Anyone up for some MP today / tonight?

[Ichabod]

I'm in the realms beyond chatroom right now, if anyone is willing for a game.

[oledavy]

http://tinychat.com/realmsbeyond

Anyone else up for a game tonight?

[NobleHelium]

Hotseat is when you have multiple players taking turns playing on one physical computer. The term comes from one player getting up and another taking the seat.

[oledavy]

Pindicator, Nicolae, Ichabod, Speaker and myself are all in the chat room if anyone else wants to jump in and join.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Shit land + single minded focus on micro-ing my empire beeline guilds = surprise raze and defeat. Damn it! I was so close!

I wanna know how vulnerable you were to getting those north eastern cities razed, Davy. If the answer is: not very, then I'll feel a little better, considering how behind I was.

[Ichabod]

Congrats Davey and Pindicator, for winning and surviving until the end, respectively.

I'll join you for a rematch some other day.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Congrats to Pindicator, for OCC'ing yet still doing better than I.

And oh man, it was absolutely painful with no happy resources. And no copper, which meant I had to cash my Oracle free tech on Horseback Riding, to defend myself with Numids. And without Copper, there was no way I could safely claim the Ivory that was between me and Davy.

Somehow I still managed to build the Colossus without Copper, but it was expensive and it hurt. My economy was finally looking up at the end, I fired off a golden age with a spare Great Prophet. My plan was to beeline Guilds, but I spent so much time shuffling around Numidians to make all my cities happy, that I failed to adequately defend my border city with Dave. And Bam! It died to S6 Keshiks (though I would have lost anyway, as all my production was put into S5 Numids pending the completion of Guilds).

Dave had a pair of cities that were kinda far away from his core, that I was planning on killing with Knights. Of course, I have no idea how vulnerable he really was, it was a last ditch effort to take down the person with a huge crop yield and the 'mids.

[mackoti]

Anyone for a game?

[oledavy]

Last night played a four player FFA on a Pangaea with Pindicator, Ichabod, and Nicolae. The game was quite interesting because it featured four ancient or classical era UUs - Ichabod's War Chariots, Nicolae's Numids, Pin's Praets, and my own Keshiks.

I drew Julius Caeser (Org/Imp) of Mongolia. Here's an overview shot of myempire right before the game ended:



The land I conquered from Nicolae:



I'm not sure how obvious it is in the overview, but my original capital was the most miserable start I have ever seen - grassland cattle, forested grassland spices, and plains marble (that I didn't know about until later). No food I ended up moving for two turns before settling on a plains hill to pick up a plains cow (in addition to the grassland cow and spices).

I soon found I was on the eastern edge of the Pangaea. My close neighbor to the west was Pindicator, who killed my scout pretty early on and stunted my early explorations. I had relatively poor land around my start, not a whole lot of unjungled grassland. However, I did have decent food bonuses scattered about, strategic resources all within fairly easy reach, stone, marble, and tons of happy. In addition to the spices at my capital, I had silks, gold, silver, furs, sugar, and ivory jungled in the north. Upon hearing about the military action to my west and with Nicolae north of the jungle belt through a couple narrow chokepoints, I decided to go with a builder heavy approach.

I leveraged the stone and all the forests at my capital into Stonehenge and the Pyramids (forgetting for Stonehenge that you needed Masonry to access the stone under my city and losing a lot of hammers). I made a run at the Oracle but Nicolae beat me to it. I revolted into Representation and threw up libraries in most of my cities to run a pair of Rep Scientists each, all the while adding axes, spears, and stone boosted walls to my border cities with Nicolae and Pin. About at this point I noticed Nicolae had only two units garrisoning his border city, and I had 8 in mine. I detailed off the garrison, he retreated and I razed the city, soon thereafter founding a city to the southeast of the ruins to pick up rice, sugar and ivory.

To answer Nicolae's question, both cities had walls, with 6 spears and 2 axes between them. A determined assault probably could have dislodged me, but it would have been difficult with Numids.

I went back to wonderwhoring and expanding - grabbed all the backfill sites to my south and east, built the HG, the GLH, and the ToA (Rep boost on the priest). Settled my first GP, a Great Prophet. Then, with my three scientists I popped out before the end of the game, bulbed Philosophy, Paper, and Machinery. I built up a nice stack of Keshiks, along with a naval element, to attack Pindicator's capital....and got wiped out for my trouble.

About this time, I noticed Nicolae's new undefended border city. I moved my next force of Keshiks north, and nailed it, eliminating him. I could see from his research that he was heading for knights and didn't want to contend with those. Pillaging all his improvements powered me through education and liberalism, with which I took Gunpowder. I began settling his land as quickly as possible, pushing my break-even down to 30%. I assembled one more stack of Keshiks, finally met Ichabod and saw that his border city was defended by pikes, and went after Pindicator instead. It was a close battle, but Pin amazingly held out. At one point coming within a .2 and .3 strength unit of losing the city (probably would have fallen if I hadn't mispromoted all my keshiks to pinch ). At that point, I just started to sandbag the last few turns. Built the SoZ and UoS, switched cities over to wealth, and turned up tech to do some last minute score boosting.

The end result:



Grabbed the graphs if any of you are interested. Surprised by several of them, actually. I thought my position was absolutely dominant from about t70 onward, but Ichabod was sitting really pretty - exceeding my Crop Yield and GNP for most of the time:

Crop Yield:



MFG:



GNP:



Power:



Score:



Histograph:



Anyway, good game everyone. Congrats to Pin for surviving until the end, as that was the biggest feat of the night considering how much stuff was thrown at him.

[pindicator]

Thanks for the post oledavy! Yeah, that was a very frustratign game early on, but then it got fun towards the end just trying to survive until the end.

See all those downward spikes in the power graph? That's when people tried to invade me

And Ichabod was always waiting for you to invade! Mr. Sneaky, I'm going to start calling him. He would have a mace stack ready right after I used up my catapults on your Keshiks. Speaking of cats, that's the reason I held out. Did anybody else tech Construction?