Babylon's Nebula of Cheddar(Phi/Ind)

[The Black Sword]

I had my heart set on Asoka(Spi/Org), I really didn't expect anyone to pick it, but I guess it makes sense for Pindicator's Aztecs.

So I went back through my trait evaluations again. First I tried to better determine the relative gold values for Fin/Org/Agg. The most convincing example I had was from scooter's PB53 updates where I could look at the relative values on T50, T75 and T100 for an advanced start game, since he was tracking his Fin bonus and posted screenshots of the finance screen. The Org and Agg bonuses actually tracked each other pretty closely, with Org beginning to pick up more value at T100. Fin only made slightly more than each.

This game had everything stacked in Fin's favor btw, scooter was playing Fin so he would have been maximising for it and he had no early game traits that would accelerate the maintenance costs. He was playing CTH which has a more powerful version of Fin(since it affects river tiles) than RtR. It didn't leave me thinking very highly of Fin. Agg was making a lot more money than I realized though and it moved up in my estimation.

That made me think a bit harder about the buffs to Ind and Imp - 15% civic maintenance and 10% city maintenance respectively. These actually seem pretty damn good, I usually feel fine picking either of these traits without the buff. Now they've got 30% and 40% respectively of the main Agg/Org effect. And actually Ind is even better than that. Every calculation in civic costs round down to the nearest integer before moving to the next part of the calculation. Suppose you would be paying 5gpt total, 1gpt for each civic. That 1gpt get multiplied by 0.85 from Ind and then rounded down to 0. This occurs for each civic individually and now you pay 0gpt maintenance! 

Ind just feels totally nuts, we're also a 5 player game with no other Industrious competition. We even have a (pretty meaningless) discount on Banks and Universities thrown in. No production bonus for the Pyramids is undoubtedly a nerf, but I'll just build everything else instead! So I'm feeling very grateful to Pin for forcing me to reconsider.

At this stage the question was what to pair Ind with. Pro doesn't work with Babylon and I still have question marks over the general power level of Fin and Exp. I was thinking I wouldn't want Org, because I only want one civic cost reduction to activate the rounding effect. But thinking about it, there's a decent chance it was coded so that the rounding effect would occur twice, so 10gpt -> 5gpt by Org -> 0gpt by Ind. Might be worth checking out for the future. I decided against Cre because I'll very likely want to make a run at Stonehenge. That point is held against both Spi and Agr also. Spi/Ind not getting a bonus on the Mids is very annoying too. I really wanted to play Spi, but it has all these points against it and it feels like a lot of work just to try keep up with the free stuff from Phi or Imp. 

Ind/Imp I thought about the longest and tried to do some sims out. Why not take both buffed traits?  I was worried I wouldn't get the full value IMP bonus on the first two settlers due to advanced start but it worked ok in the sims. I could buy a cheap settler in the capital and it only wastes the minimum 1t moving before founding. Can't buy the garden with points though because the city isn't settled yet. 

I was originally trying not to play Phi since I've used it a lot, but ultimately the new Ind/Phi broke me. This is another trait pair where the Pyramids nerf doesn't feel great, but I guess I'll just try to get my gpp from wonders instead of specialists. Either way, I felt I had to try this combo out and see if it is really broken.

[The Black Sword]

So this has been my top candidate for my start:
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500 points spent on two cities, 2 workers, 2 granaries, Hunting and 1 pop point in Babylon. Babylon quickly grows to 5 then gets a settler out, Akkad builds a worker before starting it's growth.

Compared to starts involving buying 3 cities, it is behind in food/hammers but ahead in beakers, at a ratio of almost 1:2, which I'm pretty happy with since advanced start slants things in the other direction. However there is something slightly unsatisfactory about it - the granary bought in Akkad doesn't start snowballing immediately since we build a worker first. I've been mulling this over and looking for other uses of the last 50 points, but I couldn't really find anything better. I resolved to wait for the extra information from the start to explore any further ...

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Plains hill plant with first ring 5 yield tile and immediate trade connection, I'll have to test this out.

Also, beaker costs are slightly less than in my sim, 52g vs 51g for the first row techs. I can't doublecheck settings until I finish the advanced start process though.

[NobleHelium]

The map is 32x32 Small Toroidal. There are 610 land tiles. There are more than 10 peaks on the map.

Small in this sentence means Small map size. 52 may have been the cost under Standard size.

[The Black Sword]

Thanks, that did it.

[The Black Sword]

In the end, with a good location for a 3rd city, we went back to the 3 city play:



The extra option of buying a 45h granary directly into your cities adds a bunch of extra permutations for spending your points compared to other civs. And I really tried to find an opening involving that, so I could feel my pick was working for me. They are fairly competitive, and you can see from my previous post that I'd go for them if the terrain was different. However with this setup none of them quite matched up. I'm still very happy with my pick, but there would have been something extra satisfying to have a Garden down on T0.

Anyway, this is how we spent our points:

3 cities (300)
2 workers(120)
Hunting (51)
Sheep pasture (24)
5g left

[The Black Sword]

Looking at the power levels on the demographics screen, I think there's at most 1 warrior out in the world somewhere, that or Gav bought Mining for his tech to fill up the last 2k. I was a bit worried about this because I put my hammers into Gardens in the first few turns instead of warriors but that sounds fine.

Also, Corn, Pin and OH got away without spending any points on tech I think. I'm pretty envious if that's the case, they're 50h ahead already. Hopefully the delayed tech will cause them enough disruptions. I definitely had to buy Hunting any to unlock my food tiles. Maybe I could have considered picking the Natives a bit more to start with Hunting/Agri but it still looks tough.

[The Black Sword]

Here's the demos since I haven't posted them.


As mentioned, I'm keeping an eye on the power levels to see if I can notice any units coming out. I think I've found a decent plan to protect Akkad without costing me any snowball. We'll grow on a Garden to size 3 then finish it with the plains hill. If I put 1 turn into a warrior there, that shouldn't effect any of the granary breakout points while giving me enough time to finish it in an emergency.

Dur-Kur will remain vulneruble for quite a bit longer though. The risk in both cases should be super small, but I don't see an easy way to mitigate it here. I was mulling over a size 2 Garden plan, where we give the pig to the capital and sit working mine+cottage. On reflection though, the extra food gained is probably not better than working an extra cottage for a bunch of turns. I have pencilled in a worker build at size 2 before I grow to 3, but I'm afraid we might have an excess of worker turns. Also, I'm not writing Dur-Kur in all my reports so I guess I should decide on a naming theme.

The capital has been locked in on a very nice size 2 Garden plan from the start, before growing to at least 4 while finally getting some warriors out.

45h Granaries are just good in general, but there is a little bit of debate in the early game whether you should push workers/settlers first. In my case we have 3 early happy sources already in view, so I'm pretty comfortable we'll get value from these gardens. RtR nerfed Slavery is not looking super appealing though. How many whips do I need to make up the revolt turn? I'm not sure it's viable to skip, but if I can figure something else out I might go for it.

[The Black Sword]

Border pop showed up some nice resources.

Decided to go with the worker over the settler in Dur-Kur. It means I sort of have to go to Pottery next and lay down some cottages to make use of the worker turns. I'm a bit afraid because usually I think I should be pushing food/hammers instead at this stage of the game. However the northern sheep city just looks so uninspiring and it's the only one we could realistically go for. I'd need a full set of 4 roads to settle it and after the sheep the tiles aren't great. My worker would also have to spend a turn unprotected on the hill NW of the pig. I have total vision of the surrounding area, so I won't get ambushed by any barbs but the micro would really be thrown into disarray if I had to deviate. 

There are 2 reasons commerce might be more useful than usual here; I want to make sure I hit my wonder techs before/on par with everyone else and we're already behind on beakers due to the advanced start.

Speaking of wonders, I want Henge and The Great Lighthouse in the early game. Looks like almost every city can be coastal. Both can hopefully be built in the capital which has a bunch of mines. There are not a lot of forests about so I really want to hold my chops for the wonders if I can. Akkad looks like a decent spot for the Moai, with just enough production to build the thing and 13 coastal tiles. I'll certainly get a relatively early Metal Casting so we'll want the Colossus as well. The Oracle feels like a bit of a sidequest from these goals. As for the Pyramids, I think I'll try get around the nerf by running some dirty great engineer pools. If we hit great, otherwise I'll let OH take it and go on wonderspamming.

[The Black Sword]

Gav scared the crap out of me by not playing a double turn and sure enough he's turned up on my borders ...


But it's with a scout. Nice.  

He could try camp some resource, which would be minorly annoying but it's pretty risky with me in the first time slot, if Buffy builds a warrior he doesn't get a chance to react. It would also nuke our trade routes, so I don't see him doing it. His trade screen confirms he started with just 2 cities.

I'm feeling pretty good about the opening right now. We've hit each of our techs pretty much just in time to use them, so I'm not feeling too put out at having invested some points in tech. The Demos have been looking quite decent ever since my resources have been improved.



I think OH had 4 extra pop at this time, so that mostly makes up the food difference. Now that the capital has completed it's cheap Garden it can grow quickly to 5 itself.

Draft plan for the next few turns is to go AH -> BW -> Myst. At least I was satisfied that AH first and slowbuilding the next settler was better than BW first and whipping it. The delay in the Ivory happiness makes the capital whip less powerful. The capital's settler will probably go north somewhere, we'll revolt to Slavery while it moves and then Buffy will whip a settler for the wheat spot while Angel starts on Stonehenge. Of course it's not too firm because horse (hopefully) showing up will cause us to rejig things. 

After thinking about Slavery for a bit, I realised that the extra cities don't really make the revolt turn any less efficient than usual. An extra city means we lose more resources on the revolt turn but also means another build queue and happiness counter to use. It's only high pop that would increase the cost of the revolt without correspondingly increasing the value of Slavery.

I'm thinking Stonehenge should be fairly safe btw. Cornflakes will want to pop borders with his cheap UB barracks. Gav needs to get to both BW and Pottery first to unlock the power of his cheap granaries. OH should be struggling with tech having bought none and will want to skip early non-essentials like Mysticism. Pindicator's Aztecs start with Myst but being Spi, he will likely want to use religion and artists to pop borders. He also has no extra early game hammers from his traits to put into the wonder.

[The Black Sword]

Worker turns feeling pretty efficient, every pop working improved tiles, none to spare. Another mine completes next turn for my capital as it grows. Ready to start the ivory camp next turn too. Hopefully we get a juicy horse location.