[SPOILERS] Vive l'Afrique libre : Bowsling and Aivoturso are Mansa Musa of the Zulu

[Qgqqqqq]

Why do ballistaphants beat knights (or rather, why do they beat knights any more then normal WE)?

[Bowsling]

They attack mounted units first, so you can pick the knights out of a sod without wasting a bunch of cats on it.

[Qgqqqqq]

Yeah but SoD are generally either solely knights (fast moving stack) or have no knights (cats/mace slow movers).
And even if that happens, if you have enough WE to kill off their knights then you can just plonk them in the cities they're forking any way, I don't think they'd have any chance taking down a city with 5 WE with 10 knights (for example - its rare to fork more then two cities).

[Aivoturso]

I prefer being able to take out my enemy. 5 WE per city can definitely defend both forked cities, but they won't be able to destroy the SoD. Of course if stacks generally are either all knights or no knights, then BE are no more useful than WE are. Anyway, the main reason why I suggested Khmer as an option was not the BE but +1 food from Aqueduct replacement. Bonus food is always nice and Khmer even gets it relatively early on.

BTW, if we get our first pick early on I suggest that we pick leader first. IMO, there are enough civs that have decent uniques, but the number of financial leaders is limited.

[Bowsling]

Exactly what I was thinking. Only case where I would go civ first is if we're near the bottom of the order and the great leaders are gone but a civ like India or Inca is left over.

Does anyone know when the pick is, btw?

[Aivoturso]

I would also go for civ first in (unlikely) case where we near the bottom of the order and there are enough good leaders for everyone left.

[Bowsling]

Player Analysis has been updated (i.e. actually done).

[Bowsling]

Guys we need more spam!

[Aivoturso]

Out of curiosity, how would you rate our team?

BTW, I think your analysis about the strongest teams is absolutely correct. Teams we need to really watch for are LP/Arki/Mango and Slaze/Maga. Especially if Maga runs diplo for their team, that's my strongest winner canditate as well. At this point my strategy would be to play solid game, end up likely somewhere in the middle of the pack. Then depending on geopolitics it should be relatively easy to ally with other middle tier teams, let the two top dogs to dish it out and then dogpile the one who's left. Of course we have about 150-200 turns to play before we get this far, but that's my initial assesment.

[Bowsling]

Now there's a loaded question - but yes, I agree with that completely. I really don't want this to be continents - with such a small number of teams, we could end up with a similar situation as the Intrateam game. That strategy will work well, IMO, but not if one of the front runners ends up with a continent to themselves.