[SPOILERS] Yossarian blames Caledorn

[YossarianLives]

Ok, so we're #6 in the snake pick. That means we won't get one of the super-overpowered picks, but we also shouldn't get stuck with a really bad pairing. Not too shabby. Here's the full order:

1. Team Eagles & Condors - Kurumi / HBHR (with Oxyphenbutazone dedlurking)
2. Team Dinosaurs - Whiteye / Raptorous (looking for a dedlurker)
3. Team Master and Margarita - Slaze / Maga_R (with Jovan Kukic dedlurking)
4. Bowsling / Aivoturso
5. Team Orgynized - Lord Parkin / Arkipeller / Magno_uy (with WilliamLP dedlurking)
6. Team Blame Caledorn - YossarianLives / Caledorn (with Scooter, Old Harry and Cheater Hater dedlurking)
7. Team Care Bears - Yuufo / Bisons
8. Dick76 / DMOC
9. Team My Little Marathon Cannibal Pony - Classical_Hero / Halvgud
10. Barteq / Teammate (with Harami dedlurking)

We'll probably miss out on Inca and Pacal. If one of them survives the first five picks somehow, we'll snatch it up. India will probably fall too, but I'm less interested in that. So, most likely we'll be choosing the fourth leader overall. At this point, pending Caledorn's input, I'm thinking Surry will probably be our choice.

[Old Harry]

Is choosing the fourth leader and fifth civ better than third civ and last leader (i think the answer is probably yes...)

[YossarianLives]

Yeah, leader first is definitely better unless the others somehow leave Inca for us. The four picks after us will get to choose their civ before us, so assuming India / Inca get picked up early, then we would be guaranteed one of China, France, Egypt, Ottomans or Babylon, which are the civs I had mentioned earlier that I'm interested in. Obviously this will change depending on what we see from our starts, but I think that we'll be safe to get a decent civ even if we choose our leader first.

So, about the teams choosing before us.

1. Team Eagles & Condors - Kurumi / HBHR (with Oxyphenbutazone dedlurking)
I think HBHR just registered to sign up for this game, so he's a complete mystery. Oxy and Kurumi are both playing in PB11, but I haven't really been following that game, just kinda checking the lurker thread occasionally. Besides, they had their leaders assigned so that game doesn't tell anything about how they might pick. Kurumi did participate in a snake pick in PB12, with India, Inca, Pacal and Willem banned. He had 5th pick and took Mehmed (with Mansa, Surry, Vicky and Lizzy taken), and on the way back he chose the Mongols (with Ottomans, Egypt, Carthage, China and Sumeria taken). What does that mean for this game? Probably not much. With first pick, my guess is they'll pick up India.

2. Team Dinosaurs - Whiteye / Raptorous (looking for a dedlurker)
These two are some more complete mysteries, with no previous RB experience. Maybe Cal can do more expert detective work and figure out where they're from (or maybe these guys are our Locke / Cervantes ). Anyways, I guess they'll take Pacal.

3. Team Master and Margarita - Slaze / Maga_R (with Jovan Kukic dedlurking)
I think Maga is going to make the choice for this team. I'm really not sure if she'll go for one of the acknowledged power picks, or if she tries something completely unorthodox. I'm not even making any predictions here.

4. Bowsling / Aivoturso
I bet these guys will make a pretty standard pick, probably taking either Inca or Willem.

5. Team Orgynized - Lord Parkin / Arkipeller / Magno_uy (with WilliamLP dedlurking)
I'm so pissed this team is going right before us. LP is definitely going to be able to figure out the best option based on their screenshot and position in the snake pick, probably ending up with whatever we were hoping to grab. But who knows, maybe he'll cave in to Arki and Magno, and try something unorthodox as a teaching opportunity for his teammates. I mean, God knows he doesn't need a strong leader / civ pair to be the heavy favorites in this game. So I'm hoping that they go for something crazy and leave us a strong choice.

And that will bring it to us. With the sixth pick, I really do feel we'll be able to make a pretty strong selection when we're finally up.

And of course, as I already mentioned, everything will change once the screenshots come out.

[Old Harry]

By the way, have you read Seven's tech and trait-picking thoughts from PBEM 43 (everything up to post 32) and PBEM 47 (post 13)?

They are for quick-speed torroidal maps, so not directly helpful here, but it's a really interesting way to think about value. (I'm not going to pretend I understood it all so you'll have to read it yourself...)

[YossarianLives]

By the way, have you read Seven's tech and trait-picking thoughts from PBEM 43 (everything up to post 32) and PBEM 47 (post 13)?

They are for quick-speed torroidal maps, so not directly helpful here, but it's a really interesting way to think about value. (I'm not going to pretend I understood it all so you'll have to read it yourself...)

Thanks for pointing me to these, great read so far. I just got to this post, which is a really neat analysis of the Org trait that makes me think about it in a completely new way.

[SIZE="5"]Analysis of Organized and Financial[/SIZE]

Ive heard people are often quite dismissive of ORG.
Care to explain?

It's quite difficult to compare the long-term benefits of traits, but I will try. Additionally, ORG's value is highly map-dependent. People attribute this to different difficulties, but actually difficulty is not the main factor. There are three parts to ORG's value and I will go over all of them.

I use some math from here: http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=5589

-------------------

1) -50% civic upkeep. I would estimate that civic upkeep comprises about 1/3 of your costs. Right now I looked up what my civic costs would have been without ORG, at 10t intervals, in pbem39. Civic costs went: 0, 0, 1, 1, 3, 7, 19, 39, 77, 101 (last two are estimated since at this point ORG saves fairly close to half, so I just doubled the in-game values and added 3).

So at turn 89 ORG was saving 52g/t even ignoring inflation which was 12% at that point. Now to properly value that 53g you got on t89 you have to discount it for time... my best calculation is divide by two for every 20t elapsed on quick speed. so 52 * 0.5^4.5 comes to 2.3g. (I.e. I estimate that the savings from ORG on t89 are about equal to starting with an extra 2.3 beakers). But that's just t89. Sum up all turns from say, 0 to 110, and you will get something close to 100g (probably a little more). This is NOT the same as 1gpt!! Remember we've already completely discounted for time, so it's equivalent to starting with 90-120g extra of techs researched on t0, or an extra 3-4b/t on your starting tile. I'm going to call it 110g.

Looking in that same game at my citizen and city counts, and assuming that as a FIN leader I'd earn about 1c per citizen minus 2.5 per city (i.e. assuming each city works 2.5 tiles that don't give the FIN bonus, probably resources) then the benefits from FIN would be approximately double the civic upkeep reduction from ORG.

One other thing to note about the ORG upkeep reduction: it helps extra at low population due to all the rounding. The most absurd benefit is on monarch or lower (which slightly discounts civic upkeep) when each civic is costing 3 upkeep base. In this particular case, a non-ORG player will end up paying 3 * .9 (prince) = 2g per civic. An ORG player will pay 3 * 0.5 (ORG) = 1, 1 * 0.9 (prince) = 0g per civic!

2) Discounted courthouses. This is the heavily map-dependent part. On this map, courthouses will be a very desirable build, and therefore the discount will be quite strong. As a rough guess, let's say you would like to build 8 courthouses at about t65, with an average of 15% additional bonus hammers towards the courthouses. Then a non-ORG courthouse costs 70 raw hammers, and an ORG courthouse costs 37. ORG saves you 33 * 8 = 264 hammers, which we must now discount for time. That comes to about 28h at the start or 46b (might as well convert everything to beakers-at-the-start so it's easier to compare traits, even though if they were actually all in the form of beakers-at-the-start you would see some serious diminishing returns).

3) Discounted lighthouses. I built 11 lighthouses in pbem39 and I'd say 10 were worth building even without ORG. Probably they were worth being one of the first few builds, but the first few cities didn't have any, so t65 again seems like a fair average build date if we say there is no further discount on them. So 10 * 20h = 200h, discounted from t65 = 21 start-hammers, or 35 start-beakers.

-------------------

ORG also discounts factories, but since many games seem to end before then, I am deciding not to factor that in. ORG's total estimated start-beakers on a map like this comes to about 190. Meanwhile FIN's estimate is 220.

On the pbem39 map, ORG came with an additional 1f per turn, free. 1fpt is worth about 30f to start, which is worth about 70b. So according to my math, this put ORG at 260b to FIN's 220b. This seems to jive with what I thought at the time I picked it.

Here, instead, ORG gets two free turns compared to FIN. How much is a turn worth? Well, our output at the start here is basically 5 foodhammers and 11 beakers. That converts to 21b, and 2t is therefore 42b, putting ORG at 232 to FIN's 220. Now keep in mind that these are really rough estimates... I think this means ORG is slightly better in this setup, but I've injected in incredible amount of noise with all my converting and estimating. It's also worth noting that I expect this map to have fewer resources than 39, which I believe will boost FIN a bit compared to ORG (since it becomes more about cottages).

Does 2t being 42b sit right? Compare the value of settling on a plains hill, +1hpt, which according to my math is worth 50b. Is it worth 2t to move onto a plains hill if everything else stays constant, but not 3t (-63b)? That seems plausible to me.

TLDR: ORG's civic reduction is about half as good as FIN. The other parts of ORG could vary from not much effect on a no-wrap land map, to almost completely making up the remainder on a toroid with water. I estimate FIN to be worth 220 starting-beakers and ORG 190 starting-beakers on a pbem39-like map.

[plako]

Your starting position. Only visible tiles will be kept so no need to try to read the fog.

[scooter]

Interesting start. 6F wet corn is available, so Agriculture is great as usual. The first ring forested plains hill + first ring fish is also notable, because you can instantly get 4hpt into a quick work boat if you get a fishing start. Both would result in pretty quick starts. It also means EXP would instantly get the worker hammer bonus, so that's pretty attractive here.

[Old Harry]

Tempting to move 1n depending on what might be in the fog (even if it's just more forests to chop) although the corn would then take a turn extra to improve...

[YossarianLives]

Thanks Plako for the screenshot!

Good insight Scooter and Old Harry. I have a series of meetings I'm about to go into, but I'll post my thoughts later today.

[YossarianLives]

Ok, so my first thought was that this start looks great with wet Corn and if we have to start with seafood at least it's Fish. But spending a little more time with it, I'm not really sure what the best / fastest start moves would be. It definitely seems to lack commerce potential without a cottage-able river. It doesn't have a whole lot of forests to chop down to speed up the start. And it's on the coast, which really is something I'm not a big fan of.

So, after being pleased with Plako for all the positive aspects, and angry at Caledorn for all the negatives (), I decided to try a few starts out. Caledorn is our WorldBuilder, so for now I just plugged some numbers into Excel.

The first option assumes we are Exp, we start with Agri, and we go Worker-first while teching Mining->BW. This would allow us to get the Worker out on T12, finishing the corn farm on T16. Hopefully BW completes around T22, at which point we could chop out a Settler at size 2 while working the corn and a grass mine. We basically ignore the fact that we're coastal with this option. This might be what we do if we end up with Inca.

I think my favorite option is in the middle. Here, we take a Fishing Civ and open with a WB, which completes on T8. Then we go straight into a Worker, which completes on T18. The corn farm completes on T22, at the same time we grow to size 2. Here, we're only working improved resources and get the most research, so the total yields are best with this option. We probably follow this plan if we end up with the Dutch (Fishing / Agri), Carthage or Portugal (Fishing / Mining), or Vikings (Fishing / Hunting). We'd need to make sure we tech Agri first (if necessary), and then either go Mining->BW, or maybe AH? One thing to note is that we're working high-food tiles only, so an Exp bonus on the worker would not come into play in the first 20-some turns.

I feel the last option is the worst. This is where we go with a non-Fishing civ, tech Fishing first, and then switch to a WB once it completes. It just feels less efficient to me.