Micro Challenge II

[Izuul]

oh darn, you can't overflow for more than the unit costs, can you? so if you try to whip a warrior with 14 hammers in it, only 15 hammers will overflow instead of 29.

Yeah.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

oh darn, you can't overflow for more than the unit costs, can you? so if you try to whip a warrior with 14 hammers in it, only 15 hammers will overflow instead of 29.

Failaxis bugged this in their final patch (really pissed me off considering what they left in, and was a precursor to civ V suckage). Previously, anything over that amount would have become . In an effort to patch out situations where people were using multipliers such as stone + traits + chops + whips to generalte 100's and 100's of from overflow (IE protective was actually one of the better traits pre 3.19, because of how trivial it was to put up 1000+ just from overflowing into walls early in a bunch of cities), they instead bugged it.

A fan patch made it such that overflow would apply into , but not get the multipliers. Our esteemed patch team who was actually PAID to do it admitted to trying to do that + clean up the code, but instead killed this type of overflow entirely by accident. No hotfix.

Long story short: Whipping and chopping into low- units is dangerous because your outputs can literally disappear.

 

[Jastrow]

Is this also true if playing with HOF mod? I though I was getting overflow gold. Those the mod patch it, or am I just mistaking??

 

[Snaaty]

it´s the very beginning that matters i guess

Spoiler :

not near my civ computer, so without screenees:

start worker, research fishing (4t)

switch to wb after fishing is in, max. food (7t), times nicely with bronze and pop 2. revolt and whip.
-> rule of thumb: tile with most food first, if you have 2 of them like here, tile that can go online first (fish here). wet corn would have been more tricky due to more food but online later...

ov into worker, research pottery then sailing then whatever. worker will finish t20, wb goes fish.

start granary with worker ov, worker chops forest whip gran at pop 2 when you have 12/24 food (take care not to get over that ammount)

grow with max. food, worker goes corn, whip lh pop3-2, regrow, whip wb pop 3-2 regrow slowbuild warrior.

worker builds mine on green hill (if you have roaded the tile next to corn, even better, do a road while going there, the rest when moving back).

t36 all builds are finished, t37 some hammers into whatever and 2food short of pop 6 (so some pop 1 stuff might have been whipped additionally somewhere)

 

[nona_mouse]

it´s the very beginning that matters i guess

Spoiler :

not near my civ computer, so without screenees:

start worker, research fishing (4t)

switch to wb after fishing is in, max. food (7t), times nicely with bronze and pop 2. revolt and whip.
-> rule of thumb: tile with most food first, if you have 2 of them like here, tile that can go online first (fish here). wet corn would have been more tricky due to more food but online later...

ov into worker, research pottery then sailing then whatever. worker will finish t20, wb goes fish.

start granary with worker ov, worker chops forest whip gran at pop 2 when you have 12/24 food (take care not to get over that ammount)

grow with max. food, worker goes corn, whip lh pop3-2, regrow, whip wb pop 3-2 regrow slowbuild warrior.

worker builds mine on green hill (if you have roaded the tile next to corn, even better, do a road while going there, the rest when moving back).

t36 all builds are finished, t37 some hammers into whatever and 2food short of pop 6 (so some pop 1 stuff might have been whipped additionally somewhere)

Spoiler :

The 59/60 Worker into Granary is the key here. Getting to 1-pop whip a granary from 2->1 at the proper timing is huge, all of the 1-pop whips I attempted were either from 3->2 and properly timed, or 2->1 but with no Granary benefit until Size 3 anyway. I was microing the worker to finish a turn earlier. .

Many thanks for your writeup!

 

[Snaaty]

Spoiler :

The 59/60 Worker into Granary is the key here. Getting to 1-pop whip a granary from 2->1 at the proper timing is huge, all of the 1-pop whips I attempted were either from 3->2 and properly timed, or 2->1 but with no Granary benefit until Size 3 anyway. I was microing the worker to finish a turn earlier. .

Many thanks for your writeup!

Spoiler :

not exactly. i didnt whip the worker, i built it normally. after the wb, growing and whipping would be better, but since the wb takes 7 turns, anarchy and regrowing 6 more, hammers would already decay, so slowbuilding is better

what i ment with ov from worker into granary is this:

a few hammers ov + growing to 2 with granary half full AND getting to 10 hammers while chopping the forest makes 30 hammers total and a 1 pop whip.

timing of growth, food stored and hammers only fit, if you have the right ov from the worker (needs to be 3 or 4, dont remember)

 

[nona_mouse]

Spoiler :

not exactly. i didnt whip the worker, i built it normally. after the wb, growing and whipping would be better, but since the wb takes 7 turns, anarchy and regrowing 6 more, hammers would already decay, so slowbuilding is better

what i ment with ov from worker into granary is this:

a few hammers ov + growing to 2 with granary half full AND getting to 10 hammers while chopping the forest makes 30 hammers total and a 1 pop whip.

timing of growth, food stored and hammers only fit, if you have the right ov from the worker (needs to be 3 or 4, dont remember)

Spoiler :

I was commenting that your directions as written mean the worker is at 59/60 the turn before it completes. It turns the food from the fish directly into hammers for the granary for that turn, and it seems to be the only way to be able to get 30/60 H into the granary in time for an optimal 1 pop whip.

I get 4H of overflow from the worker to the granary when following your instructions.

I was trying to outline the problems in that I was having with finding a solution in general, not the problems I was having with following your writeup! Sorry if that was unclear.

To restate, problems I had with finding a solution with an early granary were:

1) I would micro the growth of Paris to stop exactly at 0 food in box size 2, and then I would whip the first workboat. The worker would come a turn earlier, but I would not be able to whip the granary in time because overflow (of both food and hammers) would not lineup properly.

2) I would experiment with trying to whip the Worker in. Decay makes this inefficient, as you mention. If I remember correctly, everything ends up 1-2 turns delayed from your solution.

 

[kossin]

it´s the very beginning that matters i guess

Spoiler :

Yes, the whip is stronger than unimproved tiles even without granary.

 

[AnthonyIII]

Spoiler :

From turn 4 to 5 and 5 to 6, do you guys first work the clams to get extra commerce for BW and then change to the corn once the border pops? This really shows how intricate CIV 4 is. Managed it after reading Snaaty's spoiler, but I have yet to understand why I did as I did...

 

[kossin]

Please use spoilers, some might still be trying it out, the thread is 1 day old.

 

[AnthonyIII]

Sorry about that. Fixed.

 

[Tall German Joe]

this was fun. I figured out Normal after a few tries, but couldn't complete everything for Nightmare! until turn 39. I was surprised looking at Snaaty's solution that

Spoiler :

the optimal order involved only building only one workboat first, not two! I guess it makes sense, though, that working unimproved tiles would be inefficient...

 

[nona_mouse]

Spoiler :

I uh, love micro. >_>.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orq2anQy1l0

Video of solution posted. Feel free to tell me there's a better timing & tile organization on that granary whip, or let me know if anything's unclear//what I can do better. I'll probably be recording the solutions to most of these. .

 

[kossin]

@nona_mouse

Spoiler :

Thanks for the video, saves me posting a solution... I'll just say there is still some better optimization possible

 

[nona_mouse]

Spoiler :

The best I can do is 23F in the bin on turn 37 with a worker ready to move, I think more than ~24-25 that implies you can reach size 5 on turn 36 and also complete the warrior which seems like a huge leap to me.

Then again, I also thought there was no way a worker would pay off in time. It would only take 1 food gained in the first 20 turns to easily snowball to 3-4 extra at T37.

 

[kossin]

@nona_mouse

Spoiler :

The lack of variety in tiles is the problem of why you can't fully optimize the granary (1F or 1H short at best).

 

[erajah]

Very fun challenge.

Spoiler :

25/30 in the bin is very impressive, I tried a bunch of different things, but my best was 23/30.

I guess the big takeaway for me from this is to not "waste" any resources, and time the whip and improvements to maximize efficiency.

 

[kossin]

Solution​

This one had more challenging difficulties. There are many paths to the 'normal' achievement, but not that many to the nightmare one.

Spoiler :

Here's the solution I think is optimal. It's quite similar to nona_mouse's but with small variations and a bit more food at the end.

Trying a video this time with annotations... a bit choppy thanks to relatively old computer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UQiB79KWIU

 

[bestsss]

@Tall German Joe,

Spoiler :

the 2nd workboat w/o lighthouse is only one food over the unimproved corn. You need to chop the forest and finish the worker (not wasting hammers), the latter holds true for almost all starts that have worker 1st->interrupt->workboat->finish worker. So dry corn is like better than non-lighthouse clams, then you have 2 tiles to work and whip

 

[lymond]

video solutions are a great idea, Kos