NEWB1: Initial Expansion With Hatshepsut (credit to VoiceOfUnreason)

[Yahya]

Hello all,

It's been something like three years since my last post here, and I recently re-caught the Civ bug when I accidentally came across "Baba Yetu" when searching for "Baba O'Riley." Seriously.

So I came back the forums the day before the site went down. Too funny.

Back in 2012 I started a couple of game threads looking to improve my early game (see Opening Turns Practice and Yahya's Back-To-School Game if curious), and I learned much during that time but couldn't stick with it as I went into grad school with both feet.

Once the site was up again, I started looking for something dedicated to the opening 50 turns or so, and really getting that aspect of the game solidly under one's feet.

I came across VoiceOfUnreason's Noble Exercise Work Book posts and I think they are a great idea.

I can't download the save files because I get a 403 error but I figure it makes little difference. I intend to start with the same conditions, evaluate several starting positions to find a good one, and set out to achieve the goals as VoiceOfUnreason defined them.

So this will be my first effort, NEWB1: Initial Expansion with Hatshepsut, following the conditions listed in the original thread.

 

[Yahya]

Here are the conditions from the original thread:

Initial Expansion with Hatshepsut.

Our opening exercise takes place on an Inland Sea map (ancient era, normal speed), with Hatshepsut as the leader of the Egyptians. In this exercise, we want to establish a simple base from which we can begin to develop a win. We'll define that base as achieving all of the following conditions:

• Founding four cities (your capital plus three more cities)
• Growing the four cities to size four
• with at least four tile improvements (per city)
• twenty hp worth of defenders (10 warriors, 7 archers, one tank, any combination) - total
• construct a Library in the capital

The object of this exercise is to achieve this "victory condition" as quickly as possible. So your "score" is the turn on which you've achieved all of these.
______________________________________________________

I'll therefore be setting up these conditions and then showing/discussing a few starts. I welcome any discussion or direction the community can give.

• Inland Sea
• Standard
• Noble
• No huts/events
• Flat map

 

[Yahya]

I assume Hatshepsut was chosen because she is spiritual and creative, which means no anarchy and automatic growth via culture.

Egypt starts with TW and AG which are decent for a new player as the food is immediately accessible once a worker is born.

Hatty also gets War Chariots, which shouldn't matter in this exercise. The time it will take to achieve the conditions should minimize the chance of war, particularly on Noble.

Start #1:

Spoiler :

Things started off okay. I have pigs on a hill, a hilltop/riverside location for the city, floodplain, and plenty of forest for the chopping. I didn't love it but it was a nice start.

Start #2:

Spoiler :

Things are looking better. Wet cows, 2 clams, more floodplains, riverside, decent hammer tiles, and forests to boot. This one also has coast access. I am really liking this site. It might be the winner.

Start #3:

Spoiler :

This one I might like even better than #2. Another two clams, rice, lots of straight riverbank, on the coast, and forest as far as the eye can see.

I'm inclined to go with start #2, but another side of me is tempted to run with all three and see what works the best. I believe it would be 2 followed (perhaps closely) by 3, with 1 a distant third.

On the other hand, both 2 and 3 require me to get fishing which 1 does not (at least initially). That said, this is an inland sea map and fishing will probably be necessary.

For the pigs or cows I'll need AH, and I need Mining -> BW to get to chopping, of course.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First I need to chose the site and then prioritize.

Anyone have any comments?

EDIT: Saves are attached, ...Newb-I_01... is Start #1, etc.

 

[Benginal]

Cool idea Yahya.

I think you can resize the images in imgur, although I'm not positive on that one.

Start three is surely the best. Wet rice > g-land hills pigs > clams > plains cows glitch with AG and TW. That being said, play all three starts, it couldn't hurt!

If you post the 4000BC autosaves, you're likely to get a lot more feedback from the forum as people can play along.

 

[Izuul]

If this were a regular game i would choose start 1. AH is good to research with Egypt anyway (hoping for horses) and the 5F1H pigs will be a nice food tile. PH to settle on for the 2H city tile. 8 river tiles to cottage later. Clams aren't very good food sources so that detracts from starts 2 and 3.

I'm not sure how it translates to this particular exercise though. There's not really any incentive here to set up an economy so food and forests for settler and unit production will be king.

 

[Yahya]

I think you can resize the images in imgur, although I'm not positive on that one.

Start three is surely the best. Wet rice > g-land hills pigs > clams > plains cows glitch with AG and TW. That being said, play all three starts, it couldn't hurt!

If you post the 4000BC autosaves, you're likely to get a lot more feedback from the forum as people can play along.

Thanks, Beningal. I didn't think to check imgur but found it easy to do, so I've resized the images. I also added the three saves to that post.

If this were a regular game i would choose start 1. AH is good to research with Egypt anyway (hoping for horses) and the 5F1H pigs will be a nice food tile. PH to settle on for the 2H city tile. 8 river tiles to cottage later. Clams aren't very good food sources so that detracts from starts 2 and 3.

I'm not sure how it translates to this particular exercise though. There's not really any incentive here to set up an economy so food and forests for settler and unit production will be king.

I understand that horses will appear on grassland and plains. Do they appear over forests as well, or is it necessary to have open tiles for them?

You're right about the exercise. The key steps here are getting workers, settlers, and warriors and getting the cities to size 4. So I need to focus strongly on food followed by hammers. That's certainly a great focus for NEWB1 to keep it simple.

Later today as an even more basic NEWB exercise (maybe call it NEWB0.5), I will look at all three starts, plan my tile improvements, and then calculate the resulting yield of each starting location. I think based on quickness to improve and provide high yield, #1 will be the best. We'll see.

 

[Izuul]

Hidden resources will not appear on forest tiles. This sometimes leads to "suspicious" tiles that are surrounded by forest.

 

[Pangaea]

If this were a regular game i would choose start 1. AH is good to research with Egypt anyway (hoping for horses) and the 5F1H pigs will be a nice food tile. PH to settle on for the 2H city tile. 8 river tiles to cottage later. Clams aren't very good food sources so that detracts from starts 2 and 3.

I'm not sure how it translates to this particular exercise though. There's not really any incentive here to set up an economy so food and forests for settler and unit production will be king.

After reading the first comments, I wondered if I was mad, ot just the dislike for coastal starts getting in the way, because I liked start #1 best too.

That's for a normal game, though. Since the goal here isn't on the economy but essentially REXing, I suppose #3 is better due to all the forests.

 

[Izuul]

T77 on first attempt with start #3. I'm sure that could be improved upon a good bit as i have an extra improvement in my 2nd city and a couple cities at S5. 4th city was settled too late and hit S4 quite a bit after city #3.

 

[Yahya]

Okay, now I'm going to do a bit of planning. Tell me if I'm out to lunch.

Here's Start #1 with a dot map outline over it, and signs indicating the simple improvements I would make to get this city up to pop 4 and use it to start up the civilization.

Spoiler :

Those signs might be hard to see against the floodplain and with the yellow, so I'll explain.

I would build worker first and research AH.

Once the worker is born send him to pasture the pig tile resulting in a 5F 1H tile to the north. That with the city center, which I believe would be 2F 2H 1C, would yield 7F 3H 1C after 19(maybe 20?) turns.

Next would be to farm the floodplain to the southwest, resulting in a 4F 1C tile. The city would therefore be at 11F 3H 2C after 24 turns.

Finally I would mine the plains hill 2N to yield 4H and one of the forest plains tiles to yield 1F 4H. At pop 4 the city would produce 12F 11H 2C.

At that point if I wanted to remain at pop 4 I'd need 2 specialists or to switch to hammer- or commerce-rich tiles. Most likely commerce unless I found a better commerce site, which is sure to exist. But commerce really isn't the point of this exercise, though I can't go broke, either.

On to start #2 now!

 

[Yahya]

Here's start #2, done the same way:

Spoiler :

This one at first glance encourages the player to work with the clams, but that necessitates researching fishing and I wouldn't want to do that unless absolutely necessary.

Thankfully it's loaded with food-rich tiles so that's not necessary, and I can just ignore the clams.

I'd farm the FP to the North to yield 4F 1C. That plus the city would yield 6F 1H 2C (I think 1H; I'm not sure how the city tile yields work).

Then I could go all production on this site. Mine the two forest hill tiles to yield 10H, and pasture the cow to yield 3F 3H 1C.

That would place this city at 9F 14H 3C at pop 4 if my assumptions are correct. This is a much weaker starting city, unless I farm both FP and drop one of the mines. That would balance things out a bit leaving the city at 13F 9H 4C, which would support a lot of settler production.

 

[Yahya]

Finally, here's Start #3:

Spoiler :

With this start and with expansion in mind, I think I'd be forced to go Fishing. Farm the rice yielding 4F 1C, build fishing nets on the first-ring clam yielding 4F 2C.

I could then mine the two forest tiles 2N and NE to yield a total of 2F 8H.

All that plus the city center would result in 10F 8H 4C at pop 4, I believe.

At pop 2 it would produce +4F so with a granary it still wouldn't be a great settler or worker producer.

That said, I could chop like crazy here to pump out units for a while.

 

[Yahya]

So after looking at all of that, it seems the fastest growth city would be #2.

I'm still not sure about the city tiles, though, but I know it always produces 2F.

Next, (probably tomorrow night), I'll play through the goals on each start and see which one is fastest. I'm liable to make some silly errors, so it should be good fun.

 

[Pangaea]

A couple pointers, since you seem to have misunderstood a few things of importance.

1) You can't mine a normal plains tile. You can only mine it if copper or iron shows up, which won't happen when the tile has a forest on it. All hills can be mined.

2) It's more sensible to talk about excess food, instead of produced food. Each citizen consumes 2 food, so the example in map 1 will lead to 7 excess food, not 11.

3) Forests on tiles give it one extra hammer. But to build a mine on it you must remove the forest first, which requires bronze working. Then the forested plains hill you have marked for mining in map #2 will yield 4, not 5.

Plains mines aren't very good either because they produce no food (so in truth you lose 2 food while working it), but since the goal here is very short term, I guess it is okay compared with the superior grassland hills.

 

[Yahya]

1) You can't mine a normal plains tile. You can only mine it if copper or iron shows up, which won't happen when the tile has a forest on it. All hills can be mined.

Actually, I do know that but I forget it all the time. I'm often surprised when I can't build a mine. Only on hills or strategic resources then.

2) It's more sensible to talk about excess food, instead of produced food. Each citizen consumes 2 food, so the example in map 1 will lead to 7 excess food, not 11.

Yes, you're right about that. I was thinking about excess food when writing those but decided not to mention it for simplicity's sake.

Given that, after the first tile improvement at pop 1 Start #1 is the strongest for initial settler and worker production.

Start #1:
+3F 2H for 5H initially.
+5F 3H for 8H after the farm.

Start #2:
+2F 2H for 4H initially.
+4F 2H for 6H after the pasture.

Start #3:
+3F 1H for 4H initially.
+4F 1H for 5H after the farm.

I confirmed this by founding the three cities. Start#1 will produce the worker in 12 turns; the other two take 15, all three without tile improvements.

3) Forests on tiles give it one extra hammer. But to build a mine on it you must remove the forest first, which requires bronze working. Then the forested plains hill you have marked for mining in map #2 will yield 4, not 5.

Plains mines aren't very good either because they produce no food (so in truth you lose 2 food while working it), but since the goal here is very short term, I guess it is okay compared with the superior grassland hills.

Okay so that will change the hammer yield a bit. I will look at that later.

My understanding is that if REXing, you want to find the highest food + hammer yield possible because the food is converted to hammers for worker and settler production.

That means my yields above are good at the start, but I have to look again at the later stages and see what will be best, though the difference with Start#1 initially makes it look far superior regardless.

 

[Kid R]

Start 3 looks better at first, then once the surroundings are explored it's much better still. There are 3 decent cities with food very near and all 3 can share the capital's tiles while they grow and keep worker movement time down. Also of course loads of forest to chop.

Finished on turn 69 with all done plus an extra 6 warriors. Could definitely get it down to low 60s. I should have built more workers sooner - ended up with 5 but 2 were late additions in panic to get the required amount of tile improvements done

Fishing, BW, AH, writing, math, pottery (for a 4 turn improvement instead of 5!) Whipped 2 settlers from the capital at size 3 and one from Memphis (horse/copper/rice city) at size 3. No granaries or lighthouse. Chopped 6 or 7 forests - should have done more.

 

[Yahya]

Start 3 looks better at first, then once the surroundings are explored it's much better still. There are 3 decent cities with food very near and all 3 can share the capital's tiles while they grow and keep worker movement time down. Also of course loads of forest to chop.

Are you basing that on the fact that it has more forest to chop than the rest?

That's worthy of consideration. I could chop 8 forests there for a lot of extra hammers, and that would end up leaving wet grassland for cottages. Too bad Hatshepsut's not financial.

I need to crunch the numbers so I can better understand them, because I've never done that. I am taking this very slow because I want to be methodical and don't have a lot of free time.

Tonight and this weekend I should get a bit more done on this.

 

[Kid R]

Mainly i meant that the surrounding land not shown in the t0 screenies is important, not just the capital's BFC, because here our three secondary cities have to grow to size 4 and so need food. #1 and #2 don't have too much good stuff outside but near the capital. #3 has some wheat, some beef, and a few floodplains very near, plus crucially also at least 2 of the secondary cities can make use of the capital's food tiles when it doesn't need them. A city to the south can use the rice (not to mention the copper). A city to the north can use the top clam.

We can also share round some mines and farms at times, and try to make sure the 4 cities all reach their targets on roughly the same turn. That part of the challenge is a bit contrived and unrealistic, but in general sharing tiles is always v good!! Especially with the capital which often has tons of food which would go partly to waste once it grows onto some good tiles. Dotmaps with no BFC overlap are almost never optimal!

But otherwise yes, chopping a load of those forests in start 3 means a quick start cos it's extra which we need 300+ of here in total to reach the goal. People often wait til math because that makes chops worth even more , but very early on it's still worth taking a few for the basic 20 because of the snowball effect. I went direct to math for the bonus here, since i could see no other need for tech after writing.

To be overly geeky about it consider that building an extra worker early costs 60. If he is then assigned to permanent chopping he can create 20 every 4 turns (1 to move on to forest, 3 to chop) so pays for himself in 12 turns, which is well within the time frame here.

 

[pigswill]

Very rusty, after my sixth replay on map#3 achieved objectives T59 (noble warrior rush).

 

[Kid R]

^ V impressive! Tried it a couple more times and couldn't get below 67, even with a lot of micro. How many workers did you get? Doing 16 all tile improvements seemed to be my bottleneck.

Funnily enough first try on the "obviously inferior" start #1 only took 65 turns

The city sites around the capital in #1 aren't so compact *but* there's a few top food specials available - pig, green sheep. #3 is all clams, brown cow and stuff. Less forest in #1 but seems to be enough. Also not having to built workboats helps. Some interesting lessons here - not sure what they are though I guess "food is king" stays true, even just 1 more makes quite a big difference.