[SPOILERS] Xenu Succeeds, BGN Fails! - RB's First Pitboss Succession Game

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

If i were Aquaman the fight would be easier.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Xenu, in light of my misclick you may need to play the turn tonight. I'm out of time now for the day. If you just play this turn I'll grab the other turn tomorrow.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Turn played, I left unhelpful signs in a few places suggesting a strategy going forward.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

T116

I guess it has been a little while since I've updated. All you need to know about our game you can see in the mini-map.




Yes, that is us with cities stretching approximately halfway around the central latitudes of this map. This is not ideal, but it's what we've needed to do to secure food. We are horseless Persia. We have a source, its location just sucks badly enough that we haven't' bothered to settle it. Probably we should have moved one filler city a tile south to get it in our borders but we're a long way past that now. Some distant colonies are finally starting to show some profit so we can ease back on wealth builds coming up. Some of the wealth builds this turn are just holding hammers for forges now that we'll have MC at eot. 

Also seen in the above picture is that Rusten is flinging cities as far afield as he can and hoping that no one will call his landgrab so he can backfill at his leisure.   This is a great SP tactic and he's a great SP performer. He beat us to the axe on a hill location by a couple/few turns and it had fully fortified by the time I had a galley in place to do anything about it, in addition to caste artist borders popping for him. I can't compete with culture without swapping into caste and I can't really afford to give up the whip. He's spiritual, so this is a losing proposition without additional buildup first. His newest city, however, is empty and may be empty in a couple of turns. If it's empty when my galley gets down there that city is going away and we'll start building up our wooden wall of triremes to protect the homeland.... I'm getting flashbacks to that pbem where novice and I built ghastly trireme stacks. I don't want to do that again, but I also can't let Rusten just casually throw cities all over the map and block me from expansion. Our other avenue of expansion is north of our western colony but that is so distant that I can't even begin to sort out how much those will cost. But it is going to have to happen eventually.

Nauf is a more appealing target for war than Rusten. He is smaller, weaker, and, importantly, between us and our western colonies. He has been greedy grabbing three island cities in the north when he appears to have good expansion options to his south. He just fired a golden age recently and someone, though I don't remember if it is him, swapped into Feudalism. If he has LBs then any invasion is scratched for now but he is on the menu at some point. It's too early IMO for a GA to really be worth it unless he knocks out several bulbs in a row. But he still is behind the pack on expansion and, particularly, on MFG, so it isn't inconceivable that we may absorb some of his holdings before it's all over.

Commodore is prowling near our western colony cities but he has already eaten a civ and is going to run away with things if he expands peacefully and can tech. We're natural trade partners and are swapping luxury resources so I don't think he is going to try to poach anything from us. A better play for him is to just build up and consolidate. He's a rational player, unless noble helium is also playing, so we should be able to rely on good, reasonable relations unless we give him a glaring opening. Hopefully this gets us 2-3 more cities on that continent and opens up an expansion path to the north.

Our longterm prospects aren't great. Our economy has been sluggish due to having to forage so far for expansion options and has been propped up by wealth builds recently. But now that we can build courthouses and have a shrine our financial situation should improve some. But we won't be able to count on having a tech edge for any wars so we'll just have to blunt force trauma a few things if we can eek out the hammers. We'll see how it goes but I'm not optimistic we'll ever be in a winning position.

Post questions here, wait indefinitely for answers. 

[Krill]

Why did you play this game?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Why did you play this game?

We just hoped the map would be better. 

[Krill]

Better how?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Why did you play this game?

I signed up because I was enjoying PB38 when it ended and wanted to keep playing civ.  My enthusiasm for this game didn't survive the early exploration phase...the isolated island start wasn't what I was hoping for.

BGN is being pithy hoping for a "better" map, but for me it breaks down to us not wanting a repeat of the PB11 experience (aka, any map will do, let's just play). Here we have a map that is evidently "better" than PB11 in that it's probably possible for more than one or two people to win it, but not remotely on the balanced end of the spectrum because from what I've seen of the map so far not everyone got a fair shake.  Exhibit A is that Superdeath is already a member of the lurker gallery -- he and Commodore were at war probably before anyone else made contact with a second civ, that really shouldn't have been the case.  If anyone was going to have the possibility for early combat it should have been a risk common to all participants.  If we only specifically balance capitals, ok, that's fine, but there are glaring balance issues elsewhere that maybe we should have requested to be considered during the setup phase.  In the end it's a map I would not have picked myself for MP use, given disparate early luxury availability (Cairo has three hooked ancient resources, we only had access to one until IW or Monarchy), distances to neighbors, location on the map (we're in the center of a cylinder with neighbors to the north and south, great!), more difficult access to expansion than other players, etc.  I haven't seen the whole map so other players probably have their own complaints but those are the ones that come straight to mind for me.  I get the idea of playing the hand you're dealt and I'm ok with that in SP, but in MP I prefer to feel I'm on an even footing when the game starts.  I don't think I'm covering new ground here, though.  The takeaway for me is to only participate in games with a clear mandate to build a balanced and fair map.  I don't think we concretely defined that requirement for this game, and we are where we are as a result.  

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Stone/marble allocation matters too. If there are isolated starts either everyone should have a shot at stone for mids or no one should. Stone and marble are not of equal value in ancient age starts.

And I can't wait to start counting tiles for starting island sizes, food allocation, location of said resources, etc. We got what we asked for, a random map, but the map isn't great for balanced MP.

[Krill]

I agree on all counts.

Ultimately random maps can never be judged by who wins, only by the decisions you make as you go along. Even a shit hand can be played well, even if it means being taken out of the running by T100, and that has to be enough vindication, joy and meaning to play. Play to win, sure. Just don't expect to.