This is gonna be good: von Adlercreutz and Taotao

[taotao]

Random note:
Fenn has written in CheaterHaters thread. Could be that he's teaming up/ ded-lurking. Don't mind if that's the case, I'd guess that they're at similar quality and I believe he's fairly peaceful. Would be a pretty good neighbour to have.

[taotao]

Darn.
For full disclosure. Thought I clicked on this thread, but must've hit the mouse wheel or something and accidentally opened Ichabods thread. Saw the name of their first roll and immediately closed the thread. Guess I should install that script Krill was querying about in the tech thread...

Oh, btw, second team to three pages and in the top five for most views, at least we're starting strong...

[BRickAstley]

Enjoying your discussion so far

I would highly recommend installing that script, I've found it very helpful personally.

[von Adlercreutz]

So if we change what would be available? Civs: Byz, Gre, Eth, Bab, Maya, HRE, Rome, Khmer, Egypt, Portugal, Mali + discards (probably Inca at least).

There are actually a lot of good civs to be gained. All there have earlier uniques than Dutch. Especially interesting to me are: -Byz, knights are already a typical rush unit -> buff there is nice
-HRE, I like the UB (are the start techs still hun, myst?)
-Eth could be interesting, but how often do oromos actually play a big role? I haven't seen them really in action.
-Rome, with swords already good in the mod
-Mali to discourage early rushes and ub is nice
-Inca

Egypt is considered good, but I'm not sure how to best leverage the uu. Early rushes are very risky. Maybe just use WC as a HA replacement for mobile defense and opportunistic strikes. UB, well good if one needs GP.

Also Bab and Maya have ub for raising happy cap, which come relatively early. Especially the Mayan one can give one 3-4 happy for 80h. Doesn't beat HR warriors, but they require monarchy and being able to build warriors.

Then there are Greece, Khmer and Portugal. Greece has early uniques but not too impressive to me, Khmer, well uu could be useful to pick up enemy knights in a stack. Portugal is kind of similar to Dutch but their stuff comes earlier.

So if only taking civ into account I think we could improve our pick.

Leaders otoh, I'm not that sure. (Btw, I just noticed Kublai has been changed to cha,cre, while my joking was about agg,cre Kublai ). I'll make another post about them.

And fyi I'll have some events during the weekend, so I have then only very limited time for rb.

[von Adlercreutz]

So we have: JC, Alex, Bren, Cathy, Mao, Nap, Per, Sul, Meh, HC, Lin, Asoka, Roosy, Wash, Chur, Bou, Gan, DeG, Bis, Joao, GK, Sury, Peter, Mansa, Hatty, Cyrus, Louis, Isa, Vicky + discards (28+ x if I counted right). This is a bigger group to analyse.

I like JC, Cathy, Sul, Meh, Gandhi (although quite late game focused), Bis, Joao, Sury though has little for later eras, Peter, Isa and Vicky (so 11 + y (hard to say anything about discards)). Most of those have something for early expansion and economical benefits in a nice balance. 11 leaders is less than half of the options, so yeah, I'm afraid that if we change, we get something less desired than Zara.

I know I said I like Ind, but I want it coupled with an expansion trait to reduce the opportunity cost of spending hammers. Otherwise I feel playing Ind might lead to the trap of underexpansion or underbuilding military.

So I think the question is which weights more, the civ or the leader. And I'd like to hear your thought about my estimations. I'm feeling that rerolling would be risky and that the discarded stuff will be bad (well, because people wanted to get rid of it). Otoh people say that the traits are well balanced in the mod, so civ matters more and people in snakepicks often go civ first (although part of it is trying to get good synergy, which is harder here).

[von Adlercreutz]

And also while I'm in a spammy mood: naming themes. I don't know if you like doing these or not, personally I'm not that good at coming up with these. Commodore has said he wants to feel like ruling an empire and it's the same with me. And a part of it is to feel that the cities you're ruling sound like actual places. So if we want to have a naming theme, I prefer something like fantasy world places. I don't want to be ruling a bunch of vegetables . Some of the naming themes I've seen make me think if the normal names would be better, like naming your cities different emotions or just all cities bacon, written each time a bit differently.

Also I've read that people may think that stopping to name your cities is a sign of giving up. I don't want to be a war target because I got a bit lazy with city names .

[BRickAstley]

Some of the naming themes I've seen make me think if the normal names would be better, like naming your cities different emotions or just all cities bacon, written each time a bit differently.

Also I've read that people may think that stopping to name your cities is a sign of giving up. I don't want to be a war target because I got a bit lazy with city names .

Bacon bAcon baCon bacOn bacoN BacoN......

[taotao]

Allright, what could we possibly gain by re-rolling?
Well, I agree that the dutch are poor in the sense that their uniques come very late, so there's a decent chance we could get a better civ.
Looking at the leftover civs I'd rank them thus (+/- signs means they're close to another category):

Good: Byz, HRE, Rome

Ok: Gre, Bab-, Egy-, Mali

Bad: Dutch+, Eth+, Maya+, Khm, Port

Coupling the civ with a decent leader is a lot harder though as you've concluded. My (quickly composed) rank of remaining leaders are:

Good: Zara (org/cre), JC (org/imp), Mao- (exp/pro) & Gen- (agg/imp)

Ok: Meh+ (exp/org), Chu+ (pro/cha), Vicky+ (fin/imp), Bis+ (ind/exp), Sury+ (exp/cre), Peter+ (exp/phi),
Alex (phi/agg), Cathy (cre/imp), Sul (phi/imp), Asoka (spi/org), Bou (agg/cha), Gan (phi/spi), Joao (exp/imp), Cyrus (cha/imp),
Mansa- (spi/fin), Hatty- (spi/cre), Louis- (ind/cre) & Isa- (spi/exp)

Bad: DeG+ (ind/cha), Roosy+ (ind/org), Bren (spi/cha), Nap (org/cha), Per (phi/cre), HC! (ind/fin), Lin (phi/cha) & Wash (exp/cha)

So out of 30 leaders I consider 26 to be worse! Sure, there are combinations where for instance a cheap unique building or early/late-game leader/civ balance really well in order to improve the value of a leader, but you could also have the opposite of that.
I also believe we need to ask ourselves the question if one roll is likely to be enough to get a decent combo? Sure, there are 3 rolls, but I think that the last roll really should be reserved for utter emergencies where we have a terrible second roll.
As it is I think I'd be okay with a re-roll, but if it was entirely up to me I'd go with Zara and hope to make it to EIs still in good shape...

[taotao]

Regarding naming themes:
In general I like it when the name of the city helps me remember which city it is or possibly in what region of the map it's located. One way of doing this is naming the cities in alphabetical order according to when they're founded/incorporated into the empire. Another might be what I often do in SP, namely christen them according to nearby resources/location. E.g. gold-city -> Klondike, hilly pig-city -> Piggyback or border city with Spain -> Isabellapost (I'm sure you could come up with better names, but you get the drift).
One thing we could do (but I'm not sure you'll like), if we're going with Zara, is to name cities according to names where the gender is ambiguous. So, for instance we could go: Andrea, Bobbie, Charlie, Dominique, Eddy, Fran, Georgie, Hikaru...
Or then we could pick up on your title and pick words in different languages amounting to something along the lines of "good". E.g. Amazing, Bene, Charming, Dobre, Extraordinär, Fantastinis, Goed, Hyvä... (but I guess this was also one of the things you didn't like).
Or we could just take battles from the 1808-09 war (probably including the rest of Europe eventually) or then ordinary Finnish towns alphabetically?

[BRickAstley]

Are you two Finns?