SGOTM 11 - One Short Straw

[Silu]

Okay, There's about 20 posts to digest and I'll get to that, but something that I noticed: Zara was researching Mining? AKA one of his starting techs? So can we assume start techs are mucked with for more Civs as well?

Oh and well played, Muti

 

[LowtherCastle]

Okay, There's about 20 posts to digest and I'll get to that, but something that I noticed: Zara was researching Mining? AKA one of his starting techs? So can we assume start techs are mucked with for more Civs as well?

Ah ha! So maybe he wasn't cheating after all. The mapmaker cheated. We should have known that. Zara started with 14 power, which could be htg+archery+2archers=2+6+6=14.

Another detail: Would Zara grow to pop6 if he had only 5 happies? If not, he must have a happiness resource, perhaps ivory, or a precious metal. Ivory would explain his +5h jump in production that was bewildering me yesterday.

 

[Mutineer]

Just notice, I already put 1 turn to settler. 3 pop whip work for less then 10 (or 9) hammer in settler.
I am not sure exec number as I do not know how rounding work.
so No more turns into settler requite. I think best to finish granary this 5 turns we with out slavery, or build worker.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Priorities:
1. barb-city spawnbusting
2. 6 Oxford cities (total)
2. beaucoup workers
3. scouting wb
4. cottages in Delhi

Spawnbusting
Currently 119 unnowned tiles = 1 barb city could spawn or 3 barbs on our landmass
Next turn, either:
* barb city spawns somewhere or else
* 1 barb spawns at West Crab Peninsula and 1 barb spawns at Zara Sahara, since Mutineer says there's still a barb warrior near the marble.

My thoughts:
1. The confucian miss should CANCEL ACTION NOW and then go to the 2fish site to fogbust. The 2 fish warrior then goes nw to spawnbust at Pigs 3W, if it's not too late and he survives whatever barb spawns there.
2. This turn, the warrior sentried at rice 1S should go NE (do we risk it? Mutineer, do you know where the barb is?) The marble site is way more important than the fps, imo. His goal is to spawnbust at marble 1N, if possible without dying.
3. The axe should go to spawnbust at Rice 1S.
4. The sentry NE of Bombay should go 1W to tempt the barbs to settle somewhere on the flat land near the oasis, wheat, cattle region. That would be excellent for gaining our 10XP unit.

 

[Silu]

Yeah, fast expansion for now sounds great. I also can sign mysty's dotmap (couple of unfortunate obligatory compromises but those can't be avoided with this layout) and the obvious-GP-farm-is-obvious site first. After that we could give some thought to take the NE Cow/Wheat to block the Wheat from ZY. Making sure we have the health is significant with this kind of food.

I think we should use the chops for basic infra instead of the NE in the glutton city. Whipping the NE is not that inefficient as the penalty is just 50% (i.e. 20 hammers per pop, or 40 with Marble - makes for a 5-pop whip after 7 turns of Cow-only NE buildage, or 4-pop after 12). The faster growth from the Granary alone might make up for that, at least combined with the earlier Library and population to run some science.

Do we want to hook up the Marble earlier rather than later, for TGL probably? Feels dumb to not shoot for it, since we want a semi-early NE and are PHI/hopefully Rep with a Marble crazyeye. That'd probably mean the FP city 4th, latest.

LC's anti-barb measures sound good to me

Ah ha! So maybe he wasn't cheating after all. The mapmaker cheated. We should have known that. Zara started with 14 power, which could be htg+archery+2archers=2+6+6=14.

I did!1111

Of course, for all we know the mapmakers could have given him Agri/Mysti for free.

Anyhow, now the early game would make sense (both tech and beaker -wise) if had Hunting&Agri to begin with and went Fishing->Mysti->AH->Wheel. I guess what we can take home from this is that 1) our beaker & graph model does actually make sense 2) they really did muck with the start techs

 

[Mutineer]

Priorities:
1. barb-city spawnbusting
2. 6 Oxford cities (total)
2. beaucoup workers
3. scouting wb
4. cottages in Delhi

Spawnbusting
Currently 119 unnowned tiles = 1 barb city could spawn or 3 barbs on our landmass
Next turn, either:
* barb city spawns somewhere or else
* 1 barb spawns at West Crab Peninsula and 1 barb spawns at Zara Sahara, since Mutineer says there's still a barb warrior near the marble.

My thoughts:
1. The confucian miss should CANCEL ACTION NOW and then go to the 2fish site to fogbust. The 2 fish warrior then goes nw to spawnbust at Pigs 3W, if it's not too late and he survives whatever barb spawns there.
2. This turn, the warrior sentried at rice 1S should go NE (do we risk it? Mutineer, do you know where the barb is?) The marble site is way more important than the fps, imo. His goal is to spawnbust at marble 1N, if possible without dying.
3. The axe should go to spawnbust at Rice 1S.
4. The sentry NE of Bombay should go 1W to tempt the barbs to settle somewhere on the flat land near the oasis, wheat, cattle region. That would be excellent for gaining our 10XP unit.

You misunderstand me.
barb warrior is near Zara, north of him wandering around our fortified warrior on forested hill.

 

[mdy]

I agree with most of LC's fogbusting suggestions. There may not be a barb near the marble now, but one could spawn there so I still think we should send the warrior up there. The warrior near Zara could be sent to explore near the deer, if there are fish resources down there that site would look more attractive. Should the sentry NE of Bombay actually move 1NE to bust the wheat (assuming we want it)? Is letting a barb city be founded for the Heroic Epic really needed? We could probably find another barb city on another island to use if we wanted it later.

Currently 119 unnowned tiles = 1 barb city could spawn or 3 barbs on our landmass

I thought the number of barbs/cities was determined by the number of tiles that was not fogbusted, not the number of unowned tiles?

I think we should use the chops for basic infra instead of the NE in the glutton city. Whipping the NE is not that inefficient as the penalty is just 50% (i.e. 20 hammers per pop, or 40 with Marble - makes for a 5-pop whip after 7 turns of Cow-only NE buildage, or 4-pop after 12). The faster growth from the Granary alone might make up for that, at least combined with the earlier Library and population to run some science.

With Marble each whip is worth 67 hammers so we could use the forests for infastructure/workboats.

It looks like we may only have 1 decent production city, our capital. Maybe we should consider building some workshops there instead of cottages?

 

[LowtherCastle]

@mdy: Definitely unowned tiles for both barb unit and city spawning. Barbs cannot spawn within two tiles of any unit, including barb as I understand it. Cities cannot spawn on a tile visible to any non-barb player(??? if (!(pLoopPlot->isVisibleToCivTeam())) -- Are barbs a "CivTeam"?). In any case, if no barb city gets spawned this IT, and there is only one barb alive, two more will spawn and they will spawn at marble and crabs. The only possibility this doesn't happen is Zara kills the warrior at Zara. I'm 99% certain this is how the code reads. Silu will correct me if I'm wrong.

My reasoning for encouraging the barbs to spawn a city at wheat is simply that they will also consider the "danger zone" and that would be a catastrophe. I'm hoping the code will assign a higher spawn (iValue) to the wheat/cattle area than to the pigs/fp area. If we can get the west entirely spawnbusted, then by all means we could move the warrior toward the wheat, but understand that we simply don't have enough units to spawnbust everything. For example, we can't protect the wheat and the cattle with one unit.

One more detail, moving the warrior 1NE is bad for two reasons: 1) a city could spawn on the desert between the wheat and the incense, and 2) a unit could spawn by the incense and threaten Bombay...

If we can spawnbust successfully for 7t then Bombay's borders will expand and things will be a bit easier. Once we settle 2fish AND its borders expand, then unowned tiles falls below 100 and no more chance for a barb city. THeir window is about 13 turns, iirc.

 

[LowtherCastle]

I think we're probably all in agreement that the GP farm-ish double fish+pig+cow site is next. That city will need a granary, library, and NE - probably not anything else for the foreseeable future. It will also need at least two workboats, probably one more for exploration. So I think it will need a worker to chop some forests. But that makes us a bit short on workers...

Double Fish should also have a lighthouse eventually. Both lakes would be better than farmed grass. It only really needs 12 worker-turns plus any chops and roads we want, so two workers would quickly be available for Marble City, for example.

Poprushing the buildings and wbs is fine, but it's a shame we don't already know Literature to put the overflow into the NE.

masonry-AH-fishing (AH definitely before fishing to hook up the cows and pigs and find out where any horses are before settling more cities)

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We should also think about a possible site for the Moai Statues.

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Micromanagement

I agree our priority is workers and settlers. THis looks good to me:

Delhi: granary-settler/3pop(asap)-granary-Pyramids(overflow)-settler
work 1 sci, mm for 50% hammer bonus each turn
When Masonry complete, consider firing other sci. We want to finish AH before we settle 2FIsh, imo.

Bombay: wkr(4t)-?
no sci, work corn
2wkrs road/quarry stone asap, then 1 wkre goes to 2fish, other worker roads to marble or farms fp.
new wkr roads nw (useful for all western cities), then 1t road moving with 2Fish settler to pasture cows.

The stone shoudl be completed just in time for the Delhi Pyramids to get the overflow from settler/3pop(T6)-granary(T7)-Pyramids(T8). There is an extra worker-turn before Masonry is done. THis could farm or road the fp, whichever makes more sense.

 

[Silu]

Oh yeah math in my post was correct but for Normal speed, please scale with 1.5x

 

[mdy]

work 1 sci, mm for 50% hammer bonus each turn
When Masonry complete, consider firing other sci. We want to finish AH before we settle 2FIsh, imo.

Maybe we could get the extra hammer by not working a cottage instead? We would lose the same number of beakers, but we would keep the GP points. We will want to generate our next GP for the academy in Delhi (Any other GP farm will have Great Artist Pollution from border pops).

 

[mushroomshirt]

Great job Mutineer!

I don't have a whole lot to add at this point other than:
* I like the idea of catching up on our REX
* I like the 2fish pig cow city next
* I like the NE cow wheat city to block Zara

Someone mentioned OB with Zara, but do we really want this before we have founded all of our cities?

Not sure if anyone else noticed this but if you look on the demographics / top 5 cities screen you get a picture of Aksum and its surrounding tiles. Looks like floodplains to the west and a plains tile to the north but water to NE, NW, E, NNE, NN and NNW. No resources that I can see - not sure they would show up on this picture.

 

[Mutineer]

One more thin to consider. Do you see this island north near marble? This is where Justian come from I believe. May be we should settle marble city first and chop workboat to send out first?

WE need to catch up on exploration I believe and I believe there still 1000 years minimum untill barbarian galeys.

and reseach wize we want sailing soon, so we can open border and get trade benefits.

 

[shyuhe]

What is our tech path going to look like for the next few techs? Masonry and AH are the first two (and I think in that order?). Is it fishing after that? If so, we should probably prepare a worker to start chopping a forest in the GP farm site for a workboat. Or is it more efficient to start on a granary immediately since it has access to cows in its initial bfc followed by pigs after its first border pop?

 

[LowtherCastle]

Just notice, I already put 1 turn to settler. 3 pop whip work for less then 10 (or 9) hammer in settler.
I am not sure exec number as I do not know how rounding work.

A bureau poprush gives us 67h. A 2pop gives us 134h. A settler costs 149h. To 3pop a settler, there can be no more than 149-135=14h. So the build should look like this:

Settler: 14/149 ​

at most.

I tested this on the test save just to make sure.

 

[Mutineer]

Thanks I am always confused on different from normal speed.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Is there any way we can utilize the fact that we won't be in slavery for 5 turns?

Maybe we could get the extra hammer by not working a cottage instead? We would lose the same number of beakers, but we would keep the GP points. We will want to generate our next GP for the academy in Delhi (Any other GP farm will have Great Artist Pollution from border pops).

May be we should settle marble city first and chop workboat to send out first?

Good questions.

Spoiler :

So we'll revolt to slavery in 5t and 3pop the settler and build the granary. After the settler, we need 10-13 turns to grow back to pop6, depending on how full the granary at the beginning. Then 9t to grow back each time. Then mdy complicated our lives wanting our academy asap. goodjob And Mutineer wants to explore... goodjob Hmmm...

Unless we change things with chops, Delhi's build queue will look like this:

something(5t)-settler1(1t)-granary(1t)-Pyramids(9-12t)-settler2(2t)-Mids(9t)-settler3(2t)-Mids(a few more turns)

To me, shyuhe's question is:
1) Can we squeeze in another settler? or
2) Should we build another worker? or
3) Should we just put the granary overflow into the Pyramids?

Mdy's question is:
1) How soon do will we build the academy?

Mutineer's question is:
1) How soo do we build Marble City? (if it doesn't spawn a barb city)

The academy will give us an average of 14bpt while 3popping settlers.

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This is a very complicated optimization problem.

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The best of several solutions I've examined is to simply put the granary overflow plus one chop into the second settler. Then we should get settler-granary-settler(2t) and we can settle both 2-fish and marble.

 

[Mutineer]

May be it is a way, but I really want mids too. Happiness will limit our development and with access to col and soo mach food we want to run specialists.

Question, can we improve at 2 cities at one's? if not there not mach advantage to harry, unless we really afraid of barb cities.

 

[Silu]

An alternative to the Marble city WB chop would be to settle the NE Wheat city on the coast (on PH, 2 forests in 1st ring) and forfeit the Cows, maybe to cram one more city in. I don't think it's necessary though as ZY's next city shouldn't threaten the Wheat (though it's possible). Maybe I should do some math to try to figure out where he is going to settle next. I think there'd be an easy way to test that also - AFAIK the blue circle algorithm is the AI city site pick algorithm so if we have an accurate test save we can just scenario ourselves into ZY's pants and look for those. Of course seafood off that desert coast could muck things up among other things.

Anyhow, if we stay on the dotmap then GPfarm->MarbleWBChop->NE Wheat in semi-rapid succession? The rest are much less urgent than these. The immediate tech path is something like Masonry->AH->Fishing->Sailing?

One scouting priority which would be nice is to scout all the way to the west to see any possible coast (and a possible route to Justinian) there, or even more seafood which might alter our settling pattern slightly.

Oh and 5 people on this team in the BOTM28 top ten, nice Graz LC for the silver medal

 

[shyuhe]

I think exploration is more important than the pyramids here. It's unlikely the pyramids will go anytime soon given the wonder dates so far, and we also have stone. Alternatively, can we just start building the pyramids in Bombay and leave Delhi to settler/workers?

As for BOTM28, nuts. Silu finished a faster game AND scored higher than me... Congrats LC on your medal