[SPOILERS] Kurumi & wetbandit serve you Hannibal's Breakfast Cocktail (of Persia)

[teleh]

Just for the fun of it, Diet Coke.


(Was thinking of posting when 9/99 but someone beat me to it. Damn lurkers!)

[Commodore]

Here's your start, anything might change, etc, etc.

[teleh]

Thanks Commodore!

[teleh]

Two thoughts: there's that seafood start (and looking suspiciously island-y). And very stoked to be awake at 12.30a to see it!

[teleh]

Oxford's Webster's Dictionary defines 'Sim' as:
"an offense against religious or moral law"

And 'Sandboxing' as:
"the art of attack and defense with the fists practiced as a sport, at a beach or desert"

Hmm, not much help there. Think I'll try building a map in the worldbuilder instead.

First starting a game with what I know of the settings - Large, Cylindrical, Monarch - and duplicating all the game settings we decided. For a Large map, 9 teams is default so I added another AI player, and set my own team as Hannibal (the awesome) of Persia (the pretty good depending on the map ). Re-rolled a couple of times to get something like my starting shot:


(close enough. but ouch! that skew is headache-worthy)

Then put in whatever tiles I can see or infer from the starting shot. Worldbuilder's a bit clunky-feeling but probably not so bad with some practice. Note to the unwary though, be careful of using erase mode on your settler! If you then exit out to the game, um, "You Are Defeated!!" (Hello Main Menu, goodbye any work you've just done.) You can almost certainly put another settler back in, but I was careful second time round just to use terrain adjustment tools on the settler tile.

I ended up with something like the below. Rivers are painful, but I found a short vid from Ruff_Hi which explains the basics: Civ4 Rivers by Ruff Hi - YouTube

To create the river here I left-click dragged from the highlighted tile > east > north, and let go. Couple of right clicks to delete the header and footer and eh viola.



Few hills, crabs and plainscow (hello you), lashings of forest and a lovely border to mark the edge of the (somewhat) known universe, and I think we have a practice arena:




The other thing I'll do (which I've seen other folks do in reading threads here), is locate each of the other 9 Civs on the map and entomb their units in a ring of (impassable) mountains. My guess is that this stops them interfering in your sandbox by wandering around, which makes sense. There are likely various other factors involved (which I'd love to hear about!), but this isn't bad for plotting out tentative moves. When the game is available, a bit of 'Fog Gazing' (which I'm sure Webster's Oxford's can define for me too) and tile hovering will give more concrete info on what's just out of sight.

Last couple of notes:

• I've picked Big_and_Small, Snaky Continents, Islands, Islands Mixed In. To me this doesn't look like part of a big landmass, archipelago seems a bit too interesting for a knewb game, and pre-astronomy contact with everyone is probably a given.
  
• That lake I've put in! It's my way of asking karma to be nice.
  
• Flipside of that - notice the sore-thumb grassland north of the plains cow. Pretty much every other tile to be seen has a forest on it. Probably too much to expect that it has horses (coastal horses are the toughest horses of all), but fingers crossed. Maybe iron or something, I've seen that appear in some pretty weird places.

[teleh]

Here's your start, anything might change, etc, etc.

[Merovech]

Enclosing the AIs in rings of mountains means that you can easily control contact, etc, which is important for known tech bonuses (and eventually, trade routes).

[teleh]

Right. Scouting.

Scouting NW/SW gives *huge* vision on the west coast, uncovering any other potential coast or ocean-based resources (whales, anyone?) which might be otherwise orphaned or difficult to connect in the first 50 or so turns by settling in place. Problem is, NW/SW only gives vision on two (count them) additional land tiles if what's in the sandbox is accurate. I don't believe that info is the most useful in this case.

Scouting SW gives vision on only one more land tile than that (the 2 South of settler grass tile which hopefully has wet rice on it) and misses out on all the coastal tiles. Not a great option.

Scouting South reveals a grid of 8 tiles, including the "lake". Interestingly it also reveals the tile 2SE of the settler probably because of the vision over water, but I was not expecting that. I thought the forest SE of the settler would block the scout, even standing on the hill 1S. [E:] Actually the blue-circle tile is also visible, so forests must only block vision at 45 degree or 90 degree angles.



Finally, Scouting SE reveals only 6 of the 8 tiles which would be revealed by the previous option, unless the tile 2SE is water. There's no point scouting east since it reveals two tiles only, both of which are forested.

The information I'm most interested to gather by scouting is whether settling in place is going to screw me over. I recall from some other mapmaking thread Krill suggesting that a scout was moved a tile so the player wouldn't 'fuck the start up' (I know, that doesn't sound like Krill at all, but it's a true story). Kind of public musing here, but that's to make up for my excellent screenshots earlier. What I do see is that settling in place does not allow another city to be settled to the northwest of this landmass, nor on the plains hill to the northeast (not that I would settle there anyway). Removing these options isn't very disturbing because the land will be used and the 3 hills which are visible are all in the Big Fat Cross and are mines ASAP anyway (c'mon... ResourcePop).

Settling in place uses up a nice river (aww) plains (ohwell) tile which could have been cottaged but that's small beer. Any other settle apart from on top of the plains cow won't get done Turn 0, and that plains cow is going to be my 'second class citizen' city production supervisor early on (if my total failure to run turn-by-turn sims yet is any indication).

Even if there is an (Agriculture)-farmable wet food tile 2S there's no point moving toward it, as it gets straight in the BFC after 5 turns (I think) which is quicker than the time it takes to build a worker. But it would probably also dictate worker-first because the worker is far more useful than a single-use work boat even if it might get a 5-food tile up faster.

In summation: I'm sorely tempted to try a smooth move, and settle in place before touching the scout, then use the updated settle-info to figure out the best way for the scout to move. And that may be the best option, not only temping. Certainly from what can be seen of the starting tiles, a SIP looks fairly well balanced and utilitarian as a capital. I think if I have any doubt whatsoever, SIP is the option.

Unrelatedly, stumbled across this nice Economics 101 info from T-hawk while looking up commerce-to-research conversion: Specialist Economic Equivalency - Merchants vs Scientists

[teleh]

Enclosing the AIs in rings of mountains means that you can easily control contact, etc, which is important for known tech bonuses (and eventually, trade routes).

Ah - cool, thanks Merovech.

[teleh]

Hello whoever takes over!

Not sure if you're interested or just want to start over, but if you're interested, here's a link to the sandbox save from above:

Pitboss 11 - Hannibal of Persia Worldbuilder - Game Save

Best of luck - reckon this is possibly the best leader in the mix, and don't forget to leverage your early units (barbs on = free cities).

Heheh

teleh (bowing out gracefully)