[SPOILERS] Scooticator and Pindooter give a sporting try

[scooter]

I don't know if I could have done it. We were having some communication problems that just made the game unenjoyable for me. In hindsight it was probably better for me to just stay unspoiled and leave the options open, and I do wish I had done that. Also, I'm about to start a post-bacc program in a month, so my time is going to be very limited soon. So my ability to jump in and help wouldn't be all that great.

I'm glad we've teamed up for two awesome threads now. Hope there's a third in our future

Oh I agree, we were so far apart in our vision that both of us were unhappy with what we were doing. Too bad it worked out that way, but certainly no hard feelings at all. Besides, this will probably be my last large game for the indefinite future, so I may as well go out with a bang here.

scooter, it's great that you're still reporting, even if you aren't doing it every turn. I have thought up a few more questions, but they are perhaps in need of some detail rather than one line answers to have any meaning.

[*] What are you going to do with the new cities tile improvements?
[*] How many tiles benefiting from Environmentalism actually do/will you have in your borders?
[*] What's your view of Environmentalism in this mod?

So I answered the first part above, but yeah I have 161 tiles currently that would benefit from Environmentalism. I don't think the civic itself is overwhelmingly strong, but reality is the rest of the options in that column are pretty underwhelming.

Bureaucracy is good, but when stacked up against 50 cities it's not that huge of a deal. I moved my palace away from my best science city into a city with almost no economic multipliers (to hurriedly build SoL), and it had a very trivial impact on my teching ability. Nationhood is underwhelming at this stage because drafting got nerfed and that was the only thing it was good at anyway. Well, its price tag is nice too, but I'm ORG so price tag is less of a concern when picking a civic. Vassalage could be nice as well, but 161 commerce/turn sounds awfully nice. Especially during a golden age. I could consider jumping back into something else after the GA in theory, but during a GA I really want to be in Environmentalism.

So I would say it's simply an OK civic in a column filled with OK civics. I have a lot of tiles that benefit from it because I have a lot of tiles total - more than anyone. It probably is a little on the weak side given that it's a debatable choice for the civ with more tiles than anyone else, meaning it's probably a bad choice for a lot of other people. Commodore for instance shouldn't even consider Environmentalism.

[*] Same question about Free Speech.

Free Speech's problem is State Property and Free Market. State Property is awesome because of course it is. Free Market I think may be a tad overly-strong - in that it's really strong on multi-continent games with many players and AI-diplo which is the standard settings here. I could get a lot of value out of Free Speech - to the tune of 222 commerce/turn. My 111 towns is now comfortably the most in the game. That's still inferior to the type of distance maintenance I'm paying or the value of 50 additional trade routes that average $4 AND +25% commerce boost to all my trade routes combined. Ok strictly economically speaking it may be better than State Property because that actual commerce is going into cities with the most multipliers, but that's not even taking into consideration the extra food/mfg from SP.

So... I think Free Speech kinda sucks. If it was back in its original place where Environmentalism is at it would be pretty good, but right now if you aren't in Free Market or State Property you are really missing out. Commodore probably is the ideal person for Free Speech (high % of his land is towns, empire is more compact, not many workshops, etc etc), and I really doubt he even would use it.

Although I confess I'm typing this without game access and there's a voice in my head going "wait, IS HE using it now? I can't remember."

[*] What are you going to do about those mack cities?

I'm wavering. Part of me wants to go on a spree and conquer it all back from him. It would be pretty easy - his army is large, but I've spent a few turns accumulating a ton of gold (over 12k banked right now IIRC), and I could instantly have the best navy in the game right this second if I pressed the big red button. I've got airships all over the ocean, and he's got nothing in most of his island cities. If Commodore jumped on board and invaded that TBS island while I took the other islands and drove him off the mainland, that would be a pretty easy win, absolutely nothing Mack could do about that. I know he's got a Battleship or two which would turn the tide if he got those in large numbers, but I can get to Battleships pretty quickly if absolutely needed. Known tech bonus and all that.

That said, this game is headed for a space race. At that point, what does 10 island cities really even get me? Land security. That's not nothing, but if I'm gaining some land security at the expense of Plako being a bigger threat in the space race, I'm not so sure my actual chances of winning have improved so much as Mack's are damaged. Not to mention that it's always a delicate balance - if I hurt Mack's chances of winning TOO much, he stops making rational decisions and makes emotional decisions, which could tank my game just as quickly as his. Plako is really the key that keeps this from being a zero-sum affair. So with that said, there's a part of me that thinks my best course of action may actually be to keep the peace and go for the space race.

(There's also that side thing that those war turns would be enormously tedious, and RL just doesn't allow for me to have turns > 1 hour at this point, which is a real factor in some of my in-game decisions.)

Ironically, the island war and naval arms race that Mack and myself/pindicator had an era or so ago is a big part of why Plako is still in this thing. Both teams treated it like it was a zero-sum affair when it wasn't yet, and that was a mistake. It also let Commodore steal some major prizes like Communism Spy and Kremlin that he had no business reaching first except for that Mack and us had diverted tens of thousands of beakers into unlocking SOTL and Drydocks and all that so we could squabble over 10 tiles islands. In that time Commodore went from 3rd or 4th best techer to 1st. There's a lot I could say about Mack's choices and how some of them have been strange, but that's probably another post.

[*] And finally...are you having fun?

Yeah, I am. If I get dragged into a tedious war with long turns where the stakes are high, I dunno if I would be. War Weariness is a real thing - this game has been a bloody kill-fest for the Vikings. Which is why I kinda feel like just battering down the hatches and prepping for a space race.