Oh boy oh boy, I hope they won't disband the game because of this =(
Anyway, I could get a settler out a turn 35. What I did was, 1W and start with Fishing tech, building a warrior. The warrior takes 2 turns less than the fishing tech, so 2 turns go into worker. After fishing tech -> mining-> BW and start building a workboat. After the workboat continue with the worker, then settler, mine the grassland hill, and chop the forest south of that afterwards (one turn after BW). The warrior can be used to keep the settler safe. (capital is size 2)
I could shave of 5 turns by doing a worker-warrior-settler-start and tech straight to BW, mine both the grassland hill and the pigs, chop the forest W of the pigs and road it.
But this might be fast in getting a settler out, it might slow us down later, since the capital is still size 1 by that time and there is not much use for the worker afterwards. (lots of wasted worker turns!)
Wet corn would be great of course :P
Since everybody stars with a scout, do you think some people might build a warrior just to troll a nearby neighbour? Maybe some elite player that thinks to have some easy pickings on the noobsies? ;-)
No. No elite player is going to go warrior first unless he/she is in a very particular situation (a non-fishing, non-mining civ with a seafood-only start is the famous example).
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
But to get back to my earlier question, how do you evaluate if a start is good or bad? I my 2 sims, I feel the turn 35 settler has a better 'flow' than the turn 30 settler.
(May 10th, 2013, 18:32)Merovech Wrote: No. No elite player is going to go warrior first unless he/she is in a very particular situation (a non-fishing, non-mining civ with a seafood-only start is the famous example).
That would be quite a peculiar situation indeed, wouldn't it?
Anyway, I don't think we're elite enough for warrior first. Though... being in the ideal situation for it, going for the crazy long bomb with an early warrior might not be that crazy? Great players might detect it through C&D maybe?
I'm going to do some OCD simming too My first thoughts are that a really fast settler isn't in itself that great, unless there are workers and resources to immediately improve and settle for. And the strong capital is going to be extremely important, so settler at size 2 seems too soon for me. It depends on what we scout though! Exactly when to build it is something I'm unsure of too.
To an earlier post, food is surely better than hammers and high level players tend to not like plains hills. But I think the exception is when building a worker without slavery, there a 3 hammer tile is the same as a 4 food tile, if it brings the total hammers over the EXP bonus. So when building a worker, right now the forested PH is our best tile. Unless I'm missing something. But the +1 bonus in the capital is nice, no doubt about it. Certainly I wouldn't settle 1W without scouting the tile NNE anyway.
I'm worried about keeping up in beakers more than anything else, since we're effectively behind other teams from the beginning with bad starting techs. So I think getting both clams online is definitely a priority before a settler. I'll try some starts...
(May 10th, 2013, 10:03)Plunder Wrote: Maybe we can do something with typical noob mistakes/strategies? (noob-tube , heartseeker spam, unimproved grass, no siege)
By the way I love this one! There's probably enough Civ specific mistakes to not go into FPS which I know nothing about anyway. We can start with "Misplaced Capital"
I tried doing some sims. I think turn 35 is a good idea, but I like to kind of take stock of the big picture there, rather than optimize for a fast settler. An extra few turns in a city without improved tiles to work isn't going to be worth much, imo.
1. Your opening, settle 1w, fishing -> mining -> bw. warrior -> wb -> worker -> settler. I got size 2 capital + 6 food in the box. Fishing + Mining + BW + 73 beakers. 100% settler. Only one clam improved.
2. Variant: settle 1w, warrior -> wb -> wb -> worker -> settler. Turn 35 we have size 3 capital + 18 food. 96 beakers. 47/100 settler. Two clams improved. Here we trade off the settler speed for a much more grown capital and two work boats and a few more beakers.
3. Weird variant: settle 1w, worker first to mine the pigs (wasted in the long run but 2F3H tile is decent?) -> wb -> wb -> warrior -> settler. Micro could be tweaked maybe but I got size 3 capital +12 food, 86 beakers, settler 84 / 100 (2 chops into that). Would come out T37 I think. 2 work boats and 2 mines. (I tried a lot of minor variants of this, e.g. use two mines to make 2nd work boat or not, etc., not much difference.)
4. Settle in place, worker partial -> wb -> worker -> wb -> warrior -> settler. When building the work boat, max hammers using the PH forest. Result is size 3+0 capital, 50/100 turns into a settler, 96 beakers. This probably isn't as strong as the 1W opening, but it's not that far off.
5. SIP, worker first to mine the pig -> wb -> wb -> warrior -> settler. Result Size 3+14, 82 beakers, 62 / 100 settler (would have it T39).
With any of these, I'm thinking about a second worker before the settler? The reason being all those forests means lots of chops to do, and it would be nice to have a second worker ready as soon as the second city goes down. Plus we get the EXP bonus on it anyway. It's a slower settlement but the city will probably develop faster.
I also simmed Hunting -> AH first, then fishing, and it doesn't look great, as expected. It does pump out more food than the above starts, because of the pig, but it's so behind on BW, which we desperately need.
The more I look at this start the more it annoys me a bit It's like starting without Exp since the worker is essentially useless for the first 20+ turns anyway. Unless, again there's magic there in that hidden tile NNE of the start...
Things we really need:
- BW for the forests
- Fishing
- Pottery to get cottages early + EXP granary
- AH for the pig so the capital has a good food surplus, and to share with the second city probably.
The trouble is we need all of these, like really really badly
(May 10th, 2013, 18:32)Merovech Wrote: No. No elite player is going to go warrior first unless he/she is in a very particular situation (a non-fishing, non-mining civ with a seafood-only start is the famous example).
That would be quite a peculiar situation indeed, wouldn't it?
Anyway, I don't think we're elite enough for warrior first. Though... being in the ideal situation for it, going for the crazy long bomb with an early warrior might not be that crazy? Great players might detect it through C&D maybe?
I'm going to do some OCD simming too My first thoughts are that a really fast settler isn't in itself that great, unless there are workers and resources to immediately improve and settle for. And the strong capital is going to be extremely important, so settler at size 2 seems too soon for me. It depends on what we scout though! Exactly when to build it is something I'm unsure of too.
To an earlier post, food is surely better than hammers and high level players tend to not like plains hills. But I think the exception is when building a worker without slavery, there a 3 hammer tile is the same as a 4 food tile, if it brings the total hammers over the EXP bonus. So when building a worker, right now the forested PH is our best tile. Unless I'm missing something. But the +1 bonus in the capital is nice, no doubt about it. Certainly I wouldn't settle 1W without scouting the tile NNE anyway.
I'm worried about keeping up in beakers more than anything else, since we're effectively behind other teams from the beginning with bad starting techs. So I think getting both clams online is definitely a priority before a settler. I'll try some starts...
How is the C&D in this game actually? We see everyone by default, or do we have to invest espionage? I can't remember from the tech-thread.
I'm not a fan of early sniping of opponents, I don't think it adds up to a fun/interesting game. But I am sure not everybody shares this view.
What I understand is that in the earlier game the idea is to convert food into hammer through slavery, and after moving into the industrial era the focus shifts to hammers. Also we don't just get +1 hammer in the capital after 1W, there is also the +1 commerce on the grassland hill from bordering a river :P
Maybe the best way to get something out of our starting techs it to connect city #2 asap with roads for the trade routes? And maybe coin an early religion? Only one of our opponents starts with myst (Brick), and since he is industrial I expect him to go for stonehenge. So an early religion might be a safe bet?
(May 10th, 2013, 10:03)Plunder Wrote: Maybe we can do something with typical noob mistakes/strategies? (noob-tube , heartseeker spam, unimproved grass, no siege)
By the way I love this one! There's probably enough Civ specific mistakes to not go into FPS which I know nothing about anyway. We can start with "Misplaced Capital"
I hope nobody else goes with the same naming scheme then, maybe one of the global lurkers can warn us is this is the case. And if not, provide us with lots of suggestions
From my Civ MP group I learned the noob mistake of: "nukes are balanced"
(May 11th, 2013, 06:48)Plunder Wrote: How is the C&D in this game actually? We see everyone by default, or do we have to invest espionage? I can't remember from the tech-thread.
I'm not a fan of early sniping of opponents, I don't think it adds up to a fun/interesting game. But I am sure not everybody shares this view.
What I understand is that in the earlier game the idea is to convert food into hammer through slavery, and after moving into the industrial era the focus shifts to hammers. Also we don't just get +1 hammer in the capital after 1W, there is also the +1 commerce on the grassland hill from bordering a river :P
Maybe the best way to get something out of our starting techs it to connect city #2 asap with roads for the trade routes? And maybe coin an early religion? Only one of our opponents starts with myst (Brick), and since he is industrial I expect him to go for stonehenge. So an early religion might be a safe bet?
What I'm talking about is someone who is keeping tabs on the score and global average power every turn, and might actually be able to say "WilliamLP just built a warrior" on turn 5. I don't know the details of the tricks but some people get some uncannily accurate knowledge out of just reading those few grids of numbers. But yeah, a warrior bomb is cheesy and I'm not a "win at all costs" player in this game either. (Maybe next time, hehe.) The non cheesy benefits are earlier scouting and fog busting , knowing where to settle, knowing where resources and other players are, map awareness, headstart to circumnavigation, etc.
My understanding is the same as yours, workers and settlers in general are best built with the whip early (converts hammers to food-hammers). I'm really only talking about the early early game, the 30-50 turns before slavery and granaries. Speeding up the growth of the whole empire (one city) during those turns speeds the entire rest of the game by that many turns, so there may be micro tricks with a plain hill forest or mine. And later on, having a 4H tile available for micro choices seems like a useful thing, again since it's a 5 food-hammer tile while building a worker. (Even if all workers are whipped, there's going to be a few turns actually putting hammers into them first.)
Agree, the +1C from the hill would add up! There's also lost hammers from settling on the forest 1W. Would you actually consider Moai in the capital? If we also had Colossus somehow that site might be really good, too? Maybe I'm too biased wanting a lot of land tiles in the capital, I don't know.
My thoughts on an early religion are that it's a nice-to-have, but early beakers are at an extreme premium. The pig tile is a 5-1 tile, we really need to get AH soon, that will be a major food contributor to the first two cities. I guess we could get a GP through priest specialists in the Madrassa, if we really wanted. Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like one of the early 3 religions is still going to be available after we take care of BW / Pottery / Agri, maybe even AH.
Anyway, again it's awesome to have your input! So you know my personal style is to say anything and defend ideas really strongly and then change my mind when I eventually realize I'm wrong. So hopefully my tone never comes across as dismissive. We seem to be at similar levels with this game with knowing concepts but not being sure exactly how that translates to specific micro decisions.
