Evil Player's Association - TMIT (Bismark of Mali)

[luddite]

The skirmisher beats every non-unique unit in hammer-for-hammer investment until knights. You put the same hammer investment into skirms as they have into something else, you will win a field vs field battle. Seriously. This is, of course, NOT considering the defensive bonuses one can attain with them. They beat chariots and spears outright and spell serious trouble for axes in #'s. They also take 0 resources. It's entirely possible that I could take someone out of the game using skirmishers via a 4-6 skirm rush + choke. However, on the map scripts we're likely to see that won't be conducive to winning the game. If someone drops military though I WILL 2skirm choke their metal and watch them squirm a bit if it doesn't look hard.

Main problem being, you can't 2-pop whip a skirmisher, so it's hard to match the number of hammers that someone else can put into axes, swords, or HAs. Even if you do somehow manage to field twice as many skirms as they have in those units, they can kill half your stack and then run away to heal, before coming back to finish off the second half. And the unit maintenance from having that many units so early would be brutal.

Not that they're a bad unit, I just don't think they're all that great. Their main advantage is that it discourages people from going to war with you in the first place, since taking cities defended by skirms is so annoying. In 19, GES told me he probably would have rushed Seven with war chariots, if they hadn't picked picked Mali.

[TheMeInTeam]

Main problem being, you can't 2-pop whip a skirmisher, so it's hard to match the number of hammers that someone else can put into axes, swords, or HAs. Even if you do somehow manage to field twice as many skirms as they have in those units, they can kill half your stack and then run away to heal, before coming back to finish off the second half. And the unit maintenance from having that many units so early would be brutal.

Not that they're a bad unit, I just don't think they're all that great. Their main advantage is that it discourages people from going to war with you in the first place, since taking cities defended by skirms is so annoying. In 19, GES told me he probably would have rushed Seven with war chariots, if they hadn't picked picked Mali.

Well, if you do have a large # of axes you can attempt a hit and run on them if they land on a flatland tile. However, that same problem works in reverse, should people try to attack you; axes are not a legit flatlands pillage threat vs skirmishers because they can cost-effectively attack axes (and every other possible early unit).

Obviously, offensive skirmishers are not ideal unless you're talking about VERY early pressure, as in building ~2-4 before a settler and running into someone's territory with them. That's more a game-spy tactic than a PBEM one, unless we had a bunch of continents with 2 players each or something.

The problem is what to do after successfully killing somebody, and how to overcome such an economic disadvantage.

In other words I can basically just spam 1 unit for defensive purposes and nobody is going to want to touch that for a long, long time.

[luddite]

Well, if you do have a large # of axes you can attempt a hit and run on them if they land on a flatland tile. However, that same problem works in reverse, should people try to attack you; axes are not a legit flatlands pillage threat vs skirmishers because they can cost-effectively attack axes (and every other possible early unit).

Obviously, offensive skirmishers are not ideal unless you're talking about VERY early pressure, as in building ~2-4 before a settler and running into someone's territory with them. That's more a game-spy tactic than a PBEM one, unless we had a bunch of continents with 2 players each or something.

The problem is what to do after successfully killing somebody, and how to overcome such an economic disadvantage.

In other words I can basically just spam 1 unit for defensive purposes and nobody is going to want to touch that for a long, long time.

I suppose. But if you have enough defenders to even think about challenging the invading army on flat land, I think any good player just wouldn't attack at all. I haven't seen a lot of pillage wars on games here (hardly any).

[Lewwyn]

Heh, Copy cat! You'd better win and make this pick 3 for 3. This pick is sortof my baby since I've been a driving force behind picking it in both previous games. Both 19 and 21.

I have to say its one of the strongest Combos IMO. Wonders, early mints with oracle that help both production and economy, a fairly good UU for early expansion and wonder whoring. Whats funny is that in both 19 and 21 we were beat to the Oracle! We still teched MC early, but missed the chance at collossus. We did however land Stonehenges which made this a EXP/IND/half Cre pick.

Anyway my money is on you. I don't think anyone has as strong a leader/civ. I mean this combo beat out a few FIN civs in PBEM 19. None of the other picks are scary. Bismark is one of the strongest non-fin leaders. Also I think your greatest opposition will be Serdoa and he gets easily sidetracked (pot calling the kettle black ).

[TheMeInTeam]

I do believe I have one of the stronger leader/civs, but that doesn't necessarily equate to winning. I know I'm new to these, but all it takes is one diplo mis-step or someone to eat someone else very early and the game is blown wide open.

I just teched agriculture (the most obvious opening possible) and worker is almost done. If I want to roll the dice a bit on the farmer gambit, I can do PH ----> pottery ----> BW or some such and grab oracle before anybody else can touch it. There aren't a lot of immediate forests available to chop and there are plenty of hills to work from go so the production hit is less than it would otherwise be. I need to run #'s but my suspicion is that I can easily sneak a 2nd city into that mix en route.

I need to sandbox the tech order too. Pottery next for early cottaging capitol and fast granaries elsewhere could be very useful and would speed up ensuing tech. This isn't anything like the PBEM 25 starts which were rich as hell to the point of being ridiculous...the land is a lot more normal.

Preliminary looks suggest this is a modified donut map with water in the middle. For a change I'm actually going to calc #land tiles and get a feel for whether there is any "in the middle of the donut island" shenanigans going on. Based on scouting already the width from the outside to inside isn't very thick so a lot of cities on this map will be coastal. That screws with my dotmapping a bit as any successful MC oracle will greatly favor colossus on this map, especially without a heavy priority on astro. Popular as GLH is, colossus is also very, very powerful. Riverside cottage > colossus coast > cottage > coast is the order of tile efficiency. If the map isn't swimming in rivers then I would get far ahead of most.

Any speed oracle plans will get thrown off if I see fast militarization, but I don't expect that to happen. If it does, I'll grab archery ASAP.