[BTS] SGOTM 25 - Home Slices

[Kaitzilla]

No AI currently knows two techs. It is possible that one of them teched HBR instead of IW, but that would be surprising.

That's really weird.
The AI seem hardcoded to always tech Iron Working 1st if they don't have it.

I didn't think the window to liberate was that small.

I consider this one of the unsolved mysteries of Civ 4.

The threshold is fuzzy sometimes in my experience.
Sometimes 1 ruins the (Liberate), sometimes 3, sometimes it is 10.
Usually it is 1.

It gets really weird when Vassals sometimes accept a (Liberate) if it used to be their city even though vassals aren't supposed to be able to receive city gifts from a master.

(Liberate) always makes me sweat if it's not a city gift on the turn the city is founded.

************************

This attached test game illustrates the immense problems with (Liberate)
Common knowledge says a new city can (Liberate) as long as it is closer to the AI capital than to any other capital.
So how come Shanghai near the Dye won't (Liberate)?

Spread religion to all (Liberate) cities and press next turn a few times.
Watch how a few cities lose the (Liberate) option, but others do not!

Even a barb getting too close to a city makes the (Liberate) option vanish.

The whole thing drives me crazy.

 

[WastinTime]

So how come Shanghai near the Dye won't (Liberate)?

I loved playing with Pollina because she would always pop in with an exact answer--seemingly glad to research it. With me, it have to go kicking and screaming into the code. I often come up with a partial answer. It can give me a headache, but this time it didn't take too long.

The answer is: if the capital is not in the "area", which I take to mean Toku is off-continent, then you double the distance.
Therefore, our capital is 'closer' to Shanghai than Tokyo is.

See, that's a partial answer. I doesn't explain the culture thing. Want me to go back in? <= See, this is me complaining

 

[WastinTime]

This shows the doubling I was talking about:

int iCapitalDistance = ::plotDistance(getX_INLINE(), getY_INLINE(), pCapital->getX_INLINE(), pCapital->getY_INLINE());
                    if (area() != pCapital->area())
                    {
                        iCapitalDistance *= 2;
                    }

And this shows how culture and distance are both used to pick the winner: (Pretty short and sweet, but it gives me a headache)

                    int iCultureTimes100 = getCultureTimes100((PlayerTypes)iPlayer);

                    if (bConquest)
                    {
                        if (iPlayer == getOriginalOwner())
                        {
                            iCultureTimes100 *= 3;
                            iCultureTimes100 /= 2;
                        }
                    }

                    if (GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iPlayer).getTeam() == getTeam()
                        || GET_TEAM(GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iPlayer).getTeam()).isVassal(getTeam())
                        || GET_TEAM(getTeam()).isVassal(GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iPlayer).getTeam()))
                    {
                        iCultureTimes100 *= 2;
                        iCultureTimes100 = (iCultureTimes100 + iTotalCultureTimes100) / 2;
                    }

                    int iValue = std::max(100, iCultureTimes100) / std::max(1, iCapitalDistance);

                    if (iValue > iBestValue)
                    {
                        iBestValue = iValue;
                        eBestPlayer = (PlayerTypes)iPlayer;
                    }

 

[babybluepants]

As near as I can tell from moving the slider around, we are getting 3.5% more research bonus on Horseback Riding than we should.
There are 8 AI, so 30% bonus / 8AI = 3.75% each AI that know Horseback Riding.
14 * 1.2 for knowing Animal Husbandry * 22 turns to complete HBR = 369

Pretty sure we get a free beaker. 15b x 1.2 x 22 = 396b. If you count the turns on the research bar in your screenshot, we are almost completing in 21t (378b with 15 base-b).

Btw, guys, I can't pause / unpause the game. I'm back to Civ after several years - is it the Pause key that we use for this? My new laptop doesn't have a Pause, and I've been searching online for a key combination that might substitute, but no luck. It's pretty annoying.

 

[babybluepants]

How are we building the spies? They are not 2pop whippable with Kremlin.
If we invest 1h in an HA, we could whip it and complete a spy, as well. We can probably get Alpha and HBR at about the same time, too.
How many HA do we need anyway?
What else? Beijing could potentially hammer them out at a 2t pace, if we grow it into the production tiles.
GT in Gua or Yan'an could be a unit per turn + some. Gua we can also just give away periodically, ofc.

Just thinking out loud... Here is a silly idea. Would it ever pay to build a palace in Beijing? I've never actually done that before in a game. It's 160h, but the benefits would be that we could get the +50% hammers there after we steal CS from Toku, and we could wipe whip anger in Yan'an with gift / recapture. The downsides are: the palace hammer investment is wasteful at a time when we really need units, and we don't have the nice desert area for the city gifts. We could maybe put a city 3N of Beijing. Beijing at pop 8 with the Bureau bonus hammers out a spy per turn. The base-h investment in the palace is probably repaid in about 9-10t... Nah, forget it.

 

[WastinTime]

My new laptop doesn't have a Pause,

I had this problem too. I use the on-screen keyboard. Just search for 'on' or 'key'

 

[babybluepants]

Yeah, I tried that, too, but no luck.

Edit: I give up. I spent another hour on this, which is way more than I can afford to. Googling and searching these forums, the best I could find is a system registry hack. Unfortunately, the only ones I found are for up to Windows XP - 7, and don't seem to work with mine.

 

[babybluepants]

T44 choko from Yanan can capture Moscow (along with many HAs), but the point is, if we whip a Choko T36, it takes 8 turns to capture using that unit.

Let's assume we get 4 HAs moving on T37, then the closest city, Yanan, starts one T38, whips 39 and moves 40. This one would be fast enough to arrive with early ones making a group of 5-6 to DoW T42, capture 43 or 44 (depends on if there's forests blocking our path next to Moscow)

4 workers would go with the army to continue to road west. They will road
Moscow capture turn: SW, SW,
M+1 : SW, SW,
M+2 : SW (just one because of desert tiles)
M+3 : SW, SW
M+4 : W, NW (towards Berlin)

Slight issue with this plan - we can't bomb/strike Moscow right now. Istanbul is 1 tile too far.
If we settled a city 3 west of the legendary city cow (on the westernmost of the 3 incense tiles), we could just reach it. We can use that city later, but we would have to invest in a settler now.

 

[babybluepants]

Berlin capture ~51
Rome ~53
and then paris.

For these 3 we will need to have a bomber base. It could be Paris, but we have to be able to maintain OB.

We may also want to capture Paris first, if we want to move DG to an island, which in turn requires a settler on a galley in time + maybe a missionary? Where, btw? Maybe 2S3E of Hong Kong. It doesn't have any food and is surrounded by jungle.

Rome would be a good bomber base, as we won't be DOW-ing him in the homeland, and so can maintain OB. However, JC founded Antium this turn. In test games, he expanded fairly well. He is ORG/IMP and not hampered by a colonial city. I think he will likely have 3-4 cities by the time we get there. That may be ok. We can rebase to Berlin after capture and go after all the Roman cities. That takes our army further away from London, but we can probably deal with it somehow.

 

[WastinTime]

I woke up this morning with a new short term strategy. Like really short term-- after Kremlin.
And you'll be happy to hear it involves the GLH.
We spam settlers. They're only ~2pop to whip. We can get up to 30-40 cities, mostly coastal, in no time.
This is something we could not do without StateProperty.

Maintenance on 40, size-1 cities is -400--counting both #cities and civic maint. (not saying we add 40 cities, just saying costs don't spiral out of control exponentially)
With GLH, each new city does about 10gpt, so our economy won't collapse. Colossus will get us moving forward.
Once these cities grow a little, suddenly we can meet all our other goals, research, build units/spies, pay maint on units, build 10 wonders, bomber bases, etc.
And we're in a position to create massive wonderbread gold. We could research an extra era, or just pick up construction/Engineering for movement. (spies move 3)

Getting to 40 total cities requires whipping 30 new settlers (and capturing a couple cities)
We may not even stop there, but...
30 settlers = 60 whipped population = ~150 food.

30 might be over-investing and we may want to turn our attention to our final goals before adding 30 settlers, but it can't hurt to find a good 10-20 spots (3 more islands) in the short term. As our plans showed, it's easy to complete any one of our 6 main goals, but to do them all simultaneously and quickly, we need a good base.

 

[LowtherCastle]

No workers, no settlers.

Spoiler :

kidding

 

[babybluepants]

That’s really interesting.

As I’ve been thinking about the various goals, I kept thinking that it would be nice to settle some more cities. We are already reducing the tech to a minimum, and we can easily get the EP we need. The bottlenecks seem to be production and, to a lesser extent, distance. We need an army of HAs, and army of spies, settlers / galleys / missionaries, and a bunch of wonders.

Intuitively, 30 settlers seems like overkill, but the principle of settling decent sites to increase our hammer potential and to reduce some of the distances travelled is great.

 

[LowtherCastle]

This is an excellent scenario, but that's no reason to drag it out. We seem to be getting Alpha ~T39, assuming capturing Manchou doesn't delay that. When do we have our first batch of spies in place? That tells us when or if we need Paris. Everything else gets squeezed inside that timeline, right? Alternatively, it tells us to forget about dG and use either Stalin or Toku.

 

[WastinTime]

When do we have our first batch of spies in place?

Isn't the critical item getting a G.Artist? and to do that, we need 6 pavilions, Globe, regrow the globe city, 200gpp. I don't think we can get Music faster than that. Seems like we'll have spies by then. I didn't work out the timeline on this stuff yet.

We could try to roll the dice and get a low odds GArtist in the Kremlin city.

 

[WastinTime]

Looking at the map, it's a little low food. I see about 10 close, settlable spots. The next 10 are a bit of a walk and may have trade route issues. It'd be nice to know if there are some seafood up in the far north ice and if we can open up trade rts thru there for GLH.

 

[babybluepants]

Isn't the critical item getting a G.Artist? and to do that, we need 6 pavilions, Globe, regrow the globe city, 200gpp. I don't think we can get Music faster than that. Seems like we'll have spies by then. I didn't work out the timeline on this stuff yet.

We could try to roll the dice and get a low odds GArtist in the Kremlin city.

We could just build a Pavilion in Yan'an. Kremlin-whip the library for OF, and it should pretty much complete. I'm too lazy to pre-calc now, but let's say T35-36 Pavilion? If we go for the 200gpp there, we would get something like 55-60% odds on a GA. If we get a GP instead, we can use it for a shrine or to bulb Theology (I would think a shrine is better).

 

[WastinTime]

What's the latest plan for finishing/chopping the Kremlin? our workers sit idle for 1t? or, more accurately, they do a partial road?

 

[LowtherCastle]

Isn't the critical item getting a G.Artist? and to do that, we need 6 pavilions, Globe, regrow the globe city, 200gpp. I don't think we can get Music faster than that. Seems like we'll have spies by then. I didn't work out the timeline on this stuff yet.

We could try to roll the dice and get a low odds GArtist in the Kremlin city.

THe Music GA is born in Yanan, so it's already close to the target city. We can get it at the last moment. That's probably the way to go. Two more pure GSpies asap.

It's really hard to plan anything out without planning everything out. If the game is really short, the 2 pure GSpies and Music. If it's not so short, then MoM+Parthenon+GolgenAge and a half a dozen GPs.

I don't see why we couldn't get Music in a few turns when the time comes.

 

[LowtherCastle]

My tendency would be to focus more on the wonders we need to power our way to victory. Pyramids, for example, gives us Rep and later USuff. MoM gives us 36 turns of golden ages, if we so choose, which supercharges our porduction and research.

 

[babybluepants]

Does anyone know when the first whip anger expires in Yan'an?