[spoilers] Vi Viqsi Veniversum Vivus Vici (or possibly just embarrasses herself)

[Cornflakes]

What about moving your "tentative east" site 2W (putting it 3E of the capitol)? That position is closer (settled a turn earlier and lett maintenance), share fish for quicker start-up and whip of granary, and can work a few of the capitol's cottages. It wouldn't loose any seafood and still claims pigs and spices.

[Viqsi]

What about moving your "tentative east" site 2W (putting it 3E of the capitol)? That position is closer (settled a turn earlier and lett maintenance), share fish for quicker start-up and whip of granary, and can work a few of the capitol's cottages. It wouldn't loose any seafood and still claims pigs and spices.

Hmmm. Three issues:
1) I really, really hate having that much overlap.
2) That potentially costs me what is presently a grasslands forest tile (2S of the current planned spot).
3) If I do get to leap to that silver island, then the current spot strikes me as being a necessary port location. Second City is six tiles away by sea.

Two positives:
1) If that plains tile on the silver island turns out to be a better city site than it presently looks like, then that spot becomes unclobbered. (I suspect, though, that further inland on that island would be better - I can see a river under the fog along the silver tile, for example. Which incidentally also has me occasionally wondering whether or not that's another starting spot as it's shockingly similar to the existing silver tile I have here! )
2) Makes it difficult to be invaded from that direction. (See above re: is that another start?)

I think I'm going to want to send a boat to explore that silver island before committing. TE was low on the priority order anyways and 2ndCity will be able to send somebody to start looking around earlier, so it's all good for now.

[Viqsi]

Moar speculation!

It just occurred to me that one of the tree tiles near 2ndCity is frosty. And I just saw a jungle tile to the north. That means I have my position on my hypothetical map wrong.

With that plus the possibility that maybe the silver next door represents another starting spot, what came to mind was a map structure that even if it's not actually how things are laid out NEEDS to be done sometime because it is awesome:


Must... have... more... explorers...
I am such a cartography addict...


EDIT: Possible visual inspiration:


Boom.

[Viqsi]

...and while I'm being silly about this map structure thing...

IF we really are going on a revolver chamber layout the awesome would be multiplied by having starting positions based on firing turn order.

[Viqsi]

T13: No new mapping info, but, hey, I have my research priorities set.

Opted not to switch to Slavery until after the worker completes.

Also of note is that Hydra's score has gone up six points, which means another tech. This... confused the hell out of me, because I wasn't sure what tech that could be (normally I'd just guess Mysticism, but that's one of his starting techs!), and my attempts to find out have seen me mostly reinventing the wheel w/r/t C&D... and doing a undoubtedly massively crappy job of it, as it's caused a six hour delay between "send save" and "post in spoiler thread".

Question for anyone watching along: I've got copies of all my saves (I'm kind of compulsive like that ) and so I'm considering going back and looking at the Demographics numbers for each turn so as to attempt to further my education, but I'm not sure if doing that is considered to be some sort of cheap evil tactic or something. I mean, I could have been recording them all along, I just haven't so far...

Anyways. My reasoning goes like this:

• The base BPT you're going to have is 9 before any population gets involved. (Palace plus the base tile, and assuming you go 100% science which pretty much everybody does.)
  
• The highest you're going to have at first is 11bpt, working anything in the water or a river commerce resource (both unimproved) for an additional 2 commerce. (Both are options to Hydra, with a Fishing starting tech and my belief that everyone's starting at a river).
  
• I also know that he worked a 3-food tile, because of the population growth in T8. On my start (which, again, I assume is very similar to everyone else's), that's either unimproved fish or unimproved wet grasslands grains. Flood plains would also do. All of these also add commerce, tho, so he's not going at 9bpt.
  
• IF his start was basically the same as mine (fish just outside the initial city radius, but within the BFC; wet grass grains in the initial radius), then that means there's two options - either he moved and settled on the first turn (only Sareln and I moved and settled on the second turn) and got the "fish" (11bpt), or he stayed and got the "grains" (10bpt).

First Tech:

• A tech was discovered EOT7.
  
• The range of possible beakers acquired (assuming nothing crazy like, oh, a turn of cash-only ) is either 70 (10bpt) or 77 (11bpt). 72 might also be possible - say, if he switched from "grains" to "fish" as soon as cultural borders expanded EOT5.
  
• If we were going constantly at 11bpt, then Mining (at 66 beakers) would have been discovered EOT6. Therefore, he did not start with a 2-commerce tile. (Switching to one later is certainly possible, though!)
  
• There are no techs that cost between 66 and 77 beakers.
  
• I have no knowledge as regards any other crazy changes that may have occurred (see: aforementioned hypothetical cash-only turns, or perhaps one turn of 10bpt instead of 11 to confound efforts like this ), but I prefer to assume for now that nothing crazy like that is going on because that would be crazy.

Preliminary Conclusion: Mining was researched, at a regular rate of 10bpt (possibly 11bpt for the last two turns), leaving 4 or 6 overflow.

Second Tech:

• At EOT13, another tech was discovered.
  
• Factor to consider: at EOT8, a population point was added. Two tiles to work! Presumably if any 2-commerce tile had not already been in use (which I doubt), then it would be added. Otherwise, chances are another river tile is picked.
  
• This vaguely suggests that new beaker count could be anywhere from 64 (10bpt all the way through; madness!) to 78 (switch to 12bpt from 11 immediately after population growth)
  
• There are only two techs that are within that price range: Mysticism (which Hydra started with) and Mining (which, per our prior conclusion, they have already researched!).
  
• However, in various attempts at simming (which are probably laughable by the standards of some), I kept seeing oddities like an additional beaker here and there possibly due to rounding or something. So my count here could be off by 1 or 2. And there are two 79-beaker techs on this tree - The Wheel and Agriculture!
  
• Hydra's started by working a 3-food 1-commerce tile, which suggests wet grains. This suggests that farms would be a priority.

Preliminary Conclusion: Agriculture was researched. And this stuff hurts my head! "Civ is hard; let's go shopping!"

Snotty Premature Analysis: Two worker techs and no worker to take advantage coming anytime soon...

Incidentally, that +8 commerce from the Palace is something I'd never really truly noticed before despite glancing at it like twenty billion times over the course of several games. It's funny, because I was fully aware of every single OTHER benefit it adds (+1 happy, +2 culture, +4 espionage, and the whole maintenance distance thing), but somehow had completely missed that one. Learning ever increasing bits of the painfully obvious almost every other turn with this game...

So does all this test me out of C&D 101 yet, or am I still failing? I still feel like I'm poking at the edge of some kind of forbidden darkness that will swallow me whole or something; it reminds me uncomfortably of my D&D hyper-munchkin minmaxer era which continues to affect me to the present day. I get the point of having them available (demos seems to be supposed to be a vague way of showing how you're doing, with the score being a theoretically vague way of showing who to worry about); it just somehow feels inherently dishonest or sneaky to me.

[Viqsi]

T14: So far no goodies.

Indeed, it tapers to a point there - the center tile is the only one that has any land past it (given, of course, the forest tile under fog but overwhelmingly obviously there). Intended as a canal location? Strange map script behavior? Viqsi attempting to find meaning where there is none? Who knows?

Also, judging by the score Fintourist has teched again. This time it's after nine turns; that seems to limit the candidates to Masonry, Meditation, and Pottery (and also suggests he's making use of them fishes). I didn't get a Buddhism FIDL message so it's probably not Meditation, unless that's changed from SP. So I'm going to assume it's Pottery, for developmental purposes.

EDIT: Oh, and for anyone also following the tech thread wondering what the "I was going to do X differently" moment was - it was the switch to Slavery being delayed 'till the Worker completes.

[Viqsi]

T15: Well, that's going to make dotmapping interesting.

That is an imperial shitload* of jungle out there. Will have to do more investigating. Obviously the tile that my scout is on would look pretty nice w/r/t getting all three resources, but there's too large of a gap there between cities (that's what the strategy layer lines are for) and I worry about production there. Also begs the question of whether or not I should consider going for Iron Working - maybe if there's good sites up thataway.

No score changes, but I did grab the demographics, altho I've little idea what to do with them. Am I allowed to go back and get prior turns' numbers? If I don't hear from anyone I'ma gonna assume it's okay and that I'm being overcautious here.

*: U.S. customary standard measurement of a hell of a lot of a thing, most commonly roughly equivalent to 1.337 SI-standard metric fucktons. Normally I just use the metric for these things because of the standards confusion (there's way too many other conversion standards floating out there), but in this case our measurement unit seemed more apropos.

[Viqsi]

Meanwhile, let's have a quick glance at the capital of the Pho'Ni* Empire City-State:

Myst is ONE HAMMER AWAY from completing the Worker next turn. Instead, it'll be two turns. Depending on whether or not food converted to hammers for Worker production overflows into hammers for something else (like the Warrior next in the queue), this could be a good thing or an infuriating thing. I know not which.


*: Yes, it's a blend of Carthage's forebears and the source of my city naming scheme. The excruciatingly bad pun (which may or may not itself also be funny ) was just a bonus brought to you by an unfortunate quirk of my heritage. Bad puns typically make me homesick... or sick of home, I can never remember which.

[regoarrarr]

Meanwhile, let's have a quick glance at the capital of the Pho'Ni* Empire City-State:

Myst is ONE HAMMER AWAY from completing the Worker next turn. Instead, it'll be two turns. Depending on whether or not food converted to hammers for Worker production overflows into hammers for something else (like the Warrior next in the queue), this could be a good thing or an infuriating thing. I know not which.

It does. It also gets modified by whatever traits.

So if you say overflow 5 food-hammers from a worker, if you're EXP, then that gets changed to 4 overflow hammers. Or if you're also IND and working on say a forge or a wonder, then that 4 hammers gets modified to 8 overflow hammers.

[Commodore]

Meanwhile, let's have a quick glance at the capital of the Pho'Ni* Empire City-State:

Myst is ONE HAMMER AWAY from completing the Worker next turn. Instead, it'll be two turns. Depending on whether or not food converted to hammers for Worker production overflows into hammers for something else (like the Warrior next in the queue), this could be a good thing or an infuriating thing. I know not which.

It does. It also gets modified by whatever traits.

So if you say overflow 5 food-hammers from a worker, if you're EXP, then that gets changed to 4 overflow hammers. Or if you're also IND and working on say a forge or a wonder, then that 4 hammers gets modified to 8 overflow hammers.

Uhh. Yeah, Rego is right. But, um...Rego? Why are you here?