News: GOTM12 Pre-Game Discussion

[ainwood]

GOTM 12: Mansa Musa

[img=right]http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/info/leaders/leaders0015.jpg[/img]

This game MUST be played in patch version 1.61. We will NOT accept any games played under any other patch versions, and you can't play it in warlords!

Further, it MUST be played using HOF mod version 1.61.008.




Game settings:
Civilization: Mali (Leader: Mansa Musa; Traits: Financial, Spiritual)
Rivals: 6
Difficulty: Prince
Map: Continents
Mapsize: Standard
Climate: cold
Water level: Medium
Starting Era: Ancient
Speed: Normal
Options: normal.
Victory Conditions: all enabled

Mansa Musa:
Mansa Musa is Financial and Spiritual; starting with the wheel and mining. Financial allows an extra gold on any tile with two or more. Spiritual allows you to change religions or civics with no anarchy period, as well as double production speed of temples.

Unique unit: skirmisher:
The skirmisher replaces the standard archer. It has strength of 4 (compared to the archer which has a strength of only 3) and costs 25 hammers. Aside from the higher strength, the other benefit of the skirmisher over the standard archer is an extra first strike chance.

The starting screenshot is here (click for a bigger version!)


Adventurer Class bonuses:

1. Start with a worker and a scout.

Challenger Class Equalisers:

1. Start with no technologies.

 

[Adonias]

Either going for cultural, or maybe spaceship in the end, but I'll start off taking the continent with skirmishers. So lots of early wars, then a builders strategy. Nice one this month

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Yep, the skirmishers give a good reason for getting archery quickly and doing lots of very early warring.

Can't see any really big reason for not settling in place, especially with that gold there, though the site is a little on the food-poor side for my liking. The pigs will get the capital up to 4 or 5 pop quite well, but then all those plains will start stunting growth. I'll probably move the warrior northwest first just to check there's no sea resources around that would give me a reason to move the settler westwards.

Evidently we are no longer in a sawtooth difficulty pattern.

 

[da_Vinci]

This game MUST be played in patch version 1.61. We will NOT accept any games played under any other patch versions, and you can't play it in warlords!

And it does have to be played using the HOF mod, right?

dV

 

[Jar Jar Binks]

Here is the first test map I believe I got it right

 

[BLubmuz]

Finally my favourite Leader, a bit misspended on price difficulty, pity for the normal speed.
As Dynamicstpirit, i see no reasons for not settle in place, if the warrior doesn't discover some seafood.
Probably i'll avoid early religion, then the research path could be hunt, AH, archery, BW.
Worker first, though no gold to work.

I hope there is less land than in past GotM.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I hope there is less land than in past GotM.

I think on continents it's a fair bet there'll be less land. Plus, if you're going for anything other than domination or conquest, it should be possible to basically ignore the existence of the other continent (other than for trading and missionary spreading), which halves the amount of land you need to worry about

 

[da_Vinci]

Can't see any really big reason for not settling in place, especially with that gold there, though the site is a little on the food-poor side for my liking. The pigs will get the capital up to 4 or 5 pop quite well, but then all those plains will start stunting growth. I'll probably move the warrior northwest first just to check there's no sea resources around that would give me a reason to move the settler westwards.

With the financial trait, would moving west (and how many?) to get the commerce out of the sea (lighthouse for food) make sense, even if no sea resource? Settling 2W of start leaves room for a city 1S of the gold (gold, wine and one spice), keeps the pigs, one hill and one spice, and tons of sea squares for commerce. Downside seems to be turn delay, lose a forest tile, and if no sea food resource, this is not a great whipping city (but it won't be settled in place either?). Would love to hear the expert's thoughts.

addendum/edit: Maybe the other downside of the 2W move is that you have to wait for a second city to use the resources that you have moved away from, wheras you can use them all with one city settled in place. So your next city placement is freed up to go after metal or other resources that you scout.

It gets to the question of maximize now, or set up for the future. Which is better?

Evidently we are no longer in a sawtooth difficulty pattern.

Maybe just a diferent sawtooth: instead of ramp up and start from scratch, this now looks like ramp up and ramp down. Or maybe it is just becoming random.

dV

 

[Shillen]

I don't know what to make of this one. Cold climate, yet we have a lush starting position. Unless it like immediately drops to tundra and ice all around us I don't see how most of the AI's can NOT start in horrible locations. That screams that the game will be far too easy, especially since it's only prince. I would almost expect an island start with barely more land than is visible on the starting screenshot, limiting us to 3-4 cities max before astronomy. Just a guess...

And if that's the case then I would definitely move the settler either to the SW or NE so that he isn't in the direct middle of the island, taking up space.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Oooh! I've never played on a cold map before so I just generated a couple of random maps to see what they look like. The most obvious effect is huge bands of sea-ice at the poles, with one or sometimes both continents nestling up to it. So don't rely on being able to sail around the continents, other than with subs.

The continents themselves look to me very slightly smaller than with a temperate climate, though it was only a small sample (5 cold maps, 2 temperate ones) and I wouldn't have intuitively expected climate to affect continent size, so that might be a random quirk. However, as you'd expect, the continents have much larger bands of ice/tundra near the north/south extremities. That means a fair bit less habitable land. And in particular anyone going for domination should be able to do it by conquering less land, and then at the end of the game getting perhaps another 10% land-area just by plopping cities down on the (hopefully, uninhabited) ice/tundra.

Within the habitable land area, the landscape doesn't look any different from temperate maps. The land is dominated by grassland, plus jungle near the equator.

Overall I think Ainwood has given us a map with less land, which answers a lot of requests people have been making. Ta, Ainwood!

 

[Shillen]

I generated some maps also. One AI starts completely surrounded by ice/tundra in each game (loaded 7 maps). Like Dynamic said the land is short so the other 5 AI's have very little expansion room which is a huge advantage to the player since the AI's are incapable of capturing cities early in the game on prince difficulty. I'm still expecting an island start to even this out more or we're looking at a prince game that will play like a warlord game.

 

[da_Vinci]

I don't know what to make of this one. Cold climate, yet we have a lush starting position. Unless it like immediately drops to tundra and ice all around us I don't see how most of the AI's can NOT start in horrible locations. That screams that the game will be far too easy, especially since it's only prince. I would almost expect an island start with barely more land than is visible on the starting screenshot, limiting us to 3-4 cities max before astronomy. Just a guess...

And if that's the case then I would definitely move the settler either to the SW or NE so that he isn't in the direct middle of the island, taking up space.

Do you think that ainwood has left us without horse or metal, until we build ships to go get it (if we are on an island as you are pondering), or wrest it from the enemy with the skirmishers? And if that is the case, and we have a ferrous Rome as our nearest neighbor, would that make the game more interesting?

If we have to wait for astronomy to expand off an island, does that make harvesting commerce from the sea that much more critical?

dV

 

[Adonias]

It seems we are near the south pole: Tundra just south of grassland at the bottom of the screen. 2N and 2N1E of the settler seem to be sea tiles, 2S2E plains... If this were a higher difficulty level, getting boxed in might be a problem.

Can anyone make out what it is that is in the lower left corner of the sea tile 1n2W of the settler? Some kind of wave indicating seafood?

 

[da_Vinci]

Within the habitable land area, the landscape doesn't look any different from temperate maps. The land is dominated by grassland, plus jungle near the equator.

Overall I think Ainwood has given us a map with less land, which answers a lot of requests people have been making. Ta, Ainwood!

Sounds like you are saying that the ice/tundra band at each pole is larger, the tropical band at the equator is narrower, and the two temperate bands are about usual size, but are now closer to the equator (lattitude shift)? And within the temperate bands, the grass/plains ratio is usual (a dry, rather than cold, ought to be what changes that ratio)?

If that is what you are seeing, then I would think that there is a good chance that the AI placed in the temperate areas would have expansion room if not sea locked.

dV

 

[Shillen]

If that is what you are seeing, then I would think that there is a good chance that the AI placed in the temperate areas would have expansion room if not sea locked.

dV

They have expansion room but less of it. This is because the AI's starting near the tundra bands in the north/south can only expand towards the equator. This means that even an AI that starts near the equator is going to find himself closed in much quicker than normal.

 

[Jove]

I attempted to load Jar Jar Bink's test map to test run the HOF mod, and this save says it requires HOF 1.61.007. It looks like the current mod version on the HOF page is 1.61.008.

Can somebody confirm that it is HOF v1.61.008 that is now required for the GOTMs? I'd hate to get a game disqualified over this...

 

[ewokimpi]

The tile two northwest of the Settler is a coast tile, and the tile three northwest must be land.

An island start just off the continent would be fun to play. Maybe that's what we're on.

Imagine running a galley across the strait from the capital to the continent every four turns for the entire game.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I attempted to load Jar Jar Bink's test map to test run the HOF mod, and this save says it requires HOF 1.61.007. It looks like the current mod version on the HOF page is 1.61.008.

Can somebody confirm that it is HOF v1.61.008 that is now required for the GOTMs? I'd hate to get a game disqualified over this...

I'm pretty sure you'd never get a game disqualified over that, because you'd never reach that point. If you don't have the correct version of the HOF mod installed, the starting save file will simply refuse to load, so you won't be able to play until you do install it. If you do have the correct version of the HOF mod installed, then the game will automatically play using that version, even if you have other versions installed too.

 

[Civicide]

Hmm. Interesting starting location if you settle in place. Should be very nice in the early game, with the gold for obvious reasons, and the pigs providing a nice flexibility between growth/commerce and production. I love starts with grassland pigs - even at size 4, we can work the gold mine and two grassland hills while still retaining a +2 food surplus (9 production in the extreme early game is awesome). While the city won't be an economic powerhouse (only two cottageable grassland spots, plus whatever there might be in the unrevealed tiles 1E2N and 1N2E), a settle-in-place should result in a half-decent production city with a good pop of early commerce. A food resource 2N, 1E2N, or 1N2E, would turn it into a powerhouse by allowing us to cottage the plains, or even workshop them if we so desired.

If the warrior's initial move NW reveals a sea resource, it may be worthwhile to move. preferably 1W (if it catches the food), so as not to lose the second hill. 2W to grab a fish that's 1S4W of the settler would be risky since you're looking at a max of - what - 8 max production until workshops (provided there isn't, like, land with iron 1N4W)? We would need another, better production city pronto, and even though you could support 6 specialists in a GP farm, I don't know that the hit to early production would be worth it.

Like others, with Prince, normal barbs, fairly vanilla settings, I'm guessing there is a catch - an extremely small continent all to ourselves would make for an interesting Continents variation. That, and/or a funky resource situation, could make for an interesting game.

 

[AlanH]

I attempted to load Jar Jar Bink's test map to test run the HOF mod, and this save says it requires HOF 1.61.007. It looks like the current mod version on the HOF page is 1.61.008.

Can somebody confirm that it is HOF v1.61.008 that is now required for the GOTMs? I'd hate to get a game disqualified over this...

Just to underline what DynamicSpirit said:

The start file will *only* run with the version of the HoF Mod that it's locked to. If you try to load it with any other mod or mod version, it demand the one it knows.

And it does have to be played using the HOF mod, right?

Correct There will be no non-HoF Mod saves this month.

There will be two different versions of each player class save - the usual Windows one and a new Mac one. They will only run with the appropriate HoF Mod installed, and neither HoF Mod will run on the other platform.