Siege Tower
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2018
- Messages
- 44
Can't speak for anyone else, but I found VP to be an excellent Valentine's Day companion! 
I've noticed a lot of discussion about resource population and distribution, which is coincident with an unusual situation that has arisen in my current game. I'm playing Rome on a standard continents map and spawned on a fairly large continent with five civs and eight city-states. I managed to grab the Fountain of Youth with my first settler and couldn't wait to get my super-legions up and running... until I researched Bronze Working and discovered that recruitment, or rather supplying equipment, would be a difficult endeavor. I counted 8 Iron on the entire continent in four nodes of two each. One node is on a small peninsula at the southeast corner 20 tiles from my starting location, two nodes are clumped together next to Assyria's start at roughly the same distance, and the last is tucked away in Florence in the northwest corner which is again about 20 tiles away. By contrast, the number and location of luxury resources appears normal, and I counted 24 Horses evenly distributed in equal amounts of twos and fours. This is the amount and spread of strategic resources I am used to seeing and I have not encountered this dilemma before, much less while playing a civ with an early iron-dependent UU. I should also mention that there are six deer and ten cattle (!) yet only one each of sheep and bison, though I have noticed more variance with bonus resources in the past. Does this map condition jive with anyone else's experience? I considered submitting an issue on github but I'm not sure whether this belongs in the realm of "bugs" or is more like an extreme end of the bell curve of probability. Either way, with that 3:1 horse-to-iron ratio, I wish that I had played Mongolia instead! I do wonder if Genghis is on the other continent, surrounded by iron, desperately searching for horses. At least he's not around to bother me... Egypt is, though!
My plan is to keep Ashurbanipal happy and well supplied with furs, and gold if necessary, so that I can get a DoF and secure his precious iron for myself. Unfortunately, his second and third cities were placed to the north and west respectively, leaving the eastern iron still unsettled and unimproved at turn 65. Additionally, as his western expansion is a forward settle of Gandhi's capital, I suspect that he will be too occupied with that operation to settle again in the near future. My other options are to quickly settle the remote peninsula (which will require clearing a barbarian encampment and will be distant and vulnerable for quite some time), to perform an extreme forward settle maneuver on Assyria (yes, he went Authority...), or to ally/conquer Florence. There is a war between Florence and their neighbor Riga that I could use to my advantage, but conquering Riga would only yield enough influence to stay "just friends" with Florence for a few turns. Also, that war began on turn 45, meaning that I'd had little time to build a homeland army, much less an expeditionary force that would take at least ten turns to march there, only for the war to end just as I finish clearing out their defenses and begin to attack the city itself. I realize that city-state quests, rewards, and ultimately resource distribution are inherently random, so that doesn't bother me too much. It's more that, considering the limited options I have available to take advantage of my UU, all of them appear to require a significant investment of time and/or assets, yet none of them will permit me to build more than a few legions in total.
Otherwise, the game is going well. I captured Babylon's second city after he forward settled me with reckless abandon. I was already planning for Nebby to be my first conquest, and he must have agreed that it was meant to be as he settled Akkad right where I wanted him to and left it completely undefended. Admittedly, it wasn't a foolish settle, only five tiles from his capital and in an optimal location for resources, which makes it even more baffling that he did absolutely nothing to retain it. In the several turns before I declared war, he briefly had a single warrior in the vicinity who was quickly recalled to the capital. I took the city in three turns (including a turn of moving into position) with two archers, two spearmen, and a pathfinder to soak city bombardment. Neb never so much as moved a unit into my visual range! Out of curiosity, I reloaded to a previous turn and attacked without waiting for my second spearman to be completed. Same story. I know I had the FoY promotion (+5 healing) but I never needed to heal any units and there were no improvements to pillage. Babylon went Tradition so they would have had the city ranged strength bonus if the capital could have just spared a warrior for the garrison, but as it stands, the Nebster must have considered Akkad a lost cause from the very start. Or else he knows >tfw nogril iron on v-day and he's just trying to help a brother out. 
Besides those irregularities, this patch is great so far. I've really noticed the AI exploring effectively and dealing with barbarians proactively, acquiring some CS friendships in the process. I don't know if the code for this AI behavior has been touched recently, but compared to previous versions where it often felt like the only people fighting barbarians besides me were city-states fending for their lives, that was refreshing. I used to run Chill Barbarians mostly for that reason alone, but it doesn't appear to be necessary anymore. I'll have to see whether that assertiveness extends to the CS uprising quests or if they still typically let cities flip to the barbarians as they often seem to do. Trade deal evaluation appears to be fair and reasonable. The nerf to rewards for meeting CS is a bit saddening as it always felt like a decent consolation prize for finding them instead of ancient ruins, sometimes even just as good as ruins if you earn enough influence for a super-early friendship as well, but I understand that it was difficult to balance. It even seems like the city governor AI is doing a better job, especially with assigning optimal tiles for settler production. In the past, even with production focus on, I found that it would still assign tiles based on food yields, even when a different tile would give more total hammers (accounting for food-to-hammer conversion and other yields as well). The governor didn't seem to understand that having positive food, or even having enough food to feed the citizenry, is pointless and inefficient when there are hammers available due to how the stagnation mechanic works with settler production (having negative food does not create starvation). I imagine that the AI suffered little if at all from this given their bonuses, but unless my recent experience is a fluke, it looks like I don't have to micro-manage that as much anymore!
I've noticed a lot of discussion about resource population and distribution, which is coincident with an unusual situation that has arisen in my current game. I'm playing Rome on a standard continents map and spawned on a fairly large continent with five civs and eight city-states. I managed to grab the Fountain of Youth with my first settler and couldn't wait to get my super-legions up and running... until I researched Bronze Working and discovered that recruitment, or rather supplying equipment, would be a difficult endeavor. I counted 8 Iron on the entire continent in four nodes of two each. One node is on a small peninsula at the southeast corner 20 tiles from my starting location, two nodes are clumped together next to Assyria's start at roughly the same distance, and the last is tucked away in Florence in the northwest corner which is again about 20 tiles away. By contrast, the number and location of luxury resources appears normal, and I counted 24 Horses evenly distributed in equal amounts of twos and fours. This is the amount and spread of strategic resources I am used to seeing and I have not encountered this dilemma before, much less while playing a civ with an early iron-dependent UU. I should also mention that there are six deer and ten cattle (!) yet only one each of sheep and bison, though I have noticed more variance with bonus resources in the past. Does this map condition jive with anyone else's experience? I considered submitting an issue on github but I'm not sure whether this belongs in the realm of "bugs" or is more like an extreme end of the bell curve of probability. Either way, with that 3:1 horse-to-iron ratio, I wish that I had played Mongolia instead! I do wonder if Genghis is on the other continent, surrounded by iron, desperately searching for horses. At least he's not around to bother me... Egypt is, though!
My plan is to keep Ashurbanipal happy and well supplied with furs, and gold if necessary, so that I can get a DoF and secure his precious iron for myself. Unfortunately, his second and third cities were placed to the north and west respectively, leaving the eastern iron still unsettled and unimproved at turn 65. Additionally, as his western expansion is a forward settle of Gandhi's capital, I suspect that he will be too occupied with that operation to settle again in the near future. My other options are to quickly settle the remote peninsula (which will require clearing a barbarian encampment and will be distant and vulnerable for quite some time), to perform an extreme forward settle maneuver on Assyria (yes, he went Authority...), or to ally/conquer Florence. There is a war between Florence and their neighbor Riga that I could use to my advantage, but conquering Riga would only yield enough influence to stay "just friends" with Florence for a few turns. Also, that war began on turn 45, meaning that I'd had little time to build a homeland army, much less an expeditionary force that would take at least ten turns to march there, only for the war to end just as I finish clearing out their defenses and begin to attack the city itself. I realize that city-state quests, rewards, and ultimately resource distribution are inherently random, so that doesn't bother me too much. It's more that, considering the limited options I have available to take advantage of my UU, all of them appear to require a significant investment of time and/or assets, yet none of them will permit me to build more than a few legions in total.
Otherwise, the game is going well. I captured Babylon's second city after he forward settled me with reckless abandon. I was already planning for Nebby to be my first conquest, and he must have agreed that it was meant to be as he settled Akkad right where I wanted him to and left it completely undefended. Admittedly, it wasn't a foolish settle, only five tiles from his capital and in an optimal location for resources, which makes it even more baffling that he did absolutely nothing to retain it. In the several turns before I declared war, he briefly had a single warrior in the vicinity who was quickly recalled to the capital. I took the city in three turns (including a turn of moving into position) with two archers, two spearmen, and a pathfinder to soak city bombardment. Neb never so much as moved a unit into my visual range! Out of curiosity, I reloaded to a previous turn and attacked without waiting for my second spearman to be completed. Same story. I know I had the FoY promotion (+5 healing) but I never needed to heal any units and there were no improvements to pillage. Babylon went Tradition so they would have had the city ranged strength bonus if the capital could have just spared a warrior for the garrison, but as it stands, the Nebster must have considered Akkad a lost cause from the very start. Or else he knows >tfw no
Besides those irregularities, this patch is great so far. I've really noticed the AI exploring effectively and dealing with barbarians proactively, acquiring some CS friendships in the process. I don't know if the code for this AI behavior has been touched recently, but compared to previous versions where it often felt like the only people fighting barbarians besides me were city-states fending for their lives, that was refreshing. I used to run Chill Barbarians mostly for that reason alone, but it doesn't appear to be necessary anymore. I'll have to see whether that assertiveness extends to the CS uprising quests or if they still typically let cities flip to the barbarians as they often seem to do. Trade deal evaluation appears to be fair and reasonable. The nerf to rewards for meeting CS is a bit saddening as it always felt like a decent consolation prize for finding them instead of ancient ruins, sometimes even just as good as ruins if you earn enough influence for a super-early friendship as well, but I understand that it was difficult to balance. It even seems like the city governor AI is doing a better job, especially with assigning optimal tiles for settler production. In the past, even with production focus on, I found that it would still assign tiles based on food yields, even when a different tile would give more total hammers (accounting for food-to-hammer conversion and other yields as well). The governor didn't seem to understand that having positive food, or even having enough food to feed the citizenry, is pointless and inefficient when there are hammers available due to how the stagnation mechanic works with settler production (having negative food does not create starvation). I imagine that the AI suffered little if at all from this given their bonuses, but unless my recent experience is a fluke, it looks like I don't have to micro-manage that as much anymore!
Last edited:
. mad madigan?
I've started a game with the latest version and I've been seeing what others have reported, i.e. lots more of DoFs/denounce/DoW roller-coasters compared to recent versions, and I'd like to help with logging.
