Mikehendi Pitboss 16 Thread

[Mikehendi]

Thanks again for responses. I appreciate any help to keep me from making dumb moves!



Came out of Anarchy and planted this city. As mentioned before, the goal is to lock down the north border with Bantams and make sure we control everything to the south. Lourdes is in a fairly good defensive position, it can't be moved on the diagonal from the northeast because of the lake tiles, and when borders expand we get the peak tile in borders for deep visibility into Bantams territory. Lourdes is also on a hill tile too. The one defensive weakness is horse archers or knights moving into the gap between La Rochelle and Lourdes, forking the cities. I am hoping that never happens. Basically if we survive the next 25 turns without getting attacked, we'll be so far ahead of Bantams that he'll be helpless to cause much damage. Plus we have more power than him right now (although a lot of that is from tech and population).

Lourdes is not that bad of a city either. It's taken the dry corn from Aix for now, leaving both cities with +5 food, and we get three riverside grasslands for cottages before border expansion, then five afterwards. We will also have the bananas ready to go in about 20 turns post Iron Working and Calendar techs. A free religion spread here would be amazing. More likely, we will have to use a missionary to pop borders.

The barb axe north of Rochelle moved away from us this turn, thank goodness.



Let me explain the logic behind Carcasonne, our other new city. I mentioned before that this was a good spot because it was safe, and it will immediately become a strong city once it finishes its lighthouse (turning both lake tiles into 3/0/3 tiles). Why this spot though? Well, moving the city a tile east onto the hill reduces overlap, but it doesn't gain much of anything. A non-river grassland and two water tiles, no big deal. Then it also removes the ability to mine the grassland hill, which will be the only production tile this city has. And if we moved the city a tile east, we'd also need to farm over to the wheat to spread irrigation post-Civil Service. In this spot, the wheat automatically gets the extra food. I also considered a tile further south, which does pick up the whales, but then we lose a riverside grassland + riverside plains to the north in exchange for water tiles. That's a bad trade. Plus the city would then need a border expansion to get the lake tiles in culture! I think this was the best spot in this little area for a city. By the time we reach Optics tech, we'll have hit 100 culture in this city and have the whales within borders anyway.

Current sandbox has a galley finishing out of Bourges on Turn 90, with a settler ready to hop on board and found a city on one of these islands. Where that city is going exactly, that we don't know. But we will need an island city badly for Currency trade routes, so any spot with a food resource will work. If nothing else, we can plant at the crabs over there and work with that. Something should turn up.



This is the current turn, Turn 82. Mathematics research is done, and a whole bunch of forest chops are finishing in the next few turns to take advantage of it. Next city is planned for the tile east of the wines (due Turn 88), and we have workers planned to road to that spot. Of course barb axes are going to cause trouble again. I spied this guy with the scouting axe over here. Well, between the axe here, the one in Lourdes, the one coming over from Rochelle, and the spear in Aix, we can probably take care of this barbarian. Please no repeat of the last one! Horses are still in the process of being connected. Ideal would be this barb moving off to the east and leaving me alone, unlikely though.

Big news for the turn is Gavagai researching Code of Laws first and founding Confucianism. This makes Gavagai an even bigger threat than before, and he was already doing very well. Gavagai is tied with our team as the only civs with 7 cities. He is leading in Food and we are #2, here look:



Goreripper is also close with his 6 cities. Bantams is not really in the discussion. (He also recently triple whipped his capital for something, still with no granary in place, which was not the best decision.) Gavagai though, playing a great game so far. Definitely worthy of respect. He has the best leader by far for this map in Darius (FIN/ORG); with so much water everywhere, and the Toroidal wrap, ORG becomes almost as good as EXP and probably equal to CRE. Gavagai has FIN trait, plus cheap lighthouses, plus cheap UB sacrificial altar, plus the ORG discount on civic costs. It's honestly a bit unfair on these map settings. It could be worse though - he could have taken Holy Roman Empire instead of Aztecs for his civ pick. I wouldn't take either due to terrible starting techs, but if you're going to take awful Hunting/Mysticism start for Aztecs, why not take HRE instead? Anyway, the point is that Gavagai is doing a great job and is a major player in this one.



There's the corresponding GNP graph. We've been #1 anytime we run max science, and close to the lead whenever we drop to 0% science. None of our neighbors are quite our equals, though they are doing decently. Except Bantams, who has done almost nothing to increase science over the last 50 turns. He's about to get left in the dust as we all hit the Classical era and the tech costs ramp up.



Power graph for completeness sake. Everyone is pretty equal here. We would be leading by a good margin without the massive barbarian slaughter of 950BC.



Finally the Demos from this turn. These numbers are very good across the board for a game with 10 rival teams. For the curious, GNP was about 115 at break-even (roughly 65% research) and a little over 130 at max science. Teams must be hurting badly for happiness if we're in first place there despite carrying a bunch of double-whip penalties in cities. Hereditary Rule civic and religious happiness are paying off hugely. (I should also mention that we've burned three Anarchy turns thus far, Slavery / HR + OR / Judaism. Most teams have only revolted a single time for Slavery, and of course the SPI teams haven't lost any turns.) Now we need just ONE more settler out of the capital - sorry mackoti! - that settles for the wines, and then we should be good to grow upwards like mad.

I've only sandboxed up to Turn 90 so far. In theory though, we should have 10 cities on Turn 100, and our capital should be size 11 about to hit size 12, working the three resources and 8-9 grassland cottages. If only the barbs will behave themselves...

[scooter]

Just read this thread from start to finish. Really nice thread and game so far . Will be following with interest!

[Mikehendi]

My evil plan to take over Realms Beyond continues! Thanks scooter.



The main issue for this turn was deciding what to do about this barb axe. Basically, would this barb axe attack our axe on the forested hill or move away? I did some searching at CivFanatics to see what I could find about barbarian AI behavior. From what I can tell, the answer is "maybe." Barbarians can spawn with different AI routines, although the most common one by far for wandering barbs is AI_ATTACK. These ones will typically go after the first unit that they spot, regardless of the combat odds. I realized that this was what I was doing wrong with my sandbox attempts for the previous barb axe - I had pointed out that in my tests the barb would never attack Bourges no matter what I did. Then in-game, the barb did attack Bourges. Whoops. It was the same thing here, barb axes that I tested would never attack my own axe on a forested hill.

Then I changed their AI mission to the attack one. You can do this in the Worldbuilder under the Unit tab, the same place where you assign promotions. That changed everything! All of the barb axes were then perfectly willing to throw themselves at my axe on the forested hill at 3% odds no matter how many times I tested it. I then went back and loaded up some old savegames from Single Player stuff, and confirmed that all of the barbs that were spawning all had that AI_ATTACK mission, unless they were defending a barb city that spawned.

Long story short: I think that this barb axe will suicide (well, attack at 3% odds) against our own axe on the forested hill. If it moved west instead, we can hit with two axes and a spear, hopefully avoiding another debacle like the last time. There's even another axe coming in from the west. The one irritating thing would be the barb moving southwest into the forest. Then we'd likely have to bait a defensive axe vs. axe fight across the river. Please let's get this over with quickly and without another massive bloodbath.



Goreripper finished a Classical tech this turn, I opened the diplo screen and confirmed that it was Currency. Timing of this is great for our civ. Dhalphir and Goreripper have both teched Currency just before we're about to begin, that means about 5% extra bonus beakers as we research it. I also took this picture to showcase our respective resource pools - we are about the same, except that our civ is leading in food resources (7 to 5). Goreripper has horses and an extra luxury in the gold tile. Basically he settled more for strategic resources, while we settled almost exclusively for food in the early game, not sure which is better. (I'll mention though that we're finishing the pasture on our own horses next turn, and connecting a clam, and we have a wheat tile that's being worked and isn't roaded.)

Maybe most importantly, we get a comparison of our raw economies here at 0% science each. We make 61 gold/turn while Goreripper makes 43 gold/turn. Neither one of us should have any gold multipliers at the moment, this is base commerce minus expenses. I think this is pretty much the value of FIN trait in a nutshell here. I counted, we are getting the FIN bonus commerce on 16 tiles this turn (and we only have 26 total population). As good as traits like EXP, CRE, and ORG can be, on this map with water and rivers everywhere, FIN is still the king.

Now we wait for Kuro to play to find out what that barb axe did.

[Mikehendi]

Good news: CivFanatics code-digging was a success. The barb axeman suicided against our own axe.



Bad news: Our axe went down to 1.5 health in a 98.8% odds battle. And the barb axe has a friend - incoming barb axe #2.

I'm not really complaining though, this outcome is perfectly fine. Could do without the second axe, but at least this way we've got time to shuffle units and prepare. Here's how we moved our units:



Trailing axe moved into Aix to cover HR happiness. Spear moved northeast, able to cover Lourdes next turn if something shows up or be ready to move southeast. (We actually want spears in our front line Bantams cities, not axes; the real danger is fast-moving immortals. A slow moving axe stack will give us plenty of time to whip defensively and react.) The worker moved northeast and finished a road on the plains tile, covered by an axe. I kept the injured axe in place, mostly for vision purposes. We want to see where the barb axe goes next turn. If it's west or northwest, then this is pretty easy, we just swap the axes and defend on the forested hill again. If it's southwest, move the other axe southeast and defend in the forest (which is about 91% odds I think). If it goes off to the east, that's fine, we get more time to shuffle units and heal.

The one downside is that this delays the wines city by one turn, to Turn 89 instead of Turn 88, since we couldn't safely road forward with these barb axes wandering around. Not a huge deal.



Cannes finally popped borders this turn and grabbed the clams. A worker also chopped a forest here for half of the granary. We're going to swap to a lighthouse next turn, double whip it at size 4, and then the overflow finishes the granary the following turn. This was a very slow starting city, after about 20 turns of setup it's finally ready to go. Cannes is going to be a great city, +7 food and four grassland riverside cottages, four more non-river cottages, grassland hills for production, etc.

Future city will also go up there by clams and bananas after we research Iron Working and Calendar, probably a little after Turn 100. This map has great land everywhere.



Capital getting ready to whip a settler next turn. I know, I know - the plan is to cease whipping after this. But the picture shows why this whip was planned, the capital is out of tiles to work if it keeps growing. It makes sense to turn some pop into a settler for the wines spot, and we definitely can use the wines for happiness too. The whip also creates 20 production overflow (becomes 25 with OR civic) for the library, which is our next goal here. This is the best way I see to play this, definitely planning to grow upwards next. A worker pair is on its way to lay down more cottages.



Demos still continuing to look outstanding. Gavagai did some whips while we kept growing, and that gave us the temporary Food lead. We'll lose that as some whips go through over the next few turns. GNP is amazing, Currency due in four turns. Still cautiously optimistic about how things are going.

[Mikehendi]

The second barb axe moved to the northwest, a good thing for our team. I swapped out the injured axe for a healthy one, and hopefully the barb will attack again at 1% odds against the axe on a hill. I was also able to get a spear into Lourdes for the first time, finally. It was nerve-wracking having the spear south of the city playing zone defense, I'll admit I was worried about a chariot out of the fog racing in. That city should be pretty safe at this point, on a hill with a spear inside and axes able to reinforce quickly.



This is the western part of our civ, the quiet part. The biggest news for the turn was triple whipping the settler in Calais, hopefully the last one we'll do. Cannes swapped to a lighthouse in order to double whip it the following turn. Note that we finally have horses connected in the southwest, we'll have to get a couple of chariots done soon.



We did pick up bar graphs with the Ottoman team, the one led by Hashoosh. Most of them were pretty average (power, production, etc.) with the glaring exception of this one, the Food graph. This one essentially says that Hashoosh is not a contender to win this game. Way too far behind in food, not enough cities (only 5), not enough population. In fact, the larger game can be divided clearly into the two groups of haves and have-nots:

Contender civs: our team, Gavagai, Goreripper, Sevenspirits, Noblehelium
Trailing civs: Ad hoc, 2metraninja, Bantams, Hashoosh, Kuro, Wetbandit

All of the teams in the first group have 7 cities or more (except Noblehelium who has 6, but they have the Oracle to compensate). All of the teams in the second group have 4 or 5 cities. As best I can tell, the overall population numbers are similar, those of us in the first group all have 25-30 pop, while those in the second group have roughly 15-20. Tech is even harder to tell, my best guess is that most of us in the first group have more techs as well. The main point though is that there's a clear division between winning and losing civs at this point. Fortunately we are amongst the leaders.

2metraninja revolted into Hereditary Rule / Organized Religion this turn, for what that's worth.



I was looking at the map a couple turns ago, and I realized that a road on any of the tiles north of Lourdes would grant a trade connection to Bantams. With Sailing tech, a trade connection will run down those rivers and lake in neutral territory down to Pasargadae. I canceled the cottage build which was halfway complete and built this road. Voila, instant trade route. The timing is excellent, as we'll be able to tap into the Bantams cities for trade routes once Currency completes. Sadly, his four cities will not be enough to fill up our own much larger empire. For this very reason, one of our upcoming settlers will plant on the offshore islands, probably around Turn 95. That's probably a bit late compared to other teams, but keep in mind we did start with a landlocked capital, and Bourges also was terrorized by that barb axe from hell. Doing the best I can here.



This is what the trade window looks like when you're losing. We've got about double the Bantams number of cities, and double his food resources. I'll be interested to see what his economy look like once we finish Currency tech, we'll be able to see his gold/turn. Probably not too good.

Bantams doesn't report, so it's up to me to explain the craziness going on to the north. I mentioned before that I track his builds in the two cities where we have vision because I want to know if Bantams is going for a rush. His play doesn't make any sense from what I can see. Bantams did not use Slavery civic even one time for the first 77 turns of the game, no whips. Since then he has kind of gone crazy; he has whipped his capital and second city 6 times in that span, and all but one were the inefficient 1 pop whips. The one exception was a triple whip in his capital for a settler - when the capital had no granary. Ouch! Pasargadae's builds in particular have made no sense. In that city, Bantams whipped a military unit (spear or axe? one of them) on Turn 80. Then he whipped a library on Turn 82. Then he whipped again on Turn 85... for a monument!!! Yes, whipping a monument as a CRE civ in a city that already had a library. WTF dude.

The good news is that Bantams genuinely doesn't seem to be rushing anyone. He built libraries in both cities that I can see, and he finally completed a granary in the capital (on Turn 86!) Still no granary in Pasargadae. We definitely hit the jackpot here in terms of northern neighbor. It's hard to believe that Bantams is playing CRE/EXP leader, he should be crushing us in expansion at this stage of the game!



This turn the barb axe didn't take the bait, and it refrained from attacking our axe on the forested hill. The CivFanatics thread that discusses this behavior says that's because the barb AI rolls a different number every turn (actually two of them and then adds them together) and that determines how aggressive they will be. Apparently every AI leader does this as well, and some of the AIs are significantly more willing to attack at low odds than others. Long story short, sometimes the barbarian AI will pass up those suicidal fights, and something they'll charge right in. It depends on a new dice roll each turn.

Not the end of the world though. We'll have another new barb AI aggression level next turn, and even if the barb passes up the chance to attack a second time, we should be OK. If the barb goes west, then three different axes and a spear could attack. (We can't be that unlucky, surely?) If the barb goes northwest, then a full health axe can move into Lourdes to defend, with the city bonus and hill bonus. And even if that combat lost, then we still wouldn't lose the city because of the spear inside. I even swapped Aix to a missionary for an emergency double whip (finish the missionary and overflow into military). So this was an inconvenience, hopefully not too bad.

To the south, there are actually three workers outside borders roading to the wines spot. Trust me, I am not crazy. I think. Our starting scout is doing amazing work down there fogbusting, verifying that the area is in fact safe. I want to ferry this guy over to Goreripper's continent and look for contacts over there, but he's too important in his fogbusting role right now.

Elsewhere on this turn, we whipped the granary in Lourdes for 1 pop (it was best to do so immediately and fill up the food box at size 1) and the lighthouse over at Cannes for 2 pop. That city will finally be ready to contribute now, with granary and lighthouse, after 20+ turns of setup. It also turned out that I was last to play this turn, not by choice - I went to bed with 7 people still remaining to play, and they were all done by the time I woke up. Well then. I hate being the last to play, I don't like holding up the game. Fortunately it was only about 30 minutes from what I could see on CivStats. This meant that we saw the interturn movement with the barb axe:



Yes, barb axe took the bait the second time. We even have enough XP for a promotion. We also picked up a free religion spread in Carcasonne, which is awesome because now we'll get the OR bonus on that city's upcoming lighthouse double whip. Not so awesome: Sevenspirits double expanded this turn, now out to 9 cities. Their team settled three cities on Turn 84, Turn 87, and Turn 87 again. I knew they had been too quiet lately. We'll hit city #8 next turn, but we're definitely behind them. Gavagai and Sevenspirits are the teams that I think are doing the best.

[Mikehendi]

Finishing up with Turn 87, not too much to report here. I'll mention that the plan for this southwest corner has cities going east of the pigs and west of the horses; the former spot to be settled in about five turns. Goreripper's capital is just across the water to the west, and there's no reason to put cities that will only be swallowed by his culture.



Cannes after its lighthouse whip, and with the granary finishing on overflow. This city was settled on Turn 66, and it was a very slow starter. Now finally - with border expansion and work boat for the clams and granary and lighthouse - it's a strong city. We should be able to get a good number of workers/settlers out of here through growing up to the happiness cap on grassland cottages and then whipping for production.

Currency finished at the end of this turn, bringing the much appreciated boost in trade route income.



Turn 88 brought city #8 in the form of Le Havre. This spot was picked largely to claim the wines, although I checked and no cities need the extra happiness immediately, so the workers will farm the dry rice first. I'm think that this is a good location for a production city, with the plains cows and several grassland hills. We'll chop the two forests into a granary (after spreading religion) and then build a barracks and pump military stuff. The scout is still fogbusting for barbarians down in the south, and once the axe in Aix heals, I'll put it on the forested plains hill to the northeast for more fog clearance. Until the borders of Lourdes and Le Havre can expand, at least.

Research went into Iron Working en route to Calendar, to make use of the various banana resources scattered around our start. There's one at Lourdes, two to the north of La Rochelle, and another to the north of Cannes. All of the bananas are under jungle that needs to be cut down. That may or may not be the ideal tech path, but I don't see a compelling alternative. We don't need Construction or Horseback Riding, our neighbors are peaceful for the moment. Metal Casting feels like a low priority, we're not IND and the forges would be expensive to build. We don't have a compelling need for Code of Laws for the same reason, courthouses are expensive without ORG and we won't be going to Caste System any time soon. In fact, we already have more buildings than most cities can construct just between granaries, lighthouses, libraries, and markets. We don't need another building for city queues yet. Civil Service is still very expensive at the moment and we need more time for the capital to grow, doesn't feel like a great target just yet. The real goal will be the free Great Artist at Music, but again, feels like we should make use of those banana food resources first while we can. Tech is relatively cheap on this map.



Current turn Demos. GNP remains outstanding, don't be fooled by 0% science on a tech with standard prerequisite bonus and no known civ bonus. We are 135 GNP at break-even rate of roughly 60% science, and about 155 at 100% rate. (When selecting double prereq Code of Laws, our GNP is 190!) So I think we're good there. The real problem is the Food stat, where we have inevitably started to fall behind despite putting down another city. The issue is that Gavagai also has 8 cities, and Sevenspirits team has 9 cities. I'm almost certain those are the two teams ahead of us in food. As I wrote a bunch of times before in this thread, we will eventually fall behind some of these other teams in foodhammers because we have no early game traits to boost us. Sevenspirits doesn't either, but they made the super high risk / high reward play of attacking retep, and unfortunately for the rest of us teams they succeed. That means they have two capitals, two super high quality cities, and tons of land to expand into. Imagine if we had two Calais cities, and we could devote one to commerce and one to foodhammers. We can't keep up with their rate of expansion. And Gavagai has by far the best leader for this map, he's playing great and using FIN/ORG to expand very fast. With this much water, cheap lighthouses are about as good as cheap libraries, it's really unfair how good Darius is for these settings.

Anyway, I feel that we're doing pretty good for this game, and we definitely have the most techs researched thus far. (We have 16 Ancient techs and 3 Classical techs, pretty sure that is the most in both ages.) It's the foodhammers side of things that worries me. We can't afford to fall too far behind. Food of 123 on Turn 88 is also crazy high - I went and looked at other Pitboss games, and most were well lower. Like here is Pitboss 12:




Not even close. Or Pitboss 11 (this is from Turn 89):




It's partly the map, the one we have here is very fertile. But I don't think it's only the map if that makes sense. The level of competition from the other teams is high in this game. I did not know that much about Sevenspirits coming into this game, he has lived up to the reputation. Very scary team from the numbers I can see. Gavagai, Noblehelium, and Goreripper are also doing well too. I feel like we would be destroying some of the Pitboss games I have read based on the opening we've played (like the Noblehelium / Serdoa team in Pitboss 12). Instead, we have a tough battle ahead. That is a good thing though, we will have more fun in the end.

[Oxyphenbutazone]

It's basically impossible to accurately compare across games. Every map has different challenges and pitfalls so I don't think it's fair to say that you would be crushing everyone in a different game because you would have completely different land and neighbors. For example, if you had built the amount of military in other games, like PB11, that you had here, you would have been punished for it. That's not to say that you didn't build too little military here or haven't played a great game(you have), but it's just a completely different situation.

[Lewwyn]

This PB has almost a crazy amount of green landscape and resources. PB11 had significantly more plains, desert, jungle, tundra, ice. PB12 had less land to improve in general, and again there was significantly less green(just look at Serdoa/NH's starting area filled with plains and desert). If you had the land you have here in those games, then yes, of course you'd be crushing them.

Honestly the level competition in this game IMO is just okay. You have Seven who's way over the top, then you, then just below you NH/gaspar and gavagai. Gorerripper is doing okay, but I wouldn't put him at that level. Then everyone else is playing greens level. Gavagai has been a bit of a surprise to me, but then he does have Darius + something else. Personally, I don't think you will have any real competition for second place.

[Mikehendi]

That's a good point. All of the maps are different, and this one is one of the most fertile that I've ever seen. The problem is that I don't want to sit back and play for second place, I want to win. Fortunately it's a long game yet to go. There's plenty of time for other teams to slow down the leaders through wars, or for teams to make mistakes in judgment. And our particular strengths (PHI + France) do lie in the renaissance era, hopefully we still have some tricks to play.

Leader in Food (presumably the Sevenspirits team) is up to 130 though for this turn. On Turn 89. Uh...

[WilliamLP]

Adding to the choir, I just caught up with your thread, and thanks for the fantastic level of reporting, screenshots, and level of detail.

I was just reading Seven's PBEM 6 thread from 2010, his first game against humans, and I was thinking "hmm, I actually know more about Civ than this guy!" So give people like you (and some of us PB11 crowd) a couple of years I say. You can't really compare stats across games, especially with one like this where you've been able to expand fairly peacefully, other than against a few lucky barb axes. But you've been playing an extremely strong game with what you've got. You certainly do a lot of micro stuff better than I did.

That said, please don't start patting yourself on the back too early!

I'll be watching with much interest to see what you can do with PHI and bulbs. As a guy who grew up reading Bill James I love your "Moneyball" analogy.