Pregame Analysis

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Luddite is one of the most unique players on this site.

He thoroughly dominated Mackoti in Pb4 and Mackoti is really good.

He had the idea for the cultural victory in Pb6.

And he maybe played the best macro game I've seen on this site in PBEM36.

He is probably one of the better war generals on this site, but he is also quite mediocre at micro.

[Gaspar]

Last of our opponents:






Team [strike]Menagerie-trois[/strike] Bestiality

Known Roster:

• Lord Parkin
  
• HitAnyKey
  
• kjn
  
• nabaxo
  
• Elkad
  
• Herandar
  
• Sareln
  
• Azza
  
• TheArchDuke
  
• stonaq
  
• Joshua
  
• Mortius
  

Err, I mean. Known Roster:

• Lord Parkin
  

Roster breakdown:
All kidding, we're definitely looking at Parkin and the Pips here. Parkin is possibly the most polarizing figure on these forums. Pretty much everyone who has an ethical or moral bone in their body and has played against him, hates him. Folks who have either not played against him or don't care about rule-bending, love him. That said, there's no doubt he's a strong player. I do think sequential turns minimizes some of his skillset, but he's still able. Of the rest of the team... Sareln is best known for getting rushed in every game. HAK has pluck. nabaxo is a good guy with little playing record. Elkad has been in a few games around here with little of note to say about them. Azza is uh... surprisingly on LP's team after PB7. TheArchduke has a strong record of quitting on every game he starts and really likes Civ5. Mortius, best known for preferring Zulu in the ISDG. Oh yeah, and getting Mortiused in PB2. I guess that was mean, but really its Parkin and the Parkin fanboys. kjn hasn't played any games here but he's dedlurked some and actually seems quite solid, actually.

They're playing as:





Huyana Capac of the Khmer (IND, FIN, Hunting, Mining, Baray, Ballista Elephant)

Pick overview:
HC of Khmer is pretty meh, IMO. Being the only IND civ is quite valuable, and as a whole I think the trait is underrated by the old guard of RB - when everyone playing is good, Wonders often are the difference between winning and losing. When you're beating up on the JV squad - no, they don't really matter, but most of our games these days don't include JV players. That said, it dovetails less with FIN than say EXP or SPI because the main prize, Pyramids, isn't nearly as desirable when running a CE. Still, Cheap Forges are great and I'd expect the Oracle path from them. Khmer on the other hand - . I get the strength of WE but to pick a Civ just for a great defensive UU, eh, I don't see it. Hunting/Mining is ok for this start, assuming mirrored plus the guarantee of Ivory accessible. But Hunting still is a crappy tech to start with. Baray is nothing special - the +food is okay but you still never want to build an aqueduct.

Like I said, expect the Oracle path and then Parkin whoring as many wonders as possible.

Implications for us:

These guys have by far less known talents than any other team. There's no name players outside of Parkin and the players who do have a track record, have a pretty mediocre one. Parkin himself I think is overrated, while he's a good player he extracts a lot of value out of stuff like gaming the timer and hiding research, etc that won't be available in a sequential turn game. His grating diplo style won't play a second time, either. And if he tries to play like a true democracy and lets Mortius argue for ancient war and some of the other CFC'ers argue for cute but useless stuff - well even worse. Still, he is a good player. And we can expect Oracle (which also means early religion) and Colossus plus any other wonders he can get his maws on. So anytime we consider a wonder we'll need to be aware of where this team is on the tech tree.

(All scores out of 5)

Team Pirate Snapshot:

Player skill:
Leader/Civ strength:
Aggressiveness:
Intangibles:
Likely Team Cohesion: N/A
Likelihood Team is Just a Vanity Piece for the Captain:
How Angry Their Winning Would Make Me: etc, etc, etc.

Exploitable weakness: One man team, should be relatively easy to isolate diplomatically.
Biggest fear: He somehow gets left alone and bangs out all the wonders, possible DNS attack.
Pre-game prediction: Last place.

[Catwalk]

To be fair to LP, he was in favour of sequential turns. I think he's the kind of player that will play to win within the limits of the rules (just barely), but won't mind having those limits changed. As for the team, Sareln is doing well in PBEM35 and I think Azza is improving too. He's learned from his catastrophic Stonehenge start in PBEM33 and is managing a solid start in PBEM37. What is the JV squad?

Thanks for these analyses, they're a great read

[Krill]

Actually you can hide everything in sequential: you can change workforce placements and builds to hide construction costs and you demographics, and you can change research to hide that. I seriously suggest we do all of this.

[fluffyflyingpig]

Ahem, where is the writeup for TEAM?



Excellent work as always Gaspar!

[Krill]

Ours comes last, and I'm hoping it's worth the wait.

[WilliamLP]

My opinion as a so-so civ player but an observer of people: Parkin is the biggest threat by far, and to brush aside his skill is a huge mistake. He is characterized by being more obsessive about the game than anyone else and willing to do anything to win, and he wins a lot.

[Krill]

Parkin is not a good civ player. He makes mediocre micromanagement calls, and generally bad strategic calls that only work because of other players mediocrity. He is decent at beating bad players, but novice, seven and mackoti aren't going to let their teams make stupid mistakes.

[Lewwyn]

Parkin is not a good civ player. He makes mediocre micromanagement calls, and generally bad strategic calls that only work because of other players mediocrity. He is decent at beating bad players, but novice, seven and mackoti aren't going to let their teams make stupid mistakes.

Also no ones going to sign asininely long NAPs with him in this game... I hope.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Parkin is not a good civ player. He makes mediocre micromanagement calls, and generally bad strategic calls that only work because of other players mediocrity. He is decent at beating bad players, but novice, seven and mackoti aren't going to let their teams make stupid mistakes.

For a second, I thought you were talking about me