Pregame Analysis

[Qgqqqqq]

Is the Mortius comment [i]"best known for preferring Zulu in the ISDG."[/i] a spoiler of any kind?
Im not in so I don't know.

Edit:
When I saw the vanity piece and angry category I just knew they were made for LP.
Also how will you rate our TEAM? i.e. How angry will our winning make you?

[Gaspar]

Is the Mortius comment [i]"best known for preferring Zulu in the ISDG."[/i] a spoiler of any kind?
Im not in so I don't know.

No, it was really to set up the joke - obviously he's best known for getting his capital razed on T8 or whatever in PB2, so much so that losing your cap early is referred to as getting Mortiused.

Busy day in PBEM38 so no time for the last pregame piece - will look to get it up later today.

[Gaspar]

Finally, the home team...






Team Excellent Anger Management

Known Roster:

• Krill
  
• Catwalk
  
• Gaspar
  
• Lewwyn
  
• Square Leg
  
• Ilios
  
• slowcheetah
  
• coco
  
• Nicolae Carpathia
  
• ironstar
  
• spacetyrantxenu
  
• Dicorion
  
• Qgqqqqq
  
• Gold Ergo Sum
  
• v8mark
  
• WilliamLP
  

Roster breakdown:
Captain Krill is certainly the strongest player on our roster. His success rate when actually investing himself in games is second-to-none. Whether or not he invests himself in this game? Hard to say. But uninterested Krill can probably beat some mid-tier players but we're not sure, he's too drunk to send the turn on. Lewwyn has been a part of several wins on the site though is guaranteed to self-destruct somehow without someone around to get him to a: give a shit and b: not indulge his baser instincts. His micro is usually rock-solid and his macro is usually utterly misguided. Ilios is generally a laid-back FFH'er but is also an outstanding micromanager and world-class dogpile bait. We should probably just start spamming warriors now with him on the team. Gaspar is best known for his turn reports, which tells you pretty much all you need to do about his in-game skill. Nicolae Carpathia is probably an excellent player but we'll never know because he just spends all his time beating on noobs. Square Leg has shown the skills to be competitive and not enough of a relationship with me for me to insult him. GES is underrated because he bailed on his best game but clearly has excellent micro if not excellent control of his temper. The rest of the guys have either only competed in Greens games, games I haven't followed, or lurked - but I'm sure you're all awesome and I'm sure I'll have ammo to insult you when we're all through here.



We're playing as:





Willem of Sumeria (CRE, FIN, Agriculture, The Wheel, Ziggurat, Vulture)

Pick overview:
Probably not the best pick on the board, but Willie is right there with Pacal for best leader in the game. We can expect a fast start and hopefully taking advantage of cheaper courthouses as a mini-3rd trait to defray the costs of presumed rapid expansion. Obviously a big piece of the CRE/FIN synergy is getting cheap libraries up quickly to both get a very early academy and multipliers in play on your cottages. We should get out to a tech lead. Best part of Sumeria is the start techs. There's a bit of an anti-synergy in play with Cre and Ziggurats because Cre obviates the need to hit the religious part of the tree early on, but there's no arguing that Priesthood is a lot cheaper than CoL - a fact that will be even more meaningful on normal speed. Vultures are largely a pretty meaningless UU, but the higher base str means they're better than normal Axes against War Eles should Parkin be nearby.


Implications for us:

On top to bottom roster skill, we're probably either 2nd or 3rd - while we lack the heavy hitters that Team Razorblade-douchebag has we go 7 or 8 deep on experienced players who've had some success. In my mind, the biggest question is how invested our roster stays. No one player is going to beat 4 or 5 very good and better players working together. So if we all lie back and wait for Krill to win the game for us, the Trolls or Shavers will win. And that's even assuming Krill stays engaged, never a guarantee. A lot of our good players are prone to checking out, so it will be on ALL of us, from top to bottom of the roster to make sure we keep working at it. Everyone has something to contribute, we don't need or want 8 guys working on the micro - figure out what you can do, and do it.

In terms of gameplan - I can't imagine we do anything but REX and try and get a tech lead. Any wonders we land will be via tech, I'd completely ignore anything before, say Calendar/Aesthetics/Theology as even a possibility - novice and Parkin are going whore those all up. That's okay, we're CRE/FIN, we don't need any early-game wonders.

(All scores out of 5)

TEAM Snapshot:

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

(Forthcoming is from the perspective of our opponents.)
Exploitable weakness: General lack of commitment, possibility of complete meltdown at any given time due to the utter instability of the lunatics on the team.
Biggest fear: We bring our A game.
Pre-game prediction: 3rd place.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

GES is underrated because he bailed on his best game but clearly has excellent micro if not excellent control of his temper.

This is only partially true. I bailed on that game before the galleon nonsense. Luddite was already the turnplayer by then. That said, I am still pissy about it, which is one of the reasons I ended up on TEAM, and also why I will be advocating for "Jihad."

[ironstar]

Great writeup Gasper, love it.

I think we have a solid team here. And like you I think our succes depends on all of us contributing (especially the better players), and also on which personas people are actually featuring, eg. Focus Lewwyn and PBEM4 Krill rather than Uninterested Krill and similar.

I do feel we have a good mix here though. People who bring different strengths to the table. From reading your PBEM's for example, I get a feeling that you always have a very good macro sense and feel for what our opponents are up to.

We have quite a few greens too, myself included with the total of my previous experience being RB adventure 51 , but hopefully we will learn a lot and who knows, might contribute something useful. After all, even a blind man can accidently sit down on a needle in a haystack, or whatever the saying the goes...

[Qgqqqqq]

@GES when was your "best game"?
Yeah great write-up Gaspar!!
I think if we look like we're going to be redundant (i.e 7 or someone running away with the game, we should definitely go jihad on someone (LP comes to mind))

[Qgqqqqq]

@Krill, about hiding stuff in Sequential, when does production happen?
Is it eot or end of our turn?
Else we might end up being hit by that.
No matter what we should consider getting someone to do that regularly (i.e. each turn) to make sure we don't get stuck with scout build.

[Lewwyn]

TBH I was feeling pretty burnt out a while ago, but I'm a bit reinvigorated. I only really have this game to focus on and I'm not planning on joining any others.

[Krill]

@Krill, about hiding stuff in Sequential, when does production happen?
Is it eot or end of our turn?
Else we might end up being hit by that.
No matter what we should consider getting someone to do that regularly (i.e. each turn) to make sure we don't get stuck with scout build.

Everything occurs after we hit enter. The only draw back is if we forget to reset something before we end turn, like change the slider, but the turn player needs to go through each city and take screenshots anyway so they can check then.

[Krill]

Great write up Gaspar.