SGOTM 15 - Kakumeika

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Deer is a great tile that provides 2F2H unimproved (4F2H improved), but it does add another Worker technology to research before other "game winning" technologies. The tile 1-W of Deer has access to to the River (some blue can be seen at the NW corner of the Deer plot).

There is an opportunity cost to moving onto the PH Stone now, but it may be worthwhile to delay settling 1t, if it adds a Gems/Gold or even Fur? tile. (A tropical map with Deer can also have Fur, right?). Ivory would be good too, though weak in commerce.

I'd like to see what we lose by SIP: Move Settler 1-W to reveal the those three tiles plus the hill 2-W of Marble; Move the Settler back to the Floodplains and either settle there, 1-E, (T1) or even Stone or Marble (T2).

Alternatively, the Settler can move 1-E -> 1-NE, followed by settle 1-SW or move onto Stone.

On T1, as bcool suggested, the Warrior can move 1-SW on Marble or even 1-S to 1-E of Marble.

Just some serious suggestions for scouting with the Settler a little before settling by t1 or t2.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

I'm not sure I understand this.

The only excess food settling on stone might have is the corn and the FP, settling 1E would have corn, FP, and deer. So if specialists is what we want, 1E is better based on the known information.

Settling on PH Stone provides 2Hpt for no additional cost in food, thus no citizen and 2 Fpt to support it is needed for that extra 2Hpt. That in itself is a strong reason to still consider settling on the PH Stone.

We now know nearly every plot in the BFC centered at 1-E of the Floodplains. We know only a fraction of the plots in the BFC centered at the PH Stone. If we had equal information about each BFC, the decision between them would have equal certainty which we currently lack.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

I'm planning another test game soon. Please read the following and provide your suggestions.

BTW Brennus shouldn't be in the game and the AI hasn't converted to Buddhism yet.

Does my test game indicate that any AI have already converted to Buddhism? I simply settled all AI capitals (SIP) and gave all Buddhism plus gave one AI The Mahabodhi. That seems correct from the 100% influence and Population demographics. Am I mistaken?

Brennus is charismatic and I think charismatic leaders were eliminated based on the demo info.

Can you explain how the charismatic trait is "eliminated based on the demo info"?


Demographics Screen Differences:

Comparing the demographics screen of my test game to the real game shows one troubling difference: Soldiers

The real game's AI's have almost exacly 6000 more Soldiers than my test game. This means they have extra units, Barracks or military Technologies. Anyone have a clue what I'm missing in Soldiers?

The AIs in the real game have a few more hammers and land, but that can be easily corrected by settling their capitals in areas with more land and hammer plots, right?

@mabrahams: Thanks for the correction about the river east of Marble ending there; I missed that detail and it will be corrected in my next test game.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[bcool]

Can you explain how the charismatic trait is "eliminated based on the demo info"?

Sun Tzu Wu

In the demo screen you can see all the AI have 83% approval rating. If one of the leaders was charismatic you would see that one of them would have a better approval rating.

 

[mabraham]

Demographics Screen Differences:

Comparing the demographics screen of my test game to the real game shows one troubling difference: Soldiers

The real game's AI's have almost exacly 6000 more Soldiers than my test game. This means they have extra units, Barracks or military Technologies. Anyone have a clue what I'm missing in Soldiers?

I think DanF analyzed some days ago that there's two archers with each AI (or something like that).

 

[mabraham]

Deer is a great tile that provides 2F2H unimproved (4F2H improved), but it does add another Worker technology to research before other "game winning" technologies. The tile 1-W of Deer has access to to the River (some blue can be seen at the NW corner of the Deer plot).

I don't think we'll be in any rush to learn Hunting, even if we settle 1E. At size 6 (our Hindu happy cap, IIRC) we could work corn, two quarries, unimproved deer and three Gmines for neutral food, or corn, FPfarm, two quarries and two specialists. Adding more food via Hunting and camp forces us to want Slavery and granary and to construct efficient whip micro. All that might be good, but if we might well prefer Poly->Ag->Pottery->Masonry->Writing while using hammers tiles to build granary and library, then go for Hunting and BW once the machine is read to deal with the full food production... Testing would be required, of course.

There is an opportunity cost to moving onto the PH Stone now, but it may be worthwhile to delay settling 1t, if it adds a Gems/Gold or even Fur? tile. (A tropical map with Deer can also have Fur, right?). Ivory would be good too, though weak in commerce.

Some such tiles can be worked by a hypothetical second/third city 2W1N of deer, or even some other site using some other food supply. I'm not too concerned with finding them so long as where we do settle offers a sound route to production and beakers. So far 1E seems to do that rather nicely.

I'd like to see what we lose by SIP: Move Settler 1-W to reveal the those three tiles plus the hill 2-W of Marble; Move the Settler back to the Floodplains and either settle there, 1-E, (T1) or even Stone or Marble (T2).

I don't see what the likely gain is. Suppose that 1W move sees grassland pigs 2W of marble. To get the pigs we'd want to settle 1S1W of corn on T1. If we see nothing, we have to settle 1E on T1 or on stone T2. Alternatively, we could have settled 1E T0 or stone T1 and we'd later find the pigs and be very happy settling our second city on the marble or west along the river (as appropriate).

Alternatively, the Settler can move 1-E -> 1-NE, followed by settle 1-SW or move onto Stone.

To improve upon settling 1E T0 or stone T1, that combo would have to find a tile in the four blacked ones (plus possible distant hills) at least as good as river corn, and something else to pay for the lost turn. And only one of those uncovered tiles would not be in the BFC of either of the alternatives. What's the gain?

On T1, as bcool suggested, the Warrior can move 1-SW on Marble or even 1-S to 1-E of Marble.

Just some serious suggestions for scouting with the Settler a little before settling by t1 or t2.

Sun Tzu Wu

It feels like buying trouble. We've got a good looking set of options.

I can see a very tasty matrix of three overlapping cities (stone, then 2S1W of deer using the fast second capital border pop to get deer access, then 1S1W of corn getting marble however makes sense at the time). Here we might use the food to grow up a size 6 capital with library running two scientists that gets an academy and starts working cottages, while the other two cities then get the food resources to kick-start the army or further cities (with mutually out-of-phase whip cycles). Gypsy Kings with bcool and I in SGOTM13 did awesome micro on a 5-tile island with whipping and tile sharing. Tile overlap is not a concern until cities get so large that they run out of tiles to use at decent population sizes. A strong civilization at city size around 6 is normally preferable in an SGOTM to one that is strong at size 14, because the former happens sooner. If the clues about low food and large map are accurate, then eking out the best from the tiles may well be a strong step towards winning.

Or settle 1E, then 1S1W of corn, then 2N1W of deer for a similar scenario.

 

[DanF5771]

That map looks very hillyish.

Indeed! lots of hills -- I reckon this might be a Highlands map, also justified by the many land tiles plus the rather low average food-yield per tile.
-> inconvenient / unattractive for quick wars with fast movers (Horse Archers, Knights), but probably good defensive terrain to handle barbs with Warriors(?)

Furthermore despite of the many land tiles it might get crowded rather quickly because
a) there might be clusters of peaks
b) the map appears to be narrower than a default standard size Highlands map, i.e. only ~50 tiles along x-direction, compared to default 64 (this value can be derived by exploiting the graphical artifact, where you can look around the world and 'see yourself' after adjusting FOV=100 + max zoom-out and measuring pixel-distance in screen shot )
with 10 players on the map, the few good spots might be claimed quickly (argument for settler 1st?), no info about extension along y-direction though

But there is other knowledge about y-coordinate: Our starting tile has y~9 -> not much room to the south (most likely no other AI below us), suggests settling northwards e.g. on Stone.
How do I know? Just look at the clouds in globe view (there are certain distinct patterns).
Also the forest SW of Marble is of the snowy kind. Makes appearance of Elephants/Pigs in close vicinity very unlikely (max 40°/50° from equator) unless worldbuildered.

The health bar of our Warrior indicates there is at least one >3 unit somewhere on the map. (could be 4 - Mali Skirmishers?)
Together with the >default AI power of the opponents from demo screen (perhaps due to additional Archers), this might be meant to discourage us from early aggression (Worker steal, choking).
AI could have enough attack courage to fight our 2 Warriors with 4 units, even when stationed on defensive terrain -> choking might fail.

With Delhi settled on T1 and Hinduism founded on turn 14, our capital will have already popped its borders into the 3rd ring on turn 24 -> if we go settler first and find a suitable spot 5 tiles away along a river, the second city will be connected for trade routes and a net gain in commerce. This city might also start building Stone wonders soon.

 

[bcool]

Re: map analysis
I appreciate all the wonderful analysis DanF. To be in the spirit of not using the flying camera and GoTo function to determine what is in the fog, we want to avoid using any other kind of graphical artifacts to learn more about the map.
I think your conclusions based on the cloud analysis and frosted trees are fine and very insightful, but I would avoid looking at ourselves and counting pixels in the future.

Re:
settling and moving the settler

Settling on the stone?
Settling on the stone is about as good as settling 1E, and it reveals more of the map, earlier access to stone, options with builds--either more scouting with warriors or settler first, etc.
I would rather just move to the stone rather than explore with the settler if we are going to move the settler.

Settling 1E advantage?
If the map is very food poor it might be to our advantage to have one city with most of the early food resources in its BFC. So settling 1E has its advantages too. The capital could eventually become a decent GP Farm.

I like mabraham's suggested close settling of the cities.

The settler first option definitely should be explored and is only an option really if we settle on the stone. So to keep our options open, I'm changing my preference to moving to the stone directly on T0 with the plan to settle there unless something amazing pops up.

 

[bcool]

Bigger Picture?

When do we have to commit to a victory condition?

There is some advantage to committing to a grand strategy now, before we know everything we need to to make a good decision.

I unfortunately haven't had time to play out a game, but I hope to do so with STW's next test game (thanks for making those). With the rest of the world Buddhist, this is going to make any victory condition difficult. They are going to all dislike us from the start and they are going to love each other.

I expect we will deal with at least a few war declarations on us.

If we are aggressive with spreading our religion we might be able to convert a few AI diplomatically before they hate us too much to want to change voluntarily. Of course espionage might be useful here too if diplomacy fails.

 

[shulec]

So to keep our options open, I'm changing my preference to moving to the stone directly on T0 with the plan to settle there unless something amazing pops up.

I recommend moving the settler to the stone. We should consider settling elsewhere only if something really good or really bad is seen.

 

[DanF5771]

I think your conclusions based on the cloud analysis and frosted trees are fine and very insightful, but I would avoid looking at ourselves and counting pixels in the future.

agreed, my Captain.

the ~50 was a very coarse estimate.
after testing a bit with modified Highlands mapscripts, I think there is enough land to settle without a hurry.

I'm trying to prepare and post an example map later.

 

[Manco Capac]

Indeed! lots of hills -- I reckon this might be a Highlands map, also justified by the many land tiles plus the rather low average food-yield per tile.

I tend to think it might be global highland* mapscript more than the Highlands one. Given the map cylindrical map overlapping...

But I don't have access to my game, so I can't verify for sure if it stands truth or not with some world land tiles number averaging.

Now, the stand-out tropical climate makes all sense on a food poor mapscript, trying to create valleys of greenish jungles and far less of the dreadful PH's. At least, windmills on GH are sustainable with few >3 tiles.

*Yes, I forgot nothing stops the mapmaker to swap to cylindrical overlapping for Highlands mapscript, I was too used to the big rectangle typical Highlands mapscript...
Anyways, either Global_Highlands or Highlands, this reduces to the same formula: lots of hills.
The only difference is the presence of a ocean around the main continent, that might useful to speed up our campaigns.

The mapmaker sure did a very good choice to test the courage of those going to wage wars against all AI's loving each other settled mostly on hills.

 

[Manco Capac]

I recommend moving the settler to the stone. We should consider settling elsewhere only if something really good or really bad is seen.

I have a deep liking for the stone too, but highlands mapscript is somthing to consider though. We don't want to end up with a capital filled with hills.

For now, my vote is confused and tests are perhaps needed for looking how beneficial one is over the other.

 

[Walter_Wolf]

Seems like most of the team agrees with settling on stone. I also like the early 3 hammers for the capital option, faster warrior explorers for later fogbusting and MP units as their final fate, and an early wonder shot.

My proposal/plan would be:

T0 move the settler to the stone tile
T1 move the warrior

stop, take some screenshots and wait for the discussion.

Now, about the warrior move. If we move the settler to the stone tile on T0, I guess settling on/around marble is out of the question, 'cause of too many wasted turns. Regardless, the marble site should be explored sooner rather than later, but it's not that much of a hurry. That's why I suggest moving the warrior another tile East (meaning 1S1E) for revealing that part of the map, and then head Westwards "under" the marble in a zig - zag fashion (hill 1S1E of marble on T2 etc.). Will study those moves more precisely after feedback.
Another option is exploring the NW territory, as the AI will most likely be located to our North.

I am waiting for feedback on this, and plan to go ahead with it in 24 hours if the team agrees.

cheers

 

[mabraham]

I have a deep liking for the stone too, but highlands mapscript is somthing to consider though. We don't want to end up with a capital filled with hills.

The stone site has enough food (corn farm, FPfarm) to grow to size 6 from just those two tiles, and several grasslands and a Ghill to boot. I'm not concerned with the hill density of that capital site. Note that you can build cottages on grassland hills, too.

Settling 1E might prove a stronger capital in the long term once we can sustain the ~10 population it could support, but not settling on stone is a significant slow-down.

 

[mabraham]

Seems like most of the team agrees with settling on stone. I also like the early 3 hammers for the capital option, faster warrior explorers for later fogbusting and MP units as their final fate, and an early wonder shot.

My proposal/plan would be:

T0 move the settler to the stone tile
T1 move the warrior

stop, take some screenshots and wait for the discussion.

Now, about the warrior move. If we move the settler to the stone tile on T0, I guess settling on/around marble is out of the question, 'cause of too many wasted turns. Regardless, the marble site should be explored sooner rather than later, but it's not that much of a hurry. That's why I suggest moving the warrior another tile East (meaning 1S1E) for revealing that part of the map, and then head Westwards "under" the marble in a zig - zag fashion (hill 1S1E of marble on T2 etc.). Will study those moves more precisely after feedback.
Another option is exploring the NW territory, as the AI will most likely be located to our North.

I am waiting for feedback on this, and plan to go ahead with it in 24 hours if the team agrees.

cheers

Looks good - except that I believe there is no advantage to a planned warrior scout 1S1E then 1S1W (following the usual rule of thumb of moving on diagonals) because the hill 1S can see every tile that could be seen from those two tiles. So if a clockwise loop is in order, then I think warrior 1S, then 1S1W is the way to start. If an anti-clockwise loop is in order, then warrior 1S1E, then 1N1E seems best - but I don't like this as much.

Note that the warrior scout should bear in mind that we'll pop the border a second time on T24 or so. There's no need for the warrior to scout closer than about 6 tiles from the capital, because the culture will scout 4 tiles by the time we start needing to know.

 

[bcool]

If we plan to go settler 1st then we need to consider what is best for the warrior carefully.

The warrior has to be around the marble or another different site for the 2nd city T16-T20 to make sure the settler isn't eaten. (unless we settle just outside the cultural borders)

There might be some advantage to scouting around the capital even in the expected cultural expansion zone on T24 if we are looking for a good spot for the 2nd city.

I think moving the warrior 1S is the best if we want to keep the settler first option open, and I think it works even if we don't go with a settler first.

So I support moving the settler to the stone now (T0) and then the warrior 1S on T1.

Settling 1E might prove a stronger capital in the long term once we can sustain the ~10 population it could support, but not settling on stone is a significant slow-down.

Settling 1E isn't that significant a slow down. Settling 1E gets us a warrior and a worker on T20 that can improve the corn. Settling on the stone gets us 2 warriors and a worker T19 but we will not have agriculture until T21. At pop 2 the stone site is producing 4 food and 3 hammers (working unimproved corn and FP) At pop 2 1E site is working (the deer and FP) for 3 food and 3 hammers or 4 food and 1 hammer (with unimproved corn and FP)

But I think the group is leaning towards stone, since moving back to the 1E settling location probably isn't worth it once we move to the stone.

 

[Manco Capac]

Note that you can build cottages on grassland hills, too.

Yes, like all tiles that might sustain in a way or another at least 2 or more. That is why we can put a cottage on a wine PH but not on a simple PH.
Still, putting a cottage on a single food tile isn't good, just like a plain tile.
Better mine it.

 

[mabraham]

If we plan to go settler 1st then we need to consider what is best for the warrior carefully.

The warrior has to be around the marble or another different site for the 2nd city T16-T20 to make sure the settler isn't eaten. (unless we settle just outside the cultural borders)

There might be some advantage to scouting around the capital even in the expected cultural expansion zone on T24 if we are looking for a good spot for the 2nd city.

I think moving the warrior 1S is the best if we want to keep the settler first option open, and I think it works even if we don't go with a settler first.

So I support moving the settler to the stone now (T0) and then the warrior 1S on T1.

If settler first is something to consider seriously, then moving right now into the zone that we want the warrior in later is inefficient. We go near the marble, then we go somewhere else, and then maybe cover most of the same ground going back to the marble. Instead: warrior 1SE, 1NE, 1E (hill), 1SE, 1SW, 1SW, 1SW, 1NW, 1SW leaves us 3S of marble on T9 with time to scout NW to see the land west of the corn before doubling back to the marble. This gives us the option to change tack and scout the deer site if what we learn to the east (with the warrior) and north-east (settling stone) makes us want to settle near deer first. We also find out if settling SW of corn is what we want to do - but we'd make sure of that whatever we do with the warrior.

 

[mabraham]

Yes, like all tiles that might sustain in a way or another at least 2 or more. That is why we can put a cottage on a wine PH but not on a simple PH.
Still, putting a cottage on a single food tile isn't good, just like a plain tile.
Better mine it.

Sure, but it depends on the existing food excess and happiness and health caps and whether you wish to whip. The stone capital at size 2 has a food excess of 8 from the two farms. There's at least two grasslands for cottages (probably more), so size 4 still has that food excess. So even if everything else was plains or grassland hills, it can get (slowly) to size 12 working 10 cottages (probably more).