Archipelago Pitboss

[yuris125]

Been an amazing game, and congrats Scooter, very well played!

[superdeath]

1. Grats scoots!

2.

[BING_XI_LAO]

Hey, I'll just be blunt because I'm not sure what else to say. I tried to raise this to lurkers over the last couple days who are somehow muddled on this. But I'm not super interested in continuing a game where everyone is pooling resources (ie gold gifting) in a way that's never been acceptable in games here. Dogpiles are normal and fine, but huge game altering gold gifts are extremely unserious.

Didn't know that was unacceptable. Is it in the rules?

[BING_XI_LAO]

Also congrats to Scoots, how'd you win so hard, just more efficient and sweeping expansion followed by a belated coalition?

[scooter]

Hey, I'll just be blunt because I'm not sure what else to say. I tried to raise this to lurkers over the last couple days who are somehow muddled on this. But I'm not super interested in continuing a game where everyone is pooling resources (ie gold gifting) in a way that's never been acceptable in games here. Dogpiles are normal and fine, but huge game altering gold gifts are extremely unserious.

Didn't know that was unacceptable. Is it in the rules?

There's a big discussion about this in a couple places, but the problem is "the rules" are too informal here and opinions vary. So the short answer is not, it's not really in the rules in that the rules are not actually written down anywhere, which is probably a bad thing. Which reminds me I need to follow-up on the thread I created.

Also congrats to Scoots, how'd you win so hard, just more efficient and sweeping expansion followed by a belated coalition?

I think Mao of Carthage was really good here, and I think I just leaned really hard into what it was good at (trade routes) and ignored things that weren't on the path (most wonders). I detailed it a lot in my thread, but the TL;DR is Exp/Pro gets me among other things cheap Granaries, Markets, Harbors, Walls, and Castles. Carthage UB is a Harbor, so that and Castles both are huge trade route buffs, and then PRO buffs domestic trade routes so I could profit more heavily without feeding return routes to other players or being reliant on them.


I basically concluded that we're playing on a water map where all the obvious tech options on a water map (FIN, ORG, Colossus, GLH) were all banned. Also limited land tiles means cottage spam doesn't scale either. So I figured the only paths to good teching were tons of bulbs (PHI), Pyramids, or trade routes. I picked the third option. Here's a look inside one of my islands not too long ago.





18c from trade routes alone with just 4 buildings, and all of those buildings were discounted. Just 4c from tiles worked. These numbers would go up too as I began growing certain cities very tall as that increased trade yield.


I think the other half was the sole focus on Astronomy, which I planned for from T0, choosing my tech path based on it. This let me settle every single Astro island which gave me a big land lead. And since every city planted was instantly profitable due to trade routes, it meant blindly spamming cities helped my tech rate rather than hurt it.