[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

Ok, I had to know what was going on, and I figured it out from working backwards off the population stat. REM has cities of pop 3, pop 2, and pop 2. So two 1 pop whips then; he must have done themy really fast and Civstats combined them together.

But what did he whip? REM is not Expansive, so his non-capital cities need 11 foodhammers to whip a worker, and he had to spend Turn 250 in Anarchy. I'll guess a worker whip in the capital and a work boat in the second city. Could also be 2 workers if things lined up perfectly at the second city, but unlikely.

Watch me be totally wrong on this.

[Elkad]

I was wondering if you paused, whipped both cities, and then unpaused if they would fire close enough for Civstats to miss the fact it was 2 cities.

If so, it's another tool for the metagame of mining Civstats for info.

[Sullla]

That's an excellent point Elkad. I can't remember ever testing that in a past Pitboss game. It might be a bit abusable if true... Do you have any knowledge on how that works scooter? (Or anyone else who might be reading this thread?)

Other stuff:

* I agree with the proposed scouting moves. Let's see what's in that northeast corner, and follow the (coast?) in the south.

* It looks like most of the other teams have joined us in settling all three cities. There's a couple other whips popping up on CivStats; I thought it would be interesting to see what the other teams are doing. So we know from earlier today that REM did two 1 pop whips, in his capital and his second city. REM is Imp/Org Japan, which means that he revolted to Slavery civic on Turn 250, spent one turn getting production in those cities, and then whipped here on Turn 252. That's why my best guess is a worker whip in the capital and a work boat whip in the second city. It's possible to get a worker whip in the second city, but tough to get the 11 foodhammers needed from a single turn of working unimproved tiles. In any case, whipping off unimproved tiles to get workers or work boats is a very good choice. But as a non-Spiritual civ, that means no Serfdom civic for REM.

* Dreylin settled his capital on Turn 250, his second city on Turn 251, and his third city this turn on Turn 252. He then whipped 1 pop in one of his cities this turn. That's probably a worker whip too, but since Dreylin is Spi/Phi of Khmer, he didn't lose a turn of Anarchy on the initial turn. So it's possible that this is a worker whip in the second city, although again it's tough to get that many foodhammers from a single turn's worth of working unimproved tiles. But if he was whipping a worker in the capital with the Bureaucracy bonus, Dreylin could have whipped it last turn, right? Well, maybe it was a work boat whip in the second city too. We don't have enough information to go off of, and I'm not sure how much it really matters.

* Gaspar/Noble settled no cities on Turn 250, their capital and their second city on Turn 251, and their third city this turn. Then they whipped 1 pop this turn; best guess would be a worker whip in the capital, since again it seems doubtful they could get 11 foodhammers from a single turn of working unimproved tiles elsewhere. Their team is Fin/Org of the Dutch, so no Spiritual here either.

In a larger metagaming sense, I'm pleased to see so many of the other teams settling into the traditional habit of running Slavery civic. It might even be the best choice for all I know, as whipping out some workers to start the game is a good play. However, I truly don't think that Slavery civic will be all that useful in this game. We'll be spending most of our time in Serfdom and Caste System; and yes, the non-Spiritual teams will probably do a one-time Caste System/State Property swap down the road, they don't get to make use of Serfdom civic in the interim. My hope is that will prove to be a giant advantage for us as we develop over the next two dozen turns. When we're saving a turn on every farm, every pasture, every mine, every workshop, and two turns on every watermill... well, it all adds up pretty fast.

Here's something for the global lurkers to watch in the early stages of this game. See how many workers each team builds, and how fast they get them out. That's probably the single most important thing in these first few turns. We're at three right now, counting the "free" one that we produced via Universal Suffrage purchase. Looking forward to the next turn.

[scooter]

I had some time tonight, so I went ahead and updated the sandbox to match what we've scouted in-game.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5826...wordWBSave

I didn't bother updating the south island, but I think the rest is accurate.

[scooter]

Turn 253

Turn finally rolled. Scouting was pretty interesting this turn. I was wrong when I said SW-SW of our western explorer was water.



It wasn't, so I opted to uncover the most tiles possible. Nice little lake there. They'll be nice if we can lighthouse most of those, otherwise lake is pretty much crap for our purposes. Also, LAKEFISH. The best kind. Anyway, I'm thinking push southwest-ish here, and allow our northern explorer to get the top half of this divide. Speaking of.



Well that deer greatly improves this area. And yes, I believe that is a little patch of ice right off the coast of this lush green land. 2W of the deer is a strong candidate for one of our first settlers.



Sheep is a little awkward here. It'd be nice if we could settle a city to grab all 3 of these, but we can't unless we settle on the iron. Still pretty underwhelmed by this stretch, but it looks pretty unlikely to be a dead end, which means we're still good for that Explorer in the capital. Now... We could move the Rifle one more time onto the hill to get some extra visibilty to be sure. Beelining home would still get it back by T259. I could go either way on that. Maybe it's best not to risk it.



Here's our lovely capital already enjoying some ham and bacon. Representation happiness is just barely going to save it. Work boat next turn will really make this city hum. Explorer is next while growing to 4 and most of the way to 5 before cashing in the chop for another worker.

One thought - we could always order a Caravel or Galleon rather than an Explorer next in the capital. It's safe to say there's been a little more water than expected, so an exploratory boat might not be so bad. It'll allow us to make contact with someone quicker, and from there we can swap maps and uncover land far more quickly, plus get some trade routes flowing. Any thoughts?



The most interesting thing here is that we are dead last in land area by 2 tiles, and one player has a whopping 11 tiles on us, although it's very possible that's due to some culture building popping borders. Still, it's a little surprising to me that we've got the most water in our starting 3 cities.

I'm also a little curious about that high GNP. Well, it must be someone teching SciMeth and getting the double-prereq bonus as a result. It's still pretty high though.

[scooter]

Oh one more thing - I scared myself briefly in-game. I popped into Telegraph and Cotton Gin and noticed we couldn't whip, and I panicked for a very long 3 seconds. Then I remembered it's only T253 rather than T254, so we aren't whipping until next turn.

[Cyneheard]

Oh one more thing - I scared myself briefly in-game. I popped into Telegraph and Cotton Gin and noticed we couldn't whip, and I panicked for a very long 3 seconds. Then I remembered it's only T253 rather than T254, so we aren't whipping until next turn.

Also, whip AFTER workers do their thing.

[Sullla]

Great reporting as usual, scooter. Let me add my thoughts here:

* These areas that we uncovered are going to be tricky to dotmap. That patch of land in the southwest is particularly resistant to an obvious city location. Do we settle inland for the horses and cows? On the coast to claim the whales? (We can connect them immediately, and that's +2 happiness in all cities with the free marketplaces.) Somewhere on the coast to make the lake tiles 3 food? I think my tentative current spot would be 1 south of the cows, since it is on a (tiny) river, on the coast for shipbuilding, and has a lot of green tiles for workshopping. Maybe we'll find more resources to help dotmap this area in the next few turns.

In the northeast, yeah, I think the tile east of the incense is the spot. It's a shame that that location isn't on a river, and that it has 5 water tiles, but it's hard to argue with a location that also has 5 resources. I do like the fact that this location is somewhat sheltered by land and will serve as another shipbuilding spot. It's worth noting that the ivory resource is also worth +2 happiness in all cities with our free marketplaces, so settling for ivory and whales in some combination seems likely for our upcoming cities.

* With the horses located in third ring for Telegraph, and with no obvious city plants nearby, it would be really helpful for us if that city wins the 50/50 dice roll for the Holy City. We could use that culture to grab the horses, that's for sure...

* The Dutch team has to be loving the amount of water on this map. And thank goodness again that no one picked the Brennus of the Vikings!

* I think I would start bringing the rifle back to the capital now. There map information we might find isn't worth the potential game-ending risk. You raise an excellent point about different scouting options from the capital. So we have several different choices here:

1) Explorer is the best pick for revealing more land tiles.

2) We could also build a work boat to scout out more of the water. We're post-Astronomy here, so work boats can cross ocean tiles now without issue. This is the cheapest option and also a non-threatening one. The downside is that it's easily killed and only has 2 movement points.

3) We could opt for a caravel instead. Caravels are more expensive, but they have 3 movement and can explore rival territory without signing Open Borders. It's also a rather unthreatening move since caravels can't carry units inside (other than missionaries/Great People). A caravel has no real military power either, since anyone doing something aggressive at sea will be using galleons, and caravels are impotent against them.

4) We could also pick the most expensive option and build a galleon. That gives us the most movement points and also the potential to ferry military units or settlers where we choose. Note that it also would be a highly threatening move to any neighbor - imagine how we would react if someone sailed a galleon up next to our capital. It would also start the naval arms race that's sure to break out sometime down the road.

I think my preference is still for an explorer, since there's so many tiles to defog and we're more interested in uncovering land tiles than sea. Perhaps an explorer followed by a cheap work boat? I'm sure we could use it for nets at some later point down the road, it wouldn't be a wasted build. Interested to hear your further thoughts on this scooter.

* Here's a related question we should be thinking about now: what kind of deals do we want to sign with other teams when we meet them? Do we want to sign Open Borders? Do we want to trade maps? I generally think that having more information is a good thing, but once we trade our maps, they're out there forever for the rest of the teams to use. Of course, you can also argue that trading maps goes a long way to establishing friendship with neighboring teams, and that the land is going to be revealed eventually anyway, so who knows. We should probably think about this now though, as contact is likely to happen soon. If you look at the minimap, we've defogged a pretty sizable area already. There are six other teams in this game, and I bet someone's not too far past the western edge of that lake.

* I'm pleased that we're first in Food for the moment on the Demographics, however briefly. At 50 total foodhammers, we're well above the Rival Average and probably close to or in the lead. With regards to GNP, our stat looks poor there because we're probably the only team not currently in Representation civic. That's 9 beakers we're missing out on, and we only make 23 beakers total, so it's a sizable chunk of economy that we're missing out on. Add in Representation and we should be sitting right around the Rival Average of 43.

The Rival Best of 59 is a bit surprising though, I'll admit that. It looks like someone is going for Scientific Method at full blast. Perhaps one of the Philosophical teams went into Caste System to run Representation Scientists instead of Engineers (?) That would be worth a lot of science in a hurry, and it would also open up the lightbulb opportunity very early on. Still, would someone really choose that path and give up both Slavery *AND* Serfdom in the early going? That feels like suicide from a development perspective. I guess we'll find out.

I do wonder what techs everyone is researching. Steam Power seems like the best choice to me (faster workers + levees, yes please!) but who really knows.

[scooter]

Also, whip AFTER workers do their thing.

Sounds like I'm forgetting something - why?

----

Some more thoughts on the Explorer vs boat thing. I think you bring up a good point about OB/maps, because what we're going to do about that probably impacts our choices slightly.

I'll start by saying if we aren't planning to sign OB, then an Explorer maybe doesn't make as much sense. I initially started to type that signing OB is a no-brainer because we want foreign trade routes, but it occurs to me that Mercantilism will likely remain the best choice for a while until those routes become more lucrative. So maybe it depends on our map policy and how much we care about preventing vision on our land.

Before getting too far into maps... I'll say that I think the diplomatic element is lessened a little bit here. I think teams will be pretty pragmatic in this game - fill out their land, then attack a neighbor that's messed up the start and is lagging behind. They haven't actually played 250T with their civs, so the attachment level is that of ancient era where people tend to be more rational. After the first 50T, teams will be treated based on their scoreboard standing (strong teams mistrusted, weak teams eyed up as targets) because 50T is a much bigger deal here than in ancient starts. It's hard but not impossible to make friends in a no-diplo game in a normal ancient start, but I just think the game is too short for real friends to develop. On the other hand, it's definitely not too late for irrational enemies to develop because someone feels slighted.

That said, I still like trading maps. I sat here and tried to think of a great reason why, and all I came up with is that the game is more fun when I get to see more tiles . I only avoid trading maps when I think someone seeing my land would treat me differently afterwards - like say we're trapped on a peninsula on an unbalanced map, and map trading would give away the fact that we'd need to fight our way off of it. I don't think anything like that is true here, so I figure we may as well get as much info as possible. I also suspect that nearly everyone else will freely trade maps early on, so even if we deny everyone our maps, we're still living in a world where we've got only our scouting info, and everybody else has the shared maps.

(I do think the calculus on map swapping can change a little later in the middle of wars and all that. I'm just talking about the first 50T here.)

So if we don't care about OB, and we're going to freely trade maps, we probably prefer to meet neighbors ASAP. That has me leaning slightly towards Caravel. I'm not crazy about Galleon for the reasons you mentioned, and the work boat isn't any faster than an Explorer, so I'd rather just build an Explorer at that point. Explorer is a more sensible default choice, though, so if we aren't convinced a boat is worthwhile, we'd be better off just building an Explorer and being done with it. It's cheaper, and it does what we need.

There is one last factor though - the map. This may actually be the thing that decides it. What are the odds that 1) that southeast land strip is a dead end OR 2) this "ocean" to our east is actually a giant lake and dead ends. If either one of those are true, it makes building that particular unit way less useful. This requires some map guesswork. There's two options.

1) We're on one huge snaky continent surrounded by narrow/winding waterways with giant lakes breaking it up into sub-continents. Our east water is an example of one of those lakes. Kinda similar to the PB1/PB18 type maps, except snakier. In this case, Explorer wins.

2) We're on a few (very close) continents, and there's one huge snaky ocean that surrounds it all with a few tiny islands dotting the ocean. In this case, Caravel wins.

Now that I type that out, I'm leaning towards #1 and an Explorer again. Before I muddy the discussion any further by continuing to change my mind, any thoughts on what I've written about this?

[Sullla]

I have to agree with scooter, I don't think that it matters when we whip the workers next turn. If I wrote the opposite in the online spreadsheet micro plan, I was mistaken.

On the other issue, I'm very willing to go with your instincts when it comes to diplomacy. If there's one weakness that I have with these Civ4 MP games, it's metagaming the other teams and figuring out how to interact with them. Now I don't think I'm quite as bad as others have sometimes suggested, but at the same time, I'm also somewhat infamous for getting attacked by five other teams at once. So I think we'll let scooter decide how to handle these things.

Seriously though, I'm fine with signing Open Borders and trading maps. I always think I can get more out of information that the other team, and even if that's wrong, it's more fun playing with extra data compared to playing in the dark. That leans towards building a naval unit of some kind, except that goes back again to your final point about what the shape of this map looks like. My best guess from the limited map knowledge we have right now is case #1:

1) We're on one huge snaky continent surrounded by narrow/winding waterways with giant lakes breaking it up into sub-continents. Our east water is an example of one of those lakes. Kinda similar to the PB1/PB18 type maps, except snakier. In this case, Explorer wins.

This just feels more likely to me. For that reason, I think I lean towards an explorer, followed by a work boat. In that regard, it's a simple matter of cost:

Work Boat: 24 production
Explorer: 32 production
Caravel: 48 production
Galleon: 64 production

We can do explorer + work boat (56 production) for almost the same cost as a caravel (48 production), and I think that combo would be a lot more useful. By the way, here are the costs of the other naval units we can build for reference:

Privateer: 64 production
Frigate: 72 production (needs iron)
Ship of the Line: 96 production (needs iron)

As hilarious as it might be to sail around with some Privateers, I think the other teams would be able to figure out the culprit pretty easily, so no, not too likely to be worthwhile. Anyway, my suggest would be to go explorer followed by work boat, both for scouting, and then probably try to get a library done while growing ASAP. (All the beaker multiplier buildings are doubly important to get finished in our Bureaucracy capital, especially because it has both gold and incense present. Have to balance that against growing and then cranking out the settlers. Getting a bank finished would also be quite nice.)