Chairmen NobleHelium and Gaspar Demand Your Presence in the Collective

[Gaspar]

I'm off for a bit, so the profiles of our first 61 turns and the reply to Ilios request for expounding on mackoti will have to wait until later. There's a half-chance we see another save tonight, which Noble will have to brave the waters himself on. Mostly I'm writing this post to say I vote for going Calendar before Code of Laws. Otherwise, everything else is pretty well decided.

Thanks for reading my afternoon spam, riddled with typos and grammatical errors as it was.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 62.

Thanks to my super innovative "finish not the road" strategy, we'll squeeze out a worker turn to put into the plains hill mine at Factory Maze!



I realized we could have put a (temporary) cottage on the wine instead of building these roads, but I'm pretty sure we'll want these roads in the future anyway, so I think it's fine.



We see that Commodore has in fact not screwed up and put first-ring seafood next to both marble hill locations. I decided to turn the HMS Bounty around to save on supply costs and potentially provide transport services to say a scouting bowman, because we've scouted pretty far south anyway. Even if we see N7's galley down south there's not much purpose, and we'll find out when they found a city down there soon enough via checking resources. There's no real chance to take a shot at a loaded galley because they'll unload basically immediately to found near the gold.



Put a turn into a cottage here. Not sure what to do here next. We probably want to cottage-chop the forest (straight chop finishes right as the city grows, so speeding up the granary doesn't do anything), but I'm not sure if we want to do it with one or two workers. The granary might finish naturally before half the 2->3 food box so chopping it sooner might not be useful, and we could send the other guy to start roading south and potentially cottaging or farming the flood plains. Need to do more precise counting on this.



I put our overflow into Calendar, but it's a small amount. Right now both techs take 7 turns breakeven. 14t is a very long time so that's probably stupid. We still have time to decide though, we need 3 more turns to gather gold before burning it for 3 turns.



Also, Lewwyn renamed himself the "Psych" empire. I suppose he really "siked" us out a while ago with his warrior.



N7 planted a new city, Homely Pits. Oddly, it says (Liberate) on the trade screen, which is supposed to mean it's pretty close to us. I can't see it where it could be though. I don't see any borders via bleed in the tundra, they don't have Iron Working so I doubt it's in the jungle...the other possibility is like in their corner of the East Indies island hub or something. I don't know.

[oledavy]

Allow me to use this for an aside - I think the non-Fin metagame has gone a bit too far. Since Fin is banned every game on any non noble-flat map, there are basically 3 ways to boost your early game economy: Pyramids, Great Lighthouse, Colossus (in that order for strength and ease of use.) Sure, all the normal stuff applies about limping to Currency and whatnot, but ultimately if you get shut out of those three, you're going to fall way behind. I think we really need to either start reintroducing Fin or banning Pyramids in these games.

I agree with your sentiment. Banning financial significantly nerfs the cottage economy, and really seems to make the representation-powered specialist economy the best choice in these games. I would be in favor of not automatically banning financial in future games. I've never considered it "the one right trait" anyway, and I think the strategies for the other traits have evolved sufficiently over the course of 30-odd PBs/PBEMs that players know how to leverage them effectively.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Alternatively, have it so you can only pair one good trait with one "bad" trait.

After all, FIN is still stably strong. Depending on wonders is less stable.

[NobleHelium]

That's the thing though, the game shouldn't be a race to the Pyramids. That's terrible.

And yeah, I think we're mostly agreeing on the lines of say the PBEM 14 rules - FIN available with a mid-tier trait.

[Gaspar]

Having a few moments, opening the save provides a good opportunity to answer Ilios question about mackoti.

Let me start by saying I didn't mean that comment to be disparaging per se - mackoti is a very good player, one of the best on the site without question. Simply I meant that he's... very predictable. I've lurked him about as much as he can be lurked and I got a pretty good handle on him playing against him in 24. I guess the thing is - most players of a moderate or greater amount of skill play a little differently each time. He follows roughly the same open every game - slow, measured expansion followed by a run at Pyramids and GLH (on maps where GLH is a decent or better option.) Then after securing his early-game wonder, he goes on an expansion binge around the time of currency. This game is a perfect example - he landed GLH, teched to currency whilst being last on cities the whole time. Then bam, 3 cities in 3 turns: he's settled "Marble City," "Silverware" and "Port Track/Good Port" in succession. (All translations quality attributable to google, if any Romanian speakers are lurking, I'd love more accurate translations.)

An argument can be made that he's just executing good, solid opens. And I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that. But I could probably have told you where he'd be at T60 before the game started and not been too far off.

So where will he go from here? Well, this is where it depends more on the game in hand. But we can expect extreme military caution and a decent amount of grudge holding. Speaking of which, more to come in the turn report.

[Gaspar]

I'm exhausted so the full report will wait until tomorrow. Two interesting pieces of info, though:

[Gaspar]

Okay, I guess the T63 report is never going to happen. Onto the T64 report!

As stated in the last post, the two most interesting things from last turn were the discovery of how close Lewwyn's Gold/Fish city was to our Moai city and the news that Mackoti declared war on Lewwyn. This turn brings more news to the event log:



That is obviously no7 getting some RNG luck out of their Pyramids/Colossus city. They could have been running an Engy specialist off their forge of course, increasing their odds but they still had to have had a decent shout of nabbing a GMerchant instead. Nonetheless, this means our hopes of landing the Mausoleum of Maussollos are like this young woman:



We'll continue on as planned because we're not doing too much micro for it just yet - we still have another turn after this one to save gold before turning on tech for a run at either Calendar or CoL and we're dumping pretty much 1 bpt into the tech at the moment. Calendar may be the better choice regardless as we're likely to settle both Silk and Spices in the short term and getting an improved happy cap is more important than founding a religion. But it could be nice to make sure we don't end up feeding someone's shrine long term and courthouses will certainly be useful on this map, so it's by no means decided. Nonetheless, more glum news.

In happier notes, we finished Moai at last EOT, and the game congratulated us:



We will whip the Lighthouse next turn (this was the odd case where slow building Moai was roughly better than getting it from whip overflow since the cities best tiles pre-Moai outside of the crabs were the horse tile and a PH mine. That combined with the Stone plant meaning we get 2H on the city tile gave a very respectable 9 HPT at such a small size. Here's the city in greater detail. Borders will pop at next EOT and we'll be able to net the second crabs at that time.



Beyond that, not a lot to say. We popped borders at both Worker's Nest and Factory Maze, so the clams get hooked next turn. Really, its just the kickstart of expansion mode 2.0. This city at marble should get settled T68:



This city should get settled T70:



After that, the debate is really between the city for spices south of our Moai location in the West Indies (either on the circled city sign or 1W of it, as shown)



Or a tundra location, either the PH to seal the Lewwyn border there or the tundra hill to begin sealing the no7 border there. Right now leaning towards the PH of those two, just due to logistics.



I think I prefer the spices location, as I want to ensure boating protection for the Moai city and raising the happy cap is more valuable in the immediate term. By the same token, the longer we wait to settle the iceball, the more uphill the culture battle will be with Lewwyn.

Would love some input from the lurkers.

Here's the demos. City governor pulled off gold when borders popped, so GNP is slightly deflated from reality:

[Gaspar]

So let's finish up the post-Ancient era report with us...





Yeah, that about sums up our early game. We made some poor choices in the first 25 or so turns due to my not adapting to map quick enough and Noble not adapting to quick speed quick enough. I take responsibility as the player who's been around the block a few more times. One of the lessons I've learned is there are very few immutable laws in Civ. I think the early PBEM metagame here suffered from a little too much trying to emulate Spulla in PB2 and hence we had a lot of "maxims" in the community which have since been proven to be false. That's no criticism of their play, its the fact that we took Sulla's well-written opinions as gospel rather than figuring things out for ourselves. Anyway, I think the lesson to take away is that when you're playing top opponents you have to pick your spots BUT when you pick them, you have to go all-in. If we had played a bit more "sub-optimally" we could and should have landed GLH. Once unwilling/unable to do that, we should simply have skipped it.

I won't blame us for Pyramids, we had a good plan there, we just got screwed by Lewwyn. Maybe we overreacted and didn't need to tech Archery in addition to pumping out warriors, but I can't say in retrospect we wouldn't have done the same thing. I do think a conservative expansion with a strong wonder was the right play in the early game for this map because not only were expansion costs higher than average due to the toroid but the first ring is incredibly underwhelming due to middling/lack of food/lots of plains. The real quality sites are the ones we've pushed towards recently/are pushing towards now. The only settlement that was a "mistake" was Worker's Nest, which obviously should have come after The Colony but that was our play for the Great Lighthouse. Again, misplaced perhaps in terms of timing (i.e. needed to be settled sooner) but the general thought process was solid.

Other settlements are interesting in comparison. We're still the only team to have Stone - I'm not sure if others settled on the PH instead of the stone and not yet roaded or have simply ignored the site, but I think that was a solid play and it will be a very strong Moai city with double seafood and Horse available. We were the first to Gold/Fish though everyone has followed except no7. Everyone pushed the FP harder than us - that was probably an inevitable consequence of us pursuing the island sites. But I don't think that was a mistake, though it will be if we don't get there soon.

Tech path? I think we've been a bit more reactive than I'd like, but ultimately our tech path was informed by the wonder choices. I like the early math though we haven't gotten a ton of mileage from 20h chops yet. I'm sure Noble will say we should have pursued a religion for culture and perhaps he's right though I'm not quite sure where it would have fit.

Anyway, its been educational. I think we still can be competitive though I have little doubt the Pyramids and GLH powered economies will start to leave us and Lewwyn in the dust a bit. I suspect the game will break down to a battle between us and Lewwyn at some point, because he's an agitator and Noble and I are a bit spiteful. Should be entertaining, if not game-winning.

[Mardoc]

I like the Spice site better. It's simply a stronger city. If you could gain complete control over that island, and had to give up the tundra to do so, I think that's a win.

Realistically - you know and I know that you'll eventually be warring with Lewwyn anyway, you can pick up your Tundra tiles then, if you've got a strong enough empire settled elsewhere.