[PB36 Spoilers] GermanJoey's Meltdown Betting Pool

[GermanJoey]

sure

[GermanJoey]

T152-T165. ish.

Been awhile... just been insanely busy lately, and this game has just been a big disappointment all around so I haven't exactly been breaking my back to write an update. But, I should make at least one, right? I'll start with an overview of the game up-til-now and then get to some recent happenings.

Lets see, first, the map situation. IMHO, the map is OK - barring one GIGANTIC flaw - given the design constraints that OT4E sabotaged the game setup with. The holy cities have, as predicted, been a complete and utter non-factor. The general lushness of the map is decent, although wonder resources have been pretty poorly distributed. (marble being soooo much more valuable than stone on this map, and gold being important but asymetrically distributed is annoying). That's just a minor problem though.

So what's the big flaw? Well, lets redraw the continental minimap after we subtract out the barb holy cities' massive culture and the barren desert surrounding them:



See the problem? CAIRO AND OT4E ONLY HAVE ONE NEIGHBOR! furthermore, based on their position away from the "corner", it is extremely desirable for them to settle directly at their lone neighbor in order to block off a huge chunk of land. Thus, despite being the land leader for a very large portion of the early game (not surpassed until Imp/Bureau-rush TBS had reached *9* cities), Gav and Cairo both settled directly at me. This is our empire on T152, having had room five fucking mainland cities and one unplaced dry-rice-filler:



Four of the other civs managed 10-11 mainland cities, for comparison. If Cairo and OT4E were adjacent via land, there'd be no problem here. But it stands, the 2 and 5 position are intrinsically FUCKED.

Luckily for chumchu, OT4E completely wrecked his own game with his Great Library rush, and has been dead-last by a big margin on all food/production/pop/city/military metrics for the entire game. As such, OT4E was extremely anemic in his expansion and was not able to block chumchu from the south the way Cairo did against me. In fact, OT4E is so behind that I'd still bet on chumchu conquering him rather than the other way around despite the fact that chumchu also neighbors game-leader TBS.

Compounding with the land situation is the tech situation. TBS started to become a runaway by taking the HG and lib. Our original plan would have had us get lib with ease, but two things stopped us. The first was, of course, OT4E snatching the GL to my infinite tears. The second was Cairo's bizarre early GA and Guilds rush. That forced us towards an early guilds as well, meaning a Machinery bulb. Unfortunately, having machinery means that GS will no longer bulb into Liberalism. Thus, we were just a few turns short of lib. OTOH, TBS was able to successfully avoid Machinery until after lib... looking back, I think this is why he pushed so hard for elephants. Good way to use Imp strategically I guess. Anyways, he used lib to take nat, chopped out the Taj, threw an extended GA, then scooped me on the Econ merchant. (because I made an important sideline, more on that in a minute). So at one point he had like a +40% point lead on second place.

However, I think this was his first time neighboring Gav in a game, and if there's anything Gav hates it's someone who has a big lead who he doesn't think has the strength to back that lead up. Gav ended up having a very slow start for some reason... don't know if he lost his first settler to a panther or something, or if he just didn't have time to sim a medieval start and all and then did something slow like worker-first. I dunno. Regardless, he was unusually behind early. However, he's still a top player, and he's relentless. Thus, he caught up, built up, and crashed into TBS *hard*. And, although TBS lost only one city (I think, maybe 2?), he forced TBS to switch into Nationhood to draft maces plus whip down incredibly hard, dragging him back into the pack.

Now, back to us. As discussed with Krill when he subbed, even though there was a chance to attack Gav and take a good number of cities from him on multiple occasions, both before his buildup and after he committed to TBS, that would have been akin to handing the game to TBS. Our only real option was to throw development to the wind and try to find an opportunity to crash into Cairo. That opportunity came when Gav attacked TBS, while Cairo was spamming settlers and courthouses (try to always pay attention to changes in the EP graph to sniff out when people are spamming infra!). We had 6 cities available (the far fledgling island couldn't contribute), and built Knights out of 5 of them. 3 were whipped basically to oblivion; Song Clan was at 9 whip unhappy at one point, plus WW. It won't be very useful for a long time, despite it's gigantic food surplus.

Anyways, we built a bunch of dudes. Then I used research-builds and overflow to 2-turn Engineering, and finally used a GA to bomb Song Clan:



and proceeded to take off every "Knig", for great justice, and all that. Knocked down all of Cairo's units - Caught a bunch of archers, 4-5 samurai, and 6 knights outside of a city and produced a pretty huge sharkfin on his side, forgot a picture of that though... ;[



However, I didn't really have quite enough troops to take his capital before he was able to stuff it fulla junk. The whip is still the whip, and 60% culture + hill needs seige against even a small number of longbows. Yet, my seige were so, so far away... Sigh! If odds had just gone a little better...! Ended up losing far more 70% battles than I won, arrgh! But, as the saying goes, if you're gonna complain about the odds then you didn't really have enough troops to begin with. And I simply didn't. If I had pushed harder out of my capital, maybe... but then I'd be in bad shape long term. I feel like I did the best I could outta that circumstance (and my available time to play), and this is just how it ended up. Just kinda a crummy feeling thinking that 2-3 more fresh knights by the time I made it to the capital woulda been the difference between victory and defeat. Ah well.

But anyways, TBS ended up getting peace with Gav somehow, possibly because Gav was fearful that I would end up eating all of Cairo freely. Now, I had pretty much nothing defending my flank at this point, so, what I had to do was fork Cairo's capital with his last remaining developed city, that I was pretty sure was nearly-undefended, and offer him a white peace. Taking that city would leave the rest of his fledling settlements pretty much undefended, leaving him to hole up in his capital. So, he took it, and I was able to reposition most of my Knights before Gav could cross his empire. We seem to be safe, for now.

Unfortunately, this means that I'm probably in for a pretty grueling war of attrition to finish Cairo off. But, at least we're in a somewhat better position now.

[GermanJoey]

Player 1: OT4E as Roosevelt of the Netherlands

Initial Impression
An extremely strong leader with an extremely volatile civ piloted by an extremely volatile player. This pick borders on unfair if there is any significant water presense on the map.

Unique Advantages
Finally, there's the fucking Dutch East Indiaman. I'd say that one's a bit of a unique advantage, eh?

The Dutch should be banned in any game where water is relevant, don't even know why they are allowed in. 

at least OT4E is not next to us, so when he gets EIMs dozens of turns before anyone else we can feel smug that at least *we* voted the ban the dutch. 

8. Roosevelt of Dutch - Why isn't this banned?

also gonna request a ban for ONLY IND + ORG OF DUTCH.

Hey Krill, remember how the Dutch got 2 ban votes, and thus stayed unbanned due to there being one vote abstaining? (which is almost certainly TBS)

Well...

[Krill]

Figures.

[GermanJoey]

Mmmm, the end is nigh. I attacked Cairo again, with a stack of rifles, but I held a bit too much back in fear of OT4E's roaming EIMs, and also didn't think about the fact that Cairo's been in panic mode for a good 50 turns whipping lots of cats, which don't show a lot of power. (I've been putting like zero effort/thought into this game for a good 100 turns now) So, he was able to attack out and kill about 2/3 of my stack. Meanwhile, simultaneously, Gav is taking this chance to hop on me from the other side with a huge stack of Cuirs. I can probably hold my capital in the short term (maybe?) but I'm sure I'll take some losses and then eventually crumble.

I just hope that TBS doesn't hit Gav from the back or else I'll languish in this shitty game for even longer.