Training Succession Game

[Dominae]

Settler first

Cities: 3
Pop: 9
Workers: 4 + 1 Slave

Granaries: 1
Warriors: 0
Curraghs: 0

Philosophy: 39 turns (10bpt)

Constantinople: 4-turn Settlers
Adrianople: 37 Shields (toward Granary)

Tiles improved: 75 Worker-turns
Shields produced: 203

[Dominae]

Comparison

Granary-first has one extra city over Settler-first, which is a big deal in the early-game. Then again, Settler-first is only 3 turns behind, and has Constantinople spitting out Settlers at a nice 4-turn pace; Granary-first, OTOH, is awkwardly at 5-turns Settlers. So we can expect Settler-first to catch up in about 15 turns.

Granary-first has produced a lot more units than Settler-first. In fact, Settler-first has only Workers! This is a natural consequence of prioritizing Food early on; with the Food available, I always prefer Workers. However, this is a dangerous strategy because the AI could come around and mess everything up. This is why I traded techs around a lot in both games, to make sure the AIs were relatively happy with me. As expected, no attack came (one rarely does on Monarch), so Granary-first's Warriors are doing nothing more than police duty (still pretty good). Note that, had I wanted to be defensive, I could have built more units in Adrianople instead of proceeding straight to a Granary (there's a 22 Shields difference in Adrianople between the two games - a little over 2 Warriors).

Settler-first has double the number of Workers at the same time period, and a staggering double the number of Worker-turns of tile improvements down. Thus we can expect most of Settler-first's future cities to be working improved tiles the turn they're founded. A constant problem with Granary-first's start is that with so few Workers produced in the first turns (in favor of Settlers), many cities, including Constantinople, were working unimproved tiles for the first 40 turns. I assure that this is not omission on my part, but a reflection of what happens when you do not have enough Food to sustain your Granary-enabled Settler production.

Settler-first has produced slightly more Shields overall than Granary-first, but this will only get better because Settler-first has many more Shields coming in (again, due to the discrepancy in tile improvements).

Granary-first is (as punkbass predicted) ahead in the race to Philosophy, but (again!) due to the Settler-first's better developing economy I am guessing the latter will get there first (confirmed - see further posts).

Note that the extra Slave Worker in the Settler-first game was only acquired rather recently, and only contributed about 3-4 native Worker-turns.

---

Conclusion: IMO, Settler-first is the right call here. To "prove" it I will play each game all the way to Philosophy, to see if Settler-first's economy really outperforms Granary-first's.

[punkbass2000]

Well, not much time to post/report, but here's a screen and quick rundown of my 'granary first' run.

Cities: 3
Pop: 6 (though I will have growth next turn in two and two in the other as well as a settler about to found a city in tow turns.)
Workers: 2 (though significantly further ahead, I went settler-worker-settler instead of settler-settler-warrior.)

Granaries: 1
Warriors: 2
Curraghs: None

Constantinople currently at 5 turn, though that will be rectified next turn.
Adrianople: 38 shields towards granary.

Philosophy: 38 turns, 11bpt.

I didn't count shields or worker turns.

Oh, and yes, that's a SGL, which I obviously can't use for sake of comparison.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by punkbass2000
Constantinople currently at 5 turn, though that will be rectified next turn.

You mean Constantinople becomes a 4-tump next turn? How?

Oh, and yes, that's a SGL, which I obviously can't use for sake of comparison.

If Granary-first grants you a SGL and Settler-first does not, then I concede that Granary-first is better.

[punkbass2000]

Originally posted by Dominae


You mean Constantinople becomes a 4-tump next turn? How?

Sorry, I meant it will achieve sustainable 5fpt.

If Granary-first grants you a SGL and Settler-first does not, then I concede that Granary-first is better.

Oh, yeeeeah, that SGL was an integral part of my strategy. So is the next one! (I disbanded the first, honest.)

Philosophy at 1350. Not gonna do a quick rundown yet, and will probably play and post settler first tommorow some time.

One thing I didn't notice before was the minimap, my exploration was far more extensive at 2110, and I removed the minimap for this screen.

[Dominae]

Two SGLs!! I am humbled...

By the way, thanks for doing this comparison with me. I'm not trying to hijack your succession game thread, honest. Rather, I really like to know what's the best opening sequence in any given start.

[punkbass2000]

Oh, no problem, if there's anything a University needs its a few professers teaching classes and doing their own independent research

[Krill]

Simple question: In Granary first, why did you not make Constantinople build workers when it could only build 5 turn settlers. If you built 2 workers, instead of one 5 turn settler, how far behind would you be compared to settler first @2110BC?

[Modo44]

Originally posted by Dominae
Two SGLs!! I am humbled...

You simply choose too high difficulty levels.

I recently got my very first SGL. I believe it only happened because I was playing Regent level, for a Stretegy thread. No SGLs ever on Monarch and Emperor.

[punkbass2000]

Originally posted by Krill
Simple question: In Granary first, why did you not make Constantinople build workers when it could only build 5 turn settlers. If you built 2 workers, instead of one 5 turn settler, how far behind would you be compared to settler first @2110BC?

Not sure what you mean by 'only' 5 turn settlers, given the that the best you can realistically hope for is 4 turn. I tend to think you'd be pretty far behind, but I may be misunderstanding. Are you wanting two workers before the first settler, second settler or after?

[dmd175]

Hey guys. I will get to my turns this evening. Looks like we are a bit behind some of the other test runs so we'll try to catch up.

I for one appreciate the research efforts of PB, Dominae, et al. The early game is so important and the analysis will help us all.

In assessing Dominae's comparison of granary vs. settler first, I think I have the same question as Krill. Dominae did a good job standardizing the games, but I think the build queues should be as much as possible identical save for switching granary and settler. While settler first goes settler--> worker --> granary --> settler, granary first goes warrior--> granary --> settler---> settler.

It appears to me that the differences between the two tests (summed up as granary first has a larger economy quicker vs. settler first which has a slightly smaller economy but a higher rate of growth) are explained by the lack of workers and the lack of workers built, which is a function of the granary first queue. Instead, the granary first queue should be modified to build workers on par with settler first, so that we can extrapolate and isolate the effect not of order and intensity of build queues, but the effect of larger capital early/increased production later vs. more cities earlier.

Perhaps build queues with standard 1st four builds of worker, warrior, settler, granary, in different orders, followed by only settlers, or settlers/warriors, or...

Granary first: Warrior --> granary --> settler --> worker ----> settlers, etc.
Settler first: Settler --> warrior --> worker --> granary -----> etc. settlers, etc.

[girlfriend]
calls me away from computer. will edit and revise later
[/ugh]

[punkbass2000]

Originally posted by Dominae
Ok, here's my comparison of the "Granary first" and "Settler first" alternatives for this starting location. First some notes concerning my methodology.

I played the first 10 turns of the Granary first scenario just like punkbass did, and the subsequent turns based on this post:

To begin with, I hope you're not offended by my (minor) criticism of your methodology. Beyond the fact that our tests will be far from conclusive given the many random factora in any civ game, I think it would have been slightly better to start from the ten-turn save to keep variable to a minimum (I think ideal for this comparison would be to continnue from the turn before the first settler would complete, and switching that to granary for the 'granary-first' scenario.)

Thus Constantinople's queue looked like:

Warrior
Granary
Settler
Settler
Warrior (to get to size 4)
Settlers

I have quibbles here, but they're not your fault. I should have made myself more clear in my original dissection (the part you quoted and based the queue on). As you have seen in my run, I would not actually build two settlers immediately after the granary, I was just saying for the sake of argument that I could build a granary and two settlers in the same time it would take to build two settlers. Also, I presumed Adrianople was to be founded at 699 (which I still prefer, BTW). I had thought that warriors, etc. wouldn't matter for the purposes of this study, as we're primarily counting food, but workers can be a real wildcard here. For me it's almost problematic that workers only cost ten shields Anyway, for a "fair" comparison between the two I think you'd need to produce two settlers ASAP in 'settler-first' which would be sub-optimal and thus unfair anyway.

After the second Settler, I more or less took over and played the game just as I would from that point on. This, I hope, minimizes the "noise" between alternatives due to different prorities in micromanagement and high-level decisions (i.e. build order priorities and city placement).

Aside from the inherent flaws I mentioned, above, this sounds like the best way to go. I think we can assume that over such relatively few and early turns that our overall goals (individually) will remain largely unchanged and fairly easy to keep on the generally same path for both scenarios, it will just be a matter of how many resources we have, which is the criteria and should be variable anyway.

[punkbass2000]

Yeah, I just realized that Dom didn't build any warriors, including the one I built immediately. I think this seriously throws off the results. I started from turn 10 on my granary-first run and there's no really good way to build a settler at that point. Assuming that granary-first doesn't *need* a warrior (and I can't see why it would, at least vs. settler-first), to compare to what I've already done will either probably make settler-first look worse than it should and Dom's way makes settler-first look better than it should. So much for trying to eliminate individual bias I wonder if this is largely a result of me generally believing in granary-first and thus knowing the "optimal" strats with it, while Dom is more familiar with settler-first. I suppose we could try to compare my granary-first to Dom's settler-first, though that still runs into some problems, it could be interesting. I'm interested to know what contacts you had in 2110BC Dom, and when you acquired them w/o warriors. Same for huts, as well as overall exploration.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Krill

I believe the only thing that's been cemented so far by the discussion is that Dominae and I are going to have to play a one-on-one PBEM

Been there, done that, won the T-shirt. It's not all it's cracked up to be...

Yes, but it is your favorite T-shirt...

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Krill
Simple question: In Granary first, why did you not make Constantinople build workers when it could only build 5 turn settlers. If you built 2 workers, instead of one 5 turn settler, how far behind would you be compared to settler first @2110BC?

This is a good point. By sticking to punkbass's plan (as quoted in my above post), I had to build back-to-back Settlers/cities with only one Worker for support. If it were up to me, I would have built at least one Worker in there somewhere; one Worker per three cities is simply not enough in the early-game, especially when we're talking multiple pump city potential.

Would this have made a difference in comparison to the Settler-first game? What we need is someone to figure that out...