[pb46 spoilers] Hitru lurks again

[Old Harry]

Turn 99

Our trade route with Baii came in last turn - I'm not sure what changed, but it's worth 20gpt so we're delighted! They help us easily finish Monarchy this turn ready for the golden age next turn. One more intercontinental civ should fill all our trade routes.

City 18 - ReplayInfo - appeared this turn. It'll mainly be a fishing village that can draft a few units later on. Looking at the land around here our mapmaking god (praise be to TBS) may hate sheep, but he really loves deer.


Here's a dotmap for Python Island with a settling order for the urgent cities (we'll come back to the fillers later). We're estimating Guilds will arrive around t130, so getting all these sites before we start putting all our hammers into knights would be awesome.


This is what our cities are up to. The happiness column shows how important our golden age and switch to Hereditary Rule and Confucianism next turn will be. We'll use Caste System to push great people from B, G then H. The first has a 37% chance of being a prophet - if we miss that we're probably not getting a shrine. We'll switch into Organised Religion next turn too to build some missionaries and hasten the infrastructure that we've neglected in the land-grab phase.


Demos and power. Rusten's remarkable (for non-IMP) expansion continues as he hits 15 cities this turn, tailing him is Pindi on 13 (why did we have to be his neighbour?) and Krill has recovered massively to be on 12 cities. BaII and AT/Adler have been impressive too with 11 cities each. TBW (who we think choked Krill at the start of the game) and Borsche (who burnt 2mn's second city) both demonstrate that early aggression is usually counterproductive with 7 cities each.

[Juri]

How many of those Confucianism spreads are natural?

[Old Harry]

How many of those Confucianism spreads are natural?

We got a free missionary with the religion, so seven in ten turns. Is that particularly lucky? Hinduism has been around for 70 turns or so and we've got double the followers, so maybe...

[Charriu]

Digging into the code

QuestInfo (Actual name: CvQuestInfo) 177 lines

I feel like I have to apologize every time one of these classes pops up. Yes like LeaderHeadInfo before it, this once again is just a connector between those XML data about quests to the C++ code. The quests if you don't know are those special events that require you to do special things, like the one we got at the start of game with the chariots.

There's once concept of programming that you don't find in every language, but a lot in C++: Pointer. You may be well aware of variables like integers, strings or boolean, which store numbers, characters or conditional statements. You could say a pointer is a special variable that stores an memory address. It, literally, points to one position in the memory. Pointers are one reason why you can write better performing code with C++ compared to other languages. The reason why that is that on a microscopic level saving data to a boolean, integer etc. is much more cost intensive then just saving the address and switching that same address. If you do a lot of calculations those small performance differences can have a huge impact on the overall performance.

[Charriu]

Digging into the code

ReplayInfo (Actual name: CvReplayInfo) 726 lines

So first of all, yes you are right, this class deals with the replays you can watch at the end of a game. During your game data is handed to this class, which saves those data. When you win or retire a game those data is received by the python scripts, which do show those replays to you.

While we are on the topic of writing and saving data, let's talk about: Serialization. Basically what it means is translating data floating around in your code into a format that you can write to a file. This can have multiple usages, one of the most obvious once is save games. But that's not the only part in which serialization happens. It also happens when those 'Net' classes collect data to send to servers and other players. This data is also collected and formatted into a file that the other side can read. Serialization is of course a very important topic for games, as you might imagine.

[Juri]

How many of those Confucianism spreads are natural?

We got a free missionary with the religion, so seven in ten turns. Is that particularly lucky? Hinduism has been around for 70 turns or so and we've got double the followers, so maybe...

I will admit to not knowing the actual formula for spreads, but that seems like an insanely good rate you've received!

[DaveV]

There once concept of programming that you don't find in every language, but a lot in C++: Pointer. You may be well aware of variables like integers, strings or boolean, which store numbers, characters or conditional statements. You could say a pointer is a special variable that stores an memory address. It, literally, points to one position in the memory. Pointers are one reason why you can write better performing code with C++ compared to other languages. The reason why that is that on a microscopic level saving data to a boolean, integer etc. is much more cost intensive then just saving the address and switching that same address. If you do a lot of calculations those small performance differences can have a huge impact on the overall performance.

Pointers are also incredibly dangerous. If a pointer somehow gets a bad value in it, the program can spray data randomly throughout memory, causing bizarre behavior up to and including crashing the operating system.

[Old Harry]

Turn 100

How many of those Confucianism spreads are natural?

We got a free missionary with the religion, so seven in ten turns. Is that particularly lucky? Hinduism has been around for 70 turns or so and we've got double the followers, so maybe...

I will admit to not knowing the actual formula for spreads, but that seems like an insanely good rate you've received!

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/n...ad.171581/

This is a big map at 128*80 tiles, so maxPlotDistance = 128/2+80/2 = 104 which, according to that thread means any city within 6 plots of the holy city (imagine 6th ring borders) has a 10% conversion chance each turn, 7 plots is a 5% chance each turn and 8 is a 3% chance.

4 of the cities are in that 10% a turn ring (the fifth, B used up the missionary to get a temple up quickly), so after ten turns I'd be surprised for them not to have converted. The other three must be within the 5% or 3% rings and we have 9 cities that haven't converted yet. I don't think that's above expectation actually.


This turn we met Commodore and opened borders straight away. His work boat came from the east, so we may run into him soon.

We launched the golden age and switched to HR/Caste/OR. This cost us a bit of gold due to civic costs. It also cost about 40 food due to running 20 specialists - for our second GA and a bulb or shrine and to prime the pump for that eventual third GA.


Demos and power. Even after shedding 40 food we're still second on crop yield.

[Hollybombay]

Hows the empire doing?

[Old Harry]

Turn 107

Hey Holly, the short answer is that it's doing great. I've been on my holls, but Hitru guided us through our golden age without a hitch (or a turn report ). While he was at it he settled String in the east and put another settler on the galley in QuestInfo which we may send to the interesting little island we've found, or to the plains hill 4NE of String where it can work deer and corn and may become one of our strongest cities.


Hitru also settled TalkingHeadMess as the last city on the Pindicator border - hopefully he won't try to steal the sheep from us, and we can have a peaceful and friendly time over here while annihilating our other neighbour. Unless we think he looks tastier when we get knights. Pindi actually has room for about ten more cities on the mainland, so he shouldn't turn his sights on us for a while.

Meanwhile the selected chariot will go try to scout Elkad again - he just sent his scout through out land so this seems fair. And the settler from N will settle the fish in the far south. In foreign news we met a workboat from TBW - he's somewhere to the south and we think he borders Krill, so we'll get a scouting workboat headed that way ASAP.


Demos and graphs. We have Baii's (Mouseferatu's) graphs (he spent a turn in anarchy to convert to Confucianism) so I'll include all the important ones.

We also revolted to Vassalage/Slavery (which saves 5gpt and gets us some nice XP for the upcoming army) then we fired a bunch of specialists, making our crop and mfg look awesome again. The Exports-Import line is a bit problematic so I closed borders with Commodore after this picture to stop him making quite so much cash from us.

Golden ages are nice.





We'll get a couple of longbows out on the borders soon to keep the neighbours quiet.