Sirp's Training Day Game for Aspiring Monarchs

[T-hawk]

Just tossing in some comments..

I move our scout around that body of water, trying to confirm it is indeed fresh water (and wondering why he can't just taste it to see!)

You can, of course, right-click on a water tile; if it shows 2 food it's fresh water.

(Can someone please help me out here? Is it ok to attach files to posts? I knew at one time it wasn't, but I heard rumors that it's ok again. Is it ok or do you have to upload it to the server?)

You can if you really need to or if the file server isn't working, although the practice is discouraged.

Question: If I change tech mid-stream, do my beakers start over from scratch? I am under this impression, although I have nothing to back it up. This is the reason why I left IW.

Yes, all your beaker accumulation is lost if you change research goals.

a conscript army, or nothing at all! I'm not sure if you can get a free city.

You can't get an army from a hut anymore; that was fixed in one of the patches. As for a free city, only Expansionist civs can get that, and only in PTW. Yes, it does give the "advanced tribe" message. (Note that a settler is actually better than an instant city, since then you get to choose the location to found, but an expansionist civ has an additive chance for both.)

You either (1) check every city every turn. (2) accept that some cities will riot sometimes, especially less important ones.

You might want to get the graphics mod that adds to the citizens in the city screen small mood icons indicating happy, content, or unhappy. With that, it takes about one second per city in the F1 window to find any that will riot. I do that every turn until sometime in the industrial age, then I do go with Sirp's #2 there.

I can't seem to find it in the graphics forum, so I uploaded it to the file server here. Put it in the Civilization III\Art\SmallHeads directory, and it will work for both Civ3 and PTW.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/civ3moodbadge15x15simplesmiley.zip

BTW, Sirp - did you still want to try a different sound.dll for patching? If so, drop me a PM here with your email address.

 

[Sirp]

You can, of course, right-click on a water tile; if it shows 2 food it's fresh water.

Yes you can. Why didn't I think of that before? I guess one of the good things about running this TDG, is that inevitably some lurkers who know more than I will come along and point out things I can learn.

Thanks T-Hawk.

-Sirp.

 

[Wetterlind]

And then some fun...

-Still alive-

Well, I haven’t head a single sound from the Internet shop... no PtW yet. I suggest that I’ll skip this round and hopefully I can play the next time it’s my turn. If I haven’t received my copy by then my spot in the roster is open if any one else (i e a lurker) wants it.

Anyway, here is my dotmap. I used the best available screenshot.

Comments (not much, I’m on a tight deadline this week):

Red dot:
Placing a city here is important because we’ll need to claim that space before “they” get it. This place needs an early temple, thus Sparta can delay the building of a temple of its own and still get that second cow.

Pink dot:
Can possibly be placed N (the tiny pink dot).

Light grey:
Possibly useful dots, only the future can tell.

Overall:
All dots are placed on fresh-water sites, which is good. There isn’t much overlap (black circles) in the dotmap, and some overlap isn’t a big deal (at least not until some 20-80 turns after Medicine and Railroad).

There is much fertile land in S-SE.

Any comment is welcome...


Must get goin' again, RL sucks sometimes… Hopefully, next week will be more gentle on me.

 

[Stormrider]

W1 moves onto cow and determines that body of water to the north is fresh water (2 food).

Sirp - I did point out that the water was a freshwater lake. I indicated two food which I determined via right-click.

Stormrider

 

[Matt_G]

Here’s my dotmap. I loaded Sirp's save game to get the most recent info, and so I could check whether a tile had access to rivers etc.

This map is assuming the existing settler/hoplite found 1 tile north of where they stand now.

Yellow dot: High priority. Will help cut the Romans off and has access to the wheat and river. Will probably piss Caesar off, so we may want to have 2 hoplites there. Might also want to build a barracks ASAP.

Red dot: Another high priority. Grab those spices before Hammi does!! This will be a strong city once all the jungle is cleared. I would send 2 workers along with the settler and hoplite if possible. Will be a flip risk. May want to whip a temple when feasible. Also a possible source of future resources. (Coal and rubber)

Dark red dot: Third priority. Will seal our border with Monty.. I thought long and hard about this one. I hate wasting all those tiles NE (SW of Athens but the lake just doesn’t allow better placement. With a fish and plains cattle, this should be a strong starter.

Blue dot: Finishes the job of sealing in Caesar. Same caveats as Yellow dot.

Dark blue and Brown dot: Finishes our core. Brown dot makes use best use of the available land there, is on a river and the coast. Will be a good source of gold due to all the coast. Especially with a commercial dock later in the game. Dark blue, same reasons except won’t be quite as strong commercially.

Of the remaining 4 (Green dot, Powder blue, purple and orange) they all are on rivers with the exception of orange. Equally important in my eyes. Future events will dictate which needs to be founded first. I placed them where they are to make best use of the land with minimum overlap.

I also would think about placing a city 1 tile SW of where our northern warrior is now standing. It grabs a bunch of jungle for future resource possibilitys. Once we get that fog busted, some of these plans will probably change though!

Edit: I know this is a TDG, but I must say that Monty's capitol is an attractive target, don't you think?
Matt

 

[Renata]

Let's just see if this works, then comments will be in the next post. My dotmap:

 

[Renata]

Cool, it worked. Here goes:

This is hard, because I keep changing my mind.

The easy part: Blue dot is where the settler is headed, according to Sirp. Fine with me.

The hard part: I'd like to put the next settler SW of Athens, on the yellow dot, to get the last fertile land in the first ring. But the land further south, at pink dot, is better. My current inclination is to go there first, but I keep changing my mind. I'm also tempted to put pink dot one tile closer to Thermopylae to get the cow before expansion, but that loses the fish. Decisions decisions. At any rate, red dot is next, as the lack of lux will start to hurt eventually. We'll just have to hope we can get it before Hammy does. AI doesn't seem to prioritize jungle sites very highly if there's fertile land around, so we should have a shot. I'd love to get green dot - gets Sparta its second cow without a temple (in Sparta) and gets a plains wheat of its own - but it's probably a pipe dream. Rome has gotta want that spot, and I'd prefer to get the first ring (the fertile parts of it, anyway) settled first.

The lavender and light blue dots to the south are both good river sites (and the lavender site is nicely defensible from the Aztecs if we occupy the western mountain), and I'd probably go there next.

Last but not least: the remaining yellow dot near Tenochtitlan has some lovely bonus tiles (and would give us a western port), but we'll never get it unless we go after the Aztecs militarily. The yellow dots in the north can be filled in when we have settlers to spare, and may be moved slightly depending on where exactly the coastlines are up there and whether there are any fish or whales. It'll take tons of workers to clear all that jungle, so despite their proximity to Athens they can't be all that high priority.

I think that's enough to start with.

Renata

PS. @ Sirp. Why is the Roman worker building a mine on a normal grass when there's an unmined BG one tile away? (Sorry, I couldn't resist; I'm sure you'll have plenty of comments for me in about 30 hours. )

 

[GenMarshall]

Is there room for One more . I am trying to learn as much as possible so that I can be an Expert Civ3 player.

 

[Sirp]

ok, a couple of quick things first, then my dotmap:

Wetterlind: Sorry to hear you haven't gotten PTW yet. Let us know as soon as you get it. I accepted you on you saying you expected it this week, so I'll give you until the next time you come up, or until the end of the week, whichever is longer, before I replace you in the roster. (I'm probably optimistic about turn pace to think we'd do a whole round in a week though).

In other news, Shaesha tells me she has obtained PTW, so she's good to go after Renata.

CivGeneral: I'm sorry, but this game is already filled to overflowing. Six is what we've got at the moment, and it's the absolute maximum for a succession game. I think that Jason the King and Sultan Barghash would have both liked to play, but they couldn't because the roster filled up too fast. I may do another TDG after this, look out for it.

Renata: Good spot with the worker. However, there is a reason why he's mining the unenriched grassland. The turn I bought him, the road onto the enriched grassland was still being built. This left me with a choice: move the worker onto the enriched grassland, and start building the mine next turn, or get to start the mine this turn. I figured that since Athens was doing 4/6 population with its settler building, it'd be using the unenriched grassland over half the time, and so it would have benefit fairly close to that of having the mine on the enriched grassland. Since we're worker-short at the moment, saving a worker's turn seemed like an appealing option.

Now that I think about it, it probably wasn't worthwhile doing with a slave worker; possibly with a native worker, since then it'd have been a 1/6 mine saving instead of a 1/12 mine saving, but still it was a chosen tradeoff rather than a mistake.

It does raise something that's interesting to consider though, for players who haven't considered it before. Suppose you have two workers, and you want to mine and road two tiles. What is the most efficient way to do it? Lots of people will move both workers onto one tile, and improve it, then move to the other one, and improve it. This is less efficient, because it wastes four worker-turns in movement altogether. It should still be used though, if the first tile is much higher priority than the second.

The tactic I usually use in such cases is to move each worker onto a different tile, have them each build a road on their tile, then have one of the workers move onto the tile of the other, and both mine that tile, before both mining the first tile. This wastes the minimum 2 worker-turns to movement, and gets the higher-priority tile mined fairly quickly.

Likewise, lots of people use large worker teams, while these are good in some ways, you should know what it's costing you: a 12-worker-team can chop a jungle tile in just 2 turns, but it also costs them a turn to move onto the tile, meaning they have to spend 36 worker-turns in all to chop the jungle. A single worker takes just 25 worker-turns. Of course, you probably don't want to wait 24 turns for your jungle to be chopped, so it's best to use moderately sized teams, that aren't too inefficient, but don't take forever to get the job done either.

Whew, that's quite alot in this post, I'll put my dotmap in the next one.

 

[Sirp]

This dotmap was done using the 2350BC screenshot, without further world information. I've marked overlaps with white dashes, and wasted tiles with red dashes.

The first thing that struck me was that it was a difficult dotmap to do, because of the limited knowledge we had - largely due to the loss of our early scout. At the time, we only knew of the Romans, now there are two more civilizations we've contacted.

One dot I really wanted was the pink dot. That's one of our highest priority city sites in my mind. It's on fresh water, and once improved, should be a great city. The red dot is on fresh water, and snuggles in nicely with the borders of Athens and Sparta.

However, this left me with a dilemma: with the pink and red dots, there'd be a substantial amount of lost land near the capital between them. I figured that a city site on the lake with some overlap with the pink city would be fine, hence the green dot.

I am perfectly happy to have lots of overlap if it means having fresh water. Fresh water really is that important.

The blue dot is snuggled up against the coast, and will likely be one of our two important port-cities, along with Sparta. The grey and purple dots are good-looking locations, but ones that we really had to explore a bit more before deciding upon their suitability.

Oh umm...ack yeah, I did this dotmap directly from the screenshot, and forgot that the warrior has a cow under him. The grey dot would probably go one space north-west.

The yellow dot is fairly aggressive towards the Romans, and would be of high priority since they would no-doubt like to get it first. It'd allow Sparta to gain immediate use of the cattle, while it gained use of the wheat. It also doesn't have any current cultural overlap with any Roman cities, meaning they wouldn't be so angry with us.

I drew a question mark up near the spices, because although spices obviously would be nice to have, we didn't have enough intelligence on the region to make a judgement.

Note the importance of fresh water in my placements. Every one of my dots has fresh water access.

My priorities would be:

1 - red
2 - pink
3 - yellow
4 - green
5 - blue
6 - purple, grey.

Going for the yellow quickly before the Romans get there is an appealing option, but not a solid one. We would be trying to grab land in their core before we had built our own. Going for the spices too early I would have similiar reservations about. It'd be nice to have that extra luxury, but our core is in more urgent need of attention.

-Sirp.

 

[Sirp]

I'm impressed by the overall qualities of the dotmaps. We all seemed to think that the tiles south-west of Athens being wasted were a concern.

Renata, I think you need to go with your instincts on putting a city on this side of the lake. We can always try to get one on the far side later if it's still available. Tiles near the capital are important.

We all seemed to like a push down towards Rome, but Renata and Wetterlind put the site one south-west of where Matt_g and I did. I put mine where I did because it gets the wheat immediately, and is in the arm of the river which gives better defense should Rome decide to get nasty. What was your reasoning guys? (Not saying it was wrong, just wondering)

Matt_g: Your orange dot in the south isn't on fresh water, but it would be if you moved it one tile in almost any direction. Umm...that's not what I'd call well-placed Other than that your map is pretty good, if very optimistic. (We're going to have to expand nice and fast to get all those cities down near Rome).

Renata, my only other real reservation about your map is placement north-east of Athens - you don't have a definite city site, although you have two shadow-dots. In my mind, the choice of a city there is obvious, either where I put it or where Matt_g put it. (My location clears jungle and has less overlap with Athens. Matt_g's is on the same side of the river as Athens, and has less potential overlap with future cities).

That kind of city is also fairly safe to settle. Just send a spare settle up there without the need for an escort, and a couple of turns later we'll have a core city.

Anyway, overall very good quality dotmaps.

Don't feel constrained by the dotmaps though guys, if you think a city spot is better for whatever reason why you're playing, go for it.

-Sirp.

 

[Renata]

Regarding the spot down near Rome, I moved it one tile further in mostly to avoid cultural conflict. (It also avoids the wasted tile.) I figured it would need early culture anyway to defend against flips and would get the wheat then. Your point about being in the bend of the river is well-taken, though.

The next settler out of Athens (not Rome! ) has no escort available; I thought I'd send him northeast and take a look-see for any ocean resources before deciding exactly where to settle, hence the hand-waving up there with the yellow dots.

This is an official 'got it', by the way. Will play tonight.

Renata, has jury duty today, her first time, whoopee

 

[Sirp]

When you said "settler out of Rome..no escort" I thought you meant a Roman settler that you saw that you were thinking of killing or something!

The dot as I placed it is a nice distance from Rome: 4 tiles. So there is no overlap; no cultural conflict. Once we build a temple there and expand, it is guaranteed that they will get two tiles, and we will get two. What's more, there is no room for them to build a settlement between Rome and our city.

You've reminded me to write something on aggressive settlements. Dots near Rome do not have overlap with any Roman cities. This means that although the Romans might consider attacking us for lack of land, they will not consider our settlements 'aggressively placed'.

If you settle cities that do overlap with another civilization's settlements, it will make that civilization substantially more likely to attack you. The nearer the settlement, the more likely. If you settle three tiles away, it's only moderately bad. Two tiles away, and they don't take kindly to it. If you settle one tile away, you can almost count on war at some point.

In fact, if you notice the AI surprise-attacking you alot, you can almost be certain it's because you've been settling aggressively.

EDIT: Oh, and have fun with the jury duty, I got sent a letter recently saying I might be up for some of that soon. It'll be.....an experience, I'm sure

-Sirp.

 

[Renata]

I meant Athens of course. Will edit.

Serves me right for going online before coffee.

Renata

 

[Wetterlind]

@Sirps dotmap: I totally agree with you on the blue and yellow dots.

The yellow dot is fairly aggressive towards the Romans, and would be of high priority since they would no-doubt like to get it first. It'd allow Sparta to gain immediate use of the cattle, while it gained use of the wheat. It also doesn't have any current cultural overlap with any Roman cities, meaning they wouldn't be so angry with us.

And another thing: hopefully we can deny the Romans the luxury that will be inslide our borders once the city expands. Then we can trade it to them (unless we decide to boot them of the planet). Unless they do an agressive settlement...

 

[Matt_G]

Originally posted by Sirp
Matt_g: Your orange dot in the south isn't on fresh water, but it would be if you moved it one tile in almost any direction. Umm...that's not what I'd call well-placed Other than that your map is pretty good, if very optimistic. (We're going to have to expand nice and fast to get all those cities down near Rome).
-Sirp.

I put orange dot there to minimize overlap. After considering your comments, I can see I need to attach more importance to fresh water. However I also have an aversion to overlap, which I'm sure hurts my play at times. Most of my other cities are on fresh water and I figured needing an aquaduct down there was an acceptable trade off to get less overlap.
On that same subject, I considered putting a city on the same tile as your green dot, but had a major problem with the overlap.

Yeah, my map is really optimistic!
I know we won't get all those, but threw them out so you could see what my 'big picture' would look like if I had no competition for the land.

Edit: One more thing. The driving factor in my placement of my brown dot city was the fact I wanted that grassland that Sirps placement doesn't get. I don't know which is better.

Matt

 

[Sirp]

Matt_g: Oh yes, your brown dot does get one extra unenriched grassland that mine doesn't. I think either city placement is ok; the main thing that's important is for the player to understand and consider the tradeoffs.

Moving your orange dot one space east wouldn't make alot of difference wrt overlap. Aqueducts take ages to build, especially for a city that would be as corrupt as that one. Being able to avoid them is a huge advantage.

Renata: I forgot to mention before, do note that Sparta is soon to produce a hoplite. It would not be very risky to strip Sparta of its defenses to defend the new settler, and then have Sparta's defenses replaced when its hoplite arrives. Sparta is hooked up to Athens by road, and could have defenses arrive fast if it were threatened during the brief window that it was undefended.

Generally, early on, leaving a settler undefended is *more* risky than leaving a city undefended, because barbarians do worse things to settlers than they do to cities.

-Sirp.

 

[Renata]

Ah, good point about taking Sparta's warrior, that didn't occur to me. And Rome put a city in a really cruddy position that would make any city in their direction near the wheat quite agressive. There's still room there, but we should be prepared to have a pissed-off Caesar on our hands if we do go that way. In any case, the state of the empire in 1625 BC - turnlog to follow:

Renata

 

[Renata]

Forgive me for my wordiness; I cut it down some, but I suffer from diarrhea of the keyboard.

Ok, here we go. Preturn, all looks good. I hit enter.

IT: The Romans settler near *our* wheat. Pissers. Oh well, I did expect that. What a cruddy city location, though.

(1) 1910 BC: Settler/hoplite pair to city location. No movement possible on science slider. Our extreme NW warrior walks into a barb ...

IT: ... and gets killed.

(2) 1870 BC: Iron-working learned. Athens produces settler. Lux back to 10% and science up a notch. On what, I don't know yet, will see what we can trade for first. Athens' settler, lacking escort, heads northeast to see what he can see. Corinth founded, set to warrior on high shields, as we need more map info. We have iron between Corinth and Athens, on one of the mountain tiles. There are three more in view, all to the south. Trades: oh this is not good. Rome and Aztecs have definitely met; they both have wheel plus mysticism now, and the Aztecs have aquired iron-working. Just a turn too slow! Babs have masonry plus mysticism. Actually I think all three may have contact; all three want the same amount, 65 g, for mysticism. Our only brokering oportunity is to buy masonry off the babs with ironworking (horribly inequitable, but they have no cash) and see what, if anything, the Aztecs or Romans would offer for it. Since our chance at selling IW for any price won't last any longer than the Babs scraping together some cash or another tech, I decide to make the deal. Next, masonry to the Aztecs for the Wheel and 41 g. (This brokerage opportunity wasn't going to last long - Caeser was only willing to offer 20g for masonry!) Finally masonry and 54g to Caeser for mysticism. Net: mysticism/ masonry/ the wheel for iron-working plus 13g. Could be worse. Research set on max to mathematics, currently due in 18. Oh, we have horses, too, just SW of Athens near the next city location.

(3) 1830 BC: We attack a barb and win in the south, no damage.

(4) 1790 BC: Athens grows, Sparta produces hoplite.

(5) 1750 BC: Lux to 20%, math now in 12. Still at -1 gpt. Barb warrior shows up outside Corinth - c'mon take on our hoplite, I dare ya! There's more land to the north - still unclear if it's connected to us or not. Looks like it, though. Delphi founded, will be gorgeous city with fish plus whale once it expands, but will be set to warrior first for defense. With the extra land up there I don't trust we won't get barb visitors. Check in with the neighbors: no new techs have shown up. Monty's broke; Rome has 100 g. Babylon's 2 techs behind us now, lacking pottery and the wheel and without the cash (they have 25 gold, must've gotten a barb camp) to pay for either. One more thing -- Aztecs have settled a city in a nice patch of furs down there --- tempting targets indeed. But first things first.

(6) 1725 BC: Mostly zzz, but we find a barb camp SW of Corinth. Athens will build settler next turn, still at size five, so will need warrior or two to catch up.

(7) 1700 BC: Athens settler-warrior. Lux slider to 0%, math in 9 temporarily. Corinth warrior-worker. Warrior kills the barb that was lurking around. Ur's borders have expanded by the way; good thing I found another spice to the west of the lake. Will still be hard to get to before the Aztecs. Barb camp attacked; we win with 1hp left, no promotion. Diplo check: status quo except babs have learned the wheel. Could sell babs pottery for all their gold (25), but decide not to. Oh good, one more spice only a tile away from Corinth's expanded borders. So we have our 'will be hurting if we have less' two luxes within reach.

(8) 1675 BC: Lux back to 10%, math still in 9.

(9) 1650 BC: Athens warrior-warrior. New warrior heads south. Could stay as MP, but Sparta will grow next turn anyway, so minimal benefit, and there are barbs to chase. Two barbs heading in direction Sparta/Thermopylae, two more in vicinity of Corinth.

IT: Barb attacks our warrior on mountain W of Corinth. We win w/o damage, no promotion. Another barb comes into view over there.

(10) 1625 BC: Sparta hoplite (heads for Athens)-worker. Delphi warrior (stays as MP/barb defense) - worker. Pharsalos founded on lake. Athens to build warrior next turn, but can be switched to settler if next player wants it two turns faster. If not, I intended it to stay around as MP. The warrior in Sparta still has 1/3 movement left if next player wants to move him southwest after the barbs instead of keeping him as MP. They're still at least 3-4 turns away - current worker jobs are not in danger. 7 turns left on math at the moment. Diplo check: status quo. Oh one more thing. We now have six cities to Babylon and Aztecs 4 each and Rome's 3. So nice set=ups, everybody.

Here's the save: 1625 BC

Good luck, Shaesha!

Renata

 

[Matt_G]

Originally posted by Sirp
Moving your orange dot one space east wouldn't make alot of difference wrt overlap. Aqueducts take ages to build, especially for a city that would be as corrupt as that one. Being able to avoid them is a huge advantage.
-Sirp.

I didn't even consider the corrpution factor.
I am used to playing on large or huge maps. Corruption wouldn't be a big problem at that distance. I had 'forgotten' this was a standard map. My next solo game will probably be a small map, just to get out of the rut I've put myself in.