Quote:It seems like everyone had pretty significant frustrations over the nature of the map. Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like I still would have preferred being in your position, with lots of land but not a whole lot of happiness, as opposed to not having a lot of space to work with at all, but, admittedly, better use of whipping to get settlers out sooner could have alleviated a lot of my troubles related to that. Just getting more island cities quicker to just grow into coastal commerce forever would have been worth the trouble I imagine.
I think that most people who think they want to play a game of civ on RB don't know what they are getting into.
Civ is about meaningful decisions. Where to settle, how to develop, what techs to research, but also how to position units and interact with other players to get them to do what you want them to do (this bit is usually about how to get someone else to act in mutual self interest rather than against their own self interest).
We have only just started to play random maps. The knowledge base to play these maps effectively has not, IMO, existed until now. We've also built RtR so that there are meaningful decisions that otherwise didn't exist. There has been some transference of skill between RtR and base BtS, it's not like these are completely different, but players have always pushed for more "Natural" maps, rather than balanced ones. Now we are reaching that point where we can play these random, natural maps. That means that we have to know how to play the starts that have different weakness and strengths, the PvE component of the game, the different variations that we can encounter: high land, low happy, isolated, mostly water, low food etc. But this can't be the why we play civ at RB.
The why has always been to play with competent opponents. That is what sets an RB MP game apart form everything else. The starts just give us the tools that we use to interact with each other, and a set of meaningful decisions. Different maps and game settings change the "Boundary conditions" and provide variety but it always comes back to communicating and interacting with each other.
Every player should have frustrations about the map. That's generally a good indicator that players are being challenged. That the frustrations re based around different reasons is to be expected from a random map. We are all playing a slightly different game with slightly different problems to overcome, as opposed to the balanced map where, to paraphrase Gav "Everyone is playing the same game".
How does this apply to what I did in this game? I don't think that I made any significant mistakes in the first 90 turns or so. I got unlucky with combat roles, and I really should have picked something other than IND if I wanted to make this work, but neither of them are out and out mistakes. I played the start out reasonably well, managed the tech and happy issues, but I don't see any way that this start could have been played differently without a different leader/civ pairing (Boudicca of Zulu would have been so much better), or settling in place (because this changes the viable dot map and makes coastal in the first 50 turns possible). I agree with mack and Rusten that with the knowledge gained on T0, moving was the right choice, it was only later that the difficulties with this start became apparent:
(November 29th, 2018, 17:04)Krill Wrote: Going to have to put some thought into what happens if we miss Oracle. I don't actually see an workable options with no happy and no religion.
(November 30th, 2018, 10:52)Rusten Wrote: That's a very scary thought.
The mistakes I made were that I didn't read the map or OH effectively. I should have seen that once he landed Parth he was going for Astro bulb, which combined with Circumnavigation meant that I needed to plan for an Astro bulb. I knew that my economy sucked in terms of tech, and that researching them would never have competed with the speed he could reach them, and changed my entire strategy. By that point I could still have retooled a few mainland cities for cottages. I should not have been completely focused on Gav, I should have considered the wider picture. I also completely ignored religion, or rather, I never made a decision. That indecisiveness was a huge mistake. I should have been able to get into religion and OR in the first GA, and that cost me. I don't think this would have made a massive difference, because I would still have struggled to do anything with Rome because Gav would have played identically and still ended up with that third of hte world, but I would have been able to get to Rifles, Nationhood and Economics better, and with that I may still have been able to take and hold some lands, playing a longer game, without pouring resources into wealth and research builds.
OTOH, and this is just conjecture, I may have been unable to interdict around Lewwyn, and in that case, I don't see how I would have been able to stop OH taking everything and then I'd have been dwarfed in naval production, and OH would have had movement edge and significantly better transport and positioning to defend his coast from a central point, whereas I would have been forced to split my navy, and would have been easily defeated in detail. Which leads me back to how I built the border with OH. It was too stable, but at the same time, the only way to build instabilities into it was the cede all the land SW of my third city and then try to make OH over extend. I'm not sure how much of a difference that would have made.
All in all I would like to play another game on these map settings again. I think we can sort out the next version of the RtR mod, and then I have ideas for another test version with slight changes to naval movement that should solve later game naval warfare issues for good and remove the burnout from the stress of defending but still make it possible to attack. Maybe in a few months we could aim to have a game start.