[BTS] SGOTM 24 Turbo Ants

Hi folks and folkesses!

Team rules:
0. Enjoy our friendship and have fun.
1. Don't cheat.
2. Win gold.

 

Roster:

Mitchum
Pollina
WastinTime
ZPV
LowtherCastle

Log:
Turnset 1: Mitchum shows up. Jaws drop.
T0-T6, SIP TA Town, Hunting, Barb City somewhere, AIs have lots of power!?
T6-T18, AH, met Darius (t17) to east, blocked, 1 forest growth.

Turnset 2: WastinTime next. Lots of discussion. Alpha next? BW beeline? No. Stonehenge. Why? Cuz WT loves monuments.
PPP
T18-T34, Mysticism, Darius city #2 on T24! Desert warrior defeats lion! Cow City settled t30. Barbs settle Gaul with 3 archers at our 2corn site!!! We pause to discuss the Gaul setback. Mining.

Test saves below:

T18 test save

 

Useful links:

Code and Gyathaar's example on jungle growth.
Resource tiles where forest and jungle grow
Starting area map
T6 Analysis
84x52 map probably
Land between us and Darius
T18 Analysis
Dog Soldier makes BW harder to trade for
Unit maintenance costs
5 AIs landlocked?
NO MEDITATION!!!
Leader trait thoughts
Emporer barb data

GP Plan Options
Missionary plan

Preserve wkr-t non-tundra
Preserve wkr-t tundra

 

Checking in. Welcome back everyone!

 

Thanks for all of the useful links, LC. Not sure what I would have done without them. haha

Should I take the info from our pre-game discussion and post it here for the peanut gallery?

EDIT: Relevant posts from pre-pre-game discussions via PM:

LC:
looking at the layout, it seems like most or all of our cities are going to have to pop borders asap. How do we want to go about that?

WT:
I know you want me to say monuments, but I won't.
How about this thought:

Short answer: Ignore all those city sites that require a border pop. Get out of this area fairly quickly so we can chop.

Long answer....
I assume we SIP. then we get gems before IronW.
Then we settle double corn in the first ring(destroying a forest)

Assuming we don't find any path east past the desert...
Then we settle the Cow in the NW corner on the PH and build galleys to go West.
Why? cus we shouldn't chop our homeland and we really want to chop, so let's get outta here ASAP.

P.S. re: forests. There could be more in the east, past the desert, yes? or are we told no, we start with 47 forests? Either way, we can probably expect to grow enough to get to 50.
If there are a ton of forests in the east, then we an chop quite a bit and that changes everything.

LC:
Actually, I was wondering about beelining Alpha and building libraries. We need to generate some beakers also and other than furs, it's all coastal tiles.

Not so sure about abandoning the homeland. Maybe we let AIs develop some cities while we prepare to capture them and build a FP somewhere. Or move our palace and build FP here.

WT:
I did: Hunting, wheel, pottery, mining, BW.
1 worker, warriors, granary
deer, deer, fur, fur, roads
Grow to size 7, 3-pop whip a settler somewhere around turn 42
I got to size 7 before BW, so we might want to speed up research (1 deer, then 1 fur?) but probably not.
Capturing a worker would fix the problem.
Slow game.
I did: Hunting, wheel, pottery, mining, BW.
1 worker, warriors, granary
deer, deer, fur, fur, roads
Grow to size 7, 3-pop whip a settler somewhere around turn 42
I got to size 7 before BW, so we might want to speed up research (1 deer, then 1 fur?) but probably not.
Capturing a worker would fix the problem.
Slow game.

Mitchum:
I get that we don't want to chop the starting land (as defined by the start screenshot so it cannot get bigger) but I imagine that a few chops early will speed things up such that it outweighs the added 2 turns at the end. In other words, if putting a chop (or two) into a settler speeds up expansion by a few turns, that could lead to Environmentalism more than two turns sooner. Plus, if we chop intelligently to promote maximum forest re-growth, that early chop has a high probability of regrowing sometime during the game.

WT, would going Hunting, Mining, BW speed up the settler significantly to outweigh not getting an early granary? Do we need roads for happiness/health reasons?

Did you SIP? Is the gems juglified and a PH?

LC:
We can beeline htg-ah-wtg-alpha by t53 at the latest. Adding wheel delays it about 3t.

WT:
that beeline is always tempting if you can find the AI to trade with.

In my test I did SIP. Gems is jungle. It's not a PH in your test game. I didn't look closely at the real game.

Hunt, mining, BW wouldn't do us much good. We don't want to whip smaller than size 4, so we need to grow to at least 6 or 7.

I agree that we can chop a little if it seems important, but there's no way a couple chops will save 2+ turns on Enviro. I figure we will either get the regrow or we'd have to do 5, 10 or 20+ extra forest preserves out of our area. One way or another, we get it down to 1 turn.
In fact, we are virtually required to get it down to 1 turn if we intend to kill everyone and be the only Civ running Env.
To go 2 turns, we'd have to gift all the tech and force an AI to switch which seems like a hassel, but is doable.

Mitchum:
I agree that we can chop a little if it seems important, but there's no way a couple chops will save 2+ turns on Enviro.[/qoute]

Really? So getting that snowball rolling a few turns earlier won't translate into saved turns at the end?

Good point. Let's just hope that there are enough forests outside of our defined starting area to get it down to 1 turn.

ZPV:
I'm a bit surprised the rules don't explicitly disallow this, to be honest.
Taking it even further, the rules only say "To do so you must force the rest of the world to run Enviromentalism for 100 turns!"
Not a peep about us having to run Enviro

LC:
Good spot, Mitchum! Everyone please update your test save accordingly before any testing.

That really makes SIP a lot more powerful.

htg-tw-pot-wtg-alpha t54 (or t53 if we delay 3rd city)
2 wkrs, 2 warriors, 2 settlers, plus some hammers in granary or 3rd settler
city2 on t38 (cahokia-3s1e)

Cahokia builds settlers pretty fast

tw is obligatory if we build a second worker. Workers can road forests endlessly, not a waste. They speed up settling and improvements.

WT:
I like that better than waiting to 7->4 whip. I'm not sure why it's so much better. But I didn't have the PH tile in my test.

When do you do the 2nd worker? I'd like to skip it if we can since we are not chopping much if at all.

I guess we don't need the gems happy if we're not going to grow/whip, so it's nice to skip mining for probably the first time ever. The only problem I see it that Alpha is useless if we don't find any AI. Also writing/OB is not important if we can't explore AI land or get foreign TRs.

LC:
The second worker starts almost immediately, only building a warrior long enough to grow to pop2. With some MM fine-tuning, pop3 is simultaneous with furs1 and pop4 with furs2. Then settlers. I haven't tested it, but my guess is the second wkr is essentially for free, especially with an alpha beeline, because we have nothing else to build and slightly faster growth doesn't help much either (just working the lake a few turns). Settling City2 at Cah-3s1e (for example) is 3t faster with roads and gives instant TRs. Then all the other cities are settled sooner. The cow pasture and cornrows will be roughly twice faster and we don't have to sacrifice a trading partner for the dubious and belated second worker-slave.

And we get war roads to the east built in advance. We want all our roads to go through forests to maximize our chances for forest growth, so that's more worker-turns.

Think of it this way, we start knowing that there are no AIs within 10t or more of our warrior so an early slave is a very remote chance and will require an escort through the barb animals.

As for trading partners, we can plan some contingencies if we don't meet AIs, like building an early wb to explore west or to get around a mountain block to the east. Plus we don't have to commit ourselves to alpha for a long time. Writing is good for libraries to expand borders, and then for running 2 sci in our cities to speed our research, assuming we want GSes, which we do, right? The one thing we know is that we can settle 4-6 cites with enough food to run 2 sci. Probably our best research engine early on.

Beelining alpha also gets us IW asap.

WT:
GLH? Oracle for...? Machinery? We could Xbow rush the world using totem poles for 5 first strikes

LC:
GLH seems like a no-brainer. How about an archer rush?

I know what you want me to say, build totem poles . . .

WT:
I wouldn't settle 3s1e, but the roads to corn finish in time for the settler, creating city2 on t39
Alpha might be 1t later cus we'd need cash.

Mitchum:
Luckily, Hunting, TW and Pottery seem to be fairly obvious first techs so we don't have to decide on the Alpha beeline for quite a few turns. Are there any other techs we should consider? Or is H->TW->P the best option (it's what both of you did anyway)?

LC:
A slower beeline is htg-tw-ah, but it reveals horses and lets us pasture the cows. Pottery lets our cities start on granaries instead of foolishness.

Where would you settle the cornrows? Which other cities would you settle? Are we going to settle several asap and just take the temporary research hit?

WT:
.... 4e

pigs are jungled, so not there.
cows on the PH, if we had AH
I'm not a big fan of sharing the deer/fur at 3s1e

So I guess the next best spot is 3s4e next to clam.
There's also the fish spot north. We'd have to destroy another forest tho.

I'd like to get out of this area.

LC:
We should bear in mind we'll have to enculturate all the forests eventually.

All coastal cities are good with GLH.

My thinking:

The ph+cows is a hammer city, good for the GLH, galleys, and whatever else. We should plan to have that settled and pasturing the cows on AH + t0.

3Fish is an excellent GP farm.

3s1e is less maintenance than 3s4e and sharing the deer and fur speeds up its growth nicely and dovetails with whipping Cahovia, running scientists, working some hammers or whatever.

Pigs should be improved IW + t0.

That would give us a decent research engine pretty rapidly running 2 sci in each city. You want to get out of this area. With how many cities and how? Warring or settling? The problem I see with settling cornrows second is no wb to explore west.

Pollina:
Doesn't that mean that we have to run Environmentalism to be able to reduce the number of turns?

 

Hiya folks! Glad to be back!

EDIT:
And I've now got Civ working on my new PC, so my lack of screenshots will be bigger and clearer than ever before!

 

Sure, why not, give them something to gnaw on.

ZPV: Yay!

 

Question about forest or jungle growth: Which resources can they grow on?

There is this line of code that I can't find any XML for:

Code:

if ((getBonusType() == NO_BONUS) || (GC.getBonusInfo(getBonusType()).isFeature(iI)))

This is from the doFeature code Gyathaar quoted here:

I found these XML growth percentages:

forest 8%
preserve 64%

 

If I read it right,
Jungle can grow on Oil, Uranium, Bananas, Pigs, Rice, Dyes, Gems, Ivory, Spices and Sugar.
Forest can grow on Uranium, Deer, Furs, Silk and Spices.

I'm not sure if it's just me, but Quote+Spoiler doesn't display too well.

 

Thx. That would mean no fear of the forest growing on the corn, for example.

I deleted the spoiler tags. ZPV, where do you get that bonus info from?

 

Sorry for checking in so late. Busy weekend.

I should be able to run some tests next week. Hopefully.

Where was the test save again? Should we attach it here somewhere?

 

@LC:

From CIV4BonusInfos.xml - <FeatureBooleans>
I'm pretty sure that matches up to IsFeature, and it matches the observed behaviour of jungle eating grassland pigs.

 

That's weird. I don't seem to have that anywhere in my BtS XML.

Edit: But I do have it in vanilla. Is that it?

 

Yes, exactly. There are some XML files that you have to look in the vanilla folder to find. If it's no different in BtS, they didn't bother to make a second (third if you count Warlords) version of the file; the game just uses the original vanilla file.

 

Added above.

 

So we don't do any double work, here's my best effort for SIP, htg-tw-pott-wtg(partial), 2 wkrs + 2 warriors + partial granary, test save below goes to pop4, t30. Improvements -- wkr1: deerSW-deerW-furN-rd, wkr2: furS.

Notes:
t11 build warrior1(4t)
t15 build wkr(1t)
t16 build warrior1
t17 build warrior2
t18 pop2, build warrior2 !? ==> completes wkr1 same turn but puts more food into bin
t19 build wkr2
t24 wkr2 done, build warrior2 to completion
t26 build granary
t27 pop3, furN camped
t30 pop4, furS camped, (build settler)

Open questions in my mind:
1. Is SIP best?
2. Is one wkr better?
3. Tech animal husbandry instead of pottery? Or even instead of tw+pottery?
4. Where to settle?
5. How many cities to settle asap?
6. When to settle cows? It will be a hammer city and could build wbs for exploration and for other cities, in addition to GLH and whatever else. Settle it just in time for ah from alpha? That might prioritize Cornrows-Cows-city4...

My testing also carried on to t54 and I was able to settle a third city and still get alpha on t54 by growing Cahovia to pop5 before building the third city settler. That's settling Cornrows second. Settling 3s1e might get alpha on t53 since Cahovia works the lake at pop4. Alternatively, 3s1e gets cities settled faster with t54 alpha because Cahovia builds them at pop4. Otoh, Cornrows could also build a settler before a granary, so there are a number of options to consider.

Note that ah seems more guaranteed in trade than pottery.

 

This post was updated to include our earlier messages.

 

1. I don't see any better option that SIP
3. If you can promise horses, I say go AH first.

How much of this do we have to decide now vs. a little bit down the road when we have more information? I'm thinking that once we've picked our starting tech (and maybe some play testing is needed for this), worker first and agreed on SIP, I can play the first several turns to get a bit more information about our surroundings, nearby AI, etc.

 

green light from me to play : SIP, hunting, worker