This is gonna be good: von Adlercreutz and Taotao

[taotao]

As is customary in the startup process of a game here at RB I believe it is time to do an:
Opponent ranking

Now, though having spent some time on these fora in the past I don't know nearly enough of everyone to do them full justice, and what I do remember might have been mixed up with some other players, but when has that ever stopped anyone from providing their loosely based opinions/guesses as facts?
I've done these without discussion with von Adlercreutz, so if he or anyone else feel like doing their own analysis, be my guest
This will be done in a few installments starting with the group of people with the smallest shot at winning, so without more unnecessary ado, let's begin:

22. Nyles Standish as Ragnar of Babylon
Chances of winning:
Next door neighbour rating:
Entertainment value?:

I think I’ve set down my thoughts on NS earlier, haven’t I? As for the combo, although lacking much synergy, it’s definitely not bad. Ragnar is a solid leader and doubly promoted melee units plus bowmen early on makes him hard to kill in the ancient/classical era. I’m tentatively pegging him as a weak player, but who knows who the real puppetmaster is?

21. Yuris125 as Justinian of Khmer
Chances of winning:
Next door neighbour rating:
Entertainment value?:

Yuri seem like a really nice fella, but nice doesn’t give you many victories. I really thought he was going to go for a second re-roll, but alas, that wasn’t to be the case. Justinian might help him in planting cities at a decent pace, but when it comes to Adriens challenge of who might be rushed dead first, Yuri seems a likely candidate.

20. Elkad as Shaka of America
Chances of winning:
Next door neighbour rating:
Entertainment value?:

In the cramped pb25 game Elkad chose to go with an organized leader and the Dutch (ring any bells?) and fell off track quite early. I’m not sure he’s especially bad in any way, but I doubt that he really puts in enough effort to be a threat. Now Shaka is a good leader early on, but I still wonder if he’ll push his expansion enough early on to take advantage of it? America again seems almost a total wash. When minutemen start appearing there won’t be any forests left, so really all they’ve got is the guerilla promotion. If you want guerillas though, Molachs Celts should be in a much better position. As for UB, I actually don’t understand what bonus it induces? Is it an extra 2xp to mounted or what? Now, he’s not a human goody hut in the sense that he’s got an agg leader and from my understanding actually builds a decent amount of units early on, but with time I believe Elkad is about to be conquered.

19. Donovan Zoi as Stalin of Zulu
Chances of winning:
Next door neighbour rating:
Entertainment value?:

DZ is a slightly newer face at RB, but one that still has some performances under his belt. He strikes me as someone relatively new to the game that sort of does a decent job to everything. Decent doesn’t cut it that far in multiplayer though, especially if you’re very passive when it comes to war. With most other nations I’d say that DZ could be one of the best available neighbours, but now he’s playing aggressive Zulu…
Actually, if my read on the guy is correct, I believe he’ll simply rather use his impis as a deterrent to war than as offensive centerpieces, but still, if someone gets pushed around for long enough, sooner or later they might push back…

18. HitAnyKey as Alexander of Maya
Chances of winning:
Next door neighbour rating:
Entertainment value?:

I believe Commodore has described HAK as being your typical best friends grandpa; He can be spotted in church on Sunday, chatting to his wife during a game of canasta or hitting some random keys on the computer playing this odd thingy called civilization…
Inherently HAK is a pretty peaceful creature, but sometimes (particularly on weekends?) he just can’t be bothered to think things through and might start an attack just for the fun of it. Before pb25 HAK had quite a few holes in his knowledge, but I believe that his dedlurker in that game, “Murderous Mindy McCready” has filled most of those and also provided some much needed aggressiveness and consistency in the play. HAK has the ability (I believe) to play just as well without Mindy, but he (Mindy) really is useful for keeping HAK on the straight and narrow, so whether they team up is something I really want to keep an eye on.
With Alex of Maya I believe we’ll see a decent, safe expansion, with lots of Holkans for support, but later on these guys can sure be a decent avenue for expansion.

17. Grimace as Boudicca of Japan
Chances of winning:
Next door neighbour rating:
Entertainment value?:

Builder by heart and loves his wonders (his own words). He’s also a student of WWII and has the most aggressive leader, with one of the more aggressive nations in the game though…
I’d say that Grimace probably belongs in the group of people here that are still learning the game. In pb25 he managed to tank his economy really hard and was the only one of Commotays mainland neighbours that didn’t see the war coming from a mile away (though honestly I’m probably more impressed by the ones that did ). What he has going for himself is that he’s played quite a few games recently, but I believe his focus will remain mainly on this game now for a while. Taking a complete guess at his actions in the upcoming game I believe one of his goals will be to outlive a few people, so though he might not rex that quickly he won’t be an easy nut to crack initially either. Possible secondary goal could also be to get the highest promoted unit in the game. Remember suttree in pb13? Though slightly less skilled, that could be grimace here???

[von Adlercreutz]

I'm not too big fan of the early monarchy play...


This is all very situational, I don't think that we can go too much into our techpath without seeing the game situation.

Yeah, everything here is quite abstract without having game specifics. By what you're saying I'm glad to see though that I believe we have somewhat similar playing styles. What I'm still trying to do though is question whether the default line is always the best. For instance I usually do something like:
Expand horizontally while teching to currency.
Look if I've got border tension -> ha's/cats,
if not, then look if I've got calendar resources and shot at MoM,
if not (desired), beeline CS (generating GA (+ possibly rel/OR/Mon)),
look if I want knights,
look if I want lib?
what about Taj or great people?
military?...


But,
I don't know,
maybe creative (and the cheap science buildings from there) means not pushing horizontally as fast would be better?
Or perhaps an earlyish push to forges will do tons of good?
Etc.

So, in other words I might push questions like these to keep us alert and hopefully avoiding any bigger pit falls of habit...

It's good to have someone questioning you, that's true.

Using traits is one thing we can think about now. I'm mostly thinking about cre in our case, org is quite passive trait (well it means we want to go horizontal even more than normal and that CoL is even better than normal). In pb18 Krill talked about using cre, there he used it to claim land and establishing a relatively defensible border. So here's our advantage; establishing the border and culture struggles. Dotmap will be one thing we need to think about a bit differently now. Not as much sharing tiles to speed up (although I still like helper cities with setting up bureau cap if possible). In our borders we could chop libraries and get quick 3rd border pop for cultural control and we get more visibility, more warning time and also higher cultural defense. We should also look for the other guys potential dot map and think if we want to invalidate annoying spots.

Cre also helps with getting early GS if we want to do early bulbing or academy. Compass bulb is now a bit more valuable with quays, provided enough coast.

[von Adlercreutz]

Crossposted with you.

A couple of quick thoughts about your opponent analysis:
-DZ, I don't know if you have read Sullla's report about Apolyton demogame (2008), but DZ appears already there so he isn't really new. That said, his recent performance in pb25 hasn't been too impressive.

-Elkad, I think he's very prone to underexpansion, I've seen a bit more about him outside of rb. Also he has been really going for the EP economy (not possible here), while usually staying quite small which is a weird combination to me. Maybe he kept the combo because he wants to roleplay Obama ? (Joke stolen from badgame.)

[taotao]

Using traits is one thing we can think about now. I'm mostly thinking about cre in our case, org is quite passive trait (well it means we want to go horizontal even more than normal and that CoL is even better than normal). In pb18 Krill talked about using cre, there he used it to claim land and establishing a relatively defensible border. So here's our advantage; establishing the border and culture struggles. Dotmap will be one thing we need to think about a bit differently now. Not as much sharing tiles to speed up (although I still like helper cities with setting up bureau cap if possible). In our borders we could chop libraries and get quick 3rd border pop for cultural control and we get more visibility, more warning time and also higher cultural defense. We should also look for the other guys potential dot map and think if we want to invalidate annoying spots.

Cre also helps with getting early GS if we want to do early bulbing or academy. Compass bulb is now a bit more valuable with quays, provided enough coast.

Using creative to get defensible borders is definitely something we want to do (and I'm not sure how good I'm at evaluating). It can also be aimed at getting peaks into our borders to prevent surprise attacks and such things. As for invalidating opponent city spots though, that's a bit of calculated risk. Of course we want as much of the land as possible, but bullying someone out of a city might be just the thing that will push them into a war with us. It can definitely be worth it, but generally I'd say that we want to be the aggressor in every conflict.

I also believe that one of the biggest traps with creative (that I often fall into) is that you're too prone to try and create the perfect dot map (for size 20 cities) and then end up with things like only food in second ring and thereby ten long turns before the cities start to do anything remotely useful...

Great people we'll have to discuss more later on, but I severely doubt that compass is one thing we'll want to bulb. Quays are still 80h and apart from in our Moai city I doubt we'll want to work particularly large amounts of coast early on.

[taotao]

-Elkad, I think he's very prone to underexpansion, I've seen a bit more about him outside of rb. Also he has been really going for the EP economy (not possible here), while usually staying quite small which is a weird combination to me. Maybe he kept the combo because he wants to roleplay Obama ? (Joke stolen from badgame.)

Aah, he's the spy economy guy! I know I'm read reports from one guy (often building the great wall) where his choices have seemed more than a little weird as he's forcing an espionage play where it doesn't really fit (unlike some of plakos late game turnarounds).

[BRickAstley]

Here is the starting BFC sandbox for you to look at and start planning, if you choose to do so. This accurately represents what the starting BFC will look like when you load into the game. The file has any strategic resources stripped out (since you would not know those on turn 0).

We reserve the right to make any changes to the BFC, but this is at least very close to what it will look like in game, so should be dependable for planning purposes.

No screenshot for the thread too because that's just time consuming right now for me to go take a picture of each one too.

Link to the starting sandbox: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4491...wordWBSave

[taotao]

Here is the starting BFC sandbox for you to look at and start planning, if you choose to do so. This accurately represents what the starting BFC will look like when you load into the game. The file has any strategic resources stripped out (since you would not know those on turn 0).

We reserve the right to make any changes to the BFC, but this is at least very close to what it will look like in game, so should be dependable for planning purposes.

No screenshot for the thread too because that's just time consuming right now for me to go take a picture of each one too.

Link to the starting sandbox: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4491...wordWBSave

Wohoo! off we go!

[taotao]

I open up the save and this is what I see:


Initial reaction:
- Hurray, we've got a wet corn!
- but what the beeep is that peak doing there? I didn't even think it was possible to get one of those in your unmoved starting BFC unless playing ffh or similar? Could we change it to a plains or otherwise semi-worthless tile?
- and we'll have a hard time sharing any of the food with a second city.
- fishing seems to be the worst possible starting tech for us.
- we're finally on our way! (but now I'm off to sleep)

[taotao]

actually, a couple more reactions:
- that ivory tile is forested, meaning it's a 4 foodhammer tile from the very beginning.
- thus, after improvements we have: one 6f1c tile, one 4f2h tile and one 1f4h1c tile. (+ that plains hill looks slightly suspicious...)
- I figured out that the save only is a representation of the bfc with everything outside it represented by coast and therefore we might be able to share food...
- if it wasn't for the fact that we lose at least one turn doing so, I'd seriously consider moving east along the river to have a non-boatable capital (that, plus cows I guess are reasons enough to stay put).

[BRickAstley]

That peak is incorrect; that will be a grass hill in game.