Gaspar & Noble make their triumphant? return; mostly just get asked about "The List"

[NobleHelium]

I'm quite happy with how the Moai build turned out. I thought we'd need one more whip but it turns out we don't, which means we'll be at size 9 with it finished when we start the GA which is fantastic. Usually you end up with a rather pitiful city at size 3 or 4 and it takes quite a while to get it truly up to speed.

Also, Bob popped silver in his capital a bit ago, lucky lucky.

[Gaspar]

Ok, so let's reset a bit and take a look at the state of the game right now as we are on the cusp of players entering the all-important medieval era. This is usually one of the more interesting periods of games - all the key early wonders are down, the land is mostly filled up and players are settling filler spots on the mainland and one tile islands, first golden ages are being prepped and fired, and tensions start to rise as we all look to how we win from here. I'll assess generally the positions of all our opponents before going into a deeper dive on us. We'll start at the bottom of the scorecard and move up.

Bobchillingworth/Phantom Thieves of Hearts (Hannibal of Maya)



Bob is actually now tied for 2nd place on 13 cities after a little barrage of island settling, firming up his maritime border with us. He was the third person to get religion, landing the always heavy spreading Judaism in his best city of Mona, well placed for him on the Rusten border. He had a bit of a tough start, with his two main neighbors being the other two Imperialistic civs and the two who jumped out the earliest big expansion. Its honestly sort of tough to tell what's up with him beyond that. He hasn't built any wonders, he's 5th in total beakers and last by a lot in power. It does beg the question of what exactly he's been building. Still, I don't think he's played a bad game, I just think he's been unfortunate in who his neighbors are.

Bob is a competent if relatively inexperienced BTS player. I don't think he'll be an easy out for anyone but he is the most logical target for Lewwyn-expansion. Given Lewwyn's size and tech advantage which is only going to grow, I expect Bob won't be able to stave that hammer off should it come down. Ultimately, while he has the potential to be trouble for any of us, Rusten or Lewwyn, if he's still in the game 75t from now, that's probably a win from his current position.

Chance to win: 0.5%

Superdeath of China (Mao of China)



Superdeath's game has been pretty interesting, really. This is definitely the best start I've seen him play, his expansion kept up relatively well early even though now he's last on city count with 10. He's had a few skirmishes with Serdoa, Us and Lewwyn but avoided the usual large entanglements. He lost a foolish plant to Serdoa but sniped an underdefended island from us. He had the first GP but used it to build an academy in a mediocre capital that doesn't have a library. He's 4th in beaker count but he was first to IW and also is the only other player besides us with a Calendar resource hooked.

I guess ultimately, there's more questions than answers but ultimately he's proven to be a worthy competitor. His spot on the map is perilous though, and could realistically be attacked by Lewwyn, Rusten, Serdoa or Us. Likely, that, more than anything else, spells doom for him.

Chance to win: 1%


Serdoa of Russia (Wang Kon of Russia)



Serdoa has had a weird game. He got settled up on to some extent by all three of his neighbors and his initial expansion was quite slow, though he's ahead of us in city count at the moment with 12. He has CtHs best to economic traits in FIN/PRO but is dead last in beaker count. His development has been slightly off-kilter all game. Still, he's maintained his usual tenacity and both SD and Rusten paid for their aggressiveness with lost cities. There was a period maybe 25 turns ago where it seemed like he was coming back into the game but that seems to have stalled a bit. The question I have is what is his move? He doesn't have any wonders, his cities that we can see are neither large nor well developed and his military power is basically at parity. I suspect if he's going to be competitive he'll need to make his move soon, at HAs, rather than waiting for something better. Could a target strike against us, Rusten or SD with HAs work? Maybe.

Chance to win: 8.5%

So there's the bottom three. I'll tackle the top half of the table in my next post.

[Gaspar]

Continuing on...

Rusten of Aztec (Justinian of Aztec)



Rusten's played a solid if unspectacular game. He's third in beaker count and landed the Pyramids. He's tied for second in city count. All in all, good stuff. I think he also benefits from Lewwyn perceiving us as the greater threat to his game. He really, really, really limped to Currency though and as such, is a bit behind our team and Lewwyn in the overall standings. He was embroiled in a costly border standoff with Serdoa that saw two of his cities burned, though he has recovered and replanted. His city of CoC (shorthand for Cast on Critical Strike for the non-PoE players here) is the largest in the game and also possibly the best pure city in the game, grabbing corn, pigs, 2 ivory, horse and a whole passel of riverside grassland.

The question for Rusten is a sort of where does he go from here. His path to victory probably involves landing the monk wonders, which he should be able to do as the only Spiritual civ. It probably also involves grabbing some Bob before Lewwyn can take it all. Will he do that, though? He might just decide to attack in a Serdoan direction and I think that would probably be bloody. Nevertheless, he can still win from here, it just requires him to play the second half of the game a bit better than the first.

Chance to win: 15%

We're in 2nd place but I'll save the discussion of us for last.

Lewwyn of Overwatcher (Charlemagne of Spain)



Unfortunately, we have less of ol' Weeb Fox's territory defogged than anyone else and he smartly closed borders before we could get a chance to do so. He is the clear leader, having planted an impressive 16 cities and having always been ahead on city count. He's nabbed 4 wonders - Stonehenge, Oracle, Colossus and Hanging Gardens, not to mention the Buddhist holy city. He was first to circumnavigation. And since landing Currency, he's been catching up to us on tech rate, where he is the second most advanced civ in the game. Score is a very flawed metric of strength, but right now he's further ahead of us in 2nd than we are ahead of Bob in 6th. There is no question if the game ended right now, Lewwyn is the winner.

Lew just popped his Golden Age and while ours will be longer, his is unquestionably better, given how much larger his empire is. He's been saving gold for what feels like an eternity, with probably like 7-8t of burn in the bank right now. I would guess he's on for a push to Guilds where he'll hope to crunch a neighbor with knights. I think if I were in Lewwyn's position, I might just sit tight and tech hard to catch and pass us while cleaning up all the good wonders, surely he know's we're going to have to fight to get anywhere whereas he has enough land to compete without it. The thing about Lewwyn, though, is I've at least passively played with him a bunch of times and I don't really know what he's headed for because he's quite unpredictable. If I were to wager right now, I'd wager on him being headed towards victory.

Chance to win: 50%

I'll discuss us in my next post.

[Gaspar]

And last, us

NobleHelium and Gaspar of the Exiles (Augustus of Byzantium)

I won't bore as much with a story of our game as if you've been reading along you should have that and if you haven't been reading along, well, you should have been!  Instead, I'm going to do a bit of old fashioned SWOT analysis followed by a rough idea of a gameplan moving forward.

Strengths

We currently have a tech lead.  Now, Lewwyn's tech rate has usurped ours at this point but we definitely have a non insignificant number of beakers in the bank on him.  Hopefully, our upcoming GA will help us maintain that lead.  GLH and circumnavigation along with all but one of our cities being coastal means we have a consistent 8-12 commerce coming in every turn from every city but Broken Bridge.  That, plus the double gold at Solaris Temple are still fueling the majority of our research but as of right now, that's still enough.  Eventually, we're going to have to pull some more levers - maybe we need Rep, maybe we need to build a lot of wealth, etc but this will fuel us at least through early medieval.

We have a strong production base.  In non-GA terms, we are generally either even with or just behind Lewwyn in hammers per turn which says a lot considering he has a 5 city lead on us.  Some of that is a consequence of terrain, some of that is a natural bias we have towards production tiles, some of that is IND and forges.  But we're already in the not whipping very much stage of the game, at least until we get ready to mount a serious military build up.

We are top power.  I mean, LOL archers, but it does look scary enough and it also means we have a lot of units to stuff in border cities to dissuade attackers.

We have MoM.  MoM is probably the best wonder in the game and assuming we fire a typical 3 golden ages, it means we have a GA and a half on everyone else.  We also have marble and Lewwyn does not so we have a leg up on the best remaining wonder in the game, Taj Mahal.  That's a long way away, but its still good to know.  If we land Taj, that's 48 GA turns to 24 for everyone else and well, that's a pretty enormous bonus. Let's not count chickens, but it is something to look out for.

Weaknesses

Let's make no bones about it, we have the worst land of the teams we can see. There's no question there's less food in our swath of the world than the others. We're in positions where we're debating settling islands with no seafood. We didn't make the absolute best use of land possible - while we've made the most of it, The Beacon plant was definitely a mistake - but generally speaking, the land just isn't as food rich as our opponents.

This is the stage of the game where economic traits really start to power you forward and we really only have half of one. Forges are the second best building in Civ4 but it pales in comparison to what a FIN or PRO civ is getting out of their traits for econ.

We lost Colossus, which would have been a huge deal given how watery our empire is.

We don't have a ton of land overall. We're at 11 cities but more importantly, we really only have like 3 certain power cities - Solaris Temple, The Ascent and Oriath. Lioneye's Watch and Twilight Strand can sort of become those eventually, but the rest of our cities range somewhere from support city (Harbour Bridge) to utter nothingburger (The Beachhead, The Beacon.) If I'm writing a report in 50t and not showing pictures of someone else's cities in grey, we're probably not winning this game.

Its going to be challenging to put together the overwhelming force needed to take out a rival - we don't have enough build queues, we don't have a ton of good production cities and we don't have enough food to go crazy whipping.

Opportunities

There's still a fair amount of room for vertical growth in the empire. We've only really got 3 big cities right now and 2 of them can get a lot bigger.

Obviously, the largest opportunity coming up involves Cataphracts. Given our tech lead and still top end tech rate and 12t golden age on the horizon, in addition to them being the strongest units on the field for a while, they might also be the first knights on the field. Taking advantage of that to increase our holdings and intimidate our rivals will have a lot to do with defining our game.

Managing to do the above and also land Taj Mahal if not a game ender, could be a game clincher.

Our two nearest land rivals are very vulnerable to our attacks.

Threats

We have a border of some variety with everyone but Rusten, so if we ever do get ahead, we're very susceptible to a dogpile.

A corollary to the above, its meant we've had to spend a lot of hammers in bullshit archers to make sure we can defend in every direction. This works now, but means we're quite vulnerable to someone getting jiggy with enough HAs and that our defense is not able to be triangulated to a specific spot, so overwhelming force in any direction will be a problem.

Our best city, Solaris Temple, is the obvious point of attack for Serdoa. Our island holdings are quite vulnerable because we're so spread out on the water. In the long run, every city being coastal means we're going to need to have a lot of ducks on the pond to ensure we're not getting boated, particularly Ascent and Solaris Temple, which have persistent wonders that would be great gets for any of our opponents.


Conclusion

As anyone paying reasonably close attention above can tell you, I put our chances of winning at 25%. Now, I have a lot of confidence that they're actually higher than that because I think we can execute our plan at a high level, but there's no way you can look at the current state of the game and not think Lewwyn is an overwhelming favorite. So him being twice as likely to win as we are, then us being a smidge less than twice as likely as Rusten and three times as likely as Serdoa feels like the right spot. If 25t from now, we're getting ready to unleash the war machine having been largely unmolested to that point, I'd put our odds a lot higher. But no plan survives contact with the enemy and as Superdeath recently reminded us, all of our opponents are capable of making things more difficult for us.

I think this game will be pretty interesting in the long run - I'd definitely be lurking if I wasn't playing.

[civac2]

Thanks for the overview.

[Brian Shanahan]

So when does the WHEOHorn get blown?

[NobleHelium]

I would say we already have enough on our hands right now.

Big report for us coming up soon!

[NobleHelium]

Played turns 101-103.

On t101 SD built the Great Wall.  One of the things you can always expect from SD is that he is going to build some sort of wonder around t100.  Typically this is one of the better economic wonders such as GLH or Colossus.  However this game has much tighter play than usual which means he was relegated to only building a mediocre wonder. On t102 our treaty with him expired and we promptly war/peaced him in hopes of securing another 10t of guaranteed peace.  Now we didn't have to do this - that is why we spammed so many archers after all - but after pretty lengthy discussion we decided there wasn't really any downside to doing so and he should be thrilled to see the offer since his power was clearly going up in response to ours going up.  And he did accept and give us the treaty as expected.  Now why did we want the treaty?



t102 was also the turn that we finished our Moai build in Oriath with 2 chops, finished up two techs we needed to swap civics, and birthed our GP.  So after getting the treaty we popped the cork on our Golden Age and finished a couple more chops to make use of our new OR civic for good measure.  Lewwyn finally turned on tech and finished Monarchy before us, so we think he may be heading for Guilds.  Or maybe he just wants HR.  Regardless, this gives us KTB - we'll take whatever beakers we can get.  A GA means extensive citizen and tile reshuffling, so here are some cities!  These pictures are from after EOT, so in some cases the city was actually one size smaller during the turn.




Our capital, which is now actually getting close to being one of the best cities on the map.  We will do a 2t library here with the chop then overflow into a 2t missionary and then perhaps more missionaries after that.  Current plan is to save gold until the library finishes, because the city is generating some serious commerce at this point, on par with ST.




Our utility city of Harbour Bridge, now at a respectable size 6.  We will likely grow to size 7 and then stagnate for a while.  This city mainly builds whatever is needed for the empire at the time.




Solaris Temple, slowly growing to size 10.  It will probably not produce another GP this game.  It will do a missionary for Oriath and then likely a courthouse.




Broken Bridge, the city still without a granary.  We are indeed building a forge before a granary.  Don't be shocked - granaries suck, remember?  It is very similar to HB in that we mostly build whatever we need out of it that the more important cities can't be distracted with.




The Beacon, the city that we will finally grow some now that we are done building settlers for the foreseeable future.  Other than the granary, it has literally only built settlers, archers, and one worker.  You could even call this a dedicated archer pump.  But I think we are done building archers.  We will take the fish from Oriath quite soon once we are (mostly) done growing that, and thus it will be high time to build a lighthouse here.  I disagree with the characterization that this city was definitely a mistake - it is not an accident that our Moai build has ended up so nicely and Beacon is a major part of why.  Had we needed to build a monument in Oriath we'd be significantly behind on the growth curve there.  And besides, Gaspar was demanding that we plant another city at the time despite us literally not having any units to defend it.  Oh and we had a worker nearby that would have wasted turns transitioning otherwise.  So this was the only spot to plant that city at the time. Now I'm not saying that was definitely the best strategy to take, but I am saying that you can't say it's definitively a mistake one way or another.




The Ascent, which is currently in phase 2 of its life cycle.  Phase 1 was wonder building, which we sadly did not succeed as planned, but whatever.  Phase 2 is general production city, because it has so many mines in range.  We are also working some specialists because this city will produce our 300 point GP.  I haven't quite worked out how many specialist turns we'll be working over the course of the GA, but we'll figure it out soon enough.  It is producing a settler for the tundra spot at the end of the peninsula, because we want to pop borders in that city while we are in Caste. There will be a phase 3!




Oriath - everyone loves a Moai city during GA.  Sadly no Colossus, and the stupid governor is not working the Oasis after EOT because he thinks we won't have happiness for the next size.  Don't worry, we will!  And we will grow in 2t because of that.  And then to size 12 2-3t after that since the whip unhappy will go down.  We may or may not go for sizes 13-14 after that, I'll have to see.  I know I said that we are done building archers but we need one more archer because the city is somewhat vulnerable to boating by Lewwyn until we pop borders at Beachhead.




Lioneye's Watch, now working artists to pop our second GP.  You didn't really think I was going to let SD keep those overlapped tiles did you?  We're taking them back next turn.  We're not actually aiming to produce a Great Artist - just looking to work just enough to keep the tiles.




Twilight Temple, now a decent city with the granary and lighthouse done.  We'll build a forge next which won't take too long to finish with the hammer bonus in the GA.




Mao Kun worked an artist this turn so that we can pop borders one turn sooner (religion would have done it next turn), which lets us work the fish one turn sooner.  Plus we get a bigger lead on holding the tile culturally against Bob this way, so it's better all around.  The chop on the lone land tile finished the granary due to the OR bonus, so we'll be growing quickly in the future turns.  The lighthouse won't take that long to finish - we'll get a chop in thanks to the forest on the bigger island, and some hammers from the plains cottage tile at size 3.  And the cottage triggers the OR bonus as well! Although now that I think about it we might want to do a forge first.




And finally, The Beachhead.  The governor has smartly predicted that we will want to run an artist to pop borders.



We had an incident with the island south of MK where we were planning to plant a city, only to discover that we made yet another poor assumption about the map.  There is in fact only one seafood (and food in general) shared between the island and the end of Bob's peninsula.  We did not discover this until we unloaded the archer on the island because we previously did not have enough movement from scouting units to fully defog the coast.  Scouting is definitely one of my biggest weaknesses, but I also just don't value scouting as much as other things with more tangible and direct value. After an extensive debate and weighing the cost of the city plus its output, we decided to pull the plug and are rerouting the settler back to one of the remaining mainland spots.  We might still settle the island in the future, and it seems unlikely that Bob will settle the island since we have culture next to it.  But if he does, it might be more reasonable to take it over than to settle it ourselves.



We will settle the filler spot between LW and Ascent next turn, as the city tile is currently being chopped. That produces 24h in Ascent which will give us the work boat needed for the peninsula tundra spot, so that's pretty nice all around.

[Charriu]

Played turns 101-103.

On t101 SD built the Great Wall.  One of the things you can always expect from SD is that he is going to build some sort of wonder around t100.  Typically this is one of the better economic wonders such as GLH or Colossus.  However this game has much tighter play than usual which means he was relegated to only building a mediocre wonder.

Wait... so what you're saying is that SD might be an AI? 

[NobleHelium]

I have no idea whether AIs tend to build wonders around t100 or not.