Micromanaging Early Shields

[UnityScoutChopper]

Arrian wrote:

I play with the happiness governor off, so I don't get autoplaced entertainers.

I play with him off, too, but this always happens to me anyway in cases where growth coincides with expansion of cultural borders. Maybe this was fixed in PTW?

I often forget, and find myself loading up the autosave (unlike reloading for better RNG results, I have no problem with fixing something I genuinely meant to do, but forgot) - at least in the crucial early game.

This is a bit OT, but... I personally feel guilty doing that. In fact, I kept having this problem where I would load from autosave to negate that type of disorder, and then I would sooner or later have such a strong feeling that the game was "invalidated" that I started up another. I restart a lot anyway due to the "lure of the start", even when my games are going well, and thus it gradually became ridiculously uncommon for my games (huge/16) to last longer than, say, 1000 BC. I thus turned off AutoSave and, while I find myself gritting my teeth a lot, I'm moving farther into the game and, as a bonus, am learning a la sink or swim to avoid disorder... which, considering I have ADD, is a bit of a feat.

Oh, the joys of neurotic gaming! :-)

Dominae wrote:

The main thing to keep in mind when counting Shields is that your cities grow, and this growth is better long-term than a "perfect fit" for Shields and production items. It's better to waste 6 Shields building a Horsemen in a 9spt city once, than to slow down its growth on the way to 10spt.

The growth issue is "unfortunately" complicated too. Very large towns in the ancient age are often a liability, because they often outgrow the empire's overall luxury-slider needs or their palette of developed tiles, or encroach upon other towns' (especially camps') developed-tile needs, or have trouble reaching 10 shields without an odd tile allocation, etc. But yes, food micromanagement is a consideration equal to, if not greater than, shield micromanagement.

While cities are growing, frequent micromanagement helps avoid waste by splitting, for example, a 30 Shield item into 2*7+2*8. This is the main reason why I like overlap between city radii (3-tile spacing or closer).

Amen brutha! This goes for food micromanagement as well, of course.

Once the cities grow to their (temporary) maximum size, I then plan to slow their growth by working Plains with Mines, Hills, or Mountains, or simply by creating a Specialist (usually Scientists for 40-turn research).

"Temporary maximum size" is something I find impossible to keep track of in my games, as it requires a level of context that I can't see when looking at a city... and I find it too distracting to jump out and back in again just to make sure I have a good reason for limiting growth. In other words, I find maximum sizes quite volatile, as I am constantly building more garrisons, raising happiness or lowering pop enough to free up garrisons elsewhere, improving tiles to add food or enough gold to change the luxury situation, bringing new luxury tiles online, hooking border towns onto the grid, etc. etc. etc.

in general I do not agree with artifically halting growth just to avoid Shield waste.

Jeepers, where did I recommend that? My lines of defense against shield waste are:
-- starting builds at 10-shields, completing them if they're a fit, raising to 20 if not, raising again to 30 if not, then just biting the bullet unless there's a useful 40+-shield item to build
-- OCP-filling camps, 3-spaced cities (my spacing is an "opportunistic" mix of 3, 4, and 5, with camps to fill the worst gaps), and tile redistribution
-- grabbing the chance to get a little more food or gold. (Yes virginia, I sometime leave max food squares unclaimed, if they provide only a little more food and are otherwise far worse than the best available alternative tile, except in some cases where the town is in a high-corruption area.)

There's a lot to talk about here, but it's all theory and therefore rather bland.

Dominae, the great thing about Civ and 'Poly is that it's a very varied experience for a very varied crowd. And me, I LOVE theory!

Another thing I've been working on lately is trying to avoid wasting worker turns whenever possible. In the past, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash at ordering 2 non-industrious workers to both road a tile of flatland (1 such worker needs 3 turns, the two together do it in 2... but it's inefficient).

Funny... worker micromanagement, on the other hand, I really can't get into. I mean, the worker dogpile stuff. I "elide" this micromanagement by just following the rules:
- never send a worker to an unroaded tile more than once, unless there is a strategic gain involved or the gain in turns-to-first-benefit will be immense. (For this reason, I can't see why dogpiling roadbuilding on plains would be an interesting case -- it's something I'd normally never do, unless maybe there was a forest there at first and I had nothing but slaves for the job!)
- never pair slaves and natives, because otherwise the math becomes too confusing
- never pair up when there's an odd # of turns to completion, unless
- never end a worker-turn moving unless moving into an unroaded square
- "always spread outwards" -- all else being equal (which it never is), when choosing a direction to move, choose the one farthest away from your existing cities, and when choose a target space, choose the one providing the most balanced "spread" of worker locations.
- "avoid the capitol" (pre-PTW only) -- once the capitol's needs are met, never unnecessarily improve its area, because you will constantly be buying workers that will have no efficient choice but to be doing precisely that.

Enough for now, fer God's sake!! :whatevertheiconisforlaugheyface:

USC

[Dominae]

Originally posted by UnityScoutChopper
Jeepers, where did I recommend that?

Nowhere. I was just using your excellent points to make an additional one of my own.

-- starting builds at 10-shields, completing them if they're a fit, raising to 20 if not, raising again to 30 if not, then just biting the bullet unless there's a useful 40+-shield item to build

Careful not to keep raising the cost just to avoid Shield waste. Sometimes those cheaper items are more useful, and well worth the wasted 2-4 Shields. The best example of this is China with a 3spt capital: do you build an Archer first, wasting only 1 Shield, or 2 Warriors, wasting 4 Shields? I think the right answer is the two Warriors, because early scouting power is so important.


Dominae

[WackenOpenAir]

hmm really looks like you go way too far in this.

-micro should not interfere with macro strategy. what has to be build, will be build.
-i don't see production as a constant thing, i can very well produce at 6 shields for 2 turns, then swich a worker to a flood plain for example and produce 2 more turns of 4 shields to finish a 20 shield thing. Much better than looking for something that costs 30 shields.

in other words, i will never alter my production to match the shields, i will try to alter the shields to match production. mostly that is changing it near the end of producing something.

only for a production of 5 or 10 shields per turn, i will pay extra effort to reach that.
(extra effort being sacrificing multiple trade or units or even a food, to get that 10th production, or giving that city a very high priority when deciding what a worker should do)

[UnityScoutChopper]

Dominae wrote:

Careful not to keep raising the cost just to avoid Shield waste. Sometimes those cheaper items are more useful, and well worth the wasted 2-4 Shields. The best example of this is China with a 3spt capital: do you build an Archer first, wasting only 1 Shield, or 2 Warriors, wasting 4 Shields? I think the right answer is the two Warriors, because early scouting power is so important.

Heh, I was waiting for that. The Persians (industrious, spearman vs. warrior) Zulus (non-industrious, true, but archer vs. scout) and Russians (non-industrious, but spearman vs. scout) are in a similar situation. Sometimes a rise in shield count in mid-build (e.g. 3+3+4 or 3+3+5) saves one the agony of the decision. Otherwise I too generally go the for warrior, but it all depends. Actually, for non-expansionists, the spearman is the most tempting of the warrior alternatives, as it can pop huts with relative impunity - nothing worse on a Huge map than dozens of turns of progress into the darkness because your luck ran out during a hut pop.

WackenOpenAir wrote:

in other words, i will never alter my production to match the shields, i will try to alter the shields to match production.

I do both, but I too usually do the latter.

-micro should not interfere with macro strategy. what has to be build, will be build.

I find that by setting builds to the cheapest useful item, then next cheapest, etc., what has to be built does get built anyway, and then you just use your road network and move it where it belongs.

-i don't see production as a constant thing, i can very well produce at 6 shields for 2 turns, then swich a worker to a flood plain for example and produce 2 more turns of 4 shields to finish a 20 shield thing. Much better than looking for something that costs 30 shields.

Discussing production as an inconstant thing would be too complex for the article. But there are many cases where you can predict in advance your next x turns of shield production -- which in extreme cases may be constant as many as 19 turns (for new towns in the midst of a peninsula, forest, and/or hills)

Incidentally, to tie into an earlier point of Dominae's and an old important food micromanagement oddity: when a city grows, it gets immediate new SHIELDS from the new tile, but not immediate new FOOD, and the auto-placed worker generally goes to the TILE CREATING THE MOST BALANCE. The upshot? If you're going to be micromanaging food for a town because its bonus-food tiles that don't add up to 5 (or 4 for an ungranaried town), it's best to "siphon" food from the town to achieve a good/perfect foodbox fit BEFORE the turn the town grows; if it grows and has plenty of food but not shields, it'll get a free 2-shield tile; if it grows and has plenty of shields but not food, it'll get a high-food tile, whose effect will be wasted.

USC

[Dominae]

Originally posted by UnityScoutChopper
Incidentally, to tie into an earlier point of Dominae's and an old important food micromanagement oddity: when a city grows, it gets immediate new SHIELDS from the new tile, but not immediate new FOOD, and the auto-placed worker generally goes to the TILE CREATING THE MOST BALANCE. The upshot? If you're going to be micromanaging food for a town because its bonus-food tiles that don't add up to 5 (or 4 for an ungranaried town), it's best to "siphon" food from the town to achieve a good/perfect foodbox fit BEFORE the turn the town grows; if it grows and has plenty of food but not shields, it'll get a free 2-shield tile; if it grows and has plenty of shields but not food, it'll get a high-food tile, whose effect will be wasted.

Yes, you always want to time things such that your highest Food output is the one that fills the Food box. The Governor will then choose a tile with high Shield output for the new laborer when the city grows, and these Shields are immediately counted toward that turn's production.

For this reason I like to keep an unchopped Forest around my 3+ Food surplus cities (non-River is better than River). Such a tile is the highest non-bonus Shield output you can get in Despotism without tile improvement, and so is perfect for boosting production when a city grows. It does not really matter that the tile does not produce good Food or any Commerce, because only the Shields are added when the city grows.


Dominae

[Theseus]

Man, I just do not operate at this level of MM.

For the most part, I'd just rather optimize improvement of shared tiles, use chops as appropriate, and mostly select builds in line with governor-governed ( ) build capacity.

That said, from some of the DGs and the AUSG, I acknowledge that severe (and I use that word on purpose) MM is stunning in its effect.

[Dominae]

Severe micro is standard fare for some players. And, once you get used to it, does not really take that much more time. It's one of those things you have to pick up on the way to being a truly excellent player (or so I've heard!).


Dominae

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Theseus
That said, from some of the DGs and the AUSG, I acknowledge that severe (and I use that word on purpose) MM is stunning in its effect.

It really is amazing what NBarclay and Dominae and the others squeezed out of that rock GS started on. If it was a solo game for me, there is no way that the civ would be anywhere near what GS is today. I really learned a lot about playing the game by watching them work.

I tend to avoid going to the extremes on MM, I usually manage my workers until my core cities are well developed and then auto them for the captured territories (usually around RR I have them all on auto, then take off to build the rr net quickly)

I think Ralphing alone has enabled me to win quite consistently (by which, ahem, I mean restarts for half decent positions ) on Emperor. Perhaps when Conquests comes out I can take it to the next level

[Dominae]

I expect all current Emperor-level players here in the Strat forum will really enjoy the new Demigod level. It provides that nice challenge we all look for in our games, without being too in your face with bonuses like there are on Deity.


Dominae