News: GOTM 16 Pre-Game Discussion

[Capt Buttkick]

With raging barbs, two factors I prioritize higher than usual:
* Settle on hills
* Get to archery asap and train archers (good synergy with settling on hills of course).

When I say asap, I'm pretty sure I can throw in Poly first, but I'll do some tests before I start (getting religion will help with early city defense due to the culture boost).

After that, beeline for IW and spam out the Jags (I guess we won't have copper nearby or I'll certainly throw some of those into the mix).

 

[=FC=Gorgon]

Gorgon: Most of the fastest conquest players do not even reach CS in tech before they are finished.

If you are considering a quick conquest, wonders are pretty much out of the question. In WOTM5, I spent 35 turns building 4 early wonders, then went entirely military for the rest of the game, if I hadn't done that, I could have cut at least 75 turns off my time. The earlier you start, the faster you'll finish.

Makes sense. Thanks Thrallia. This is new to me so it should be fun.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I'm likely to go space or cultural so want a good long-term commerce spot for the capital. I'm pondering about the hill W of the corn for settling. It loses the clam but looks like it has at least two, possibly three, flood plains (SW of the hill looks like one, I can't figure out the tile W of the hill). That has the advantage that you can start cottaging really early. The other reason why I'm tempted by it is that it looks to me like there's coast south of the visible flood plain. If that sea stretches west then settling in-place might make at least one floodplain permanently unusable.

Trouble is - moving the settler there will waste two turns if it turns out the starting spot is better. And the starting spot does look not too far off cottage-heaven, with rivers and decent production too, although eventually it'll need a few farms to give enough food to work all the hills.

I'm disinclined to settle 1S of the start because that will bring in too many ocean tiles for my liking.

(EDIT: I'm also pondering about 1N of the starting spot. That stops you building a lighthouse, but keeps the clam and corn (although you can't build a workboat until you have another coastal city), and looks like it may increase the number of grassland/grassland-hill tiles. And makes it marginally more likely that another city to the SW can work the flood plains)

 

[KurKo]

am i the only one who's going to settle 1E, the spot where the scout is now?
6F from corn + 6 grass hills sounds great to me! and with more happines there's still clam, plain hills and room still room for few cottages but this will propably(hopefully ) before that.

does anyone agree?

 

[Erkon]

Pangea/low/small is not very small at all. A couple of worldbuilder maps indicates that the land is about 40 tiles across. A little bit too far for Jaguars only. The start screen indicates a twin city placement (2W from settler and 2E). A third city may be necessary to get horses. Research to Iron Working and Horseback Riding, then build jaguar and horse archers. Shut down research to save gold for maintenance. Keep captured cities to build more units. The tricky question is if the challenger settings will generate a higher score or not?...

 

[CliftonBazaar]

On the first turn I'll Move the scout N, NW while moving the settler SW,W to see what is revealed.

 

[The Lance]

Hmmmm.... This game is for vanila.... No GW...

gah!!!!
hmmm, guess you can tell what version of civ I play most, time to change plans lol

 

[Smirk]

I'll probably move the the settler SW then either W or NW, or NE then E for the two hammer capital. In any event I figure my first two cities will make use of this area it all depends what my initial push will be, tech to conquest or bang out some units at the start. At prince I surmise an early weak unit force could make some ground, although contending with barbs with any sort of fast conquest becomes increasingly difficult unless the space is tamed by your cities.

 

[Mutineer]

I hope that Challenger in this game is in resonable scale. Not like absolutly unplayeble in Wotm6 or resonably unfair in Gotm15

 

[Antoninus]

am i the only one who's going to settle 1E, the spot where the scout is now?
6F from corn + 6 grass hills sounds great to me! and with more happines there's still clam, plain hills and room still room for few cottages but this will propably(hopefully ) before that.

does anyone agree?

It all depends on what you typically like to do, or what you want to do with your capital in this game. Ask youself this, when you get to Bureaucracy, do you like the 50% production boost or the 50% income boost? If your capital is your production center, than your starting cite is great. You've added all those hills by moving one east. If you're like me, I usually have a production center in another city by this point in the game, so I'm (usually) using my capital as my income/science center. The 50% production boost is just nice to have, but its more like icing on the cake.

That's what's cool about this game. So many ways to analyze it, until your head hurts ...

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I hope that Challenger in this game is in resonable scale. Not like absolutly unplayeble in Wotm6 or resonably unfair in Gotm15

I suspect people going for long-term peaceful sciency games may find that the challenger setting helps them to get a fast victory. The AI's extra archer is largely irrelevent if you're not doing early warmongering. And the extra AI techs will mean you have more techs to trade when you reach alphabet: A common issue on prince is that if you get alphabet early and do one or two rounds of tech trading, you end up so far ahead of the AI that there's nothing more you can trade for.

One thing to watch for though - with the aggressive AI settings, the challenger setting will mean that you start off militarily weaker than all the AI - that might make some AIs more likely to declare war on you very early on (I noticed in a couple of tests that with the aggressive AI settings, the AI sometimes declares war on you very early - eg. when you've just founded your 2nd city and the AI still has only warriors to attack with)

 

[LowtherCastle]

...might make some AIs more likely to declare war on you very early on

If they're anywhere close to you, which I doubt with only 4 AIs. I'm thinking we're going to spend half the game searching them out.

 

[slowrider]

If they're anywhere close to you, which I doubt with only 4 AIs. I'm thinking we're going to spend half the game searching them out.

In the 10 test games I ran (just clicking through to see when wonders were built) I was just a homebody and met all 5 AIs very quickly (the 4 other civs and the barbs).

Regarding the comment about the AIs declaring early war, this definitely could be true especially if you take a religion. In the games I was clicking through (up to turn 200) I didn't have a religion and they largely left me alone but I was playing random opponents and wasn't up against a predominence of warmongers. I expect this to be a cagematch on a tight island against a bunch of thugs with well endowed capitals probably even better than ours. It's going to be a free-for-all.

One other thing I noticed was that each civ will have a limited number of cities before land runs out and there were some very large stacks of defenders in those cities especially after the early ages.

 

[LowtherCastle]

met all 5 AIs very quickly (the 4 other civs and the barbs)

Meeting is one thing, having them close enough to worry about stack attacks another. I assume you tested with low water level. How close were their capitals to yours?

 

[Jastrow]

I suspect people going for long-term peaceful sciency games may find that the challenger setting helps them to get a fast victory. The AI's extra archer is largely irrelevent if you're not doing early warmongering. And the extra AI techs will mean you have more techs to trade when you reach alphabet: A common issue on prince is that if you get alphabet early and do one or two rounds of tech trading, you end up so far ahead of the AI that there's nothing more you can trade for.

One thing to watch for though - with the aggressive AI settings, the challenger setting will mean that you start off militarily weaker than all the AI - that might make some AIs more likely to declare war on you very early on (I noticed in a couple of tests that with the aggressive AI settings, the AI sometimes declares war on you very early - eg. when you've just founded your 2nd city and the AI still has only warriors to attack with)

Another thing to consider is whether or not you want a religion... Their extra tech could certainly be relevant to when the first 3 religions are founded.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Meeting is one thing, having them close enough to worry about stack attacks another. I assume you tested with low water level. How close were their capitals to yours?

I've generated quite a few maps at these settings and looked at them with worldbuilder (mostly coz I was trying to figure out what the difference is between Pressed and Natural coastline!). I'd say all bets are off on the distance to the nearest AI. I've seen it 20 tiles away, and I've seen it 5-6 tiles away. On average (median) I guess you're looking at 10-12ish tiles though.

My take: Use that scout and don't decide how to deal with the AI until you have some idea of the map.

 

[Khalid]

I have played 2 test games and the observations:

having the nearest AI's capital 8 and 10 tiles from the starting spot. I have destroyed them with jags before they settled the second city. (research agri, mining, bronze, iron, built worker, barack, settler, wariors until iron)

You can have the budhism AND research agriculture before you finish the worker from the start.

Barbs are not a problem, merely annoying. Archers appeared 1000BC, axes 400BC. Shock jaguar on a forested hill will usually kill barb axe. Lot of wariors comming, but you can just promote jags on them.

Killed 2 civs before they hooked up metal. Build nothing except barracks and army. Looks promising for conquest. Tried to research cats before shutting down research, but got broke, just when started construction. The army maintenance is just too big to research that far. So max research horse archers.

 

[Affirmative]

I played one test game with a similar start location. Founded two cities, teched to IW and then filled in some worker techs before shutting down the science.

Conquest victory by 1020 AD, nothing special at all. I think the real cause was not getting the first few jags out quickly enough to wipe out the first two opponents before they put down their 3rd (the first civ), and 4th (the second civ), cities. Spent way too much time throwing my stacks around finishing off these crappy size 1 or 2 cities. I guess in the future I need to have another stack of like 5 city raider jags that are on cleanup duty while the main stack of jags and axes goes after the big cities.

The AI never really competed with me. Even the last civ for me to kill was still using just axes, horse archers, and spearmen at 1020 AD.


Little question for the people who know how this game works. I finished with a score of ~36000, up from 1000 when the game ended. How does one make sure that he gets the most points possible? I guess I got no real points from tech, and because I was razing cities after the first two civs due to maintenence I didn't get the same amounts of land/population. The goal was to capture the pyramids and then go state prop so I could afford to keep more cities, but they were, no joke, in the single furthest away city on the map. I just remember looking at some of the other gotm games with early conquest/domination wins, gotm 14(was that the russian one? =x), very early wins with scores around 75k.

 

[DaviddesJ]

Pyramids has nothing to do with State Property. You aren't going to get Communism by 1000 AD.

 

[Affirmative]

Pyramids has nothing to do with State Property. You aren't going to get Communism by 1000 AD.

I think that may be one of my issues, I just don't really know my way around civ4, still stuck on civ3. I somehow drew a parallel from police state -> state property. =[