5 workers. Oracle shot possible, great teching.

2pts - Grashopa
GLH, OB with Greece/Sumeria, great scouting, possible Colossus or tech up the Oracle path in the same amount of time and take another tech.

1pt - nishant1911
4 cities, good tech, glh, mids in 9.

 

[kossin]

2: Why is the Colossus useful to us? We are not financial, so I don't really see us working a lot of coast tiles, except maybe in the future moai city. Plus astronomy might end up being important. I understand that researching metal casting is not a waste at all, because there are triremes, forges, and as far as I know it's a very decent tech to trade even on immortal. But I'm curious about what is the general opinion on the Colossus.

Riverside cottage>coastal colossus>cottage>coastal

 

[Grashopa]

Run coastal tiles for commerce while farming everything else means you'll get your research in faster than someone who cottaged up AND you'll have the production to whip out the army. Oh and forges are half off, oh and Great Merchants are ok.

 

[ABigCivFan]

Just noticed this thread, too late for the first round but will post for comparison.

1200BC

Spoiler :

SIP, tech went AH-Mining-Fishing-BW-Mason-Sailing-Myst-pottery-writing

build: worker-warrior-warrior-fb-worker-settler

settled stone/pig/wheat city next, hooked up stone, went GLH then pyrimad, 2nd city chopped TGW to pop culture and block barbs

saw Gig to the west, hurried one settler to settle fish/rice/2x suger, 1 more settler will get the fish/rice to the west. had to hurry so gig does not take those nice spots.

at 1200BC, Got GLH, TGW, 4 turns to Pyrimad, will then go Representation+Slavery

then spam some coastal cities with food specials to run multiple rep scientists + high trade routes.

got 1 W2 warrior to escort 4th settler, 1 axeman. met 3 civs.

 

[kossin]

I'll compute the votes today, when I can find some time!

 

[Mitchum]

If it's not too late to vote, I cast mine as:

Dhoomstriker - 3.5 points
nishant1911 - 2 points
obsolete - 1 point

 

[kossin]

Round 2 - 40 turns

By a single point, the first round's elected save by the voters is:

**********
* Grashopa *
**********

Runner-ups were Dhoomstriker and nishant1911. Good job everyone!

(Save is link in his name in the box right above this line.)

Round 2 will last only 40 turns and about 5 days or whatever is required to have a decent number of saves to select from.

Good luck to everyone!

 

[Dhoomstriker]

@ABigCivFan

Spoiler :

Nice work!
It seems that you have managed to do almost all of the things that we have been talking about as being the most desirable elements from the various saved games. Even if you have read most of our comments in order to figure out what people thought was good to get for this game, it is still impressive that you managed to get most of these "good things" into a single saved game!

+ Built The Great Lighthouse AND have more than 2 Cities
+ Managed to get Foreign Trade Routes via Gilgamesh getting Writing
+ Expanded the borders of the Stone City to encompass a Food-based Resource (two in your case)--although I am just going by the screenshot and can't be 100% for certain, I would imagine that The Great Wall's +2 Culture would have expanded City 2's borders by now
+ Started on building blocker-Cities for Gilgamesh (either that or relied on the precense of a Barb City on our landmass close to Gilgamesh, as we saw happen just as effectively in at least one game)
+ Got The Great Wall (while it is debatable whether it is good or not if you want more experience for your Axemen plus the Failure Gold), you at least leveraged it to expand your borders early in City 2 (I am guessing) and have put it in a City where we won't get a Great Spy as our first Great Person (also good, in my mind--I'd rather have a Great Spy as my 3rd or 4th Great Person). It would have been better used on Faliure Gold had you not managed to get Foreign Trade Routes, as your economy would be in the tank right now without said Foreign Trade Routes, especially with such a far-settled City--but, since you got the Foreign Trade Routes, completing The Great Wall instead of getting its Failure Gold worked out fine.
+ Good exploration
- No Flood Plains Cottages (not everyone will treat this point as a negative, but I believe that it is especially nice to build Cottages in your capital when you are low on Happiness)
- Working unimproved squares just to pump out Wonders faster (again, the Foreign Trade Routes help to make up for this fact but you'd be even further behind as a result of working the unimproved Plains Forest squares)
- No Granaries (from what I can tell from the screenshots), plus no Cottages, plus the fact that you met multiple Civs makes me think that you should have researched Writing before Pottery, in order to get additional Foreign Trade Routes that much faster (meaning that we'd gain in your particular case of knowing multiple AIs and having Domestic Trade Routes by researching the less intuitive "Writing -> Pottery" path, which would actually be finished faster than the normally helpful "Pottery -> Writing" path with its pre-requisite bonus towards research on Writing).

I'm not sure how many Workers you got so I can't comment there, but your Forest-Chopping pattern looks to be reasonably good and you seem to have kept a minimalistic approach to Road-building.


Oh yeah, don't forget to vote for your favourite games!

 

[ABigCivFan]

Thanks Dhoomstiker, I played my turnset without reading any spoilers.

Here is my reply to some of your comments:

Spoiler :

+ Got The Great Wall (while it is debatable whether it is good or not if you want more experience for your Axemen plus the Failure Gold), you at least leveraged it to expand your borders early in City 2 (I am guessing).

wow did not realize TGW only had 2 culture pts, lol. besides poping border, i also get it to block barbs since the capital is focusing on wonders and my only axeman went escorting the settler up north

- No Flood Plains Cottages (not everyone will treat this point as a negative, but I believe that it is especially nice to build Cottages in your capital when you are low on Happiness)

Since I am going GLH and Mids, commerce is not a pressing concern in the early game. I farmed 1 flood to help with growth and settler/worker building which is most important for opening. With Representation, farm helps to bring up the pop cap and scientist count faster too. I can switch floods to cottages for Bureaucracy

- Working unimproved squares just to pump out Wonders faster (again, the Foreign Trade Routes help to make up for this fact but you'd be even further behind as a result of working the unimproved Plains Forest squares)

with stone while building Mids, every hammer counts double, so plain forrest are "improved" also i am at pop cap, no need to work the food tiles

- No Granaries (from what I can tell from the screenshots), plus no Cottages, plus the fact that you met multiple Civs makes me think that you should have researched Writing before Pottery, in order to get additional Foreign Trade Routes that much faster (meaning that we'd gain in your particular case of knowing multiple AIs and having Domestic Trade Routes by researching the less intuitive "Writing -> Pottery" path, which would actually be finished faster than the normally helpful "Pottery -> Writing" path with its pre-requisite bonus towards research on Writing).

As you can see my priorities in my tech order.
1. Improve Pig, build a river Mine
2. Hook up Clam
3. Hook up Stone
4. GLH
5. Grab the fish/rice/2xSuger city
6. Pyramid
7. Pottery then Writings for open borders

I was going to start Granary ASAP in helper cities, so went Pottery before Writing. It is also a habbit

I'm not sure how many Workers you got so I can't comment there, but your Forest-Chopping pattern looks to be reasonably good and you seem to have kept a minimalistic approach to Road-building.

I only have 2 workers. Building the 3rd in the Northern city. It was a habbit playing Deity to manage the unit count early to not drag down the economy. But then Micro becomes very important early with small number of workers. Besides we need a few military units to explore and garrison for expansion, that is always a top priority in my openning. We are expansive, can always get additional cheap workers quickly when needed.

I chopped trees in a pattern that there is good chance for them to regrow (saved surrounding trees).

 

[Grashopa]

Did you count the votes correctly? I guess I'll have to throw in another 40 turns... Be careful with the barbs here as I believe this is the game where I had to retreat my W2 warrior into a city to heal. May want an Axe before the settler.

And since a couple people mentioned going for oracle I assume one of them actually played ahead and got it So you may want to try as you can also go straight for Code Of Laws before MC. I'd like to see someone go caste to see the difference in tech rate without needing to whip out the expensive library first in all the to be founded cities.

 

[kossin]

I used Excel to count the votes so unless I missed/mixed a vote, the results should be accurate

 

[Benginal]

To Turn 110:

Spoiler :

Turn 70: Revolt into slavery. I like whipping, what can I say and now’s as good a time as any.

Turn 71: 2-pop whip an axe in the capital.

Turn 77: Meet Charlemagne.

Turn 78: Meet Lincoln, what kind of map is this. I open borders with Lincoln. This works out nicely as he’s Hindu. I’ll avoid relations with the Buddhists for the time being.

Turn 83: Settle city 3 on the south west coast. I decide to put him on the grassland as opposed to the forested river tile. This way I can preserve a forest for chopping and a riverside grassland. Since I’m expansive, I don’t even miss the health that much.

Turn 87: Metal Casting in, start on Aesthetics. I’ve got a ton of neighbors to trade around with, so I’m going to use this tech both as trade bait and as a prereq to Literature. Pyramids in, start on a warrior and then forge.

Turn 94: Toku demands that I close borders with Lincoln. They’re both Hindu, so I’m not sure what the deal is, but I turn him down since I have no idea where he is and I’m not scared of him.

Turn 97: Whip the forge in city 2 and start on Colossus.

Turn 98: Nobody will trade alpha, so I put a turn into it. I won’t be trading away Metal Casting, as I want to ensure that we get the Colossus. I start on Literature next.

Turn 100: Get Alphabet from Charlemagne. Let’s tech trade! With giggles: Aesthetics for Iron Working and Meditation. With Pericles: Aesthetics for Hunting and Polytheism. I notice some people have Maths, so I’ll trade for it before I finish my chops on the Great Library. Start self-teching literature.

Turn 103: Giggle settles up north, bastard. He offers maths for alphabet, I take it, what the heck.

Turn 105: Charles wants me to convert to Buddhism. Surely, you must be joking. Colossus in, start on settler. Literature in, start on Library.

Turn 107: Chuck demands Metal Casting. Just to be a prick, I turn him down, probably wasn’t a good idea in retrospect.

I just realized I never revolted into anything after building the pyramids. At first I was super pissed, but it probably wasn’t that huge a deal given that I’m not running specialists yet and the happiness bonus isn’t really applicable since I keep whipping. I finished the Colossus and the Great Library is 16 turns away. I founded three more cities with two more settlers close by. Giggles got on to the island. I probably should have closed borders with him. Actually I think he is my main trade partner, so that could have been bad. Would I have been able to trade “through” him, Kossin? Overall, the saves not great, but it’s not terrible.

 

[ABigCivFan]

125BC (turn 110)

Spoiler :

1100BC: went for Oracle after pyramid.

saw gig researching Alphabet but no Math, i went for Math to open currency, + chop hammer and unique building/hanging garden.

Oracle to currency.

Traded math+1 for Alpha, math for IW, later currency for calendar. Trading currency to the AIs actually helps increasing the trade routes

capital is looking monsterly, so went for COL (cheap court house everywhere to help expansion), then Got Civil service around 200BC.

currently going Literature to get GL. helper cities slowly coming on line due to jungle. soon many more scientists will join the empire.

125BC Empire:



125BC capital:

 

[Slizský slimák]

My Turn 110:

Spoiler :

I do not know wheather my strategy can work but I have only three Cities and now, I prepare for war with Gilgamesh, who has already began to settle my own continent. Two of my Cities looks very good and the third one will finish Moia Statues and Lighthouse soon. Instead of talking, many pictures are attached.

 

[drlake]

Hmm, looks like no pre-round strategy discussion. I haven't had a chance to look again at the save, but what are you guys (who haven't played it out) thinking?