SGOTM 14 - Kakumeika

[Sun Tzu Wu]

White Dot Maps could be used for the locations of planned cities.

Red Dot Maps can be used to show desired fog busting unit locations. Notice that the fog busted area is a full 5 x 5 square area that includes the 2 NW, 2 NE, 2 SW and 2 SE corners that is missing from the BFC shaped Dot Map.

To edit/add/remove Dot Maps, press the Alt-X key combination and press it again to get back to leave Dot Map edit mode.

To view Dot Maps, press the CTRL-X key combination and press it again to get back to hide the Dot Maps.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[bcool]

nice job walter_wolf.

I hope to play out a game tomorrow and maybe explore a few options with settling/wonders.

 

[Walter_Wolf]

PPP looks good to me. Probably no real need to upload to the server at T33. Just give us screenshots of anything you discover, such as where all that tasty bronze is.

I'd actually prefer that the game be uploaded to the server at each major stopping point. It will also be a nice record of our games which will be especially useful when we win!

After uploading the game, be sure to download it and continue your turn set with the new downloaded save file.

Sun Tzu Wu

Ok, to avoid any unplanned events (HDD crash, lightning striking my house, tsunami etc.), I decided to upload the save after all. It seems we will have a few days delay untill the next mini turnset, so it seemed like a reasonable decision.

The info from the upload page:

Spoiler :

Thank you, Walter_Wolf. Your entry has been recorded and your upload is complete.

You may confirm that your submission is in the system by checking the submission list.

Here are the new details we have recorded.
Reference number: 11145
Game: C-IV SGOTM 14
Your team: Kakumeika
Your name: Walter_Wolf
Date submitted: 2011-08-27
Software Version: BtS 3.19
Game date: 2680BC
Player race: America
Firaxis score: 91
Session time played (hh:mm:ss): 01:52:52
Total time played (hh:mm:ss): 04:35:37
Game status: Incomplete
Submitted save: Dorothy_2680-BC_Aug-26-2011_18-43-14.CivBeyondSwordSave
Renamed file: Kakumeika_SG014_BC2680_01.CivBeyondSwordSave

Right click the Renamed File link above to copy it.
You can then paste it into your team post as the download link for the next player.


Here is your Session Turn Log from 2800 BC to 2680 BC:


Turn 32, 2720 BC: You have discovered Bronze Working!
Turn 32, 2720 BC: Barbarian's Wolf (1.00) vs Dorothy's Burke (Washington) (Warrior) (2.70)
Turn 32, 2720 BC: Combat Odds: 0.1%
Turn 32, 2720 BC: (Animal Combat: +10%)
Turn 32, 2720 BC: (Plot Defense: +25%)
Turn 32, 2720 BC: Dorothy's Burke (Washington) (Warrior) is hit for 12 (88/100HP)
Turn 32, 2720 BC: Barbarian's Wolf is hit for 31 (69/100HP)
Turn 32, 2720 BC: Dorothy's Burke (Washington) (Warrior) is hit for 12 (76/100HP)
Turn 32, 2720 BC: Barbarian's Wolf is hit for 31 (38/100HP)
Turn 32, 2720 BC: Dorothy's Burke (Washington) (Warrior) is hit for 12 (64/100HP)
Turn 32, 2720 BC: Barbarian's Wolf is hit for 31 (7/100HP)
Turn 32, 2720 BC: Barbarian's Wolf is hit for 31 (0/100HP)
Turn 32, 2720 BC: Dorothy's Burke (Washington) (Warrior) has defeated Barbarian's Wolf!
Turn 32, 2720 BC: While defending, your Burke (Washington) has killed a Barbarian Wolf!

You may wish to copy it to Notepad for reference when you write your turn set post. It includes any entries you added with the in-game Chat facility

Nothing much happened as you can see.

 

[bcool]

I updated frogdude's testgame to T33 and renamed the civilization and player to avoid the savegame confusion Walter_Wolf brought up.

Let me know if I missed something.

 

[bcool]

I will compile results of my tests here

1st test
settled stone/crabs/gold city first, built workboat whipped and started lighthouse, eventually built GLH here
then settled gems/wheat has granary, lighthouse, library
then settled SE of cows
then settled fish/pigs/clams
then settled ivory/clams shares fish with fish/pigs/clams
teched wheel, sailing, masonry, pottery, writing, 1/2 thru math
6 cities total
wonders GW T63 GLH T78

Lessons learned from this game
-Seems like the gems/deer/crabs/wheat city might make a better great person farm since we settle it significantly earlier and the other spot needs a border pop and 2 workboats to really get going.
-playing out the game a bit, we would have to think carefully about how best to use the Great Spy (not as good as I thought with such far distances to travel.

2nd test
Not very satisfying test game (had to whip a defender and I don't know if I was as focused)
settled gems/deer/wheat/crabs first built GLH here T82?
settled stone/crabs
settled cows 1SE
settled elephant/fish/oasis/floodplain on plainshill
settled pigs/clams
tech wheel, sailing, masonry, pottery, writing, part of mathematics
More granaries and workers perhaps
wonders GLH T82?

3rd test playing out a game
Played out a game similar to the 1st test. Got the great wall and ended up stealing metal casting, currency and I have enough left to get feudalism (but my spy got caught). I also did a city revolt and found the city visibility useful during a war. I think the great wall is something to strongly consider...

I was going for domination and bulbed machinery, and double bulbed astronomy... Not sure what date I could get victory by, but it seems like ~1300 AD is doable with the testgame. I'll try to finish this game out, but I was just getting a feel for it. And of course we don't know what surprises the wizard might have. I found the same things that Kaitzilla found... the trading value the AI use is messed up, and the wizard if he is all by himself is going to be very backwards.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

White Dot Maps could be used for the locations of planned cities.

Red Dot Maps can be used to show desired fog busting unit locations. Notice that the fog busted area is a full 5 x 5 square area that includes the 2 NW, 2 NE, 2 SW and 2 SE corners that is missing from the BFC shaped Dot Map.

To edit/add/remove Dot Maps, press the Alt-X key combination and press it again to get back to leave Dot Map edit mode.

To view Dot Maps, press the CTRL-X key combination and press it again to get back to hide the Dot Maps.

I just updated bcool's latest t33 test map to illustrate what I mean by the above suggestions for using Dot Maps:

Normal use of Dot Maps to Plan Future Cities:

I used five White Dot Maps to show the planned location of our next five Cities in approximate order of founding, labeled by signs City #2 through City #5. I used a light yellow dot map to indicate an alternative City #4 with Marble in ring 1. I also use it the show the tentative location of City #7, but gave it a different label since most of its BFC is not yet revealed and it needs more to be a good site.

The above paragraph describes the normal use of Dot Maps (future city sites).

Using Dot Maps to Plan Barbarian Spawn Busting Coverage:

I also added Red Dot Maps to represent the 5 x 5 area centered on any unit that shows its Barbarian spawn busting area. Four to six units plus our Capital at ring size 2 is enough to completely fog bust our local land area with the exception of one land plot SE of our capital; its probably not efficient to build a unit to fog bust one plot, so I left it uncovered.

I'm assuming that Barbarians can't spawn within 2 plots of your culture. After rereading the Barbarian thread, I'm not so sure that's true and in that case the Red Dot Maps must touch Cultural Boundaries, such that your culture plus the 5 x 5 areas of each of your units (including all non-military and work boats for water) cover your local land's shape. Thus the fog busters must all be two plots closer to our capital to be effective.

Note that the above only covers Barbarian unit spawning; a Barbarian city can spawn in area where units prevent unit spawning if it is not directly visible to any unit. Thus, its best to position spawn busters on hills with views not obstructed by forest/jungle/oasis in ring 1. Only by ensuring all plots are visible, can one ensure that a Barbarian city is not founded/spawned.

If the above doesn't make sense, please try rereading my original post quoted above. If it still doesn't make sense, please ask questions.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[Walter_Wolf]

idk

maybe it's better to dot map test games and post screenshots. We might overspam the strategy layer too much. After a possible change of plan, the map might look confusing. That applies to the capitol surroundings. I would "dot map" only the cities planned further away in the real game, when the map gets "too big to remember every tile".

my 2 cents

 

[bcool]

I agree that overlapping dotmaps for both city placement and fogbusters is excessive. I opened the savegame and it was a bit hard to intepret.

Plus the positioning of the fogbusting units will change as we settle cities and as our borders expand. Our capital's borders will pop on T50 or T51 depending on if we revolt to slavery or not. So we don't have to worry about units spawning near there after T51 for sure.

I took a screenshot of STW's city planning and fog busting plan (I zoomed out because I thought the map labels where easier to see than the dot maps)

I took a stab at it as well.

One of the biggest differences in mine compared to STZ, is that I think the stone/crab/gold site should be settled first. There are a few reasons for this.

This city can immediately start working the oasis. It provides a not insignificant boost to our research. It is also easier to establish a road link to this site if we research the wheel first. (Which by the way doesn't slow down the The GLH because we can whip the workboat and the excess hammer go into the lighthouse when we finish sailing). It can probably finish the GLH faster than the gems site can if we build the stone quarry quickly and aggressively chop forests near the city.

The game just seems to flow better by settling this city first. Even if we don't go for the great wall or Stonehenge.

Another difference between my plan and STW's plan is I'm not as keen on my Great Person Farm site, since the gems/deer/wheat/crab site is almost as good and will be much better developed when we want to start building the National Epic.

I moved that city so it can get us elephants faster and is next to the fish so it can get good tiles worked faster than the original Great Person Farm could (since that site has no good tiles in its initial culture). That site needs a border pop to start really taking off. In addition settling near the elephants and fish gives us the option to settle another decent city on the coast which probably makes sense with the Great Lighthouse.

 

[Walter_Wolf]

I've been testing the wonder production time against spiritual and industrial combo AI teams on Emperor/hub map. I was going to make 10 runs, and come out with a statistic, but it takes forever .

On the 2 games I played, the times were: SH T44 and 45, GWall T59 and 55, Oracle T68 and 66, TGL T 87 and 90.

I'll finish the tests tomorrow, and report the results. Now I have to go sleep.

cheers

 

[frogdude]

One of the biggest differences in mine compared to STZ, is that I think the stone/crab/gold site should be settled first. There are a few reasons for this.

This city can immediately start working the oasis. It provides a not insignificant boost to our research. It is also easier to establish a road link to this site if we research the wheel first. (Which by the way doesn't slow down the The GLH because we can whip the workboat and the excess hammer go into the lighthouse when we finish sailing). It can probably finish the GLH faster than the gems site can if we build the stone quarry quickly and aggressively chop forests near the city.

The game just seems to flow better by settling this city first. Even if we don't go for the great wall or Stonehenge.

Under the assumption that Amundsen finishes exploring the northern and eastern coastlines, we don't actually need roads to get a trade route up for the stone city. With Sailing, the trade route follows the river north out into the bay, and then all the way around to get to the city.

I'm a little skeptical about our reliability of being able to get the Great Wall. I decided to explore the possibility of getting Pyramids instead as another early wonder.
I founded the Stone city first. It built the GLH by whipping the lighthouse into the GLH, then whipping the workboat into the GLH, and chopping everything in sight. I made a couple of errors with tile working as I didn't switch to the stone when it was up (and I was also slow in getting it quarried in the first place).
The economy was tanking seriously in parts as I built the 3rd/4th city, and it really demonstrated to me that until we get the GLH, we have to be very careful with our research order & expansion dates.
Other errors I made included not getting the workers in good position to build the gem as soon as I could, which also hurt the science a bit.

The capital went hard on the Pyramid as soon as it could do so with stone.
Final wonder times, GLH turn 73. Pyramid turn 74.
Writing was just recently learnt, so didn't have libraries yet. There's no real point in getting the pyramid up before having a library or two yet, but I'm hopeful that fixing all the errors I made above could alleviate that issue, even if it slows pyramids by a couple of turns.

 

[Walter_Wolf]

As promised, I finished testing wonder build dates. Run 8 games, and the end button position pixels almost burned out .

I started the games on a hub map against 4 teams each containing an industrious, and a spiritual leader (ramesess has both but nvm that). I thought this would give me the fastest wonder times AI can come out with. I added the spiritual, 'cause we seem to play against at least two spi ones in our game (is that right?).

I typed the turn numbers in a spreadsheet, and just calculated the min, max and average turn number of all the wonders being built up to turn 150. The lower part of the sheet lacks the min and max value for the 1st twelve wonders, to narrow the turn range a bit.

Tell me if you wish to see some more powerfull stat. tools, as I will use some if I find any to be appropriate (histograms and alike).

Spoiler :

I'm not sure if the wonders spelling is correct. Forgive me if it isn't.

cheers

 

[bcool]

Under the assumption that Amundsen finishes exploring the northern and eastern coastlines, we don't actually need roads to get a trade route up for the stone city. With Sailing, the trade route follows the river north out into the bay, and then all the way around to get to the city.

Ah, nice I didn't notice this.

I'm a little skeptical about our reliability of being able to get the Great Wall.

There does seem to be a real possibility the Great Wall will be built before we can do it with stone. However, I think it is something we should go for if we can.

I decided to explore the possibility of getting Pyramids instead as another early wonder.
I founded the Stone city first. It built the GLH by whipping the lighthouse into the GLH, then whipping the workboat into the GLH, and chopping everything in sight. I made a couple of errors with tile working as I didn't switch to the stone when it was up (and I was also slow in getting it quarried in the first place).
The economy was tanking seriously in parts as I built the 3rd/4th city, and it really demonstrated to me that until we get the GLH, we have to be very careful with our research order & expansion dates.
Other errors I made included not getting the workers in good position to build the gem as soon as I could, which also hurt the science a bit.

The capital went hard on the Pyramid as soon as it could do so with stone.
Final wonder times, GLH turn 73. Pyramid turn 74.

These are good times. I'll have too look more closely at the GLH. However you may have sacrificed expansion or development a bit too much? I think there is a good chance we can delay the pyramids to about T85 without much risk of losing and get more workers/settlers out.

Writing was just recently learnt, so didn't have libraries yet. There's no real point in getting the pyramid up before having a library or two yet, but I'm hopeful that fixing all the errors I made above could alleviate that issue, even if it slows pyramids by a couple of turns.

Yes I would be interested in seeing the plan perfected. I would mind seeing the pyramids delayed more than a couple turns.

 

[bcool]

I played a game getting the lighthouse by T74 but without an attempt at the pyramids to compare.

summary of differences T74 GLH no pyramids bcool game vs. T74 GLH & pyramids frogdude's game
5 workers vs. 4 workers
5 cities vs. 4 cities
1 settler moving vs. 1 settler almost finished
18 pop vs. 15 pop
2 lighthouses vs. 2 lighthouse
1 granary vs. 2 granaries
more roads, gems hooked up, ivory hooked up in 2 turns, workers set to improve gold on border pop vs. limited roads, still need to hook up gems, ivory 10+ turns away, workers not near gold for anticipated border pop
writing finished & slightly more gold vs. writing finished & slightly less gold

and given Walter Wolf's wonderful research, The earliest pyramids goes is T95 with industrial AI -- I assume that means the AI had stone, but I'm not sure.
Regardless, I think we can delay the pyramids, and delay the forest chops into the pyramid until we get mathematics.

 

[bcool]

As promised, I finished testing wonder build dates. Run 8 games, and the end button position pixels almost burned out .

I started the games on a hub map against 4 teams each containing an industrious, and a spiritual leader (ramesess has both but nvm that). I thought this would give me the fastest wonder times AI can come out with. I added the spiritual, 'cause we seem to play against at least two spi ones in our game (is that right?).

I typed the turn numbers in a spreadsheet, and just calculated the min, max and average turn number of all the wonders being built up to turn 150. The lower part of the sheet lacks the min and max value for the 1st twelve wonders, to narrow the turn range a bit.

Tell me if you wish to see some more powerfull stat. tools, as I will use some if I find any to be appropriate (histograms and alike).

Spoiler :

I'm not sure if the wonders spelling is correct. Forgive me if it isn't.

cheers

Hey Walter Wolf this is great. There are two sets of 8 games, does that mean you tried it with industrial/spirtual leaders and then without?
Why are there two sets? I'm confused they look like the same games, but you removed some information from the second set.
So the 2nd set is with the earliest and latest removed to give a better sense of what the non-extreme ranges might be I guess?
So if I read what you wrote I would understand...

 

[Walter_Wolf]

Well, you answered the question yourself. I guess you were right about industrious + required resource gave the fastest times. Exploring all of that would require a whole week of playing . I should have written down at least the religions funding to estimate the tech rate ,but didn't think of it at the time.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Note that the above only covers Barbarian unit spawning; a Barbarian city can spawn in area where units prevent unit spawning if it is not directly visible to any unit. Thus, its best to position spawn busters on hills with views not obstructed by forest/jungle/oasis in ring 1. Only by ensuring all plots are visible, can one ensure that a Barbarian city is not founded/spawned.

Sun Tzu Wu

Without either horses or bronze, I am a little concerned about barb cities. If they show up, we won't be able to remove them for a while with only archers.
If a barb city spawns on that hill down near our marble, we will lose access to it.


I've reconsidered a little on the Great Wall. Paired AI tech faster than usual. Also, the shared aspect means that when one AI is wiped out, the remaining espionage points can still be used on the other AI. We will also be able to grab techs that the AI researches right away like calendar, construction, and horseback riding.

The normal speed/long walk aspect is still a problem, but having full vision of all AI cities might give us very advanced warning of any invading army headed towards our land bridge.

It might seem counter-intuitive, but I'm pretty sure WFYHBTA tech trades don't apply to AI that have not been met yet. If we go with the great spy first, should we actively avoid meeting the other AI until we pillage tons of techs from our neighbor? Or is it impossible to do so and reckless not to try and find the Wizard as quickly as possible?


Good job Walter Wolf on those wonder times!
Clearly an early rush is out of the question, and our thoughts naturally turn to REXing and wonders. That table will help us out tons.

I'm gonna try some extended test games looking at conquest vs. culture vs. diplo victories. I'll spend a tiny bit more on map analysis since I did not try every variation of hub* map.

 

[Walter_Wolf]

Some thoughts

One of the top priorities in this game is seeking the Wizard. If we guessed right it's a hub map, I think we can break into neilmeister's brain quite easily. Once we see the location of The witches from the east, We can guess the Wizard's location. There were witches from the east, north and west in the story, so I draw one variant of possible wizard locations. Assuming he is located in the South.

Spoiler :

Of course, it would be more interesting if he was in the SW corner.

I'm really bad in drawing with my hand. It seems the same applies for the mouse

 

[bcool]

It is also quite easy to modify a hub map. So the wizard could be in the center, or he could be in one of the spokes but the mapmaker could have easily made it into an island.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

I did a thread search of our team thread for Personalities, looking for "Random Personalities". There were about a dozen posts, but only three said anything more than a passing reference to it. I quoted the relevant parts of these three posts below:

Two aspects we must fear : Random Personalities and Team Play.
Random personalities is only shuffling CIV4LeaderHeadInfos.xml values (I think) and
the thing a woodsman II warrior fears the most early is a archer retaliation on higher difficulties. This possibility of retaliation comes with AI unit courage. With random personalities, we don't know at all if the target will retaliate or not. So, I think avoiding attacking a worker in the first ring (even if the warrior lands on a forested tile) when there are three archers of more
in the city is safe. I even saw horrendous cases the AI retaliated me with only two frigging archers and I was on the winning side with odds.

For test games, we need to be sure we have these two early Mysticism owners via early Buddhism and Hinduism (by say turn 7 minimum). Including Asoka and Gandhi should suffice in doing this, since only Personalities are random; the free technologies are fixed.

edit#2: Diplo a bit harder on random personalities than I thought
It doesn't even show you the favorite civic of the AI on the info screen. I thought we would at least know what civic it was. I guess that would make figuring out which personality they are easier.

They all contain information about Random Personalities that goes beyond the fact that Random Personalities means simply shuffled Personalities. I thought Tachy's contribution to our team knowledge was the best one, although we may not actually make use of it; I was impressed by the depth of Tachy's comment regardless of our being able to act on it. bcool's contribution was also very useful, especially since there is some misinformation about it in the forums (bcool is right; favorite civic moves with the Personality).

Conclusion: We don't understand Random Personalities as well as we should. For example, I'm wondering whether AI traits move with the AI Personality or are AI traits fixed; In my opinion they move with the AI Personality, but we need to verify this. If so, we don't really know what traits the AIs have. This implies that we should not use Random Personalities in our test games so we can be sure that we in fact have AI opponents with specific traits like Industrious. Our estimates for Great Wonder AI dates could be way off, if we don't have actually have any Industrious AIs in the test games.

In a quest for more information about Random Personalities, I did a Google search of civfanatics.com and came up with one thread worth reading of the dozens of hits (I filtered based on Forum section and number of posts for only about the first twenty hits). That thread is:

Has anyone tried Random Personalities?

Unfortunately, no one said anything in this thread about leader traits. So that question remains open.

Please let us know of any better sources you may have.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[bcool]

Conclusion: We don't understand Random Personalities as well as we should. For example, I'm wondering whether AI traits move with the AI Personality or are AI traits fixed; In my opinion they move with the AI Personality, but we need to verify this. If so, we don't really know what traits the AIs have. This implies that we should not use Random Personalities in our test games so we can be sure that we in fact have AI opponents with specific traits like Industrious. Our estimates for Great Wonder AI dates could be way off, if we don't have actually have any Industrious AIs in the test games.

I did a quick check in the testgame and it seems AI traits are fixed. I world built in some great spies and used them to infiltrate the various leaders. This gave me city inspection powers and the expansive leaders still had +2 and the creative leaders still had +2 and the charismatic leader still had a free +1 so I suspect we can safely assume that the AI leader traits are the same.