[LURKERS] PB27 Map & Lurking: Walking in a :weed: wonderland

[The Black Sword]

So I guess that AT continent becomes Krill, Gav, Dtay, Ichabod, Barteq and .... Adrien?

Can Adrien survive here? His southern borders with Krill and Gav clearly have bigger fish to fry and his northern neighbours are surely about to collapse. He should be able to hit 20+ cities with Agg/Org and a holy city.

Meanwhile the second continent has REM, TaoMack, Serdoa and a power vacuum to the east. Yuri is the strongest civ over there but his aggression level is set at 0. A plako comeback? Or just more colonies for England and Russia?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Plako hasn't seemed terribly interested in his past few games. I'm not saying this to be overly critical, just an observation. I think he'll need to make a strong effort toward...something(?) to break out.

[Rowain]

Judging from Nyles post and graphs I wouldn't be too surprised to see a plako attack/comeback soon:

[BRickAstley]

Yeah even if plako isn't a *big dog* he'll still kill someone and last to the end of the game. Partly cause who around him is going to conquer him?

[Haram]

This game is awsome. Not only the amount of warring and action, but also how smoothly it goes, considering the number of players.

I am only afraid, that it just becomes decided by a decision of a direct Astro beeline of a player, who had the map in his inbox. Just to be clear - I am not suggesting in any way, that Mack used any illegal info in this game. I'm just concerned, that this outcome will cause some kind of blemish to follow this great game.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Mackoti never opened the messages I sent with map information. There is a setting that shows which messages have been viewed and he didn't open them.

The concern about outcome being dictated in part by an astronomy beeline is legitimate. The islands are "win more" rather than "win" though. You have to be in a good tech position to take full advantage and you have to have balanced expansion with tech to really be in a position to make the most of early access to the islands. Good enough tech to get there early but enough expansion to support the overseas colonization properly. Some of the early victors have a great city count but only taomack have the tech at this point to match. Unless something is happening with NS but their reporting is (intentionally I think) horrible so it's hard to know for sure.

[Haram]

Mackoti never opened the messages I sent with map information. There is a setting that shows which messages have been viewed and he didn't open them.

Thanks, it's good to have this issue explicitly explained

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Mackoti never opened the messages I sent with map information. There is a setting that shows which messages have been viewed and he didn't open them.

Thanks, it's good to have this issue explicitly explained

This is what it looks like.



I went through several pages and do not see any other messages sent (by me) to mackoti. So conclusively, he didn't have a leg up on islands from me. If anyone else involved in the mapmaking process messaged mackoti you can check this but I don't really see the need.

[GermanJoey]

He never read mine either:




(not screenshoted, but he never even opened the original )

I also don't think the new world existing is necessarily a problem. There were two easy ways that we were expecting people to use to figure it out. The first is simply exploring your own continent and noticing that a.) it has about half the number of players, b.) nobody has islands, and yet c.) the landmass takes up only about 25% of the minimap. Hmmm. (There's also the idea that a hemispheres map would be totally lame and so there's no way the map is just two blobby continents surrounded by many thousands of tiles of ocean) The second, which doesn't even require scouting, was to just multiply the average land value (from the demos screen) by the number of players and then compare that to the number of tiles on the map, given by info you get when you hover over your score. That shows there are like a thousand tiles still unsettled, some of which is in the fringes around players or cities in revolt, but about 800 tiles of which is in actual, new, unclaimed land.

Several players/teams have figured out the existence of the new world, using one of the two above methods, yet have chosen to do other things instead. For example, Krill figured it out what, like 40 turns ago? And yet here he is, locked in this pointless stalemate with Gavagai over some junky ex-Tsargon land that locks up his first great person indefinitely. If he just ceded that land, threw a GA, double-bulbed Astro with GS he produces during it, he'd have pretty competitive Astro timing with Mack. Likewise, Gav and Bacchus could do the same, but they are both stubborn about not letting Krill get anything easy. (to be fair I'd probably feel the same). dtay almost went ahead with Optics, but is now veering towards Engineering out of paranoia. Etc, etc. And who knows what's going on with any of the players that don't actually report.

Besides, even with the Astro beeline, its not like the Dutch will claim ALL of the new world. They only border so much of it, and they'll soon have many more neighbors that will want some of it too. If they're too greedy they could stretch themselves too thin. I bet they'll probably be able to safely grab a good ~150 tiles of it though.

[GermanJoey]

Taotao just described their civ as "mackoti" when listing city counts... looks like mack's takeover is complete.