SGOTM 08 - Smurkz

[Renata]

I tried that with my temporary copy and I can't get it work. It says that merged cells have to be the same size, or some such. In any case, here's the screenshot I promised yesterday. This is only for Yosmurkzhappy. I can't find whichever version of the spreadsheet it was that had the latest for the other two cities.

Yosmurkzhappy:

Spoiler :

Still feeling useless without the game on hand to check the current state of things. Come on, new hard drive, get here!

 

[CommandoBob]

Oh, and I run BtS on Vista, including HOF mod, without problems. I don't really understand the people who advocate sticking with XP, or 32-bit systems, just because they are more mature and things work more smoothly. If we don't take the bumpy road every now and then there'll never be any progress made.

Spoiler rant :

For those who don't know me well, this philosophy is somewhat central to me regarding my research. Sure we could all keep programming in C++, just because there are more tools/users/whathaveyou. But if we never make the investment to switch to better systems, we'll be stuck with the crappiness forever...

I have enough trouble trying to figure out what my co-workers have coded that the road is always bumpy. And even trying to add something that looks so easy, like logging, has turned into a massive time sink. But I know that (someday) the logging will work and I can tell the remaining few how I got it to work so that they can use it.

Bumpy roads? Bring 'em on!

However...

the Charming Mrs. CommandoBob becomes the Cranky Mrs. CommandoBob when technology doesn't work like she expects.

Charming to Cranky in 0.2 seconds.

 

[Niklas]

Chris, good idea about the pasting, I had no problem making that work. It won't copy over the formatting though, and as such the sheet is rather unappealing. It would be a fair deal of work to add that formatting to the copied values every time. Also, I of course want you guys to be able to use the sheet, otherwise I'd have to be the sole source of ideas.

Regarding the sheet Renata posted, I would like to reemphasize that everything beyond turn 110 is pretty much loose crazy thoughts I had one late night when I had nothing better to do, with no real strategy behind it. We should discuss that more in detail. Also, Renata managed to scroll a bit too far to the right, so the Happy and Size columns are missing, nothing really worth seeing there anyway.

One thing to note - if we settle 1N of stone then it will be a while longer until we have Sheep connected and can grow to size 12 in Yo without penalty. We could of course decide that we don't care so much if Taoism should end up on the island, and settle as soon as the Settler can get over there, then we'd have the Sheep online a lot faster. Does anyone know the exact calculations for how a holy town is chosen? If not, I'll look it up.

Same question for maintenance in BtS, does anyone have a good link? Otherwise I'll look it up in the source.

 

[Xcalibrator]

Renata, tsk, tsk, don't feel useless! That shot of the spreadsheet was very helpful. For example, are the GPP numbers correct at the beginning? They don't seem to change for getting the GLib.

There's a city maintenance thread by Curious Cat, but for vanilla Civ. See particularly posts 89 and 113. Note that city maintenance and civic maintenance are different.

There was also a good thread on religions--I'll look.
Ah, see this by VoiceOfUnreason.

 

[ChrisShaffer]

Renata, pasting over merged cells is an OpenOffice error. In fact, it's the one error that I spent developer points to vote up in the OpenOffice buglist. You shouldn't have gotten that error in Excel.

Niklas should be able to paste it in Excel. Niklas, try 'paste special' which gives you a lot of options including "values + formatting".

 

[ChrisShaffer]

It appears to me from the VoU post that it is most likely the holy city will be Hara or Hari. Neither has other religions, neither has a palace, and they both will have higher populations than the sheep city. I think we should settle the new city ASAP and take our chances.

 

[Niklas]

Hey, look at that, I could do a two-pass to paste first values and then format. Thanks Chris! For the record, I got the same error as Renata when trying to paste format followed by values. The other way around worked great though.

I agree with Chris, we should settle as soon as the settler arrives, the chances are much higher for Hari or Harapura to become Taoist. No sense wasting valuable turns on that slight a risk.

Talking to rolo on IM, he had a look in the source code for colonial maintenance. It depends on a lot of factors, I'm too tired to look them up and do the full maths, but a few things are noticeable:

First of all, colonial maintenance is only applied to cities not in the same "area" as the capitol, which means other landmasses. That Shaka happens to be bisecting the area makes no difference.

Second, colonial maintenance is a slap-on penalty on top of the normal city maintenance for distance and number of cities. The two don't affect each other.

Third, the colonial maintenance is calculated per-area, and depends on the number of towns in that area. The basis is the number of towns squared, so for one town there's almost no penalty, a slight penalty for two and three, but steeply progressing from there on.

When I'm a bit less tired I'll have a look in the XML for the missing values of the formula.

 

[Niklas]

It's nice of you to keep up discussion while I'm away, but that's no reason to stop discussing when I get back.

I'm currently looking at how to program OpenOffice - it's of course completely different from Excel - and I think I have a pretty good idea how to write the needed macro. So now I just need to figure out how to write a single macro that will conditionally run one or the other, using exception handling or whatever. Hopefully I'll have this fixed up in no time.

Of the game at hand - thinking about it, it seems to me that we actually have quite a lot to discuss before playing on. We've been pretty focused on getting that GLib, and now that we're there (almost) our only relatively long term plans are all fulfilled. So it would be good to take some time to discuss such things now, before we decide on what to do short term.

So tell me please, how do you all see this game play out for us from this point? What are our next three or four milestones? What choices can you see coming up? Remeber, no idea is too silly to be mentioned!

 

[Methos]

The obvious one is weakening Shaka and taking at least his capital. We also need a couple good research cities that can focus on nothing but advancing us, as well as a few production cities for wonders/troops.

That's probably not what you wanted, but its a start.

 

[Renata]

I'm not great with ideas, but here are the things that are floating though my head:

Shaka. We need a consensus on how we're going to deal with him. Right now it looks like we have a couple people arguing to make nice with him for now while settling aggressively to his south, and one (me) arguing for soonest-possible war. I'd like to see some more input on that. If we bypass him, we'll need several settlers out soon to make it worth our while, plus all the associated military units and so forth. If we decide to go after him, we still need some settlers (to help with upkeep costs, if nothing else), and acquisition of HBR becomes a high priority. And a bunch of other considerations, of course. Really almost everything depends on what we decide about this.

Exploration: Out scouting so far sucks rocks, and that warrior is too slow. We need some boats in the water. I strongly prefer galleys for that purpose, as opposed to workboats.

A city to build AW and generate priest specialists. Niklas is still assuming the capital for this, but we have some other options. There's Shaka's capital if we go to war very quickly, but that may very well take too long. The stone spot is not horrible for the purpose. Even working the stone all the time, it would have 8 excess food after LH (9 with baray), enough to eventually run four priests. Five priests if all production is sacrificed. 1N of the marble south of Shaka would be better, though: plains cow, clams and fish for a total of 13 excess food after LH and baray, which would mean we could work a few one-food tiles for production or commerce and still get five priests there. Plus the site has several forests for chopping -- even if settled after the stone site, it might be up and running quicker. One negative is we'd probably have to spend the ten turns on building the fort canal in order to hook up the clams -- all the way around Shaka is much too far to sail a workboat.

Philosophy bulb for Taoism: I really want that religion, given that nobody in our vicinity is likely to come up with one instead.

I'll add more later as it comes to mind.

 

[r_rolo1]

Some notes on this:

-Shaka: We can't reasonly maintain the good graces of Shaka without a shared war or religion. Tao would help in maintaining the peace, but why on earth would us want to be deprived of the use of a city site like ulundi ? . And given shaka and joão tendencies, both will build a lot of cities and because of that will have inflated power countings compared with us ( given that we are cornered ... thanks map maker ).... in shorter words, shaka will war us before rifles and there is little that we can do about it. But we can definitely choose the time that we start the war vs him, that would be after having balista phants on line.

So my opinion about a short-medium range goal is to get Shaka down. Like I said to niklas already , I would tech construction and HBR ASAP ( getting the rest of drama and bulb philo does not collide with that ) and get cats in between ( ok, A wat could prove useful in between, but not in a place that we can't defend from Shaka ), if this was a offline game of mine. You're not alone, Renata

About boats. We need to start making 2 galleys teams and to fogbust coastal tiles . Barb galleys en masse is a PITA. Going MC just because of trirremes seems like a bad detour and exploring with WB is not a winning option either

 

[ChrisShaffer]

The more I think about it, the more I believe a fast war against Shaka is the way to go. Ulundi is too nice a city to leave in AI hands.

For research, let's bulb philo, get hbr and build some oliphants.

If along the way, we can drop a settler on the marble S of Shaka, so much the better.

We need galleys for fogbusting and defence or our nets WILL be pillaged. We've been lucky on that count so far. I'm not convinced galleys for exploration are worth it though. There is a decent chance we are isolated and galleys might not actually find anyone new. The warior is woodsman ii - it isn't that slow.

Put AW in the sheep city. What else are we going to build there? It also continues a policy, which I support, of keeping our gpp pools unpolluted.

 

[Xcalibrator]

Are barb galleys really that big a threat? I play Emp/Imm and almost never have a problem with them pillaging, but perhaps that's because I play Small maps with an extra AI so they get crowded out. Still, another galley to explore farther N and E would be nice. By the way, if Shaka does have a city on the isthmus we can transit a workboat through there to get to the clams on the other side of the marble site--no immediate need for a fort. If he doesn't, then we ought to grab the isthmus ourselves and block him--maybe even close borders for awhile if he tries to send a settler farther south before we've secured the area.

Whether we want to build an invasion force or settlers/defense/galleys we're going to need a lot of hammers--what would we give up? The Parthenon increases GPP rate in all cities, but only by 50%. Over the long term you only get maybe 15% more GPs in total. The advantage is you get them sooner. But maybe we want to emphasize Great Sci's at first, in which case we only want to build the Nat'l Epic in Yo!

I'd like to get the Hanging Gardens cuz I love me them Engineers. The extra pop would also come in handy for whipping stuff in all our cities. But is it worth it, even with extra health? We'd need an aqueduct first (100 hammers). I assume we'd build it in Hari to go with the Pyramids' Engineers.

What about Maoi? Once we get stone we really ought to build this somewhere, fast. Maybe on the isthmus if we can get there before Shaka? In Hari to augment its production? On stone island?

Angkor Wat is a Lot of hammers (500, though 50% stone bonus). Yes, we get an extra hammer for every priest. But as far as Prophet GPPs, we can just run Caste System, right? [Edit: Error. Unlimited Sci, Arties, Merchants.] If we do it, I agree that Stone Island would make sense, not only to keep the gene pool pure but because the mainland cities' hammers should be used on something else.

As for the detour to Metal Casting to get triremes, I agree it's not worth it for that. But it gives us forges and the Colossus. The latter is cheap, especially with copper, and we could really rake in the commerce with all the coastal cities we're going to have.

Now, the ballista in the room: Sounds like I wait longer than most people before launching my attacks--never had much luck with axe rushes, and I usually only take a fringe city or two with cats--I wait for trebs/maces for the big push. Shaka's impis counter our ballistas, and everything else is countered too (both ways). Our only ace would be lots of cats. How confident are our more aggressively inclined teammates that we wouldn't get bogged down and lose a lot of units? I'd love to learn/see how to do this if it works, but I'm a bit skeptical.

The alternative would be settler spam, taking over as much of the good land S of Shaka as we can. That's also expensive in hammers, for the reasons noted. But if we could delay a fight against Shaka I think we'd be able to throw a lot more resources at him at once.

As for our "slow" frontier mountain-man beaver-trapping warrior explorer, I've grown rather fond of him. I call him Jacques. I think he's doing a fine job. Maybe we could portage a galley across the isthmus and give him a ride to new lands.

 

[r_rolo1]

Phants eat spears alive, just look at their strength vs spears strength ( even modified ). Phants are one of the Civ IV units that has no direct counter in their age ( remember that they are Classical units, not ancient ( spears ) or Medieval ( pikes ) ) , and given that we have Ivory , IMHO we should press the advantage. and remember that our phants will probably come from stables + barracks cities, that is more than enough to give them shock

 

[Xcalibrator]

Ah, I was thinking of Pikemen's 100% vs mounted--spears are only 50%. OK, that's significantly better. Yes, yes, I see now, hmmm....

 

[Niklas]

I never thought I'd awaken so much blood thirst with my innocent questions! But maybe you have a point...

I admit, I'm a researcher and builder type (like you didn't already know). When I go to war, I like doing it with maces vs archers or rifles vs longbows, by leveraging the research advantage. I was set on us doing the same here, but we are pretty hemmed in... and Elephants are at a distinct advantage against even Impis (which I admit I also incorrectly thought had 100% bonus).

Ok, let's do it.

But a few things I will still want to see before we start our warring. First of all, Yo! should build NE right away. Second we should still complete our Drama research and bulb Philo. Third, I still want to see a settler go claim the southern marble site. I agree with Renata about it's placement 1N of marble. I don't mind spending those 10 turns on a fort, but that's no rush. And it's a great specialist farm, and I think the more of those we have the more we will push the advantage of the special route we've chosen. Parthenon would go very well with that too, but you can't have everything...

So who builds what? And how fast can we have Construction+HBR? I guess this calls for some more spreadsheet work...

 

[Methos]

I've found an early push to grab two to three cities typically removes that AI as a threat for quite some time. Granted, I don't often do it, but when I do, it is very effective. If it won't cause any slowdown of our overall plans, I'd definitely be up for removing a few cities off of Shaka (especially his capital).

Remember this is BTS, which means we can blockade. It is a very strong tactic, so we definitely need to get blockaders out early to weaken the AIs.

 

[ChrisShaffer]

How much do we really want to weaken the AIs? We want them to build lots of wonders, right?

 

[r_rolo1]

Are you seeing shaka hoarding wonders?



Yup, me neither

In fact, I doubt that both Shaka and João will build a lot of wonder even if left undisturbed. The other ones out there.... that is a whole diferent pie

 

[ChrisShaffer]

no shaka isn't building wonders. But surely Methos wasn't suggesting using blockades against Shaka! For now we need the trade, and after we declare war we'll be using oliphants, not galleys.