SGOTM 08 - Smurkz
- Thread starter AlanH
- Start date
Backwards Logic
Emperor Palpatine
BL, got your gear in order?
Well, I still don't, but my brother owes me big time, so when I get a chance I'll set up the save on his shiny new desktop. So there's no screw-ups, where is the most recent spreadsheet for me to pour over the next few days gearing up for my turnset?
Yes, by one turn, since the coastline was deeper than I predicted. But it's not obvious we want to settle before turn 109 (Philo/Taoism) anyway, we'll have to discuss that. Note though that the note about the mistake with skipping a corner in the last turnlog was regarding the other galley. The delay of our shuttle galley is only due to a more awkward route to travel than I expected.
Renata, no, nothing else of interest. Well, except that Shaka's settler moved for the Iron, but we knew that would happen.
BL, good to hear. The latest spreadsheet for the capitol goes to 110 and can be found in post #646, denoted Plan C. I've also attached the latest version of the sheet itself, still under construction. I've played a bit with ideas for the capitol past 110 but those are really just loose thoughts. We should discuss that a lot more.
I will most likely enter radio shadow after this post until tomorrow night. Please don't let the discussion slow down in my absence.
ChrisShaffer
Board gamer
Hi Niklas. Thanks for converting the sheet to xls. Unfortunately, when I open it in OpenOffice.org 2.4 and enable macros, I get an error:
Code:
BASIC runtime error. Object variable not set.
Xcalibrator
Ultraviolet Catastrophe
I can open the xls sheets with OO both at work and on my Mac, but most of the numbers come out as ####. Still, it's good to at least see the build plans.
Assuming we want to settle N of the stone to get both the sheep and fish, we'll want one of our core cities to build a workboat for it. We won't be able to hook up the whales from there, but without the fish that city won't be worth much. Even so, it might be a good place to build the Moai (10 sea tiles, I think), which is most useful when built early. Since our capitol will have NE and Oxford, an alternative would be to build the Maoi in Hari---not as many sea tiles but the hammers might be of more use on the mainland in a nice big city where we'll likely build some more World Wonders. If Hari borrows the hill plains mines from Harapura for the occasional production burst, it'll then have a LOT of hammers.
Too bad about the whales (which need Optics--not far off), but we can build cheap colosseums soon, and once we get Taoism established that's a +1 happy, and we can then build temples (a bit expensive), so with +3 happy we should be OK for awhile, right? Before long we'll have Metal Casting and forges for another happy.
I see the tentative Yo! build plan calls for another settler soonish. Where's he heading? Shaka will probably have fenced us in by then so I assume we'll put a second city on Stone Island. Good to have two cities there for mutual defense if nothing else. I think the NE coast, with access to fish, might be best but haven't thought hard about it. Oh, we'll also want to keep an eye on any AI galleys wandering by Stone Island--we don't want them to pop the goodie hut before us.
OR, we could be bolder (foolish?) and start settling the mainland south of Shaka. Lots of nice sites and resources there, but it would be hard to defend and more expensive to maintain.
I like the idea of gifting/trading Myst to Shaka to try to get him to Pleased and maybe pick up Archery. He won't decide to attack at Pleased [Edit: make that Friendly], but we'll have to wait ~10 turns before we completely relax since he may have put prior plans into action. Keep the eyes of our Shaka-recon warrior open!
No iron means no swordsmen, crossbows, pikes, or knights, but copper suffices for maces.
Now that we can chop jungle, do we want to chop the ivory camp? Pro is one more food for Harapura, but con is we lose the 50% defense there. But if we can keep Shaka Pleased [D'oh! Friendly!] until we attack him I guess it doesn't matter. We'll of course want to chop around Harapura.
With Harapura busy with the Parthenon and Yo! with Nat'l Epic for awhile, I guess the only immediate build question is for Hari--what's the plan there? Some combo of axe, spears, workboat?
Assuming we want to settle N of the stone to get both the sheep and fish, we'll want one of our core cities to build a workboat for it. We won't be able to hook up the whales from there, but without the fish that city won't be worth much. Even so, it might be a good place to build the Moai (10 sea tiles, I think), which is most useful when built early. Since our capitol will have NE and Oxford, an alternative would be to build the Maoi in Hari---not as many sea tiles but the hammers might be of more use on the mainland in a nice big city where we'll likely build some more World Wonders. If Hari borrows the hill plains mines from Harapura for the occasional production burst, it'll then have a LOT of hammers.
Too bad about the whales (which need Optics--not far off), but we can build cheap colosseums soon, and once we get Taoism established that's a +1 happy, and we can then build temples (a bit expensive), so with +3 happy we should be OK for awhile, right? Before long we'll have Metal Casting and forges for another happy.
I see the tentative Yo! build plan calls for another settler soonish. Where's he heading? Shaka will probably have fenced us in by then so I assume we'll put a second city on Stone Island. Good to have two cities there for mutual defense if nothing else. I think the NE coast, with access to fish, might be best but haven't thought hard about it. Oh, we'll also want to keep an eye on any AI galleys wandering by Stone Island--we don't want them to pop the goodie hut before us.
OR, we could be bolder (foolish?) and start settling the mainland south of Shaka. Lots of nice sites and resources there, but it would be hard to defend and more expensive to maintain.
I like the idea of gifting/trading Myst to Shaka to try to get him to Pleased and maybe pick up Archery. He won't decide to attack at Pleased [Edit: make that Friendly], but we'll have to wait ~10 turns before we completely relax since he may have put prior plans into action. Keep the eyes of our Shaka-recon warrior open!
No iron means no swordsmen, crossbows, pikes, or knights, but copper suffices for maces.
Now that we can chop jungle, do we want to chop the ivory camp? Pro is one more food for Harapura, but con is we lose the 50% defense there. But if we can keep Shaka Pleased [D'oh! Friendly!] until we attack him I guess it doesn't matter. We'll of course want to chop around Harapura.
With Harapura busy with the Parthenon and Yo! with Nat'l Epic for awhile, I guess the only immediate build question is for Hari--what's the plan there? Some combo of axe, spears, workboat?
Same, it's not usable for me in Open Office, either. So frustrating. I can open the current sheet (temporarily have a copy of Excel to use), though. Since Niklas is away, I'll try to take some screenshots for you this afternoon. (Unless someone else can get to it first.)
Can someone who can open the game tell me what the effect of the GLight was on our trade routes, and what our current bank account is, with income/outgo/beakers and so forth?
I think we sort of have some conflicting priorities coming up. We need to take Shaka out (or at least down a few notches), both to reduce the threat to our cities and to grab expansion room. We really have nowhere else to go, as we have only one good (stone/clam/sheep) and one decent (fish, river, two hills) city site visible. Five cities won't do it for us for very long.
However, we want to keep Shaka around for the better trade routes (can we even fill out our GLight quota with just our own cities?), because who knows when we'll establish a trade route with Joao? Based on where the warrior is and where Joao might be, it's going to be at least 20-ish turns yet, looks like. And that's assuming Joao has explored the coast to the west and north of Shaka, the tiles that we haven't seen, which might be a big assumption. Shaka wont have many (any?) of the wonders we need. And unless we find an additional civ (or Joao knows additional civs), which we can't be sure of, we need Shaka and Joao both to have a tech for Joao to be willing to sell to us.
I'm not sure how to get out of that dilemma. But maybe it isn't one, really. We're already considerably ahead of both civs in tech, and that disparity is just going to get larger. We won't get many techs from Joao, and maybe we can get the most important ones before we'd declare war anyway. In any case, I don't think we need to wait for Trebs before declaring, because I don't see any real downside to distracting Shaka first by setting him against Joao. We should be able to get enough fair trade bonuses to keep him at cautious with us even with a couple of negatives.
Can anyone who's played recently say where they've seen units from Shaka and Joao in the south and west?
Can someone who can open the game tell me what the effect of the GLight was on our trade routes, and what our current bank account is, with income/outgo/beakers and so forth?
I think we sort of have some conflicting priorities coming up. We need to take Shaka out (or at least down a few notches), both to reduce the threat to our cities and to grab expansion room. We really have nowhere else to go, as we have only one good (stone/clam/sheep) and one decent (fish, river, two hills) city site visible. Five cities won't do it for us for very long.
However, we want to keep Shaka around for the better trade routes (can we even fill out our GLight quota with just our own cities?), because who knows when we'll establish a trade route with Joao? Based on where the warrior is and where Joao might be, it's going to be at least 20-ish turns yet, looks like. And that's assuming Joao has explored the coast to the west and north of Shaka, the tiles that we haven't seen, which might be a big assumption. Shaka wont have many (any?) of the wonders we need. And unless we find an additional civ (or Joao knows additional civs), which we can't be sure of, we need Shaka and Joao both to have a tech for Joao to be willing to sell to us.
I'm not sure how to get out of that dilemma. But maybe it isn't one, really. We're already considerably ahead of both civs in tech, and that disparity is just going to get larger. We won't get many techs from Joao, and maybe we can get the most important ones before we'd declare war anyway. In any case, I don't think we need to wait for Trebs before declaring, because I don't see any real downside to distracting Shaka first by setting him against Joao. We should be able to get enough fair trade bonuses to keep him at cautious with us even with a couple of negatives.
Can anyone who's played recently say where they've seen units from Shaka and Joao in the south and west?
XC, I don't have time to read or comment on your post right now, but you can fix the ### issue by changing your macro security setting -- you want the level where it asks you first if you want to enable the macros.
ChrisShaffer
Board gamer
If I disable macros, I get ####. If I enable them, I get a runtime error and the program crashes.
We don't currently have enough cities and/or trade partners to fill our trade route quote - we're one short of full.
We don't currently have enough cities and/or trade partners to fill our trade route quote - we're one short of full.
Xcalibrator
Ultraviolet Catastrophe
I did the Enable Macros thingy but it didn't seem to make a difference. Bummer.
Since it'll be awhile before our Antarctic galley can get home, and the home galley is needed for shuttling and patrol, perhaps we could build a workboat (30 hammers) to do some more exploring to our north (and then east? west?). Another galley would be 50 hammers--less likely to be sunk by barbs but more costly. Maybe build that in Yo! before starting NE? If he hits a dead end he might be able to make it down to the Stone city in time to be useful for the Fish.
Since it'll be awhile before our Antarctic galley can get home, and the home galley is needed for shuttling and patrol, perhaps we could build a workboat (30 hammers) to do some more exploring to our north (and then east? west?). Another galley would be 50 hammers--less likely to be sunk by barbs but more costly. Maybe build that in Yo! before starting NE? If he hits a dead end he might be able to make it down to the Stone city in time to be useful for the Fish.
Backwards Logic
Emperor Palpatine
Alright, so I've downloaded the Mod onto my brother's computer, and every time I try to load the mod it crashes. It is a Windows machine running Vista with Service Pack 1 installed. Ideas?
EDIT: I have gone to the Vista Fixes page and set up a second admin account as suggested. The game still cannot load the mod.
EDIT: I have gone to the Vista Fixes page and set up a second admin account as suggested. The game still cannot load the mod.
Backwards Logic
Emperor Palpatine
For those tech savvy people who can decipher this, these are the error details:
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Civ4BeyondSword.exe
Application Version: 3.0.0.86
Application Timestamp: 467d16e8
Fault Module Name: CvGameCoreDLL.dll
Fault Module Version: 3.1.7.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 489f0036
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0010c7b0
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 3164
Additional Information 2: f31c530d3d12785f4cca5eb2cbce0d8e
Additional Information 3: 5bad
Additional Information 4: 65bf2d356a09dad7b19a2b0136140f76
Also, it crashes during the "Init Engine" phase of the load.
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Civ4BeyondSword.exe
Application Version: 3.0.0.86
Application Timestamp: 467d16e8
Fault Module Name: CvGameCoreDLL.dll
Fault Module Version: 3.1.7.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 489f0036
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0010c7b0
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 3164
Additional Information 2: f31c530d3d12785f4cca5eb2cbce0d8e
Additional Information 3: 5bad
Additional Information 4: 65bf2d356a09dad7b19a2b0136140f76
Also, it crashes during the "Init Engine" phase of the load.
Xcalibrator
Ultraviolet Catastrophe
Sorry BL, I'm of no help, especially with regard to Vista.
Are we planning for Hanging Gardens (300 hammers) in Hari? We have Math, but need an aqueduct (100 hammers), and will have the 50% stone bonus for HG around turn 118--plenty of time to build the aqueduct before then. HG will likely come in before Angkor Wat, with the resulting increase in population--perhaps we'll want to time that to optimize a whip to finish off AW.
So, just for the sake of argument (and since there've been passing mentions), how about going for reckless expansion on the western arm of our continent? (See screenshot in post666.) There are a couple really nice sites, such as 1N of the marble (plus fish, cows, clams, lots of forest), 1S of the wheat, and 1N or 1S of the isthmus cows. Depending on what our warrior finds south of the marble, settling directly on the marble might be preferable--would provide a canal to the western ocean (or we could build a fort if we settled N of the marble). How bad would maintenance be with such farflung cities? How badly will it hurt our military prep against Shaka? If we can get him to friendly to buy time, we could build up a bigger tech (and core-city production?) lead over him and attack with trebs. Meanwhile, we'll have another couple of really nice cities coming along south of him that might even be able to spare some hammers to harass his soft underbelly. The extra maintenance wouldn't be as bad if we can get the Colossus.
This plan may be foolhardy, but I think we need to take some more risks and continue to do the unconventional if we want to beat the other teams. Once we get a few turns beyond the GLib I hope we'll start to overtake more teams, but it is distressing and somewhat surprising that our relative standing isn't so great.
What are the alternatives? That warmonger, Renata, is pushing for an early attack on Shaka (after siccing him on Joao?). I am afraid, but maybe if we build enough cats that would work. Or should we build spies and destroy his defenses that way? With his highly promoted units, though, it would still be a hard, probably impossible fight without cats, right?
Would it be worthwhile to do some WB tests for attack versus expand? Eh, probably it's too early for that since our build plan is pretty full for the moment--we definitely want NatlEpic in Yo! and more units from Hari, right?
Are we planning for Hanging Gardens (300 hammers) in Hari? We have Math, but need an aqueduct (100 hammers), and will have the 50% stone bonus for HG around turn 118--plenty of time to build the aqueduct before then. HG will likely come in before Angkor Wat, with the resulting increase in population--perhaps we'll want to time that to optimize a whip to finish off AW.
So, just for the sake of argument (and since there've been passing mentions), how about going for reckless expansion on the western arm of our continent? (See screenshot in post666.) There are a couple really nice sites, such as 1N of the marble (plus fish, cows, clams, lots of forest), 1S of the wheat, and 1N or 1S of the isthmus cows. Depending on what our warrior finds south of the marble, settling directly on the marble might be preferable--would provide a canal to the western ocean (or we could build a fort if we settled N of the marble). How bad would maintenance be with such farflung cities? How badly will it hurt our military prep against Shaka? If we can get him to friendly to buy time, we could build up a bigger tech (and core-city production?) lead over him and attack with trebs. Meanwhile, we'll have another couple of really nice cities coming along south of him that might even be able to spare some hammers to harass his soft underbelly. The extra maintenance wouldn't be as bad if we can get the Colossus.
This plan may be foolhardy, but I think we need to take some more risks and continue to do the unconventional if we want to beat the other teams. Once we get a few turns beyond the GLib I hope we'll start to overtake more teams, but it is distressing and somewhat surprising that our relative standing isn't so great.
What are the alternatives? That warmonger, Renata, is pushing for an early attack on Shaka (after siccing him on Joao?). I am afraid, but maybe if we build enough cats that would work. Or should we build spies and destroy his defenses that way? With his highly promoted units, though, it would still be a hard, probably impossible fight without cats, right?
Would it be worthwhile to do some WB tests for attack versus expand? Eh, probably it's too early for that since our build plan is pretty full for the moment--we definitely want NatlEpic in Yo! and more units from Hari, right?
CommandoBob
AbstractArt
I did a quick Google search for 'Bts vista' and 'Beyond the Sword vista init engine'.
Bts vista found this thread BTS under Vista and that thread mentioned a patch 3.03 that allowed BtS to run under Vista (if I read the thread correctly).
The other search found this thread, My bts crash, where they were able to log a BtS failure. You might want to do that and compare with the results of that thread.
Another option is to upgrade your brother's PC from Vista to XP.
Backwards Logic
Emperor Palpatine
The problem isn't starting BtS by itself, it's just when I load the Mod once in-game is where it crashes. I talked with Methos online, and over the next few days I'll be trying a few things to get it working. I'll keep you all posted.
Sorry for low input in the discussion, but the WE has been busy with family (btw we played an amazing boardgame (I am deeply into boardgames too...) which is Pandemic. If you like boardgames, this is a very nice one and a coop, which is a nice change). End of the off-topic 
Niklas:
Great turnset, and nice handling of the marble crisis.
I will not be able to comment on the situation before tomorrow, unfortunately.
@BL:
Cannot give you any advice on your issue, maybe you can post in the HOF forum and see if it is a known issue... (btw, CommandoBob gives a recommandation I made mine a year ago: sticking with XP
).
Niklas:
Great turnset, and nice handling of the marble crisis.I will not be able to comment on the situation before tomorrow, unfortunately.
@BL:
Cannot give you any advice on your issue, maybe you can post in the HOF forum and see if it is a known issue... (btw, CommandoBob gives a recommandation I made mine a year ago: sticking with XP
).
If you are getting a crash when you start the HOF Mod, the most common problem is a missing or bad patch install. Installing patches vis the in game menu has been known to fail. I would reinstall the 3.17 patch manually.
Ok, back.
Sorry to hear the sheet isn't working under OO. I'll investigate to see what can be done about it, but I don't have any major hopes. I'm really happy that I managed to code this up in excel in the first place, but if the coding environments are different then I'm pretty much screwed at fixing that up.
It is possible to code the sheet up without using macros. It just takes a . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . of more manual work from me, and would use a lot of extra columns to accumulate results. If all else fails then I'll resort to that, but obviously I'd rather not.
Will be back later with more thoughts on the game. But tentatively I like Xc's reasoning regarding aggressive expansion. It would be nice to know what kind of maintenance penalties we'd be facing, I suppose we could calculate that a priori.
Shaka has a town that we haven't seen yet. My guess is the isthmus with the Cows and Wheat.
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.
Sorry to hear the sheet isn't working under OO. I'll investigate to see what can be done about it, but I don't have any major hopes. I'm really happy that I managed to code this up in excel in the first place, but if the coding environments are different then I'm pretty much screwed at fixing that up.
It is possible to code the sheet up without using macros. It just takes a . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . of more manual work from me, and would use a lot of extra columns to accumulate results. If all else fails then I'll resort to that, but obviously I'd rather not.
Will be back later with more thoughts on the game. But tentatively I like Xc's reasoning regarding aggressive expansion. It would be nice to know what kind of maintenance penalties we'd be facing, I suppose we could calculate that a priori.
Shaka has a town that we haven't seen yet. My guess is the isthmus with the Cows and Wheat.
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 :
I'm thinking Denniz may be right about what the problem is. Not just because he should know, but because now that he mentions it, I remember seeing this same thing come up several times regarding the in-game installer. Hopefully, uninstalling the mod and reinstalling manually will fix the problem.
ChrisShaffer
Board gamer
Niklas, I think you could share a version of the spreadsheet with us - we wouldn't be able to edit it, but at least we could see it. Simply copy the entire city worksheet and paste it onto a blank sheet using "paste as values" - that way, we could view the output without needing to run macros. Does that make sense?
I also like Xc's aggressive expansion suggestion.
I also like Xc's aggressive expansion suggestion.
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