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(May 27th, 2020, 16:11)El Grillo Wrote: Sentry WC sees 4 full tiles thanks to elevation and water, and the absence of seafood means that the currently marked X should be fine. Plemo played shortly after I took this screenshot and he opted to keep moving to the south. Thank you for cooperating Plemo, in return I will let the Warrior live.
I said back then that this spot would be a better city spot then 1N. But with Amicalola gone and the new revealed tiles, I don't think we need to settle this place that soon, right?
May 27th, 2020, 17:11
(This post was last modified: May 27th, 2020, 17:11 by El Grillo.)
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Agreed, without Amicalola the city doesn't need the lake on the diagonal any more, and it can wait a bit since we have a stronger Ivory option in the northwest, and it's a slowish starter needing culture to hook the crabs, and lacking in forest chops. It'll end up as a glorified fishing village, especially if an island city to the southeast ends up needing the crabs more.
May 28th, 2020, 17:11
(This post was last modified: May 28th, 2020, 21:27 by El Grillo.)
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T50:
I really screwed up my Granary-building math so unfortunately the T50 recap won't be quite as nice as I had hoped. Still, can't complain about where we are, and if I could be guaranteed this position at the start of the game I'd have definitely taken it. We've discussed our short-term goals (boom safely, emphasis on safely), tech path (Meditation -> Sailing), and next city placement (riverside copper), so there'll be a few turns where we just scout and let things proceed as planned.
Speaking of scouting, it turns out there's even more land to the northwest. What is going on here, this map clearly isn't set up the way I had imagined it was (a donut roughly in the shape of PB2 with players spaced evenly around the outer edge, but with more natural-looking edges). At this point we don't actually have evidence that we're on a donut at all, i.e. we haven't seen any indication of an inner ocean. I guess the Warrior is going to just keep heading NW following the defensive terrain, and we'll see what we see.
The other two WCs are healed and Springer Mtn is out of revolt. The C2 WC will just check out SE-SE to defog the coastal route, then can sit on the marked X to prevent any barbarians from spawning. The C1 Shock WC will follow the coast to the west and look for Amicalola's neighbor. It's too bad neither of these units can get Sentry from barb xp, but that's the price of using autopromote. I would definitely like a couple of wins on the 6/8 WC headed west to unlock the Heroic Epic for us.
City review, now with actual Granary-building plans. Something about this is still throwing me off, I can't quite explain why. It would be a lot easier if I could directly set food and production quantities in a sandbox, but it seems BTS doesn't support that. I had to tweak my tiles a bit to get all the numbers right. I've read up again on Granary mechanics, but I'm not sure I fully remember how to best build and fill them.
Tuolumne Meadow:
Working one turn of plains forest to finish the Granary a turn earlier trades off 7f for 3c, which seems well worth it. We finally get to work our first FIN riverside cottage on T51 (hurray?).
Humboldt Forest:
This city can just proceed as planned, but I'm 10h behind where I thought I was, so its Granary will finish a couple of turns later and help on the 3->4 growth instead.
Springer Mtn:
As mentioned before, swapping to an Obelisk next turn and whipping immediately to get the 3 improved tiles in culture ASAP. May end up just growing on fogbusting Warriors, 2-pop whipping the Granary, and then regrowing again. With all of its hammers, this city might as well build a bunch of Warriors while it's unconnected to the trade network, I suppose.
Demos with Springer Mtn look good as expected, but surprisingly someone has more food, which I'd guess means 4 improved food bonuses along with some extra pop over me. We should overtake this as we grow our cities a bit more. Costs went up significantly with Springer Mtn included, but I'll have enough gold to finish Meditation, and the cottages and lakes coming online will help a bit too. Global top power is steady so I don't think it was superdeath whipping units last turn. Lazteuq settled his 3rd city this turn. Start-of-turn score tracking is getting a bit hard to parse now that there are more cities claiming tiles and growing pop each turn, so I might stop that and just focus on mid-turn city founding, whips, and the power graph. To be honest, while in-depth C&D was crucial in making the decision to attack Amicalola, it takes me quite a bit of time and isn't the most enjoyable part of Civ for me.
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About the granary: The best time to finish a granary is when you have of your foodbar filled.
To explain why for those that don't know. The granary has an internal storage, which you can't see in normal play. Every time you gain food at the turn roll your granary is filled with the same amount of food. The storage limit of the granary is half of what you need for a new pop, so if you need 22 food for the next pop, the granary fills up to 11 food. When your city grows you get the overflow from the food + what is in your granary storage. So let's say you are at 20 food, need 22 food and you make +3 food while your granary is full. After growth your foodbar contains 12 food = 1 overflow + 11 granary storage. One last important information is that whipping instantly reduces the stored food in the granary.
So with that in mind it's best if your granary finishes the same turn that you hit the half way point in food.
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Hmm, could you please elaborate on that last part about whipping reducing Granary stored food? The tests I ran, and the article I read at CFC, concluded that whipping had no effect on the amount of stored food.
The pattern I remember is whipping 1t from growth once the Granary is filled, allowing it to regrow that turn and end up with 50+% food on the next turn.
Sadly, for me the difficulty I was having recently was just in adding numbers up to 60 and counting up the turns in-game vs the sandbox 
May 29th, 2020, 02:43
(This post was last modified: May 29th, 2020, 02:55 by El Grillo.)
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T51:
The turn rolled right as I was about to go to bed, but you know how it goes...
In the biggest news of this turn, I could've sworn Ramk's culture wasn't here last turn!  My assumptions about the map continue to be challenged. He clearly isn't where I thought he has, due north of us. Really glad this Warrior has survived long enough to get this crucial scouting info. I'm guessing this is his second city which just popped borders (somehow? Or I was just blind last turn) founded in our direction. We'll have a better idea next turn if I can peek into the diagonal. I may want another WC soon to patrol this area just to keep him honest, and we'll definitely have to look at the front city dotmap again.
Southern scouting reveals nothing of particular interest. Good thing too, I don't know if I could take finding two neighbors in unexpected places in one turn...
At home, the numbers do match the sandbox, thank goodness. Also, the capital's third-ring expansion revealed a juicy pig tile in the eastern peninsula. Peeking at the fog around that peak, it looks like this region might be fairly sheltered from the north. But does the entire landmass veer sharply from there? That doesn't seem to be the case. Fortunately, the sentry WC will illuminate this quite satisfactorily over the next dozen turns.
Picking up two 2f3c tiles is good enough for top food and average GNP.
I had another thought about not whipping Springer Mtn immediately, but instead keeping its pop high and maybe even whipping Humboldt Forest on the turn before Meditation finishes, to make it favor Springer Mtn as the holy city (if we get it, of course). Considering it's only 4t until Meditation, it's not a huge loss for Springer Mtn if we just whip in the Obelisk a few turns later.
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Well by whipping you reduce the amount of food you need for the next pop. Let's take this example:
You need 26 food for the next pop and your granary storage is filled to the max of 13. Now when you whip one pop you only need 24 food for the pop, because of the reduced pop size. Therefore your upper limit for the granary storage is now 12 instead of 13. Because of that you loose this 1 food in your storage. I could totally be wrong about that, but I remember my microplan back at PB40 was correct with this.
Now there could be a few things there that explain difference between my explanation and yours/the articles:
- The article didn't state which version of BtS it used.
- PB40 used RtR and there could be changes regarding that storage limit in there, that I don't know right now.
But regarding:
Quote:The pattern I remember is whipping 1t from growth once the Granary is filled, allowing it to regrow that turn and end up with 50+% food on the next turn.
You are totally correct. In addition to that sometimes a 2t from growth can become a 1t to growth, because of the reduces amount of food needed for the next pop from whipping. Let's say you have 21 food in, make +2 food and need 24 food. That would be 2T. But if you 1-pop whip here you only need 22 food to grow now and still have 21 food in and +2 food, so it also is a 1T growth.
May 29th, 2020, 02:51
(This post was last modified: May 29th, 2020, 02:53 by El Grillo.)
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Ah I see, you're right about the maximum amount of food stored going down. I haven't yet tested that part, but it makes sense. In that case I think we're on the same page, thank you for clarifying 
I used the trick where whipping helps to meet the growth threshold twice in the micro for the WC rush, it really came in handy there. It's going to be trickier to keep finding optimizations like that now that I'm playing without an accurately synced sandbox, I don't have the talent of some players to find these solutions on the fly.
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T52:
There was lots of new info to process this turn!
First off, I missed one simple explanation for how Ramk's culture could have appeared on that tile at eoT50: it's his capital's third ring!
So uh, yeah, about those assumptions  The Warrior will defog a bit to the south, since there's no chance it'll be able to spot his city tile. Maybe I can find his second city too? I get the feeling this area between us is deliberately less rich and contested than the floodplains river valley between me and Amicalola, but it'll be important to get a defensible border all the same. I'll be doing a revised dotmap at the end of this post.
Fingers crossed for seafood 2E of the Warrior. N of crabs would be a great Moai city!
In the southwest, I changed my mind slightly about this WC and intend to bring it gradually back up north.
Meeting more neighbors in this direction is a bit of a luxury given how much empty space there should be (though I wouldn't be surprised to see borders when I land on the gold hill), while the priority right now is supporting exploration and settling efforts towards Ramk.
At home, I tweaked the cities to both finish their Granaries this turn as planned, they aren't getting max efficiency on the first storage cycle but close enough. Global average power continues to rise gradually, but no one is spiking.
The other big news was getting graphs on Plemo. As expected from his other games played, and from his being first to 3 cities, he's doing quite well for himself. It looks like he had three food resources at his capital and picked up another at his second city, and he's been putting his pop lead into a couple of earlier mines and cottages. I definitely need to figure out where he is and keep an eye on what he's up to.
This report has already gotten quite long, so I'll split off the revised dotmapping into its own post.
May 29th, 2020, 20:11
(This post was last modified: May 29th, 2020, 20:41 by El Grillo.)
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T52 dotmap update:
The change in my thinking is for two reasons. One is knowing that Ramk is to the northwest instead of due north, and the second is remembering that duh, my capital will pop its third-ring borders on T50 and claim more tiles. I swear sometimes it's like I haven't played hundreds of hours of this game.
The north:
Instead of the next city being the backlines riverside copper/floodplains site, I'd like it to be Brown dot instead. This has to do with both reasons for the remapping. One, it's no longer straight in Ramk's direction and so shouldn't draw his immediate aggression, and is more defensible if it does, since it'll be so much closer to our cities than his (e.g., 1t move for a WC in the capital). Second, the capital claiming 3rd-ring copper means that the site can immediately work two high-yield tiles in the copper and cow and contribute much more, much earlier. Furthermore, it claims land in a direction that supports a future city in the corn/gems area, and there are two Workers positioned perfectly to get it up and running quickly. This city can stagnate on hammer tiles (cow + farm + copper + 2x grass hill mines) and build military more or less indefinitely.
Gray dot will need some stronger defenders and worker support post-Iron, but I think it'll be a good safe long-term border city with Ramk. He can found his own riverside hill to claim the dyes in a way that minimizes overlap, along with a city south of that rice. Given how close our capitals are, I think it's a reasonable split, though that jungle pig is a toss-up.
Central Egypt:
These sites are somewhat lower in priority, but high value. White, Dark Blue, and Turquoise dots are sites that can chop out a Granary and then just work floodplains cottages forever. They'll need some Worker labor and a way to expand borders, but will be powerhouses down the road. Purple is slower-starting and lower-priority.
The south:
I'm still thinking about the logistics of how to best get these sites up and running, but I think this is where Yellow, Red, and Green dots should be planted (presumably in that order). I'd like to spec Yellow and Green for production of boats and military for the eventual expansion westward, while Red is a slightly above-average fishing village only because it claims the Silver.
All in all I think we should easily have room for 14-15 reasonable-quality cities at this point. Let's see if we're able to secure them all without exposing ourselves militarily. That being the case, we also don't necessarily need Sailing next, and might be better served heading to Mathematics or Iron Working earlier instead.
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