Seventh Turn Summary

The seventh turn of “the 2009 campaign” of Strategic Primer officially began at the end of the sixth, in September 2010, and ended that December.

By this point players had adapted to the reality of the end of “free” agriculture; the “initial harvest” of apples, which had the longest season of any crop players could begin with, ended in the sixth turn. But the players took a variety of approaches to address this new situation: some focused their efforts on large-scale, what we might call “brute force,” agriculture, simply planting as much land as possible so as to reap as large a harvest later as possible. Others, more focused on industrialization, turned to new technology to improve the efficiency with which their workers could produce agricultural yields.

A few players were increasingly feeling constrained by their suboptimalfortress plan: the “default” plan I offered for players with their headquarters in forest only included three acres cleared for fields, which was plenty for the initial harvest (with only ten mouths to feed at first), but now clearly insufficient (with several times that many people to feed and to set to planting). With the only way to clear more space being to cut down trees, several players were spending their workers’ labor on woodcutting despite a huge surplus of wood from their Starting Package resources.

While the nature of the map (mostly land, with a few large bodies of water, rather than the other way around) makes pedestrian or mounted exploration practical, the “lakes” can prove to be a major obstacle, as some players’ explorers had been finding at this point in the campaign. For nearly all players, exploration was still in the fill-in-the-blanks stage; few had investigated any of the interesting sites that their explorers stumbled across in any detail.

Most players were by now dedicating substantial labor to animal domestication and other forms of scientific research. This was not showing results for them as fast as I’d expected when I designed that game mechanic, partly because I was only “rolling” for results once per worker per turn instead of once per hour; on the other hand, in this campaign the game ignores several factors that I later realized it should have modeled.

In contrast, player-provided scientific discovery still varied from player to player. A couple of players were forced into discoveries by their cramped-space problem I mentioned above, but one resumed the explosive pace of the first turns, at least temporarily. And the specific advances the players came up with continued to take the game in directions I hadn’t even thought of.

With harvest ended, and the new hunting-and-gathering model not yet developed, all players’ populations remained the same as last turn:

• The smallest population was 12 workers.
• The largest was 73.
• The average was 32.
• The median was 28.
• The standard deviation was about 20.5

As might have been expected given woodcutting’s labor requirements and players’ low populations and focus on food production, wood production returned to zero, while usage fell slightly.

• Some players neither used nor gained any wood this turn.
• The player who used the most wood used about 400 cubic feet of wood.
• On average, players used about 105 cubic feet of wood.
• The median usage was about 40 cubic feet.
• The standard deviation was about 162.9.

After these changes, or lack thereof:

• The player with the most wood had about 540,000 cubic feet.
• The player with the least had about 12,600 cubic feet.
• On average, players had about 290,000 cubic feet.
• The median stockpile was about 240,000 cubic feet.
• The standard deviation was about 238,000.

Here are some statistics on players’ scientific and technical advancement:

• Most players gained no advances
• The player who gained the most, by absolute number, invented nine advances
• The player who increased his advance count at the largest rate this turn did so by about 9%.
• The average increase was about 1 advance.
• The average percentage increase was 1.48%
• The median increase was 0 advances.
• The standard deviation of the increase was about 3.4

After those discoveries and inventions were accounted for:

• The player with the fewest advances had 60.
• The player with the most had 113.
• The average player had 73.
• The median advance count was 67.
• The standard deviation was about 18.1

There is one additional statistic that players may be interested in, which my my records were not complete enough to allow me to calculate for previous turns but I can now begin to report: how many tiles each player had explored. For the purposes of this statistic, any tile for which the player knows the base terrain or anything else about a tile—in short, if the tile is included in the player’s map—counts. Due to the disarray of my records from that period (I started keeping my Strategic Primer-related files under version control in the middle of running the following turn), some of these may include turn eighth-turn exploration; the statistic will be more certainly correct for future turns.

• The player who had discovered the most tiles knew about 285 tiles, about 5% of the map.
• The player who had discovered the fewest tiles knew about only 16 tiles, which is about three-tenths of a percent of the map.
• The average map size was about 165 tiles, about 3% of the map.
• The median map size was 213 tiles, about 4% of the map.
• The standard deviation was about 103.

• 2009-2022 Campaign Turn Summaries