SGOTM 17 - The Shawshank Redemption

[Dhoomstriker]

Okay, these images aren't perfect since I'm using a test game with out-of-date terrain, but they should give you a rough idea:
If we delete the Scout, we'll only be missing out on spawn-busting one square. It's not worth moving the Archer there to cover that one square (i.e. it's not worth moving from the yellow X to the red X as then we'd miss spawn-busting more land that is closer to the Horse City--which would only be 1 square depending upon where the Workers are, but that location--2E of the northern Rice--would be more convenient for a Barb unit to spawn).

So, I think that we're in pretty good shape with just the 2 Archers in the north (one on the blue X and one on the yellow X), with Workers pickup up the spawn-busting slack to the south of the blue X.

In particular, Mansa's Cultural Borders do a great job of spawn-busting the south-west side of the Lake for us (the Lake to the south-west of the Horse City location).

Spoiler :

The other image shows the south-west... the terrain has not been updated, but you can see that without any of our units there (I deleted them) and with our Cultural Borders plus Mansa's Cultural Borders combined (I didn't draw black lines since it's the hidden squares that aren't fog-busted)... there's not a lot of area left where Barbs can spawn.

Spoiler :

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Are we going to stop REXing, though?

I mean, with a bit of planning, we could get pretty good use out of a City in the north-east.

If it weren't for fear of Mansa stealing the Horse City location (or doing something lame like Monte did in the test game and settle SW + SW of the Horse city location to grab the Banana but ignore the Pig), I'd say skip the Horse City for now and build a City in the north-east.

But, no, we need the Horse City; it's just too good and it would suck to have to settle it to choose between EITHER the Pig OR the Gems because Mansa messed us up.


If we aren't going to stop REXing (at least if we're going to get one more City), then we might as well whip Aachen's Settler now and regrow faster, so that we can whip the next Settler faster.

With Chopping the G For Pig plus another Forest Chop, we'd have an instant Granary and could quickly grow to Size 3. By then, with 3 more Chops, we'd have our Library up there and could very quickly be working Pig + 2 Scientists.

I think that doing so is a much better use of our island Worker than having him build Plains Cottages.

One of the Forest Chops would be outside of our Cultural Borders, but it would be worth that Chop just to get the Library's Scientists up-and-running sooner.


Again, if we didn't have to worry about Mansa possibly messing up the Horse City location, I'd settle in the NE first, but I think that we have to settle Horse City first, even if it won't be productive for a while and will just be a territorial placeholder City.

 

[Jastrow]

I dont think we can afford to rex too much more before currency... What are we doing with the great scientist comming in about 4 turns???

If we are settling/academying him, then I think we can afford to keep rexing, at least for Horse, N-East, and Silber-Bridge, without crashing too bad. If however we want to look at bulbing something, then I am starting to worry we will fully stall.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

With a little bit of rearranging of our Archers (and leaving Ivory City without a defender), we should be able to position our Archers so that the Scout can be deleted in 2 or 3 turns' time without any area not being spawn-busted, other than the area to the west of the West Lake beside our future Horse City, which we don't care about as such a Barb is likely to harass Mansa instead of us.


It may even make sense just to have 1 Worker Pasturing the Horse Resource, since we can work a Lake for Commerce instead and then we won't have 2 Workers out of position for helping with the north-east corner. With 2 to 3 Workers in the north-east corner (maybe 2 of them Chopping/Pasturing and a third one building Roads?), such a City will get up-to-speed with its Scientists in time to help with the push to Currency.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

I'd say that we settle the first Great Scientist in Prague. When The Hanging Gardens come online, we won't have to worry all that much about Mansa's Cultural Borders oppressing Prague, so I don't think it makes sense to build the Academy anymore (we won't really need its +4 Culture to maintain our hold on Prague).

A settled Great Scientist is worth 6 Flasks and 1 Hammer per turn... which, with a Library means 7 Flasks per turn... and, with 2 Scientists also being hired means 8 Flasks per turn.


I'd also probably just leave the south-west unspawn-busted and use the Warrior to fully explore toward the north (no point in moving 1S just to reveal the obvious Peak there).


With our Archer stationed in GP Farm, and our pillagable Resources on the east side of GP Farm, I think that we can afford to let a Barb unit spawn in the south-west there.

So, our Warrior could move 1N (to reveal an obvious Peak) -> 1NE -> 1NW and not have to worry about Barbs because of Mansa's Cultural Borders doing the fog-busting in the area.

 

[Mitchum]

Nice work so far!!

Looking at spawn busting, we don't really want any barbs spawning south of Prague. A barb axe could come and pillage our village, which would be very painful. The worker building a cottage on the banana will spawn bust that, but once he's done, I think we should try to cover those squares.

Same thing with the tiles between Horse City and Aachen. Right now, our worker is spawn busting those 3 tiles. just make sure that when you move the settler and then the worker north to pasture the horse tile that we cover those three tiles.

As mentioned, only one tile SE of Ivory City is uncovered. That can easily be fixed. Once the library is done and the borders have popped, we'll free up one archer.

I'd keep the warrior spawn busting the west. We really don't want a barb coming at us from that direction, expecially since our archer is not fortified in the city. By the way, I think that archer can move into GP Farm (or 1W of GP Farm). I think with our borders and Mansa's we have the whole area covered.

One "easy" way to see if Mansa's (Monty's) cities spawn bust a tile is to use debug mode (chipotle) and either Alt-Z or Ctrl-Z (can't remember which) to take control of Monty's civilization.

In general, I'm fine with the plan so I won't comment on it. I just want to avoid barbs causing more issues and more inopportune whipping of units that we don't need right now. We got lucky that we've only faced one warrior, spear and archer. It could have been a lot worse.

 

[Jastrow]

Actually, it was a bit worst than that... I did not report an additional two or three barbs, since actions to deal with them were completly obvious...

In the north, yes, the spawn busters have been giggling around. With the worker actions, this actually did spawn bust a few extra tiles (at the very north edge) "for free". They need to move back once the worker and settler are done.

The GP-farm archer is on the way back to GP-farm...

In the south, I just, as I am typing this, realized something.... I beleive that barbs cannot spawn on resources? Can someone confirm this?? If this is correct, then there is no need to span bust the silver tile, which means I can move the archer back to bust south of Prague instead at no cost.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

I beleive that barbs cannot spawn on resources? Can someone confirm this??

That was easy enough to disprove... I ended the turn once and a Barb Archer spawned on a Gold Resource. Note that I put Gold Resources in the squares that our Culture and Mansa's Culture are not fog-busting (Mitchum, I put a similar image earlier in the thread, but just showed hidden squares for the squares that aren't being fog-busted).

Spoiler :

That said, I don't think that we need to 100% spawn-bust everywhere. Jastrow proved that we can take on some Barbs and win. Also, units like our Scout, if they exist solely to spawn-bust one square, are probably better off dying, saving us 1 Gold per Turn.

It won't hurt to win a few Barb fights and see if we can get a Guerrilla II Archer or even get up to a 10 XP unit for The Heroic Epic.


We're obviously in the "north-east quadant" of the map... looking at the test game shows just how small the map really is... we either need Astronomy or some tricky bridge like Jastrow is proposing to get to the south part of the map. We don't know what's in the west (a pure wall of Peaks and we have to go south -> west -> north?), but I'd rather that a Barb Axe spawn to the west of GP Farm (Mansa's Chariot can handle it, our Archer that is about to fortify in GP Farm can handle it, or said Axeman could also just beeline Mansa's 3rd City to the north of there) if it means us being able to explore northward with the Warrior now, in order to see what's in store for us.

We already "protected" Mansa's Chariot by killing off a Spearman on his behalf, so he owes us one by killing off a Barb Axeman for us.

Seeing what's to the north of where the Warrior currently exists is going to be very important to our strategy. Let's make sure that if we are going to commit to going for Astronomy that we know we need it or at least ensure that we highly suspect we need it.


Protective Archers have served us quite well so far and the odd single Barb unit spawning here or there isn't going to severely hamper us. It's when you have Warriors instead of Archers and have multiple Barb units coming at you where there are major problems, and when we don't even have pillagable Resources nearby, I'm even less concerned.

Yes, it could be annoying for a Barb unit to spawn to the south of Prague, so after we've Cottaged the G Riv Banana, we'll probably have to pull Archer 5 from around the Silver area toward the area south of Prague, to spawn-bust there instead.

It might suck for a Barb Unit (or even a Barb City?) to spawn by the Silver, but we should be able to handle a Barb Unit and if a Barb City appears there, it will be a useful training ground for some of our Military Units. Pre-Iron-Working, that area sucks to settle (other than for Jastrow's idea of seeing if we can "Culturally-bridge" past the artificial Ocean square that should normally be a Coast square), but if a Barb City went there and grew a little bit, it could help us out later... and, if the Barbs learn Iron Working and build a Worker that can Chop Jungles for us there... well, it would be fantastic.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Ideally, Jastrow will have time to update the test game. Such a test game will be ideal for working out some of the Worker actions and related spawn-busting.


In terms of additional Cities, I see us getting Horse and NE Cities for sure.

Any Coastal City (i.e. Fish Peninsula, Silver, or Dual Banana) could potentially get settled around the time that we're going to complete The Great Lighthouse, but out of those Cities, I'd only really consider settling the Dual Banana City pre-The-Great-Lighthouse.

Counting squares on the map, we have 32 squares in height (16 would be half), with 15 land squares counting the Railroad land squares and north of there.

Simple symmetry would indicate that there should be no Ocean at all and that our Coast squares would be adjacent to Coast squares of the land in the south.

Obviously, kcd_swede must have ripped off any AI to the south some of its "expected" land area... but by how much? If the Ocean is one or two squares deep, then we only need 1 "southern" Coastal City and some Culture there to bridge said Ocean. If the Ocean is 3 squares deep, then you're already talking square 21 for the next portion of land, leaving only 12 squares of land in height for the AI in the south.

What we don't know is whether there is part of the Ocean that is, say, 4 squares deep and another part that is 2 or 3 squares deep.

Anyway, after we get The Great Lighthouse, we could try the brute-force approach and settle all 3 of these Cities on the southern Coast (1S of where we'd planned to settle the Dual Banana City) and see if we can bridge the gap via 2 Cultural Border expansions (3 Cultural Border expansions would be unrealistic).

In the meantime, we want to know what's to the west of Mansa... if it's a pure wall of Peaks, then we know what our task will be (travel south over the Ocean as our first challenge) and we might even do what we can to get a Great Artist instead of Astronomy, as an example... we wouldn't even need Drama for a Theatre or Music for a free Great Artist... running Caste System and hiring a ton of Artist Specialists in one City would do the trick.


So, let's say that should be our goal... forget Astronomy and generate a Great Artist (possibly multiple ones if there are multiple Oceans to bridge for each quadrant*).

* Of course, that's assuming that there are quadrants... there might just be one massive 3/4 of the map and ours is 1/4, but it's all the same, really... getting out of our "Quarter"master area via Ocean seems to be an intentionally-set-up goal. I would have believed that kcd_swede possibly messed up with the Ocean squares near Stone Island City, but seeing the same thing to the south of the Silver is pretty convincing that he did so on purpose.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Counting width-wise, I count 52 squares. The 26th square from the east would be 3 squares to the west of Mansa's westernmost Cultural Border.

What might be very interesting is if Mansa has founded a City up against a wall of Peaks in the west and if we can use a Close Borders teleportation trick to get our units across those Peaks.

We could theoretically build a stack of 20 Horse Archers, teleport them over the wall of Peaks, and then capture enough Cities "on the other side" to be able to whip out Rathauses and then an eventual army there, thereby allowing us to attack the world from two directions at once.


If Mansa Cultural Borders are a couple of squares away from the wall of Peaks, we could found a City at the edge of the Peaks and then gift him a Great Artist, which he'd probably use to try and Culture Bomb our "trap" City. Then, his Cultural Borders might stretch far enough across said wall of Peaks in order to set up the teleport.

Or, if you can gift a City and have the AI keep the Culture, we could simply build a City against said wall of Peaks, Culture Bomb the City, gift the City to Mansa, put our army into position, and then Close Borders with Mansa. Unfortunately, this last idea will not work (I just tested it), but the above idea of gifting a Great Artist could be one way to short-circuit our way to victory.

But, until we see how these Peaks are laid out, it's going to be hard to accurately develop such a plan, so I think that it now becomes crucial to send our Warrior northward, especially since Mansa's third City has made much of the trek northward very safe from Barb threats.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

@Jastrow: Do you need help with updating the test game?

 

[Jastrow]

Sorry, my schedule changed unexpectedly, and I had to work last night. I was free tonight in exchange. It also looks like I will be busy tomorrow evening, but would be able to play on Thursday (not sure I will be able to do much testing between now and then tho...)

Yes, I will need help on the test save.... My current effort is attached.

-I *think* all cities are correct (I might be a hammer or food of in Ivory, it should be double checked.)
-Improovements are certainly correct.
-Most units are correct; others are close.

-New terrain is NOT updated.
-Total gold was not checked, but my guess is it is off a bit.

I am not good with WB, and do not have a good way of compairing a test game and the real game... How do you guys do that anyway, two computers??

So I would need someone to check the accuracy of the test game, and put in the new terrain, to the extent you think it is relevant.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

If you think that Hammers/Food/Flasks might be incorrect, then it would help if you could provide the saved game from one turn earlier (such as an autosaved game), as well. In the span of one turn I can correct these differences pretty easily.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

I am not good with WB, and do not have a good way of compairing a test game and the real game... How do you guys do that anyway, two computers??

Different people have different methods of doing so. I like taking screenshots and opening Civ 4 in non-full-screen mode, so that I can switch between the two applications.

Taking screenshots is a lot safer than having the real game open for a long period of time, to avoid getting confused which game is the real game and which one is the test game (the fact that we pause the real game helps to reduce the risk, but taking screenshots reduces the risk of messing up the real game by accident even more).


If I want to compare two areas precisely, I'll select a unit in the real game, press "c" to centre the screen on that unit (you can do so with the game still pasued), and then take a screenshot. Then, in the test game, I'll use the World Builder to place a unit on that same square, exit the World Builder, click on that unit, press "c," and then take a second screenshot. Then, I can Alt + Tab between the two screenshots to see where they are different. After having made changes in the test game, I can take another screenshot and compare that screenshot to the real game's screenshot. I normally don't use this process EXCEPT when fog-gazing, and will simply just visually inspect a screenshot of the real game when building the World Builder terrain.


I can see about updating anything that's not quite right in the test game tonight, especially if you have given me the saved game of the turn prior to the current turn.

 

[Jastrow]

Sorry, but apparently the autosaves for the real game got overwritten by me updating the test game....Or did you mean an autosave of the test game, one turn earlier? That I of course have, and the last 3 are attached.

My computer does not allow me to run civ in windowed mode. It instantly crashes if I try...

 

[Dhoomstriker]

The Gold value can be edited manually, but the Flask value cannot, so it helps to ensure that you've earned the correct Flask value. In this case, with us being at a 0% Science Rate, as long as you hired the Scientists at the right times (if you didn't, the GPPs will be off, too), then there shouldn't be much to do in this regard.


If a City has too many Hammers in a build item, it's hard to undo those Hammers, but you can always go back a turn or two and then partially build a unit that we'll never complete, like a Scout, instead.

Or, by going back a couple of turns, you can use the World Builder to change the composition of the squares... you can add a bonus Resource, add a Forest, add a Hill square, and you can add an Improvement (Improvements are located on the far left tab of editing the terrain/Resource, which is a tab that sometimes gets hidden in the World Builder interface, so use the < and > arrow buttons to see all tabs).


For example, let's say that I want to make 2 more Food and 2 less Hammers. Instead of working a Grassland Cow for 4 Food plus 2 Hammers, I can place a Pig and a Pasture on a different square, have the citizen work the Pig instead of the Cow for one turn, then remove the Pig and Pasture using the World Builder. Thereby, we will earn 6 Food for a turn and the totals will be correct again.

If I'm short by a lot of Flasks, I might do something fancy like turn a regular Mine into a Gem/Silver/Gold, but then I'll be short by 1 Hammer, so I'll have to add a Forest to another square that I'm working.

What's really neat is that you can build a Gold Mine on a Coast square, for example, if you want less Food but more Commerce... basically, with some playing around, it is possible to alter the values earned in a lot of creative ways.


Flasks are earned on an empire-wide basis, so it doesn't matter in which City you earn them, while Food and Hammers have to be adjusted in a particular City.


You can use the Edit City World Builder option (I think that it's the second icon from the bottom left?) to click on one of your own Cities and then adjust your Gold value, which is the easiest factor to update, which is why I focus on getting the Flasks (and Commerce and Espionage, if those Sliders were used) correct and then I will manually adjust the Gold later.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

I meant autosaves from the test game, so those should be perfect. I'll look at more precisely updating the test game tonight.


Ideally, going forward, you will manually save the game on each turn for the real game, in case we need to check something (like Demographics data or where we last saw a Barb Unit)... although it's rare that we actually need to use these manually-saved games if the turnset write-up provides most of the turnset's details.

 

[Mitchum]

Another thing I try to do is to copy the autosaves from the real game into another folder right away so that they don't get overwritten...

I'm busy on a business trip this week but things should be semi normal next week.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Another thing I try to do is to copy the autosaves from the real game into another folder right away so that they don't get overwritten...

Actually, please do not be lazy in this way.

It is greatly preferred to make manual saved games of every real game turn. Reloading an autosaved game of the real game can lead to you being asked to make a decision again (such as accepting or refusing an AI's demand), since those questions come to you AFTER the autosaved game was created (and thus those questions will be asked of you again when you load from an autosaved game). Being asked respond to these questions a second time will flag the game as having been replayed.

If you save a manual saved game, it will get saved after you've responded to any such requests or demands from an AI and thus we won't encounter problems with making the Hall of Fame Mod think that we're reloading.

 

[Mitchum]

Actually, I manually saved the game every turn AND I copied my autosaves to another directory after I played my turnset. I keep the autosave just in case I forget to save a turn or two or if something happens to the save. In any event, I agree that keeping the real save is the way to go. That was the only way I could recreate my turnset in the test game. I opened my manual save, which I do at the very end of every turn. Then, on my second computer, I replayed the turn to ensure that it matched the real save.

In any event, with the saves from the turn before the actual save, I'm sure that you'll be able to re-create the test game to match the real one.