[BTS] Shadow Game #3 for @guyyee - MONARCH

Regarding second city spots:
- you’ve identified the issue of lack of food. With your capital also being food poor, you don’t really want to share pigs either. With a low food capital, you’d normally look for an opportunity to share the gold (so that the capital can grow faster when needed) but there doesn’t seem to be a good way to do that here unfortunately
- as a small note - bananas also require calendar, making that city a more distant prospect
- send your next warrior E/SE to see if there’s anything better there. Hopefully there is as there’s nothing outstanding yet on what you’ve uncovered
- if nothing else, I would say second city is the Ivory one - can just work both ivory’s at size 2 and pump out workers

Regarding scouting deaths
- these things happen sometimes (end move directly next to bear). But you can mitigate to a degree by moving over covered terrain where possible and on hills for better visibility, and by healing between attacks.

 

Indirectly yes. You have a smaller bonus here, and on the higher difficulty levels. Animals are therefore more dangerous, and not the gimme fight (even free wins) on the lower levels.

Unfortunate the warrior died before he could check out the east. That area looks most tempting to me. There is at least one floodplain, and maybe some seafood nearby if the coast is close. Plus those gorgeous rivers. Ivory is nice and all, but there isn't any food, so I wouldn't settle there early. You could potentially settle on the western ivory and use the oasis for food. It's not much, but at least something. Banana is a Calendar resource, so also not something you want to settle so early. You need the 2nd and 3rd cities to be productive right off the bat, so it helps you get into a strong position. Therefore I hope there is some proper food to your east.

 

Trying to wrap my head around this: how does gold effects city growth? my understanding is that food fuels growth.

 

Plains gold hill produces 1 /turn; the citizen working it eats 2 /turn for a net of a loss of 1 /turn, slowing down growth. The bunches of commerce generated make it a power tile, especially early in the game, so you'd ideally want it worked every turn. When you want to grow the capitol quickly, you'd prefer not to work a -1 /turn tile, so it would be useful to be able to pass the power tile but slow-growth tile to another city every once in a while.

 

It's debate night, I'll keep it short...

Turn 35/500 | 2600BC

1. Completed mine (gold), completed pasture (pig).
2. City working on both gold and pig tiles.
3. Two workers chopping out settler for second city.
4. Warrior revealed terrain on east side of capital. Flood plains galore, with another gold tile to boot (money money money!!!)! If I were to settle here (on gold tile), it will be a tad too far from capital incurring higher maintenance cost. Tough! I'd most likely want to grab the floodplains land though, at some point.
   
5. Northeast side, nothing much save for a clam tile on the coast.
6. Going back to the elephant tiles west of capital, this looks more attractive now that a horse tile is revealed to be also in close vicinity.
7. research path - after pottery > archery and horseback riding? with a view of building up HA horde soon

keen to hear your expert opinion...

Spoiler east side of capital :

 

That's fine, not too far for the quality of land. Probably long term want to move capital their. I would suggest scouting a little bit E of floodplain's to see the best place to plop down the city.

When you settle it farm 1 FP and cottage other 4.

Another possibility is farming 3-4 FP's, working gold, plus running that town as a GP farm with 1-2 remaining cottages as well.

 

Umm nopes..London is perfectly fine and strong.

City thoughts:

Spoiler :

Think i'd settlle 3 east first, close and river connected. Floodplains farm and can focus on growing some green London cottages early. Nice amount of close forests (1 chop should go into granary + whip).

There will be so much already that a city should be next. 1ne of sheep has 4 forests + 5 tile, so even if scouting reveals nothing new it's good.
Jumbo spot also has 4 forests (1 will be in London culture), and gives additional happy.
Clams city has very good potential but could wait until those are settled.

HAs are always an option on Monarch, but this one is also an excellent builder map.

 

Wow, there are quite a number of shadow games playing concurrently on S&T. CIV4 is gaining contemporary traction for sure!

Thank you @odin1981, @Fippy. appreciate your suggestions!

The floodplains-rich land east of London is enticing as a capital. Can you explain your thinking? Interested to know your thought process.

you are referring to the elephant tiles? what do you mean by "okay for settlers/workers"?

What is "builder map"? I'm open to exploring different paths to victory, just so I could learn. Do you mean going all the way to late game? I'm all for it. What's the tech strategy?

p/s thank you @Fippy for annotating on the map, very helpful.

 

Cottages can be grown sooner for London, and honestly so far there's nothing better at floodplains spot than what London already has.

Yup Jumbos = Ivory. Okay for settlers/workers means there are some decent base and forests, but not much . So holding growth (and building them) matters little.

Builder map = you already have excellent land and a very strong economic leader.
So you could wait for better units while developing

 

Your capital will almost always be your most developed. To consider any other city for a bureau capital it has to be significantly better which the flood plain spot is not. Also Palaces are expensive.

 

No point moving the capital with such a strong start as that. You could roll a 100 maps and not find something better. Better to get out 2 settlers or 3-ish workers (for roughly the same as a 'wasted' Palace).

Also, large floodplains areas like that tend to be very low on hills/hammers, so building a palace there could take half an eternity without lots of OF-whips into the palace. So far we don't know if there is food either. Need more scouting first ofc, but I reckon a better move is to split up those FPs among several cities. You don't want 12 FPs or something in one city, because the health will be a nightmare in the early game (and late too tbh).

 

You could probably use another warrior or two for fog-busting. I know it's monarch, but you've got a lot of fogged land around you for barbs to spawn, and it's going to be dangerous to send out a settler without an escort.

as fippy said, the helper city 3 east is a good one there, and doesn't need a warrior.

(Fogbusting is where you park a unit outside of your cultural borders preferably in on a hill or other defensive spot. Barbarians won't spawn within a radius of that unit, so a few units outside of your borders can drastically reduce the amount of barbarian trouble. On Monarch, you'll start to notice it though it's not too critical yet).

 

Made me curious enough to check. Depends on map script of course, but I went ahead and ran up 5 Standard Pangaea maps and pulled together a really quick script to count up bonuses from the WBSave.

• 2560 tiles (always)
• 1301-1608 ocean tiles (1497 average), so about 1060 non-ocean tiles.
• ~160 bonus tiles per map. A small number of them are fish or whales on ocean tiles, so a little under 15% of non-ocean tiles have bonuses.
• ~24 of those bonuses are very late-game (coal, oil, aluminum) and really not worth worrying about. ~2%
• Another ~33 of them are Monarchy or later, nice to have but not a major factor for your first city or two. ~3%

So around 10% of tiles will have a bonus you can actually use before Monarchy; catch 4 mystery (non-Ocean) tiles with an initial settler move, and there's about a... 34% chance of finding an extra early resource. Which makes your offhand ~33% either scarily accurate experience speaking or you've seen someone doing this sort of analysis in the past.

 

I have too much experience with this game
(getting proven wrong still sometimes, which speaks for it's great depth)

 

I didn't mean a early switch to capital moving my apologies. But from the land I saw on it, potentially long term you could move it to there later if it was more preferable. Because I've played for year's I tend to have a much longer term view than just the initial "what's it look like".

Though the problem with the FP spot (I would settle the city one S of mountain is production or lack thereof in it. You only have two chops after border pop with it. So it could be problematic. It would probably be best served as a commerce city or GP farm.

 

Anyway, that FPs area is a bit far away for the earliest cities, it's more of a 5th city kinda spot. Scout it out, and maybe park a warrior for fogbusting purposes if there is a nicely located wooded hill. For early cities, I'm more intrigued about the sheep location (actual food), and the clam. But I agree the second city is best placed 3E on the hill there. Farm the FP, and it can help grow cottages for the capital, and borrow wine if needed too (once improved, they are food-neutral).

 

Turn 54/500 | 1840BC

1. More of the surrounding area revealed. Starting to feel some pressure here as things don't look too good territory wise, getting boxed in from three sides (north, west and east)
   
2. Dutch empire encroaching from the west, threatening the ivory tiles.
   
3. The floodplains on the east side claimed by Carthaginian empire.
   
4. The sheep tile to the southwest also just beside the cultural border of Holy Roman empire.
   
5. Copper tile revealed just northwest of clam.
   
6. In view of this development, should I rush the settler (popping out from London on next turn) to claim the copper tile south and get some axemen going?

Spoiler Feeling the squeeze :

 

Quick thoughts: Get that clam spot while you have time, then maybe grab the bronze spot.