SGOTM 05 - Murky Waters

[klarius]

War weariness has to be our biggest concern.

We are over 100% as EK has 2 war crybabies at size 2.
A little scrutinizing the map shows that we will probably lose another 11 battles in the next 4 turns (Delhi, Tokyo, Guangzhou).
Note, if a raging barb is within 4 tiles of a city, it will attack if he has nothing better to do. And better (for barbs) is only pillaging or suiciding before it even reaches the city.

That's more than another 10% WW and we don't know where we are at exactly now. We may well reach 134% in these turns already.
The gold can be connected in 13 turns from now. That helps a bit, but if WW creeps up further (and it will - at least Delhi is attacked more often as the 1/3t one can afford), WW goes through the roof (there is no limit).

So that's why I say build another settler in EK at size 1 and use it to get peace (hopefully). At size 1 EK will be ok even at 200% WW and a pop-rush unhappy. At size 2 it will already nearly shut down at 150%. I don't want to rely on MW before the gold is hooked, because it runs in problems at 134% already (possible every turn know). But we can live with a few turns, so no need to get the pop down first. Definitely don't grow MW now. That gives 2 more unhappy and we are already at the limit. Growing makes only sense to pop-rush 2 pop immediately (ok, maybe better grow now to nearly 4, so we can reach it fast).

 

[LowtherCastle]

Exploration: make sure the wb reaches all corner coastal tiles when moving around islands. We don't want to miss coastal tiles diagonal from land, so no short cut .

Our exploration looking for 1) access to other AIs and 2) potential Happy resources. No short cuts!!! Here's a pictorial demonstration:

 

[klarius]

Our exploration looking for 1) access to other AIs and 2) potential Happy resources. No short cuts!!! Here's a pictorial demonstration:

Yes we should know this tile.
But my fog gazing says there is no coastal connection (it's a little different shade of blue on the sea tiles, if they are adjacent to coastal tiles).
The best there could be is another culture link possibility. Still we should know.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Deja vu.

For the uninitiated, Murky Waters blundered through SG3 and SG4 to 2nd place finishes because we did no serious testing in advance. Early on in this thread, I made a plea for a strategy based on testing:

Our inadequate strategizing, imo, has dropped us from gold to silver in the last two SGs. Noteworthy is our inability to work late/end game factors into our strategy.

What we can test in advance

At this point, we are speculating that gifting a city to Asoka is the way to go. Could be. We have also speculated on building Pyramids. Could be. Maybe the way to go is to build an armada and bee-line Asoka. He's anyway the most distant enemy.

My point is this: Gyathaar is a genius at creating novel scenarios that probably no one has any experience with. Do we speculate or do we make some test runs to find out how this will play out?

This is my last call for testing in this SG5: I am limited to 3 hours of borrowed CIV access per day. I'm willing to forgo the incredibly fun GOTM21 tonight to worldbuild a map that approximates the world we have. I can place the AIs appropriately, then I can approximate our moves up to now, (or klarius and Ioan could fill in their own), and then we would have an excellent approximation of our current state. (The only thing I can't do is promise I can do all this in 3 hours.)

Then we could agree to a series of tests and divvy up the tests and run them.

I doubt you guys are actually interested, so there's no way I'm making this scenario unless there's exuberant, enthusiastic interest from a number of you all.

I repeat: This is my last call for testing in this SG5. (Some of you may be hoping I'll keep that promise... )

 

[LowtherCastle]

@klarius: If we have trade connection to our Barb city with stone, do we have stone for 1/2-priced Wonders?

 

[Erkon]

...general ramble...
I doubt you guys are actually interested, so there's no way I'm making this scenario unless there's exuberant, enthusiastic interest from a number of you all.

I repeat: This is my last call for testing in this SG5. (Some of you may be hoping I'll keep that promise... )

Excellent initiative. You are correct that we lost SGOTM4 due to not enough testing.

LC, if you setup a map, I will for sure play it. But please remember that I will probably become a pain the the ass if I get experience to back up may statements

 

[Erkon]

@klarius: If we have trade connection to our Barb city with stone, do we have stone for 1/2-priced Wonders?

Sorry to interfere: no, we will not. We need a diplomatic contact to open up resource trade.

 

[klarius]

@klarius: If we have trade connection to our Barb city with stone, do we have stone for 1/2-priced Wonders?

No. Resources are per player. In a normal team game, you could get the resource by just asking for it, but we cannot trade with the barbs.

 

[Erkon]

@klarius - if we research Horseback Riding, will the barbs:

1a) spawn keshiks
1b) spawn horse archers
1c) not spawn mounted units at all <= me thinks

2a) build keshiks (in one city given connected horses)
2b) build horse archers (in one city given connected horses) <= me thinks
2c) not build mounted units at all

Are barbarian cities connected in the same way as other players? If so, does the barbs have a capital?

 

[Erkon]

The tile will be revealed once the WB comes back. Murky - please ensure all coastal tiles are visited.

 

[klarius]

Well, there are limitations to what we can do with testing. A big one is the RNG obviously.
But we even don't know the starting techs of the AIs. We just know Gyathaar tampered with them.
We know that WW is eating our empire. We know Asoka is the biggest problem, with his centrally located hill capital.
Getting to him to kill him, needs a culture link established (at least ~35 turns, even forgoing gold city) and about 25 turns movement.
We can have a second settler 14 turns from now, following my outline.

We know he would currently accept EK.
EK has a higher value than any town we could settle and give away, due to 3 resources including the higher worth copper, but I still think it's worth a try (with a two resource town).
We cannot simulate the exact war success of Asoka, so a test will not show, if that works.

Another possibility, though quite a desperate measure , would be to pillage the copper and make peace for EK. We can take it back 10 turns later (though most of WW is still there, but has reduced a bit instead of increasing steadily).
The peace will reset his war success, so there should be a good chance to get peace again later due to our higher power (all the barb units).
But I wanted to keep that only as fall-back.

@Erkon: 1b and 2b.

 

[LowtherCastle]

We know Isa didnt have mysticism and probably had mining. We know at least 3 if not 5 Ais had mining, iirc, but that could be checked on the first save from BP. But that's not that important to me for the testing. Nor is the war success of Asoka or the RNG.

What we need from the test scenario is approximately the WW we have now to start out with. Gyathaar made The Continent huge to guarantee that we're all going to get a load of WW. The map evens out the RNG, imo. Even teams who bee-lined Pottery instead of BW will give teams a bucket load, probably even more, since our axes win occasionally (at least when I'm not playing...). The only teams w/o the WW are the ones who built warrior first and immediately DoPed, before human barbs appeared.

What we need from the testing, for example (brainstorm with me here):

1. How realistic is it to try for the non-catapult Conquest?
2. How much does this +100% WW kill our research and warring? ("a whole bunch" would be a useless answer.) Is it so much that it's virtually inconceivable to achieve conquest before LBMs?
3. When we DoP Asoka and others, does that work to our benefit long-term or is it better to suffer pop2 cities and trudge along, meanwhile keeping Asoka as a sputtering non-entity?

There's no doubt in my mind that we can approximate good answers to these questions if we're willing to take a week of testing to do it....

Btw: Have you made tile/mvmt counts if we can culture bridge to Asoka via Alex? Because with that forest there, that city can pop an obelisk way sooner than to the W.

 

[LowtherCastle]

On Gifting a City to Asoka

I'm thinking gifting our Culture Bridge city to the west is not so good after all, because when we take it back we'll get it at pop1 with no culture. We'll still need the 33 turns to expand the cultural borders. Settler(14t) + settling (x turns) + Asoka Gift grows to pop2 (17 turns? or less for AIs on Monarch?) + 33 turns to expand borders = ~65+ turns.

It might be wiser to gift him some jungle/banana city that we want for our production center after IW.

Guess it depends on whether it's sooner to produce the 2nd city over there or when we decide we'll capture his city back , but we can't capture it before it grows to pop2, right? Or it auto-razes.

 

[Erkon]

...

What we need from the testing, for example (brainstorm with me here):

1. How realistic is it to try for the non-catapult Conquest?
2. How much does this +100% WW kill our research and warring? ("a whole bunch" would be a useless answer.) Is it so much that it's virtually inconceivable to achieve conquest before LBMs?
3. When we DoP Asoka and others, does that work to our benefit long-term or is it better to suffer pop2 cities and trudge along, meanwhile keeping Asoka as a sputtering non-entity?

...

Both BP and jesusin experienced "no significant" ww in their test games (see post #5 and #7), so yes - the test games can be misleading. Still, I think that the three issues LC brings up are general and valuable experience can be extracted from test games. I don't think the test map has to look like the one we're playing. The key property is to have one large chunk of land (600 tiles) to allow enough barbs to spawn and generate the WW.

It will also give us practice in running defecit warfare (i.e. loosing gold at 0% research).

 

[klarius]

An option would be just to build a city on the western shore on the rice then auto-raze it after 10 turns of peace. That gives us a workable rice for the newly build city w/o the need of IW.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Both BP and jesusin experienced "no significant" ww in their test games (see post #5 and #7), so yes - the test games can be misleading.

You see, that's where our early testing was simple-minded. Our conclusion should not have been:

tests misleading,​

but rather:

different land masses, different effects​

==> Big Conclusion: As soon as we had a general idea of the land mass (we had it pretty early on), then we do a new round of tests that would have told us:

Whoa....we're in for some intense WW...now what?​

Of course that's water over the dam for this game, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we can't gain some insight testing now (as you agreed with me on, I take it).

 

[LowtherCastle]

An option would be just to build a city on the western shore on the rice then auto-raze it after 10 turns of peace. That gives us a workable rice for the newly build city w/o the need of IW.

How much per turn from Rice in city center? And how much does the AI need on Monarch level to go to pop2?

 

[LowtherCastle]

On Worker Actions for Murky's Turnset

Do we need any more imporovements considering our population limits now?

Or should our workers just:

1. road to GC, build mine and road to Trojan Asoka? -or-
2. road to GC and Trojan Asoka?

 

[LowtherCastle]

An option would be just to build a city on the western shore on the rice then auto-raze it after 10 turns of peace. That gives us a workable rice for the newly build city w/o the need of IW.

Saves 4 turns on border expansion with 1 wkr farming rice, 6 turns, w/2wkrs farming rice.

 

[klarius]

On Worker Actions for Murky's Turnset

Do we need any more imporovements considering our population limits now?

Or should our workers just:

1. road to GC, build mine and road to Trojan Asoka? -or-
2. road to GC and Trojan Asoka?

Why road to GC. It's absolutely no problem to have sailing before the gold is hooked to GC.