Turn 62 : 1560 BC

[PJayTycy]

report:

* moved scout along banana culture borders : SE on jungle hill
* moved worker to cows and started pasture (we have 12 turns before culture will expand, just enough to build the pasture and a road to the iron-hill)
* Tassagrad completed axeman (+4 exp), if we switch to a forge next, it will be finished in 6 turns.

[PJayTycy]

endturn attached

[binTravkin]

Any intelligence news?

[PJayTycy]

scout screenshot


foreign intelligence
Mercs : their second city grew a pop, they now have 4+4
Sarantium : their second city grew a pop, they now have 4+2

next turn our score will go up: due to culture expansion 20 turns ago and Being which will grow from 4 to 5
(although it will be unhappy then and we have to wait 3 or 4 more turns before we should whip again).

I don't have time to create more screenshots now, but I'll do so later. One overview screenshot will have to do currently :

[binTravkin]

Mercs seem to be quite powerful - two cities of pop 4 isn't little at a stage where some of the civs only just founded their second cities.

They were probably neglecting their military, instead trying to REX and now either barbs or Horde have razen one of their cities.

[Impaler[WrG]]

I've examined the source code and according to my calculations Barbarians can only spawn after the city count exceeded 10, prior to that only animals would spawn, Barbarian cities can spawn once the global city count hits 15.

Acording to PJ's score analysis their are currently 13 cities, Sarantium founded the critical 11th city in 1960 BC that opens the Barbarian floodgates. Mercs 3rd city was in 1760 and was then followed by a double in 1680 when we and Storm founded cities bringing the total to 14. The lost city puts us at 13. Two more cities will allow Barbarian cities to spawn.

I think It would be prudent to incresse our Barbarian defense meashures, the simplest thing to do is just have every tile under observation as Barbs can only spawn in unseen territory (the code first desideds that a barb is going to spawn someware in the world based on how many tiles are un-owned but places the barb based on un-seen territory. This means we can protect ourselves from Barb incursions by simply have a wide area of watched territory around us. Positioning some units on a few key hills could eliminate barb spawns in a lot of the peripheral territory, barbs walking in from outside that could be intercepted before doing major damage.

[Mart]

Would it be good to train our military by barbarian wars?
In Smac mindworm hunting was quite profitable, both planetpearls and unit morale.
In SP I noticed, getting quick woodsman II for warrior could be mostly by looking for animals - this gives 2 moves in forests and jungles.

[Lacero]

Originally posted by Impaler[WrG] the code first desideds that a barb is going to spawn someware in the world based on how many tiles are un-owned but places the barb based on un-seen territory. This means we can protect ourselves from Barb incursions by simply have a wide area of watched territory around us.

And they'll appear near our enemies (everyone else)

[Chaos Theory]

This may be anecdotal, but I seem to notice that even if I have just a single unobserved tile near me, barbs can flow out of it at a pretty good clip. Does the barbarian code try to place a barbarian at a particular tile and then displace it to an unobserved tile?

[Impaler[WrG]]

Yes it dose do something like that, it loops through each Area which I think would be continents of oceans and eliminates invalide (observed) tiles untill it got just the unobserved ones and randomly picks one of thouse. If one one tile was left the barb would always spawn from that spot. It also seems to track the number of barbs currently wandering in each area and spawns then when the total is below some threashold. Being over the threshold or having no unobserved tiles in the area can prevent them from spawning. Barb City spawning dosn't seem to work in the same way, it seems that when its planting a barb city it can be in any unobserved tile in the world but ones in areas that are low in barb cities are more likly to get it and it runs the city site selection code to put the city in a good location.

From seeing the code I think a clever player might actualy be able to steer barbarian cities into apearing on the spot they want, if they leave a good base site un-observed and cover all the remaining terrain so as to force the city to the one desired site. You would likly need to eliminate all other barb cities on the continent to get pass the ratio test which is based on a handicaping value, tiles per barb city.