SGOTM 17 - Maple Sporks

Darn, now we can't freely make bad jokes about scandinavians! :p

Bad jokes are ok... we'll just feel sorry for you. Good jokes (about scandinavians) are forbidden though, by gentlemen's agreement, or bet, or whatever its called nowadays.:rolleyes:
 
Bad jokes are ok... we'll just feel sorry for you. Good jokes (about scandinavians) are forbidden though, by gentlemen's agreement, or bet, or whatever its called nowadays.:rolleyes:
Noooo, I don't want to be guilty of complying with something as logically inconsistent and morally decadent as a gentlemen's agreement!! :hide: I'll stick to bad jokes about Norwegians and I guess all must be fine. :mischief: And nobody mention a galleon chain. :suicide:
 
On first moves, my first inclination was actually like Sengir's regarding the scout. It reveals 6 sea tiles the archer won't uncover. Seeing jungle around the hill 2N of the worker, I'd move him 2NW. Archer NW.

If we don't settle T0 (which is likely) revolting to slavery immediately is logical as we effectively won't have the anarchy.
 
Good point about the worker moves and the jungle, although we can get rid of the jungle rather quickly with IW just 1 tech away. And I remember KCD talking about putting a resource on jungle in last game, to force us to self tech IW... maybe this time he hid something nice there :) And is it shading or do I spot a bit of coastline on the topright of our view area?

All in all I agree with moving the worker 2NW, as there is nothing going to be revealed in the jungle/ocean that we would likely want to settle our capital on.
 
There's no coast in the NE-part, it's a jungle grass, if I'm not mistaken.

I agree with sending the worker 2NW, the jungle can wait a bit.

As for the scout: nocho pretty much nailed it. Seeing the seas, hopefully discovering seafood, will help decide where to settle. After that, it can start scouting in a circle to the north.
 
What are your first thoughts on tech path?

I'm inclined to go maths. Typical tech the AI won't trade easily and opens critical techs like construction, calendar and currency. Chop boost is pretty important too.

Would oracle be feasible? Should test that.

Does anybody know what a settler costs and if a new city with classical start comes with any buildings, granary maybe?
 
IMHO, the exploration of the coast have one goal : detect sea food in the relevent area : the area that might be usable to plan a city. As we will never found our cap on the hill, the only relevent location are 4 tiles W of this forested hill.
And these 4 tiles are revealed by both the archer and the scout as shown in my test game:

scout

archer

additionnaly we can see two more tile in the west with archer.
 
I'd go for Math as well. With a little luck we can trade it around for Alpha and IW.

And I'm pretty sure we won't stand a chance on building the Oracle: available on Ancient starts only.
 
I like the opening with math.
I'm tented to go math, currency, code of law and use our cheaper settlers toward fast expansion (if we have space)

for oracle: it is not available.

no building in new city.
settler cost: 100
 
We'll need a volunteer for the first set. Who takes? :)

The save should be available on Friday. I guess first set will take several days and a lot of careful moving of units, especially the first 3 turns or so.
 
I can play. I have to work friday though, so depending on what time the save will be available, the opening moves might have to wait a few hours.
 
I dont mind an early turnset either. I will be quite busy until monday, but after that I should have plenty of time to play some turns.

Regarding the scout, right now I am not convinced that moving south will give us an immediate advantage. The archer will tell us the relevant tiles for settling our capital (as astre pointed out), wheras the terrain to our northwest is far more interesting for determining where to settle our capital. The archer can then move onto the hill the second turn to show us the extra sea squares.

Edit: The one drawback is that we might miss the sea resource that could be hiding to the SE of the hill, which could prompt settling 1N of said hill.
 
can play whenever you want but unfortunately not during work time EU time zone
for scout vs archer, no real opinion in the end. i forgot that the tile SW of crab could be in the BFC of the capital :/
 
Ok, preliminary roster based on the above and perceived interest so far:

Sengir
Iagoc
astre
DwarfSleepy
nocho
pigswill
Norvin

Subject to suggestions and change, of course.
 
Had a bit of a try at how to do an opening sequence. Just so you know, something like this is possible after just 19 moves:

Civ4ScreenShot1163.jpg


Three cities! Being IMP chopping settlers is rather strong. So went straight chopping after the initial slavery switch on T0 and if we have 4 forests in the BFC you can do this. Basically two chops per settler. First one came out on T9 IIRC.

However, there are downsides too of course. All cities still at size 1, slider down to 40% already, forests spent pre-mathboost. Still, I think chopping out 1 settler immediately is quite strong. It all really depends on what kind of land we have around us. Chopping settler+worker might work well.

Some by-thoughts to this approach:
1) Ideally the worker starts chopping asap. We won't know where to settle yet, but if we settle T1, ideally the worker would already be on a forest in the inner ring of the city as border pop comes after first chop and chopping outside your borders gives less hammers.

This in turn means we should move archer and scout first. And then possibly stop worker move after 1NW as subsequent 1W (or even SW) is a guaranteed forest...

2) The archer shouldn't wander off too far away. I had my first chopped settler run into a lion already! Not sure when animals appear, but it's probably around T5, which IIRC is the case on ancient starts as well.

3) Note that if the capital is coastal and city 2 as well, we'd have immediate TR connection (as we have sailing). For the connection the (water)route should be completely unfogged, but not necessarily completely within our cultural borders.

4) A bit of a funny option, but settling on banana is an option for even faster settlers... Long term probably not the best thing, but if we move capital anyway, at least worth a moment of thought (before discarding :p).


On a completely other note, I looked up what a "Quartermaster" actually is (for the non-natives :p). On wiki it says "In land armies, especially US units, a quartermaster is either an individual soldier or a unit who specializes in distributing supplies and provisions to troops." which leads me to think that the Maze-type map astre mentioned may indeed well be the case... Nice long supply lines to our final target...
 
Oops, don't know how but missed the opening of our own thread. :blush:

Working on a set up using Dropbox to help track our moves to improve our test map. The next few days are hectic so I'll try to get it ready by the weekend.
 
I like the idea to chop asap and do not explore with the worker (to gains turns)
I also love the idea to do a settler in the top production (IMHO, only preceed by WB if crabs) followed by a second worker.

That would imply that the only exploration data will be made by the scout and the archer. In that case, i only see one opening: scout goes 2 NW and the archer 1 SW.

Non ancient start are always very low on tech for quite some time (remember RR 16? on industrial start. the first tech came after 30 turns or so...) therfore, i propose we should limit ourself our developpement (2 is ok, 3 seem too mutch) until we have currency, code of law or a big city...

EDIT: some data according how my tets game went in term of AI:
- someone always belined TGL. no way i could beat him in both my test games.
- someone goes CoL first in both my tests maps
- all religions goes away quite fast.
 
I have been rethinking our initial movements. If we move the archer SW the tile not revealed is not crucial in determining settling position. If we chose to move the capital W or WSW we will retain the crab resource and trade a banana for a forrested hill, giving us some production. If there is a sea resource in the unrevealed tile, great. If not, we'd probably still settle there regardless for the hill.

It is crucial to know the lay of the land N and NW of our settler before we can determine where to settle. In my opinion we should settle WSW, unless we uncover something of interest to the north. Moving the worker NW and the scout 2NW we can see pretty much anything of direct interest for a T1 settle. If we see a resource we can then opt to move the worker NE or NW to uncover more of the potential BFC depending on where we find a resource.

To recap:
Archer SW
Scout 2NW
Worker NW and either SW, NW or NE depending on what we find


Alternate plan:
I just realised that if we SIP we have a fogged tile in the BFC (why is the worker placed 1N of all other units, which are in a nice line?) We could move our worker SE SW to uncover the tiles on our eastern border to make sure SIP is a bad idea. The tile might be a production resource. We could then move the archer NW and the scout NW NE to uncover as much as the relevant land as possible to determine an alternative settling location. As stated before I dont think that we need to scout our SW immediately, as I dont think it will influence our capital settling.


Edit: Oh and although its probably clear already from this post, but to elaborate: I think that T0 exploration is more improtant than starting a chop 1 turn sooner, so I vote we use the worker to help uncover as many possible BFC tiles as we can, to avoid misplacing our capital.
 
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