[SPOILERS] Bismarck of Mali (NobleHelium and Lewwyn)

[NobleHelium]

The current plan is to chop three forests for Henge. We could potentially only use two forests; that will probably delay it by two turns, which may or may not be risky. Good call on using Chopper to finish the gold mine, I forgot about the free road from the city.

[NobleHelium]

Researching Pottery is good for getting granaries. Right now in the sim what I'm doing is building a work boat and a granary in Helium and then onto Oracle. The order of construction depends on whether we get Pottery or Polytheism next. If we get Pottery next I put a few turns into the work boat and then swap to the granary and whip it as soon as Helium grows to 2. Overflow into the work boat and then onto Oracle, works out exactly. Not getting the granary may end up delaying Oracle because with only two chops we are doing a lot of real production and the fast growth really helps to get access to a second mine sooner.

Anyway 2 gold maintenance is lower than I expected. That means either the world is not toroidal, or the map canvas is different than Donut Small. It's obviously Small since it says that in the settings, but I'm not sure if different mapscripts will generate different map canvas dimensions for the same map size. Can any lurkers answer this?

The other person with a second city is Kuro, who also went 2x worker -> settler like us. The spreadsheet says he completed the settler last turn, which if correct means he founded really close to his capital and built three roads (including the new city's tile) in order to found without a turn of movement. Or maybe the spreadsheet is just off. Either way, it's definitely him since nobody else got more points.

[NobleHelium]

Anyway, we may be able to save a forest on Henge for Oracle since we can work the Gold a turn sooner and gain an extra two net hammers. I'll see if I can find some time to sim it out tonight, but it may have to wait until tomorrow.

[NobleHelium]

Hmm, rival best soldier points is 19k. Kuro was at 16k, second city gets him to 17k. He got 12 points, which means he also finished researching a tech at the same time, which must be Hunting. So we'll beat him to Polytheism if we research that next, but I still think Ellimist will easily beat us to that. We could still research it instead of Meditation so that we can get Judaism later, what do you think? Should we still research Polytheism (rather than Meditation) even if we know we can't get Hinduism?

Also according to the spreadsheet he would have finished Hunting a turn earlier, so he must have revolted to Slavery and delayed it by a turn. Presumably after the settler finished. I bet he did a third chop into the settler to complete it 1-2 turns earlier.

[NobleHelium]

All right well, did some pretty thorough simming. The earliest I can reasonably finish Oracle is EOT 52. This is using a two-chop build for Stonehenge, which delays it to EOT 39. And this hurts growth quite a lot, because Helium has neither a work boat nor a granary in this scenario, and has been working two mines at size 2 for several turns. And it loses a lot of commerce from not being able to work the other tiles in Helium's radius. In the normal build I can go up to size 5 at turn 57 before whipping. I don't think this faster Oracle build is a good idea.

As an aside I looked at the maintenance in the live game and it is lower than in the sandbox even with a rectangular wrap (slightly). So the map canvas must be a different size.

[NobleHelium]

So yeah. I just created a Donut Small flat map and the maintenance is exactly the same as in the live game. If any lurkers could tell me whether different mapscripts can create Small maps of different size, that would be very helpful.

[NobleHelium]

Stop the presses!

I have determined that we are quite likely at the edge of the map. Observe a screenshot from the live game:



Now compare it to two grid vertices from a sandbox game:



One is at the edge of the map, and the other is not. Which one does the picture from the live game look like?

I'm still interested in an answer to my question to lurkers, though, if anyone knows. Obviously the map does not have a north-south wrap, but an east-west wrap is still possible.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 30. Let's take a gander at cities:



Fortunately for our intelligence-gathering efforts, Kuro is CRE and thus his second city has more culture than ours, so we can see it on this screen. Although that'll probably be irrelevant soon since Stonehenge is going to outculture him by a lot. That is part of why we are building it in Helium and not Hydrogen, so that we get the border pop in two turns. Anyway as you can see, Kuro grew to 2 in his capital this turn. I am behind on the C&D since I still need to figure out his numbers from last turn, which is going to be pretty difficult due to the addition of the second city.



The maintenance being low is good news for us, since the other two haven't built a second city yet. Unless Ellimist goes and plops down two cities in quick succession while we are busy chasing wonders of course. Also I forgot that he is SPI, so no need to figure out when he revolted to Slavery, haha.

Okay, let's see. Kuro's GNP is either 22 or 23 last turn. CY is 13. MFG is 3. Previously he had 19 GNP and 8 CY. So +5 food and +3-4 GNP. He gets 2 GNP from CRE and 1 from the city. He gets 2 food from the city. So he must be working a 3 food tile that may or may not be on a river. I'm going to say that's the equivalent to our Rice tile, which may or may not be Rice of course. He most likely settled near the Ivory since he researched Hunting. If his island is the same as ours, it's interesting that he chose to settle next to the rice and not in the nonforested tile like we chose to do. Or maybe he doesn't have a forest there.

The big question is, the GNP gain seems a bit low. If he founded next to the rice it is most likely on the river which means he would already have a trade route. So maybe he founded SW of the rice even though that doesn't get the Ivory. It's a little odd either way but that seems more likely. Or maybe his Ivory is in a different location.

Now since we know Kuro grew this turn, we can work backwards and calculate when his settler finished. He has a 6 food surplus with the Corn so that is a 4 turn growth. So he had his third chop come in the turn after I noticed the life expectancy drop (which signaled the second chop). Two turns of movement for the settler is also consistent with founding on the (possible hill) SE of the rice, assuming he built two roads like we did. He could have built a road while waiting for BW to come in (if the road wasn't on a forest or hill tile) and then built a second road with his new worker before chopping (or afterwards).

And I'm far too tired to figure out this turn's demographics, so I'll do that tomorrow.

Oh and I put up more signs. Just to remind that we finish the mine with both workers, and then chop each forest with one worker each.

[Lewwyn]

Oh and I put up more signs. Just to remind that we finish the mine with both workers, and then chop each forest with one worker each.

Aye, aye!

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 31. The gold mine finished, so we are now tops in GNP and research. It's like having a second palace!



Now naturally we are still low in CY which is generally the most important resource early in the game, but we'll get going on that soon. I forgot to mention that finishing the gold mine with both workers actually speeds the Stonehenge completion date by one turn, because we were limited by the third chop which has now been sped up since the mining worker got a turn donated to him by the other worker. Plus we get another turn of working the gold of course. So we are due Stonehenge in 4 turns, at EOT 35. I have renamed the workers to North and East to signify where they need to go to chop. I also turned off the governor in Helium, we'll need to remember to turn him back on when we farm and switch to the Rice. Leaving him on means he switches to the Rice before it's farmed, and we don't want that.

Kuro whipped his capital back to 1 (must be for a work boat), and Ellimist planted his second city (determined by population average extrapolating his population value). I'm not sure about the other demos...I'm going to go figure out yesterday's before I do today's. In a bit.

Oh and hopefully Ellimist finishes his research in the next two turns, so we can see whether he researched Polytheism before we decide what to do with the Fishing overflow.