(My first SG)For newbies

lurker's comment: I'm at work and cannot see the pix (our IT department blocks them), but I'm going to hazard a guess at what you may be seeing on Scout's map. IIRC, he said he was using distance 4 Ring placement.

When you go in the cardinal directions, east, west, north or south, each tile counts as 1.5. When you go at an angle NE, NW, SE or SW, each tile counts as only 1. So, if you're going directly (let's say) south 2 tiles, it's actually 1.5 + 1.5 = 3...and it gets more complicated if you use a combination of S and SW. Whatever total you get is then rounded down to the closest even number. That's why CAII can save you so much work. Either Scout or I can take a look tonight. Where it appears to be CxxC, I'll bet it's 2 tiles at 1 1/2.

@goodsmell - ICS = Infinite City Sprawl and generally refers to very tightly packed cities. It's often used for specialist farms in corrupt areas. It's also used for AW games where you want a foot soldier to be able to support the next city in a single move on a road. Even when not playing AW, some people like to use it for ease of defense...the higher the level you play, the more likely it will be for the AI to attack earlier because they start with free units.

ICS in corrupt areas with lots of grass for food is usually CxC, but CxxC closer to the core.

 

In that case, the Yellow dot is on RCP 4, but the Blue dot is on RCP 5. I will keep the Y dot where it is, but the blue dot was better in scoutsout's map.

 

lurker's comment:
This great a Newbie SG Game. Been Watching the forum a while now learning lots of stuff from other games. Nice to see a Game explain this whole ring placement that I been trying to figure out. Keep up the great work.

Edit: Thanks

 

You didn't do the Lurkers Comment thingy right. You can make it appear by wrapping lurker's comment: [ /delurk] around your text, omitting the space.

 

@Choxorn: You are correct, yellow-dot was misplaced for proper RCP. I saw that after I'd uploaded it, but didn't bother to change it as I was simply trying to show a technique for visually planning city placement.

I rarely bother with RCP, as I prefer to place cities based on terrain considerations. I'm playing the current classic GOTM, and I did not use RCP in that game. I think it has value as a teaching point in this game, and knowing how to use RCP is useful in Vanilla... but I would never advocate RCP as "the way it is done".

 

Sorry for the double-post, but after reading some earlier comments, I wanted to offer a little more discussion on the dotmaps:

There seems to be a little bit of confusion on city "spacing" versus "Ring City Placement"; and it appears that my dotmap added to that confusion.

Ring city placement treats the orthogonal tiles (N, S, E, W) differently than the ones going NE, SE, SW, NW; gmaharriet notes this difference. RCP offers some advantages in managing corruption, nothing more.

Notes such as CxxC or CxxxC refer to spacing, and treat all tiles equally. There are a number of factors to consider when considering how loose you want your city placement.

• As noted by others, a tight city placement offers tactical advantages. One-move units can make it to another town in one turn with a CxxC pattern.
• Tighter city placement patterns allow you to put more citizens on tiles earlier in the game. This point can spawn an entire sub-thread on empire management... and that is beyond the scope of this post.
• The down side to city management is that you will generally settle beyond the Optimal City Number (OCN) which will contribute to increased corruption.
• Tighter city builds can be a weakness in the industrial and modern era, as it can sometimes be tricky to get such cities optimized at size 12.

For this game I recommend that the team do three things

• First, ignore my dotmap altogether.
• Second, experiment with dotmapping a "tight" settlement pattern
  • Start with an RCP first ring of 3.
  • Once you've developed the first ring, see what possibilities exist at different ring distances for the second ring.
• Third, experiment with a "loose" settlement pattern, with an RCP first ring of... let's try 6.

If you guys would like to divide the work, perhaps the team leader could split things up a little bit... let a couple of teammates put some ideas together for a "tight" pattern, and a couple of others put together a plan for a "loose" pattern.

 

Bad news...I just found that I'm going to have to go out of town for my grandma's birthday and Memorial Day Weekend. I hope this won't upset the game too much, but I'm not going to be able to play for at least a week or two, so I doubt I'll get back in time to play the SG. Thanks for inviting me, though.

 

Roster then:

Pequenino: Just played
goodsmell: skipped
choxorn: Up, will get to playing
Yagtag: ghosting for a week or two
cody: On Deck
Little Corporal
William

 

Im not really sure, but i think that the loose patern is gonna be a bit more difficult, so how about cody and choxorn take it up. I guess goodsmell, William, and I will take up the tight pattern one?


@yagtag7: No problem. We´ll skip you in your turns, when u get back, just post so in this thread and will bring u back into the roster.

 

I prefer to do the the less difficult job since I barely understand you guys especialy Scoutsout's high english . before almost every post of mine , I'm trying to write it the best I can for you guys . and as you can see It's done unsuccessfuly , maybe a bit successful.

so I prefer the job when I should'nt participate too much with detailed posts .
It's okay ? well I hope so ..

 

Goodsmell, you do very well at getting your ideas across. I don't know what is your first language, but I probably couldn't write it as well as you do with English.

Yes, Scout speaks very, very good English indeed. Orthagonal?

 

I'm done. Here's the log:

No Pre-turn as the save was on turn 16.

Turn 1 (3250 BC):
-The scout and the Warrior explore. Dang it, I forgot to change the production in Washington.

IBT:
zzz

Turn 2 (3200 BC):
-This time, I remember to switch to Granary.

IBT:
zzz

Turn 3 (3150 BC):
-Warrior discovers hut

IBT:
-Worker finishes cutting down forest

Turn 4 (3100 BC):
-Thanks to chop, Granary will finish before Washington grows, so I switch to Barracks then back to Granary to waste some shields. Strangely, it won't let me build the Pyramids.
-Worker roads, and I tell him to build more later in the set.
-Warrior pops a Settler from the hut. I send him to Yellow dot- He'll get there in 8 turns.

IBT:
-Get WC- start research on Wheel
-Treasury is running dangerously low, so I decrease science by 10% until we get city #2 (but I forgot to change it back )

Turn 5-Turn 6 IBT:
zzz

Turn 7 (2950 BC):
-Switch Washington back to Settler, as it will grow next turn.

IBT:
-Washington: Settler->Barracks

Turn 8-Turn 10 IBT:
zzz

Turn 11 (2750 BC):
-Settler on White dot settles New York- set it to Warrior
-Scout and Warrior pop huts. Scout gets zip, Warrior gets CB and discovers that NW arm is a penninsula.

IBT:
-Palace Expansion- go with landscaping


Turn 12 (2710 BC):
-Settler on Yellow dot settles Boston- set it to Warrior

And, nothing happened the rest of the set except the worker building roads and the Warrior and scout moving around. I reccomend we get some more workers, build some more cities, and keep exploring until we find another civ.

Here's the save.

 

lurker's comment: Okay... I know this isn't a "Training Game", but I saw a couple of things in your log that I feel the need to comment on.

There are a couple of points I want to make about this one.

• The reason you couldn't start the Pyramids is a basic part of the game mechanics. You cannot build a Wonder if there are any shields in the bin from a forest chop, pop rush, cash rush, or short rush.
• If the game wouldn't let you queue up the Pyramids, why did you waste the shields from the forest chop? This was needless.
• I don't mean to tell you how to play, but I think building wonders should be a decision made by the team. Wonders are very expensive, and it's generally poor form to queue up a wonder without discussing it with your teammates first. An expensive wonder like the Pyramids should almost never be queued up at this stage of a game.
• I highly recommend that each of you read Ision's Wonder Addiction article in the War Academy, if you haven't already.

This is something that you guys will learn about when you start playing the higher levels; it generally makes more sense to spend your gold researching second-tier techs and buying the first-tier techs from the AI.

This is where you're starting to get your game off track. You peeled off a settler before you completed the granary... this has two negative effects. First, this depleted your population, and secondly, it robbed the shields from the build you most need to build population - a granary. Granaries are what allow a city's population to bounce back twice as quickly after losing the 2 citizens needed to make a settler. And it's too early to build a barracks. The time will come for conquest, but right now you guys need to focus on grabbing as much land as you can in this first stage of the game.

 

This is in addition to Scout's comments. I read and re-read this several times earlier tonight and this morning, trying to figure out what you had in mind. At first I thought you were making a joke about wasting the shields, having switched to a barracks and accidentally missed the warning about the shield loss. I hope you didn't do it on purpose.

Maybe you were joking (I can't be sure), but I hope you're aware that you should WANT the granary to complete BEFORE growth. Once you have a granary, it only takes 10 food to refill and grow again. Without a granary, it takes 20 food to grow, and growth is extremely important in the early game. By not having a granary, it takes twice as long to grow, so it is sometimes worth even slowing down your growth by a turn or two to get the granary first, but never the other way around.

 

So 2 more cities? and one building the Piramids?.........Well, i don´t usually build the Pyramids early in the game, but i do think that its effect will be very useful, especially since we are playing continents, and not archipelago.

Like gma, i didn´t understand the whole Granary thing at first either, but i guess its pretty much sorted out by now.

@goodsmell: Don´t worry, i think the pattern i chose for us in the RCP, is the easiest, and there´s gonna be 3 of us working on it, so don´t worry about ur English

 

You don't usually build Pyramids early , well I never build the Pyramids in the game because I don't really need Granaries in all my empire , where Granary is needed I will manually build it, without Pyramids ( Pyramids it's just wasting shields ) .

* I realize now you were wrong with building a Settler , choxorn we still see no civs so we don't need to rush . we can build granary to make our capitol grow faster and then go for expansion .
* After building our Settler in Washington ( Already said I don't like this ) you went for Barracks when we still see no enemies ( civs ) so we'll actually pay maintence for nothing.
I was'nt protest if Barracks were done after the neccessary stuff and then build our military.
but now it's not neccessary and I've a wildguess that we're ALONE in the island .

* I'm sorry I'd no comment when Pequenino played his turnset about the researching .
I barely understand why researching WarriorCode , I think we better were going for Wheel if we want militaristic tech ( horses are better since movement and retreat skill ) . and probably we'll meet few civs soon , and I've pretty sure one of them or even more will be militaristic and as I remmember they'll have the WC ( we'll be able to trade this and not research ) .

@Gmaharriet - Thanks for the compliment , and I'm living in Israel so my language is Hebrew , but I born in Ukraine ( USSR ) . so my strong languages are Hebrew , Russian and the weakest English and I was thinking to learn German & Spanish .
I'm really impressed Scout's english , sometimes I've to translate words

 

Well i think WC is a lesser tech compared to Wheel, and like Scoutsout said, it´s better to research lower techs, and then buy the "bigger" ones from other advanced civs. So i was kind of hoping we weren´t alone in the island, and that we could trade with other civs soon in the game. I saw my own demise (recall post number 88, in the Post Turn paragraph), AFTER i played my turnset, as i realized that we were hopelessly alone in a relatively small continent.

 

Sorry- thought the plan was to switch to Granary then back to Settler at growth time for some reason- oops. And about Pyramids- none of the cities are currently building it. I only tryed to build it so I could switch back to Settler. After switching to Barracks after Settler built- d'oh! I think next player should switch it to Granary, then start building some Settlers to get some more cities. As for researching WC, I agree with you, Goodsmell. The AI always researches it right after BW. Mil civs (in this game, Aztecs) start with WC (except Japan), and Sci civs (in this game, Russia) research it off the bat. And Germany, who is Sci-Mil, starts with BW and WC. In other words, it's a tech we could have easily gotten form another AI, and these civs already have it (well, russia probably does), and I don't know about the other civs. If all the AI have researched one tech right now, Aztecs, England, France, and Egypt researched BW, Russia got WC, and Germany got Wheel. And some of them have probably met by now, and traded their starting techs. So- we're probably in last place right now.

 

He said research the bigger ones and buy the smaller ones.

 

@choxorn: Arent first-tier techs bigger? If not, then i WAS wrong, but i doubt that first-tier techs are smaller.