Mikehendi Pitboss 16 Thread

[yuris125]

You don't need religion for Stonehenge. He's almost certainly going for Oracle. Which makes sense, except if he devotes full attention to Oracle, he's falling behind in expansion, so much so that Oracle won't help to catch up. I made that mistake in the very first game I played at RB (PBEM19)

[Mikehendi]

Thanks for the post, Ichabod. (Are you the same Ichabod from CFC? I remember someone with that name in a succession game a while ago.) I always get the granary mechanics wrong. Hopefully I was close enough this time.



This was last turn. Capital swapped to settler, workers moving in preparation to next city location. Not too much going on.



Now on the current turn, Turn 53. Buddhism was claimed by someone out there, I'm not sure who because 5 teams picked up a tech this turn. It's one of SevenSpirits, ad hoc, Gavagai, Bantams, or Noblehelium. (I don't think its our neighbor Bantams, although that wouldn't be too bad because the religion would likely spread to us.) Maybe it's ad hoc because there was finally some activity in his thread today (?) Who knows, not really that important.

Our scout's getting some good map info along the Bantams border up there in the north. We can see where the second city went, located east of his capital. I'm hoping that we can sign Open Borders once Writing tech is done and explore Bantams territory. As best I can tell from the bar graphs, Bantams has teched Archery already and built 2-3 archers for some reason. It doesn't make much sense, but he's getting 3k power increases, and they can't all be from barracks.



Main news from this turn was executing the triple whip for a settler in the capital. The road is almost in place for the settler to found our city on Turn 55. (There's an axe guarding the worker on the X tile.) At the top of the screen, a worker finished a forest chop for La Rochelle, which will finish the monument and go into a granary next. We could REALLY have used a Hinduism founding in that city, could have skipped the monument and chopped out a work boat instead for the clams in the second ring. Not to be this game though. We'll be regrowing population for the a little bit, four pop to be gained in the next two turns.

Couple more cities were founded this turn, both Noblehelium and Kuro adding their third cities each. Gavagai double whipped a likely settler for his fourth city. The real laggards are Dhalphir (first to two cities... and still at two cities), wetbandit, ad hoc, Bantams, and 2metranina. All still at two cities. 2metra is likely going for the Oracle, as Yuris said. Wetbandit is a likely Stonehenge candidate, he's playing as Hannibal of Egypt after all. Ad hoc could be in the wonder game too, he's got Huayna Capac as his leader. Let them chance after all the wonders they want. With no traits that boost any kind of early expansion or buildings, we've got to focus purely on expansion. And we'll make our move in the Renaissance with musketeers and cheap universities/Oxford.

I think that I probably made a mistake in the research order. Probably should have gone Masonry -> Monotheism before going Writing. It only made a difference of 2 turns on landing Judaism (T58 versus T60) but those will probably be the two turns that cost us Judaism. We shall see.

[Ichabod]

Thanks for the post, Ichabod. (Are you the same Ichabod from CFC? I remember someone with that name in a succession game a while ago.) I always get the granary mechanics wrong. Hopefully I was close enough this time.

Yeah, same Ichabod here.

Granary mechanics are pretty hard and I'm constantly second guessing myself about them (yes, I had to double check before writing my previous post). I'm nowhere near an expert like some guys around here, what with avoid growth tricks and so on.

Your opening seems pretty solid to me and that's the most someone can achieve without early game traits, I think. I like the plan for Bourges, early academy sounds very nice.

[Mikehendi]

Nice, it's good to know that the Civilization world can be a small place sometimes.

Anyway, so I know that Bantams doesn't have a spoiler thread and doesn't post anything about what he's doing. We've been working through Demographics numbers and trying to find out what's been going on up in the north. They suggested that Bantams wasn't playing very well, and this turn kind of confirmed that. Here's what we can see:



It's not a pretty sight. That's a sheep tile and a wheat tile (it's wet grassland wheat so basically = wet corn) both being worked by cities, both unimproved. Ummm... what's going on here? Color me confused. The capital is two north of the sheep and the second city is north-northeast of the wheat. Bantams started with Agriculture tech, and I'm pretty sure that Animal Husbandry was the first tech that he researched. How in the world is it possible for a 5 food sheep tile in the second ring of the capital to still be unimproved 54 turns into the game???

Good news for us, in any case. We may have hit the jackpot here in drawing a weak opponent, because this is far below the RB standard for Multiplayer games. Hopefully we'll sign Open Borders next turn and enter that culture for more information. This is pretty sad play.

Lots of stuff happening next turn, we grow two pop and found our fourth city. More to come then.

[Mikehendi]

Bantams agreed to our Open Borders proposal! No trade connection yet, but we can spy on his territory and see what he's doing. (Of course he can do the same thing to us if he wants.) We moved in the scout and found some good information.



Persepolis is located on a hill (not a plains hill) with copper already connected in the first ring. I'm guessing that everyone has copper at their capital in this game, since we both do and the Zulu teams apparently also had copper for impis at their starting city. Everything else beyond that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Persepolis already has a barracks finished, for some unknown reason. No granary. I guess Bantams really wanted promotions for his units? And yet weirdly, despite the copper he hasn't built any axes yet. Maybe he only recently connected the copper with a road, something like that.

Anyway, there's an archer and a warrior in the capital (both already having used their promotion for no reason) and then another warrior sitting fortified on the hill one tile outside cultural borders. Basically Bantams is playing like someone terrified that he's about to get attacked, even though our military for most of the game to this point has consisted of 3 warriors and a scout. Oh, and he also has a worker building a road on the tile south of the copper. So no, don't improve the sheep or the wet wheat tiles with a worker, but do build a road that leads absolutely nowhere and serves no purpose.

At this point, I'd say it's a matter of "when" and not "if" we'll conquer Bantams. It's going to be nearly impossible for him to recover from such a poor opening set of moves. We'll expand until this landmass is full of cities, and then run Bantams over with knights or musketeers or something in the Renaissance. (He has no cottages and his GNP is similarly terrible.)



We've got our fourth city up and running in the form of Aix. I like this spot a lot, getting to pigback off the capital's 100 ring culture for that sheep and then claiming the corn tile with Aix's own borders. We've also got an oasis in the second ring, three grassland river tiles to cottage, forests to chop, and a ton of non-river grasslands as well. This will be a strong city once we have a granary and a library in place. It did double our expenses though (-4 gold to -8 gold).



Demos are way better than I expected. I thought that we'd get outpaced in the early going by EXP and CRE teams, and maybe that will still happen. Right now, looks pretty good. The GNP is kind of unfair since we're at 100% science on cheap Masonry tech, but we're actually #2 in that category with value of 39 when we change to min science. I think that means our economy is overall good. I'm rather surprised that Food is this good while our capital is still recovering from its last triple whip.

It helps that Goreripper is the only other team with four cities, although I do think we'll see other teams hit 4 cities pretty soon. What's more surprising is the teams with only TWO cities still: ad hoc, 2metraninja, Bantams, Dhalphir, and wetbandit. We've played 55 turns now! Wondering what they are doing. Some wars between teams maybe?

Next up is planning city #5.

[Catwalk]

It looks like you did indeed luck into a weak opponent, go for gold and win the whole thing

[Mikehendi]

Lots of turns going by quickly at the moment. Here are the last three.



The fifth city is going to be settled somewhere in this river valley in a few turns. I am trying to decide between going with one city (red) or two cities down the road (yellow). Normally I would put a city on the nearest yellow tile, and then get a second one later for the clams resource. More cities are usually better, since they can all draft and work cottages. The problem here is that the grassland hill sheep is a very weak food resource. It's only 4 food + 1 hammer per turn, which is barely enough to power a city's growth. A city there would need at least one grassland farm if not two, and it wouldn't be that productive. (This is why we didn't put a city here earlier, the sheep isn't very good.)

I'm leaning more towards the red spot. We can chop the one forest in the first ring for a monument, and then use the work boat under construction in Bourges (which has the intended goal of defogging a sea route to Goreripper) to use for the clams after borders pop. That gets the city to +6 food, +7 food with lighthouse later, and that makes for a strong city, with lots of grassland tiles to cottage. Anyway, I plan to try them both out in the sandbox and see which one I like better. I did not have time to work on the planning this week, that's the goal for my Saturday.



The scout also got a full look at the Bantams capital this turn. We can see all 21 tiles. Bantams was working the corn, the copper, the furs, the unimproved sheep (3/0), and the unimproved plains hill (0/3) tiles this turn. Not very efficient, and dreadful from a GNP perspective even with the 4 commerce furs. Note the worker building a road to nothing while the sheep and wet wheat for his second city sit there unimproved.

The next turn we moved over and spotted his other city:



Bantams has both copper and horses connected already. That's crucial information, we'll need to watch and see what he builds. With Demos bar graphs, we should be able to see if he's planning an attack ahead of time. The resource here is grassland wheat or basically = grassland corn, it's a 6 food tile when improved. Which it has not been so far. This is almost like a clinic on how not to make use of a lush, fertile starting spot.



Our territory on the same turn, with the tile yields on to display which ones are being worked. We have 13 pop to the 7 pop of Bantams, and we're working (almost) all improved tiles: 7 resources + 4 cottages + 1 grassland farm + 1 lake tile. Even the lake tile isn't that bad with Financial trait at 2/0/3 yield, and this was the one turn using that while waiting on another cottage to finish for the capital. Plus two of the cottages have matured into hamlets, and a third is about to join them. Along with the sheep pasture finishing at the fourth city (4/1/3 tile with river + FIN bonus), that's how we get up to 45 beakers/turn early in the game.

The capital can just reach 15 foodhammers at the moment for a four turn worker. It's a good build because we can't grow to size 6 due to whipping unhappiness penalty. Build the worker, grow to 6, then triple whip another settler for city #5. Bourges is growing to size 6 as well to triple whip a library. It grew into unhappiness on the following turn, which you'll see in a minute. Only one turn of unhappiness though as the previous granary whip wears off. La Rochelle maybe should have 1 pop whipped its granary here, but instead it's growing to size 4, double whipping a worker, and then finishing the granary with the overflow. This delays Rochelle's development slightly, in order to produce another worker. I didn't have time to go back and test the tradeoffs in the sandbox - it probably works out OK. We can definitely use the extra worker.



The Demos are still very good, at least when researching at 100%. That said we were still #1 in GNP at 0% science this turn, I think the number was 41. I keep expecting other teams with better early game traits (EXP and CRE) to catch up and pass us in these numbers, and it's not happening yet. Not complaining!



Finally the current turn. We had a chance to kill a barb warrior with our axe, only I turned it down. Even though it's 99.9% odds, there are two barb warriors on that tile, and if we took a lot of damage, there's a small chance that the second barb warrior could attack and kill our axe. And then what do we do for city #5? Can't send workers and a settler off into the fog with no protection. I had the axe sit in place and wait for a better opportunity.

Elsewhere, worker finished a cottage north of the capital, allowing us to swap off the lake there. We've been cheating a little bit here on worker labor, running with only 3 workers for 4 cities. We can get away with this because we did have 3 workers very early on, and our civ was in a position where worker labor was outstripping improved tiles for a short period. Plus we've cheated by having Calais work the extra lake tile, and La Rochelle is going to grab a lake tile as well when it hits size 4. (Ideally they would always be grabbing grassland riverside cottages and never lakes.) So now we get a worker out of the capital and double whip one out of La Rochelle to hit 5 total, which is just barely enough to keep pace with our cities.

I was an idiot with our research path by choosing to research Writing before Masonry -> Monotheism. If we'd done things the other way around (which we easily could have), we'd be finishing Monotheism and founding Judaism at the end of this turn. Instead we have to sweat things out until the end of Turn 60 / beginning of Turn 61. We've still got decent odds to get our own religion, but it was a completely unnecessary and stupid risk.

Fortunately there haven't been many techs from other teams in recent turns. There has been a crazy amount of whipping, lots and lots of whips out there. Turn 56 had 11 pop whipped by different teams! Lots of 1 pop whips as well, which are often inefficient in the early game. I keep wondering if some of these teams are at war with one another, otherwise it's hard to explain the many whips and terrible expansion (5 teams are STILL on only two cities each! Thank you Bantams!)

The super dangerous team is the Sevenspirits Zulu one. I know this is not exactly a revelation, everyone knows that Seven is very good. But even I can tell from Demos stuff that they are outplaying everyone else in this game. They already killed Retep and took his capital. They added their fourth city this turn, only 3 turns after our team. They are keeping up in tech; I don't have a clue what they are researching, but they have 10 techs now which is more than anyone other than our team. They must have tons of land to expand into since Retep is dead. They are the team to beat in this game. I have to hope that their poor econ traits (AGG/SPI) will lose out in the long game to our much much better ones (FIN/PHI). If we can run over Bantams the way they ran over Retep, then it's an even game. That's a big "IF" though.

[Mikehendi]

Fortunately I did have a chance to do some planning yesterday for this game. I think we'll be in decent shape for the next 10 or so turns. Basically we can set things up to finish Monarchy tech and also produce a Great Scientist both at the same time, at the end of Turn 72. Then revolt to Hereditary Rule (and Organized Religion if we land Judaism) on Turn 73, as the Great Scientist walks north to the capital, Academy on Turn 74. Expansion is lower than I like because the second city is tied up producing the Great Person and not whipping settlers or workers. That said, we get city #5 down in the west on Turn 66, and we'll be able to double expand to 7 cities around roughly Turn 75. Anything beyond that point is too far in the future.



On to the current turn. We've revealed some seafood resources near Bantams, and the land appears to keep going to the east a bit more. Bantams has found another team in the last half dozen or so turns, because he went from spending 4 espionage points against us every turn down to 2 EP. Whether we've got another team on our continent or he found someone across the water is unclear. I want to head the scout east and either find more contacts or find the eastern shore of our continent. (Still moving one tile per turn with the scout for safety, we've done well to keep him alive all this time.)

Bantams finished an axe last turn in his capital. He's now got 3 warriors, 2 archers, and an axe by my count. Hopefully the axe is just intended for defense; I would be surprised if Bantams tried to do anything aggressive, our power rating is very close to his. I do make sure to play each turn after Bantams so that I can change builds or whips in response to what he does.



This is a little bit irritating. I'd be lying if I said that I really wanted a Bantams warrior hanging out near La Rochelle. Still, Bantams is a multiplayer ladder guy, so this is probably one of their "sentry" units designed to warn him if we make any aggressive moves. I don't really care that much so long as the warrior stays up there on that hill. We'll expand borders from the monument in La Rochelle in 5 turns, and that will help give us more early warning of anything on Bantams' end. There's also an axe coming out of the capital in a few turns after that worker finishes, and I'm going to try and rotate him up to La Rochelle, rather than having our frontline city defended by just a warrior.

Our cities are still doing their thing, growing and working cottages. Judaism is still alive, although we'd have it already if we'd taken a better tech path. The big mover this turn was ad hoc, who gained 31 score points from a combination of a new tech, land points, his third city, and finishing Stonehenge. That news isn't bad for us, since ad hoc badly delayed his expansion to build Stonehenge and isn't viewed as being a power player. If we're really lucky, then some other Industrious teams were also going for Stonehenge and were left holding an empty bag. (Wetbandit and 2metraninja are both IND as well, and both still have 2 cities. If they were going for the wonder, they just lost bigtime.)

Hopefully we just have to survive two more interturns for our religion.

[Catwalk]

You probably know it already, but keep in mind that you'll need to revolt 2 turns if you want to switch civics as well as switch religions.

[Mikehendi]

Thanks, I did know that. We'd want to revolt to Hereditary Rule for sure as soon as Monarchy tech is done; if we land Judaism, then we'll want to pick up Organized Religion basically for free at the same time. Whether to pop into Judaism as well depends on how well the religion is spreading, we might want to save that turn of Anarchy and change religions in a future Golden Age. But let's make sure we get the religion first.



This was another rotten bit of RNG luck. We attacked the barb warrior with our axe at 99.9% odds and nearly lost the axe. Down to 2.0 out of 5 health, blah. (The other barb warrior is on the tile west of the bananas, it was visible at the start of the turn.) Fortunately I waited until the two barb warriors were separate or we might have lost this axe. Well it should be OK, we should have a chance to heal up this axe with no problems, but it's still a minor pain.

Bantams moved his warrior a tile closer. It looks like he's just scouting our territory, which is not a big deal. (He keeps fortifying the warrior after moving and then canceling it at the start of each turn for some reason.)



Here's the rest of our territory with the tile yields turned on. Two cities growing at end of turn, fourth worker finishing, good stuff. Bourges swapped to library this turn, it'll be 3 pop whipped next turn down to size 3, and fortunately has the food to regrow immediately to size 4. Then we start working some Scientist specialists for that early Academy.



Demos still very good. They will of course drop when we pull off some whips though. Anyway, the main thing to discuss is the Monotheism / Judaism race. The religion is still there, which means we are once again guaranteed the dreaded coin flip chance at founding the religion. I'll list our possible competitors in order from no threat to real threat.

No Threat
Ad hoc: got a tech last turn. Not possible to land Judaism, out of the race.
Gavagai: sane story, tech last turn, no chance.
2metraninja: discovered a tech this turn, won't be stealing this religion.
Bantams: no, just no. (More seriously, discovered a tech 2 turns ago. Not beating us to Monotheism.)
Goreripper: he discovered Writing on Turn 54 and hasn't gotten a tech since. Not possible.
Noblehelium: he's not in this race. This team discovered a tech on Turn 53 and nothing since, so even if that tech was Polytheism, they haven't picked up Masonry yet. They cannot research Monotheism.

Low Threat
Sevenspirits: This is unlikely but theoretically possible. They picked up a tech on Turn 53, and then another on Turn 58. If the first one was Polytheism, and then the second one was Masonry, then they could 3-turn Monotheism and discover it the same time as us, and then win a coinflip. I really don't thnk this is possible because I don't think this team has enough GNP to tech Monotheism in 3 turns.

Dhalphir: Discovered techs on Turn 51 and Turn 54, nothing since. If the first was Polytheism and the second was Masonry, then they could tie us for Monotheism next turn. I think this is unlikely though, since that would mean skipping either Pottery or Animal Husbandry techs, one or the other. Theoretically possible though.

Kuro: Picked up techs on Turn 51 and Turn 54, nothing since. This is basically identical to Dhalphir, I find it unlikely that this team would beeline so deeply on religious stuff, but it's again possible.

High Threat
Wetbandit: Most likely to tie us and beat us to Monotheism. Techs picked up on Turn 52 and Turn 56 without anything since. The big difference for wetbandit is that his civ has discovered 10 techs already, instead of the 9 techs of Dhalphir and Kuro. That means that wetbandit has enough techs discovered to get all of the big early game 3 (BW, AH, Pottery) and also have Mysticism / Polytheism / Masonry. I'm hoping that his extra tech was Fishing and not stuff on the religious line.

Maybe this is all silly. I mean, can my luck really be THAT bad to lose two religions in a row on coin flips? I'm pretty much resigned to it happening though. The next turn can't get here soon enough so that this resolves one way or another.