Planning the start

This is truly inspiring! I love the way the conditional formatting outlines all of the worked tiles as if grass so you only need to enter bonus and shortage food to see the growth pattern :goodjob:

Offa said:
BTW the spreadsheet does give bonus shields on growth, but it does assume you have set the governor, food surplus and lux slider to make sure the right tile is used.
Click to expand...
I always set governor for production with moods, commerce and food off. Is this correct?

What is the significance of food surplus and why are turns with growth <4 highlighted. Is this to do with getting the bonus shield tile worked.

What do you need to set the lux slider for?
 
Umm whoa. I could make an automated program with a BASIC wiring, but it would involve a large number of variables. (Basicly, I am to lazy to do it)
 
Perugia,

This will impact on your capacity to manage an effective 'settler pump' without the city going into revolt or using entertainers (thereby wasting a city worker).
 
Perugia said:
I always set governor for production with moods, commerce and food off. Is this correct?
Click to expand...
Yes, at least for early cities. I think later corrupt cities might as well emphasize food.

Perugia said:
What is the significance of food surplus and why are turns with growth <4 highlighted. Is this to do with getting the bonus shield tile worked.
Click to expand...

Correct. The spreadsheet assumes 2 bonus shields on growth, but this is only going to happen reliably if there is 4 or more surplus food. With <=3 surplus food sometimes you get the shields and sometimes you don't, because of a devious mechanism probably related to gold. The highlighting is to alert you to this so you can allow for not getting the bonus shields as appropriate.

See gotm 41 first spoiler, in which this is discussed:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=114779&page=5&pp=20gotm41 spoiler
 
The only trouble you might have with such a spreadsheet (as I did recently...) is predicting which tiles new citizens will be assigned to, and also the tile re-assignment when the culture boundaries grow.

Another thing to watch out for, which has caught me out, is when pop growth and culture expansion happen in the same turn: the new citizen may get turned into a Clown to prevent a riot, instead of working a tile.
 
eldar said:
Another thing to watch out for, which has caught me out, is when pop growth and culture expansion happen in the same turn: the new citizen may get turned into a Clown to prevent a riot, instead of working a tile.
Click to expand...

Very true. It is one of the reasons I put in the culture indicator. The thing to do is to increase the lux slider before growth, when growth and culture expansion happen together. Having to remember this sort of thing isn't easy though. I think it was much worse in civ2.

The citizens can all get reassigned with culture growth, even if the population doesn't change, so you have to check the city screen to check things are OK.
 
Offa said:
The citizens can all get reassigned with culture growth, even if the population doesn't change, so you have to check the city screen to check things are OK.
Click to expand...

That can be annoying too. If a citizen from a roaded/river tile is moved to an unroaded/no-river tile (for extra food/shields/however the "governer" sees fit) at that point, it'll create a Clown because the Lux %age is no longer enough due to the drop in gold.
 
Offa said:
The citizens can all get reassigned with culture growth, even if the population doesn't change, so you have to check the city screen to check things are OK.
Click to expand...

In some cases they get reassigned at population growth alone, e.g. if you have assigned them by hand very differently than the governor would have.

I made a series of tests of the preferences of the governor. I set fpt to 1 and tested how this influenced his decision. If some of the available tiles had 3 xpt, he would move also the 1fpt (jungle) citizen away at population growth to one of the richer tiles.

I also found that setting the user preference to production in all my cases (not full coverage, but still) made no difference to having no preference set at all. Food preference and commerce preference did make a difference. It seems production preference is default, at least in the lone capital.

I think there will be no hard and fast answer, such as RCP etc., to the question how the new citizen is assigned to a tile, simply because it is programmed to be a complex decision based on so many variables that it can't be pinned down through game-play tests. Better simply ask Sören?

For the average settler pump, we must simply not rely too heavily on the two bonus shields during the growth-to-size-four-and-5-fpt phase. Not making the wrong tiles too attractive in terms of xpt can help, though, as can proactively keeping up happiness in order to avoid clowns.

Which is exactly what you caveat states.
 
All food, gold, and shield calculations are done before cultural expansion, so there is no worry about laborer reallocation there (just make sure you don't forget to change it again).

I've done testing where telling the governor to emphasize production made a difference.
 
TimBentley said:
I've done testing where telling the governor to emphasize production made a difference.
Click to expand...

A difference to having the preference set to food or commerce, or a difference to having all three options off? (Governor "managing citizen moods" of course always off.)
 
When compared to all options off. With no emphasis, it chose a 3f/0s square, then a 2f/1s square. With food emphasis, it chose a 3f/0s square, then a 3f/0s square. With production emphasis, it chose a 2f/1s square, then a 3f/0s square.
 
Hi Offa, great tool here, I´ll use it!! :goodjob:

Now, I found something that bugged me - but I could fix it myself and would like to share it.
It´s about the city center: AGR civs often start with 3 fpt here. So I rewrote the formula in column O (fpt) to start with =W$5 ... instead of =2 ...

Sorry for bumping this old threat, but I think it deserves it!
Btw, maybe this would be better placed in the Utilities forum?
 
Hello Twonky, I am always pleased to see my thread bumped. I agree I should have automated the city centre food to match the food in the box :blush: . I did automate it for city shields, which is even less likely to vary.

Feel free to include your improved version?
 
@Offa: Thank you very much for posting that, that looks like an awesome tool!

:worship:
 
Here is my new version of Offa's start planner. It now features:
  • multiple independent tabs for planning alternate scenarios or additional cities. Copy & paste tabs as needed.
  • cities up to size 12, with or without an aqueduct
  • support for agricultural and/or industrious civilizations
  • support for accelerated production rule
  • more terrain types
  • additional data entry fields
  • adjustable date column

Start plan 3.0 is a beta version which needs testing, since I made extensive revision to the food calculations. I will make corrections (suggestions welcome...) and release version 3.1 later. There will likely be a culture counter added to version 3.1.

Edit(2/4/17): Withdrew version 3.0 for bug fixes
 
Last edited:
Oh my, how nice of the forum to give notifications for ancient posts. :)

This was more than a decade ago :eek:

Offa are you still alive ?
 
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