A Tale of Two Cities

[Aginor]

When I have referred to it, I have meant '3' (the blue circle tile). This probably does need clarification.

It's not viable to crack the whip indefinitely. There's a great article on the ROI somewhere - it ends up working out that it's a viable strat up to size 10 if you've got a Granary up, but that the returns start dropping off rapidly around size 6.

As for the early rush of our capital issue:

1) What are the odds?
2) We can deal with discovering the Horde when it comes. By going Hunting first and getting a Scout online, they're not likely to blindside us.

[Dominae]

I'm not saying it's very likely or that we will be completely unprepared, but there are scenarios in which the game is not "over" if our opponents get to our capital, in which case we will be happy to have the Hill.

It's certainly not going to sway my decision, but it's something to consider.

[Blake]

Blake are you using an updated sim with the difficulty set to Prince? Without using Cottages we might not reach all the techs we need in time.

Yup. The research is tight, but not unbearably so. I think the research is slightly faster on the hill because there's no need to work a hammer tile. The FP site OTOH doesn't need AH for a while.

It's not viable to crack the whip indefinitely. There's a great article on the ROI somewhere - it ends up working out that it's a viable strat up to size 10 if you've got a Granary up, but that the returns start dropping off rapidly around size 6.

*nods*. I feel it's best to whip when you're killing off population which isn't working anything too good. At the start, we can grow a lot faster than we can improve, so lashing the excess population makes sense. Once we get Monarchy we can keep growing and growing and adding allocating to mines, at this point it's probably best to stop lashing and turn the capital into a super-city.

I'm not saying it's very likely or that we will be completely unprepared, but there are scenarios in which the game is not "over" if our opponents get to our capital, in which case we will be happy to have the Hill.

Yeah... there will be ample time for an enemy to amass half a dozen chariots before we have even 3 new cities, a rush could arrive long before our borders are anything near secure.

And our skirmishers also work best when we don't have to use them. They are a deterrent. So the harder we make our defenses, the less chance we'll have to use them. It's best for any enemy to think "We don't even have a chance of dislodging those skirmishers".

I'll try and get up a detailed comparison of the two starts... after sleeping.

[nbarclay]

Hereditary Rule deals only with happiness problems, not with health problems. We may want to wait until we either have more health resources or are finished expanding to grow our capital really big.

[Theseus]

Just opened the latest sim... here are my impressions:

* This is a friggin' great city site (ie, the hill).

* The only things that could really improve it would be the best food or gold resources, but even without those it's great.

* Health in the short- and medium-term is not a gating factor, due to the high availability of food.

* To the extent there are health resources in the immediate area (which will be necessary post-Monarchy), we can just as well pick them up via cultural expansion and tight city spacing as by moving the first Settler.

I say build on the hill, right now.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Theseus
* Health in the short- and medium-term is not a gating factor, due to the high availability of food.

I could not disagree with that more strongly. Flood plains are really nice tiles in the absence of health problems. But health problems reduce flood plains to where they're no more useful than river grasslands. It takes two unhealthy laborers working irrigated flood plains to match the food surplus one healthy one could produce. Or, looking another way, an unhealthy laborer has to work an irrigated flood plains to get the same food surplus that a healthy one can produce working the same flood plains with a cottage. So health would very definitely be a significant limiting factor on our economy if we go with the hill start.

[Dominae]

As I was simming, I remembered this:

Originally posted by Blake
It's not unbearable though since the fast growth means we don't spend much time at unhappy levels. I think the main thing is we get Monarchy ASAP (since Monarchy follows priesthood, there is no change of early research).

Monarchy is a ways off. In the interim, without the +1 Happy from a Religion and +1 from the Temple, or poprushing efforts suffer. I tried it. It's much harder to get to those 3 pop rushes (size 6) without slowing down growth in the process. Size 4 rushes become all but impossible (i.e. painfully slow). The same goes for 10-turn overlap rushes, which we would need to do if we kept our pop small, unless we work Mines to slow down growth.

This is indeed a challenging start. I wish we could develop some common ground with regards to simming. One of us should post a complete, step-by-step sim and let others try to improve on it. I'll look into that.

[nbarclay]

What I'm using to try to deal with the happiness issue in my current experiment (where I missed Buddhism) is a tactic of building settlers or workers using hammers in between pop-rushed settlers. The basic idea is pop rush all but the first turn of a settler, then build military while waiting to grow to the after-rush happiness limit, then build a settler or worker conventionally (thereby suspending growth), then build military again while growing to size six, then build the first turn of a settler and pop rush the rest. I haven't played far enough to see how it works out yet, and there might be better tactics, but it's one way of dealing with the low happiness limit.

[nbarclay]

I just came up with an interesting option for a flood plains start.

1) Start off by researching Mysticism and Meditation while building a warrior and maximizing growth.

2) When the warrior completes, start a worker. The same turn, Meditation is discovered, so start researching Hunting.

3) Five turns later, Hunting is discovered. Shift emphasis to production and interrupt building the worker to build a couple scouts.

The Meditation beeline dramatically increases the odds of getting Buddhism, in exchange for about a five-turn delay in the scouts compared with the best that can be done emphasizing growth until the capital reaches size 3. (Purely in terms of production efficiency, it would be better to wait until we build the worker and the worker can build a mine to shift any emphasis to production for scouts, but that would cost another big delay in scouting.)

[notyoueither]

Trying to get a feel for where we are in opinion. We're pretty evenly divided. Please correct me if I'm wrong about where you stand on the issue.

for hill city:
dejon
Blake (awaiting final word of possible new plan using fp)
Theseus
vmxa1

for fp city:
nbarclay, 3 of the hill {Edited by nbarclay to correct my vote.}
Aginor, 3 of the hill
Dominae

awaiting final word:
Arrian
As for myself, I am hoping a consensus develops. I'll do some of my own noodling around when I can get out of work.

[nbarclay]

I'm not sure we should count votes cast before we learned about the error in health calculations. Correcting the error reduces the number of healthy citizens a hill start can give us by one third before we hook up the sheep and by 25% after we do. The correction doesn't hurt the flood plains start nearly as much. That raises a serious question about whether people who voted for the hill start but haven't said anything since we learned about the miscalculation would still vote the same way after learning about the error. (Note that I write this from the perspective of being someone who changed his vote after learning about the miscalculation.)

I'd like to ask people who voted but haven't spoken up since the miscalculation was discovered to reconfirm (or change, as the case may be) their votes if they want to make sure their votes are counted.

[nbarclay]

I edited NYE's vote tally to correct which flood plains I think it's best to settle.

[Theseus]

I'm playing through the new sim... I don;t have time to lay out the whole path as Dom requested, but I will note that with a hill start I am still running into the happiness cap before the health cap (i.e., unhealthy but not to the point of materially screwing me up).

I just got to 1000BC, having:

Units:
3 Warrior
2 Scout
2 Worker
2 Settler
3 reg Skirmisher

Bldgs:
Granary

Top Techs:
Writing, Archery, Med, BW

Improvements:
6 fp cottaged (6 roaded)
2 fp irr'd
2 hill plain mined
1 sheep pastured

Current:
Pop 3, growing in 1; Library in 20; IW in 6

Note: Don;t remember if rushed Granary; did rush the Settlers; didn;t settle more cities yet

Note: I'm sure we could do better optimizing, resulting in higher pop as of 1000 BC... even so, the re-growth rate is *fast*.

I have good notes about halfway through, but then I was experimenting, and I'm out of time right now (thus the unknown about rushing the Granary) ... sorry, running out.

My vote for the hill stands!

(Last note: Whipping EotS will ahve an interesting effect on the city rankings!!)

(Laster note: I'd offer to have nye call me on my cell, but I'll be on a subweay! )

[Aginor]

Working on final paper due in 4.5 hours so I don't have much time to comment/demonstrate math, but here goes:

1) Looks like it's 8 Forests vs. 7 on FP3/FP2, so no health differential. If there were a pop point differential I'd insist on FP3 *no matter what*. OTOH you will eventually be able to get away with a chop on FP3 that you can't afford on FP2. Could be a key 30 hammers for a Wonder/building.

2) Toss the whip out the window if you're on the hill. It ain't worth it.

This is a gut feel call on the basis of the depressed food production. Basically, at size 4, 2 extra food = 20 food/10 turns = free whip every ten turns with a Granary up (since we're size 4 and knocking us down means we need 40 to grow, storage box restarts at 25 once we're working on size 5).

To put it another way - whipping is generally only cool when the troops are unproductive to start with. ie: unimproved squares worked/at or near happiness limit. Health limit is gonna be a big problem there. The opportunity cost of turning all your FPs into farms (rather than splitting Farm/Cottage in an effort to get some research going) isn't worth it. Not having anything at all above Writing in 1000 BC on Prince level scares me.

Also, whipping is a LOT stronger when you can feed brand spanking new unhappy citizens (along with the content ones) to the Ritual of the Machine. Overpopulation can be a good thing, and the whip at size 6 is a beautiful thing indeed. Particularly if you want to whip infrastructure (Library) or Settlers.

True, there is an MM art to it as noted - at this difficulty sometimes you want to flog down to size 3 and arrest growth at size 4 with Mines, then kick the size up a turn or two before the unhappy penalty resolves in order to get to size 6 at the right time again. Similar tricks apply on Emperor, but it's much harder there to get mileage out of the whip without either a happy resource or just plain silly food production (2 coastal Fish, and other similarly abusive starts).

Finally, keep in mind that you build Settlers and Workers considerably faster if you're not struggling against the health cap during the early game. It's not just about hammers. At size 4 that +1 hammer on the hill turns into an effective -1 hammer/turn any time you choose to build a Settler or Worker.

Long and the short of it - the only grounds upon which the hill is defensible as a settlement point IMO is if you decide that defense > stuff. Me, I'd always prefer another couple units to defensive terrain bonuses. They're more flexible. But then, I'm the same guy that ran Yang in SMAC all the time, so production-maximization disease is to be expected.

[Blake]

To put it another way - whipping is generally only cool when the troops are unproductive to start with. ie: unimproved squares worked/at or near happiness limit. Health limit is gonna be a big problem there. The opportunity cost of turning all your FPs into farms (rather than splitting Farm/Cottage in an effort to get some research going) isn't worth it. Not having anything at all above Writing in 1000 BC on Prince level scares me.

In my hill trials I always cottage every floodplain and have had no growth problems. The sheep is 3-2-1 so every tile being worked provides 3 food. With a sheeply health cap of 3, that gives a grand total of +5 food for growth, which is plenty. It's also enough to work the 2 plains hills and the grassland hill once we've maxed out at the happy cap.
If a tile is farmed, it should be one which will be shared with a 2nd city, primarly so that 2nd city can grow from size 1 faster, and/or to micro-manage the food situation to avoid things like being 1 food short of growing.

Finally, keep in mind that you build Settlers and Workers considerably faster if you're not struggling against the health cap during the early game. It's not just about hammers. At size 4 that +1 hammer on the hill turns into an effective -1 hammer/turn any time you choose to build a Settler or Worker.

The fact is, on the hill the point of break even (+1 hammer -1 food) is initially at 3 pop, that is when we'll probably stall to train a worker. The pasture then raises the break even point to size 4, which would be a good point to train a settler. So it's only after training this worker and settler that the hill site actually starts to lose out, and a health cap of 3 is quite ideal for whipping down from 6.

I'd also like to point out the hill site gets +1 floodplain, which reduces the food difference to -2.

What clinches it for me is the defensive bonus of the hill. If nothing else it turns the capital into one less city the enemy can feint. Another factor is at the hill it's optimal to get AH early, which means we learn of horses. In order for the FP site to beat, it's nessecary to delay AH significantly.

The deer will probably come in handy for working whatever else is down in the tundra, like silver or furs.

Vote = HILL!