RBP6 Lurker Thread

[Gaspar]

Think I have learned my lesson only to sign up for ideas and in teams that really interest me (should have learned my lesson from the teamwork in PBEM21).

Nothing personal, Jkaen, but I think the lesson you should have learned at this point is you don't have sufficient free time to play competitive multiplayer Civ at Realms Beyond.

[Cyneheard]

Team 2 did something completely unexpected: they researched Liberalism. That was a whaaaaat?! moment for sure. Aside from the free tech, Liberalism isn't very desirable as a research target. The only other things it offers are Free Speech and Free Religion civics, both of which seem underpowered in this game. Free Speech towns will be great eventually, definitely, but I can't imagine that it would be superior to Bureaucracy civic at this stage of the game. Free Religion seems inferior to both Organized Religion's economic development and Theocracy's unit production, depending on what a civ wants to emphasize. I really don't see the logic behind this choice, especially not when Team 2 still lacks Feudalism tech (!!!) and all of the other useful techs behind it, like Guilds and Banking. Team 2 still can't build longbows or knights, craziness! The only thing that I can think of is that they somehow didn't know that we already had the free tech. Was someone not checking the event logger each turn? But even then, you can simply highlight Liberalism and it will tell you whether the free tech has been taken. They must have wanted Liberalism for some other reason. I can't see what that is!

Um. Talk. About. A. Blind. Spot.

And, seriously, is a cultural victory THAT bizarre a concept to him??? I think Team 2 was right to decide that the gambit was their best hope to win (especially since they can't out-micro Speaker et al with their roster).

[MJW (ya that one)]

I would guess that Spulla thinks a culture win is not possible or extremely hard. If that is true this does not count as a mistake because they assuming that team 3 is not going for a culture win assumes the worst case i.e. that team knows what they are doing somewhat.

I agree with Spulla because they are great players. It would be if team 3's plan actually works.

[Dantski]

Going for culture in multi is just suicide really, in order to go for it quickly you need to rush the culture building techs and shut off research. Militarily you'll be attacked long before you get close.

Ballsy trying it though, so fair play to them.

[Bobchillingworth]

Culture is a lot easier for team games though, right? They only need one legendary city each (assuming they want to split it that way), and being able to focus all of their individual great artists and culture on a single city means that they shouldn't have to make quite as serious a military sacrifice compared with if they had to have 9 Legendary cities total or something.

[Krill]

Yeah, each team can build the Hermitage in the culture city, they only need 3 temples for each religion for the cathedral,, they all have an NE each to pump artists from, and even the GP threshold doesn't increase that much (yes it increases for everyone on the team, but it increases it less than it would in a none team game). And they only need 25K culture. And they have FS.

So if they build Hermitage, use FS, make 100 commerce and 20 culture with breakeven at 70% with a cathedral (which I think is on the low side) then they make 270 culture a turn. Add in 5 bombs per city (easy) and they need to make less than 12K culture to win.

I think that's actually possible.

[Darkmantle]

I think Sulla doesn't interpret getting liberalism as culture because they aren't actually making much culture yet. Until they actually go 100% culture free speech does little for them and there is no way they are going to go free religion, when they have temples and cathedrals to build and religions to spread. What they need now is a strong enough economy and the right techs to defend themselves and then pump it all into culture in one big push before anyone can get to them.

The major cognitive bias Sulla has is he thinks people running light on military will always be invaded and punished for it. But that is not true, they do it for as long as they can get away with it, like Krill did in PBEM IV. With the massive sprawl of this map it is going to be extremely hard to make big gains in territory, hold and economically support them, until you have a really strong empire already.

A major aspect to actually increase the chance of culture is also the incomplete map knowledge. The teams know the sections are mostly mirrored and can logically guess which city is most likely to be doing a culture run i.e. the massive flood plains monstrosity is definitely going to be trying to be a legendary. But how far into their empire do you need to penetrate to actually reach that city? If you have to spend 6 turns running a stack of cavalry into their empire to reach the city it is going to be almost impregnable with enough pikes and catapults being whipped from every surrounding city.

This should all provide us with some entertainment. Team 1 going for the best economy and military shenanigans. Team 2 trying to sneak a culture victory. Team 4 aiming to just create havoc and Team 3 with the biggest empire deciding how best to use it.

[Lord Parkin]

The major cognitive bias Sulla has is he thinks people running light on military will always be invaded and punished for it. But that is not true, they do it for as long as they can get away with it, like Krill did in PBEM IV.

Or like some other guy did in this game I forget.

Seriously, the major problem with culture is that the victory takes so long to achieve even in the best of circumstances. Plus everyone with the slightest interest in the demographics can see you're going for it from miles off. The only way you have a realistic chance of succeeding in this sort of game is if 2/3 of the other teams (i.e. everyone except Sullla/Speaker/Sunrise) allow/assist you to take the victory just to spite the other team. Which could be a possibility I guess, though it's rather a long shot to bank on. Then again, pretty much any plan is probably a long shot for anyone other than Team 1 at this point, so maybe it's not as silly as it seems.

Will be interesting to see what happens anyway.

[Darkmantle]

Or like some other guy did in this game I forget.

Oh I had you in mind when I said it The reason I used Krill's game over yours, as the example was it was always war. You used diplomacy to secure your position. Krill's PBEM IV game was masterful because his enemies built huge quantities of troops to try and invade him but never had enough of an edge to actually pull the trigger and let their armies loose. Knowing that he had sufficient population to whip to create a defensive army if he needed to meant he didn't actually have to build that army.

Team 3 having the idea of grabbing Kremlin seems like it might be disgustingly powerful. If Team 1 hasn't thought of it then they may end up in a world of pain.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Sullla's capatial is making more beakers than team 3's captail with oxford. The only way blowing this game is possible is if team 2's culture win works and only with "help" from other teams. The rational move for teams 3 & 4 is to drop out. They have no chance and in always war you don't like or hate anyone enough to spend your time being a kingmaker.

My only real comment on Sullla's newest update is that this game has a large snowball effect only because tech trading is disabled. Because tech trading is such a big part of Civ it is agrueable if this is a civ game or not