same turn simultanious mass hut popping

[BaconLad]

ive been trying a few new things recently and heres one that i think deserves a mention.

this is what happend in my latest effort...

i started the game as normal, found my 1st city, got building a settler, and aiming my tech for monarchy. after monarchy i always go for writing. once i had that, i changed ALL production to dips. every dip that was built i sent out in search of huts, once i had found the huts i orderd the dips to "sleep" next to the huts. meanwhile im still discovering techs, literacy,mysticism,philosophy,etc...
eventually i had 13 dips next to 13 huts (could of got more, but at this point there was no where else for me to explore)
then i popped every one in the same turn (i saved/loaded before each one) and got 7 advances including trade, polytheism, monotheism, pottery and seafarring. i also got an advanced tribe in a superb location perfect for frontier stability, and 5 "none" elephants all in the same turn.
i cant remember the date, but it was still early in the game and i was sending trade caravans to london which was building mikes chapel.
my science rate however went from a tech every (approx) 7 turns to (approx) 13

 

[Prof. Garfield]

If you were going to save the game before each hut, there was little reason to pop 13 at once, because you could have got what you wanted at each particular hut as it came around. Then, you could have placed most of your production into settlers instead of diplomats. 9 settlers and one diplomat would probably have given a much better return on investment than 13 diplomats.

There are certain circumstances where poping huts on the same turn is useful, however. If, for example, a continent has no cities on it, the chances for an advanced tribe go way up. The city question depends on if there were cities at the beginning of the turn, so poping multiple huts on the same turn would yield a greater proportion of advanced tribes over individual popping over several turns. Of course, this involves having a horde of units in area and the expense to do so might outweigh the potential benefits of extra advanced tribes. Besides, by the time you can muster a large enough horde and find a large enough continent, chances are that someone will already have planted a city on it. I usually explore in a direction with only one ship, loaded with settler/diplomat/caravan combination of some sort and drop onto any visible huts to see what I might get. Once you have one city, it can produce another one, and then both can produce again, and soforth until the island is covered.

 

[BaconLad]

the reason for the mass same turn popping as aposed to individual popping, is my 1st 7 techs have to be in the correct order, after that its a free for all.
production could be spent better, but hey its far from a perfected technique. also i try not to build too many settlers before building grannaries/pyramids.

in terms of covering an island with cities based on finding one advanced tribe i have to say that i just cant be bothered managing more than 30cities or so. these days i play purely for enjoyment, now i could adopt other ways of playing and have a rampant empire producing massive scores, but would that increase my enjoyment? it is possible to have a great game on deity with just one city, so 30 should be plenty to show the ai whats what.

 

[LordValuna]

when i have popped 3 huts in a turn, I found that they didnt seem random. You might get three advanced tribes, 3 techs or 3 units. I havent had 3 barbs but have had 2.

I dont know if you can take advantage of this non-randomness (without rezorting to reloading the game)

 

[Peaster]

LV: I'd be VERY surprised if the results weren't random... IIRC, Samson [maybe the greatest Civ2 scientist of all time] studied hut results in some detail and didn't mention this. Of course, he may have just missed the whole idea. If you think they aren't random, maybe you should do some testing. This could be a pretty big Civ2 discovery, which would probably have a very big impact on strategy.

BL: I think the Professor made some good points, assuming you want to improve your play. [If not, why bother posting in the Strategy Forum?]

 

[civiijkw]

The hut-popping results may be skewed in one direction or another based on the beginning of the turn values, but there is still randomness within that skewing. Some time you may want to test popping the same hut 10 times and see how many different results you get (advanced tribe, nomad, weeds, tech, 1-move merc, 2-move merc, various barbarians, gold of various levels). It was said elsewhere that you will not get an advanced tribe or barbarians until after you've built your first city, but I don't think anything else is ruled out (if you pop the hut early enough the chance of weeds seems virtually nil).

I've noticed what seems to be a higher chance of getting nomads from the cap huts, but I haven't done any real research to verify that.

Getting the 7 techs from huts would have increased the beaker cost for the one you were researching since you were now researching the 15th tech rather than the 8th. You must have been getting some trade arrows from the advanced tribes as I would have expected the beaker cost should have more than doubled and thus the number of turns per advance to should also have more than doubled.

 

[civiijkw]

To expand on the tech cost, if you have fewer additional techs than your key civ then the cost would be 96 beakers for the 8th tech and 210 for the 15th tech. If you have the same number of additional techs (such as if you are your own key civ) then the costs are 104 and 225. If you have significantly more then the costs are 120 and 315. In the first case 7 turns would be based on 14-15 beakers per turn and 13 turns would be based on 17-18 per turn (2-4 beakers per turn were gained in the advanced tribe or tribes). In the second the numbers per turn would be 15-17 and 18 (1-3 beakers gained) and in the third the numbers would be 18-19 and 25-26 (6-8 beakers gained).

I am going to guess that you were ranked supreme and playing a purple civ so that you were your own key civ gaining 1-3 beakers from your new advanced tribe(s).

 

[Prof. Garfield]

also i try not to build too many settlers before building grannaries/pyramids.

Consider this: without improvements to terrain, you can usually get a surplus of 2 food from a city (on grassland/working grassland in despotism and on grassland/working a forest in Monarchy) regardless of how many citizens your city has, provided most are working a grassland. It takes 10 turns to grow a size 1 city to size 2, 15 turns to grow a size 2 to size 3 and 20 turns to grow a size 3 to a size 4. Constantly building settlers before a city reaches size 3 gives the same growth rate as a grainary in a size 4 city, not to mention extra production on the city squares. Of course, there is something to be said for real time management of fewer cities.

There are, I suppose, two variations on the build lots of small cities concept. One is the ICS strategy and the other is spreading the cities out enough that they can eventually grow to full size. I usually practice the latter strategy; it can give great results in a democracy. Results are best in deity plus three where a couple trade routes and 40% luxuries (which allow any city with 4 trade to produce 2 luxuries and keeps new cities out of disorder) can allow a city to grow as long as it has ocean available, or roaded grassland. A little more infrastructure is needed at deity, but the results are still great. In non representative governments, the ICS strategy is probably the best, because you can't get 1 turn population growth of celebrations, so smaller food boxes are better.