[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[scooter]

Turn 188

Whipped the other worker. I believe we're the only civ with two size 1 cities with only two other players left to play, so the double worker whip seems to not be totally in style.



Jungled wet rice and green land seems to be the name of the game. This area looks pretty promising. A city for banana/rice that can share the deer could potentially be worthwhile. Maybe SE-SE next turn?



Seafood works for me. I'll continue heading southwest down the coast next turn.



I saved the best for last. First, there's the return of the infamous ice floodplains to go with a grass wheat tile. Both the wheat and corn are fairly easy to irrigate, so we're definitely putting an early city up here somewhere.

I'm noticing lots of river tiles. I'm thinking prioritizing Steam Power for Levees will be a good move further down the line. Demos below:

[scooter]

Alright, let's talk city names. For the first couple cities I'll try to avoid games Sullla or I played in even though a couple of them will definitely feature soon enough. I'm going to give descriptive names to cities, but I'll write a little blurb (or have other people write blurbs if they have favorites) about each one. The names themselves are open for discussion, so if you have a better description of the game in 15 characters or less, fire away. Here's our first two cities with the name of the game and the city name I'm thinking of assigning it. The first will be the capital, and the second will be the plains hill city.

Pitboss 1: The Pilot

PB1 is not really one of the best games we've had at RB for a variety of reasons. The skill level in that game is quite a bit lower than the standard of today, and over half the original players in that game aren't even around anymore. Regardless, it's still the game that got me and a whole lot of other people to play Civ again after thinking I was done with the game, and it's been years since then. I randomly opened up the forum one day and found this game was a couple months in, and I blazed through all the threads in a couple nights to get up to speed. I thought about going with PBEM1 which was the true pilot, but PB1 was the one that really brought Civ MP fever to RB, and we're still going strong roughly 150 games later (PB, PBEM, FFH, Civ5).

This game will feel weird to go back and watch because it was played with full diplo and full tech trading resulting in a very bizarre game that was mostly played via email/chat clients. In an 11 player snake pick on vanilla civ with no restrictions, nobody picked Pacal. Given the presence of tech trading, that actually turned out to be a good decision too!

Besides the obvious, this game's most lasting impact is probably the creation of the Regoarrar Scale of Disappointment. I won't spoil it if you somehow aren't aware of what happened. Go read the last dozen pages of his thread. That disappointment is now the measuring stick for all painful losses in Civ games here.

FFH PBEM 1: Pocketbeetle

Disclaimer: I have no real interest in FFH. I tried it once, thought "eh, too weird" and never bothered again. This is the only FFH game I ever followed even though I tried again once or twice. This game is a mod PBEM with a handful of players, not a big Pitboss. Despite all this, Pocketbeetle's thread in this game is probably the most enjoyable forum thread I've ever read on the internet. It was wildly entertaining. A couple of the other threads were high quality too (Bobchillingworth and Selrahc come to mind), which made this game even better.

Pocketbeetle's blend of newbie-friendly explainers, extremely detailed game analysis, and ridiculously fun reporting style made this game unique, so I'll name the city after him. As far as I know, he never played another MP Civ game around here after that.

Sadly, most of the images appear to be lost to time since they were hosted on imageshack. I checked the wayback machine, and it couldn't do much of anything with it either. It's a shame, because I think this thread will always be my favorite.

[Tohron]

I remember reading Pocketbeetle's thread years ago - as someone familiar with FFH, one of the fun things was how he was able to use his civilization in unexpected ways. His Kuriotate civ was designed to run a limited number of mega-cities (3 on a standard map) that can work all tiles in a radius of 3 rather than 2, while all "cities" after that can't produce anything or grow past size 1, and cost no maintenance.

This would seem to favor peaceful Wonder-building and going for a Culture victory, but instead Pocketbeetle did things like trigger a plague event that adds unhealth equal to city size (so a size 15 city gets 15 unhealth that drops to 0 over 15 turns) because his main opponent depended on sacrificing pop to promote his Vampires into super-units, or diplomatically trade for the super-rare Ice mana and do a bunch of maneuvering to get a unit that could double-cast Snowfall every other turn - a maneuver roughly equivalent to double-nuking (he won the game shortly after this).

[scooter]

A couple stray player comments from Civstats.

1) Nicolae has now played, and he whipped the second city as well. That makes 2/5 of us with a pair of worker whips, with just Plako still to play. Nicolae is Spiritual FWIW.

2) Most puzzlingly, RMoG played this turn and yet again did not whip. I was assuming they were just a turn behind due to the extra anarchy, but this is stranger. They definitely took two turns of consecutive anarchy. This rules out one of the ideas we tossed around which is to take Serfdom first, then swap into Slavery on the second anarchy turn later. So whichever civic they chose they're committed to indefinitely. Going with Serfdom seems a little brave considering they aren't Spiritual, but maybe it's doable. I really don't know - I didn't really consider it too much as a long-term early choice for us because why bother if you're going to be Julius of Aztecs.

The other possibility is they chose Slavery but chose NOT to whip in the first 5 turns, which means they simply made a mistake because 2T'ing into Slavery and not whipping is almost certainly worse than taking your second turn into it later and utilizing Serfdom for a bit first. Either way, they're making some unorthodox choices.

3) I'm not sure what to make of Mackoti waiting so long to settle his second city. He settled it last turn (T187) meaning he could have moved his settler up to 5 tiles before settling. He was the only person to wait that long to settle it.


I don't see anything else especially noteworthy. We should have a new turn tonight.

[Sullla]

Scooter’s suggested scouting moves look good to me too. The northern longbow will likely reveal the top edge of the map if we go NW-NW over the next two turns. I love what we’re seeing so far: green lands and food resources everywhere. This is looking pretty good for the Imperialistic side in the Imperialistic versus Spiritual debate. (Conversely, if we had a small, barren map where a handful of large cities was the way to go, Gandhi’s Spi/Phi combo would be looking like the right choice.) Soon we should be able to start thinking about dotmapping and where to put the first new city. Long story short: a large, fertile, non-Toroidal map is pretty awesome for our setup.

I also have to echo scooter’s thoughts about the other teams. For a quick refresher, here’s what we’ve done so far:

T185: Anarchy
T186: Settle both cities
T187: Whip worker in capital
T188: Whip worker in second city

As of right now, Nicolae/REM are the only ones who have whipped their second city, with plako still to play. This is very puzzling to me, since every team (save RMOG) started out the game by whipping a worker in their capital. What could the other teams be doing with their second city? Presumably the initial starting worker is improving tiles at the capital, either connecting a food resource or chopping a forest. Improving a tile at the second city wouldn’t make any sense. Is the plan to have 1 worker improving the capital and 1 worker (the whipped one) improving the second city? That would be super slow, and if you were going to whip one city, wouldn’t you slave your non-capital over the city getting the Bureaucracy bonus? This is all confusing. What’s even better for us is that we’re one of the three non-Spiritual teams. We lost the first turn to Anarchy. Shouldn’t we be further behind here? Well maybe not, since those teams all lost the first turn at the second city anyway by having to move their settlers. (No one founded both cities on the starting turn.) And there’s a good chance that we’ll see a bunch of worker whips in the second city coming out next turn. Still, I’m liking how this game is starting out for us.

The RMOG team (WarriorKnight/Dave) deserves some additional commentary. As scooter posted, they have not whipped at all yet, and that includes the current T188 where they’ve already ended turn. This makes absolutely no sense to me at all. What are they doing with their starting worker? If they’re trying to chop out a second worker, that means the capital and second city are working unimproved tiles for a very long time. If they’re improving a resource first, then the first worker build takes ages to complete. I think it’s roughly 5 turns, something like that. Furthermore, what’s the second city doing? How long are they going to go with no improved tiles there? When I played around with this in the sandbox, all of these non-whipping openings came out far behind the immediate worker whip in both cities. Late era starts are all about improving tiles as fast as possible, and as far as I can tell there’s no way to do that quickly without whipping out more workers.

Are they planning on using Serfdom? Building workers by hand? Were they the team that took the 2 turn Anarchy, as seems likely? A lot of questions about their play thus far.

[scooter]

As of right now, Nicolae/REM are the only ones who have whipped their second city, with plako still to play. This is very puzzling to me, since every team (save RMOG) started out the game by whipping a worker in their capital. What could the other teams be doing with their second city?

I'm as puzzled as you are about RMoG, but I think there's a good explanation as to why fewer teams have done a second city whip yet. A whip is worth 37h with the forge, which means the magic number for whipping a worker in the second city is 17h. After two turns, we've compiled 18h thanks to the plains hill, whale, and horse combo. If our cities were reversed (with the capital being on the plains hill and second city by the pigs), we would not have been able to whip this turn. My math says we'd be sitting on 16h last turn (pigs hill, grass hill forest, center tile, engineer = 6h * 1.25 => 7hpt +1f => 8fhpt) rather than 18h in our second city. I'm wondering if a couple players are bumping into a limit like that. Our second city is probably unusually fast at producing the worker based on our decision to flip the two cities.

Whether that'll prove worthwhile or not - I guess time will tell. The 1T faster third worker is a nice perk of the reversal, though.

[Dreylin]

I thought about going with PBEM1 which was the true pilot, but PB1 was the one that really brought Civ MP fever to RB, and we're still going strong roughly 150 games later (PB, PBEM, FFH, Civ5).

Kind-of sad that you didn't go with PBEM1 (my moment of glory!), but Pitboss 1 was objectively the right choice.

Besides the obvious, this game's most lasting impact is probably the creation of the Regoarrar Scale of Disappointment. I won't spoil it if you somehow aren't aware of what happened. Go read the last dozen pages of his thread. That disappointment is now the measuring stick for all painful losses in Civ games here.

Y'know I don't think I went back and read the other threads after the game - I think I was approaching my burnout period - and probably have never read that part ... and now I can't because the thread is 121 pages long and suffering the same problem as your PB33 thread; it just won't load!

[scooter]

Turn 189



Quiet scouting turn, but an iron/horse pair was spotted down here. It seems pretty clear that we've got a land dead-end with a water coastline down here. I'm thinking of moving the Explorer 1NE and deciding from there based on what we see before generally looping south to the coast, followed by west along the coastline. The longbow could then take a couple more turns to polish off the remaining tiles, and we can make a relatively informed decision on any possible city locations around here. Sound about right? The other option is sending the Explorer south then west immediately and letting the longbow figure out the rest, but that takes a little longer.

The northern longbow moved northwest, but no new revealed tiles.



Pig pasture completed this turn, and now it's chop time. Three workers out currently.



I was looking at this and thinking it looked a little Donut-y (the shape obviously, but also the general green-ness), but it's definitely not a lightly edited Donut script. First off, we're clearly about to hit the top of the map before hitting the top of the circle, which doesn't happen on Donut. It does make me wonder though if Donut was the inspiration here, and we're looking at a circular-ish world with some excursions.



Judging by GNP, we are definitely not all researching the same tech. Food/MFG is pretty much decided on whip timing right now, so it's not that interesting quite yet.

[antisocialmunky]

The map looks like less attacker friendly than the last PB you played atleast. Plenty of water but less favorable for the attacker. Also, what do you think about trying to get circumnavigation?

Also, would like to request that the first city you have Marble in the BFC of be called PB6-AWCV(Always War Culture Victory/Cheese depending on your feelings on how spoilery the name should be). Do you care if city name descriptions have spoiler info in them?

[Sullla]

All the scouting moves sound good to me, scooter. The explorer and southern longbow can finish clearing out that patch of fog south of the capital, then the explorer heads off on deeper scouting while the longbow heads back for guard duty. The northern longbow looks set to fogbust whatever is lurking up there in the jungle. (I wouldn't be shocked if there are ways for teams to reach each other both in the center of the map and also along the northern/southern edges, and we'll want to know about that.) The second explorer can head of to the east on another deep scouting mission when it pops out. I'm liking the idea of having two explorers out there - more map knowledge is always better, and building it didn't slow us down or stop anything important from taking place.

RMOG have played their turn and not whipped again. At this point, I think we have to assume that they're doing some kind of Serfdom opening, and that will be an interesting comparison point. I envy the lurkers here their chance to pop into that thread and see what the heck is going on. Not what we're doing, that's for sure.

One other tidbit I spotted: one of the teams has expanded borders already. They actually popped borders last turn (T188) judging by the Demographics that scooter has been posting. That means a turn of using Build Culture, which is not the end of the world but certainly somewhat inefficient this early on. I guess one of the teams either wanted to improve a second ring resource or chop a second ring forest. We were lucky that we didn't have to worry about that at the capital; when I tried using Build Culture at the second city to chop the forest there a turn faster, it came out behind letting the borders pop naturally, since it messed up the complete work boat -> chopped worker plan. Maybe it's the best option for another team with their different settling pattern though, I have no idea.

I'm loving this fast turn pace. Looks like everyone else either has their own micro plan or is flying on instinct and playing quickly. Only one problem: scooter didn't rename our cities yet. We should fix that next turn.