RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Speaker]

Here are my proposed city sites:

1) Pink
Already agreed upon. We found it in a couple turns.

2) Black
I think it's in a better spot here. It allows us to split off the Wheat for a turn or two to grow up to size 2 faster. Once it grows a bit, we can also split off some of the cottages from Gettysburg to help them grow.

3) White
I moved it a little closer than you had it. We'll have to play this one by ear based on what Greece does. I'd rather not settle too closely to them because.....

4) Red
Dantski has forced our hand on this one with his aggressive placement of Djenne. If we don't plant this city, we cannot use the 5f, 1h Deer that is 2-tiles away from our capital! We'd rather plant it on the coast, but planting so aggressively, having a hill to aid our defenders is key. The major negative here, from an MP perspective, is that the city has two hills right in front of it. If possible, you want to avoid this, since allowing your enemy to fortify on a hill allows him to stream units safely to the very gates of your city. Once he gets Construction and some catapults, you'd better have enough units to clear it off!

So, when do we want to plant this city? We'll need plenty of units to defend it, since it will be sure to piss of Dantski. But really, what did he expect with Djenne? The 5f 1h Deer is the second (or third, depending on who you ask) best tile anywhere near our land...

5) Blue, Yellow, Green
Require Calendar to grow. Good thing it is going to be prioritized in our plan, for the Mausolleum. Like Red, Yellow is pretty aggressive, so it prefers to be founded on a hill.

[Sullla]

I can live with those city spots. It's a tight build, but then again, this is a MP game...

The real question is which of these cities would you found next, Speaker? We have no need to go to Black, which is our safest location. Would it be White then? (I'm thinking you'd like us to get some more military before we plant Red or Yellow.)

My only complaint about White is that we need a border expansion to get the fish in the spot you have picked; on the tile NE we could chop a work boat instantly and get +5 food right from the start. And I don't think we need to crowd Antietam quite so much.

I would probably favor an order something like White, Yellow, Green, then Blue or Red, Black. (Red near the end because it's practically a declaration of war on Dantski. The tile SW of Red is inside Djenne's 21-tile radius!)

[Dr. Nomadic]

Wait guys, do you have fishing yet? And what classical era techs do you guys have? I wasn't paying attention.

And since there was no response:

Lurker's Sarcastic Question: Do you want to help Dantski by gifting him those workers?

[scooter]

I'm curious, why is there so much overlap in some of those cities (white/black/yellow/red in particular)? You explained red, but it seems like planting cities with that much overlap has short-term benefits, but results in weaker cities long-term...? Is there any specific reason(s) you want so many of them so close together?

(I'm not challenging/disagreeing, I'm genuinely curious as your skill levels are far beyond my own)

[Rowain]

Easier to reinforce in case of war.
Once you have 3 movement on roads you can station your army in chancellorsville(?) - out of sight- and still move it into white & blue in 1 turn if you need.

Besides 5tiles overlap aren't that much. Especially for white-dot where they can run several specialists (deer + fish).

[Speaker]

I'm curious, why is there so much overlap in some of those cities (white/black/yellow/red in particular)? You explained red, but it seems like planting cities with that much overlap has short-term benefits, but results in weaker cities long-term...? Is there any specific reason(s) you want so many of them so close together?

(I'm not challenging/disagreeing, I'm genuinely curious as your skill levels are far beyond my own)

The quick answer is that the short-term far outweighs the longterm in multiplayer.

In multiplayer, your cities tend to be a lot smaller than in singleplayer. Slavery while working food+cottages is much more common than growing to the limit and working all 20 tiles, and planting with overlap allows for greater micromanagement possibilities, as you can swap tiles back and forth between different cities. Happiness and health resources are much harder to come by, further restricting growth. Being able to reinforce one city with units from another is paramount, and that 1 extra movement might be the difference between saving and losing a city.

I'm going out of town for the weekend Sullla. I'll have internet access on Saturday evening, and most of Sunday, so I'll be able to check in. I didn't have a chance to look at your micro plan, so we'll just go with it as is for now. I have no doubt it's quite good, and I think we're on the same page in terms of our overall plan.

[Sullla]

Good luck this weekend, Speaker. I'll be fine to cover our turns while you're travelling. If you get a chance, maybe you can think about the question about which one of those dots we should found next.

We received an email from Whosit this morning claiming that he had met our scout, and upon logging into the game, verily it was so!

Salutations Speaker and Sullla of the Killer Angels,

My Scout, Bib Fortuna, came across your Warrior, Jubal Early. Are you perhaps hunting the pirate and smuggler known as Malcolm Reynolds? If you are, I wish you the best of luck; the Empire is well aware of the threat that pirates and rebels present. With that piece of business aside, I would like to simply add that I hope our two empires can coexist peacefully and forge agreements to our mutal benefit.

Best regards,
Whosit, Galactic Emperor

* * * * *

Dear Speaker and Sullla,

It has come to my attention that I may have misidentified Jubal Early. The theme underlying the names of your cities should have tipped me off. I hope that you will pardon the instincts of a sci-fi fan. In any case, I am still pleased to make your acquaintance.

Best regards,
Whosit, Galactic Emperor

His two cities are named Imperial Center and Carida, so it appears we have another Star Wars fan on our hands here. I'm going to send out a bunch of emails in a little bit; I'll keep them simple and not propose anything unusual, since I won't have time to run them past Speaker first.

Anyway, with contact with Nakor coming next turn, we'll have met 7 of the 8 teams. I think that I'm going to turn Chamberlain back around and send him towards our borders. Why?

* We only need contact with one more team, and Jubal Early is way more likely to find Broker, who is down to the south and has units in Jubal's vicinity.

* There's a lot of black tiles to be defogged northeast of Pink/Fredericksburg, in an area that we might settle one day.

* Chamberlain could scout out Jowy's cities once we sign Open Borders with them (which we will soon).

Seems like it would make more sense than scouting out terrain on the other side of the world!

[Sullla]

Email roundup. I have gone ahead and sent these, since Speaker will be away traveling this weekend.

sunrise/regoarrarr:

Dear regoarrarr and Team Byzantium,

We are very sorry to hear that you were unable to return your worker to the safety of your borders. Fortunately Spiros was able to defeat his barbarian opponent - thank you for clearing the way forward for Chamberlain.

I can't think of anything funny or clever to say here, so I'll continue to wish all of you luck in breaking the Ottoman choking attempt. (Been there before in some MP games, and it definitely sucks.)

Sullla
The Killer Angels

athlete and kalin:

Dear Rebel Alliance,

We are very happy to accept the 20-turn Non Aggression Pact with your team, to last until the end of Turn 80. You'll probably be occupied in the immediate future with the war against sunrise, but don't hesitate to contact us if you've got anything on your mind. Good luck cracking the tough nut of Athens!

Sullla
The Killer Angels

Jowy:

Dear Jowy,

Don't worry about it, this is a very busy time of the year, and we've also been feeling an overload of diplomacy from contacting more teams. Thanks to your directions, we were able to find a scout from Whosit this turn, and we can see the borders of Nakor so that we'll make contact next turn. Still looking for Broker and plako, but they can't be too far away either!

As you said in your last message, we have indeed found you to be a man of honor and integrity. I hope that you view us in the same light! :) It's unquestionable that our cooperation thus far has allowed us both to get ahead of the teams that are locked in destructive warfare. Indeed, we may both be able to expand into territory that would have belonged to sunrise, had he not been slowed by warfare. There's a lot of nice unclaimed land to our northeast and your east. I feel bad for sunrise, of course, but our teams might both end up profiting handsomely from the Byzantine/Ottoman war, if we can both get a larger share of the land without needing to fight anyone.

Our third city is located near our capital. We pledged it would not be founded in an aggressive spot, and we kept our word!

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

Whosit:

Dear Galactic Emperor,

Greetings to you, Whosit! I see from your city names that you have adopted a theme based on the Star Wars universe. Does this mean that you are pledged into a mortal struggle to the end with athlete and kalin's Rebel Alliance? :)

As your second message correctly guessed, we are not using a sci-fi theme. Speaker suggested trying something based around the American Civil War, and it developed over time from there. But speaking of war, we've heard some rumors that there may be a conflict taking place in your local neighborhood. Is there any truth to that? Our team is located pretty far away, and we're not up to date on the past history of your region. We'd be happy to pass on the information we've gathered about our part of the map in return for what you can tell us about your area.

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

We also received a message from Dantski after a couple days of silence:

Hi guys,

I'm sorry for a small wait on the reply, just been a little busy the last few days (may have noticed my thread wasn't updated either so I'm not ignoring you!

I am happy to re-sign a NAP and offer a 15 turn extension (not sure what date that takes us upto).

How's your scouting going? I heard that plako is the other side of Nakor and Whosit's Rome is next door to him.

Guess the layout of teams assuming the land is a ring....

iamjohn-athlete-daregorise-jowy-you-me-nakor-plako-whosit

With a gap someplace where Mortius once was.

Hope you're well and not whipping your poor citizens too much!

-Dantski

This is good news. I'm going to wait until the turn ticks over and we meet Nakor before sending a reply, however. (I'd like to see if Nakor is involved in a war with Broker first, which could affect how I write the response to Dantski.) But that's in like 3 hours, so there's little delay hopefully.

[Sullla]

sunrise has reloaded back to the start of T61, the turn before the one we just pleased. Consider me not amused by this particular turn of events. Going back essentially two full turns is a fairly drastic solution. In the future, it would actually be better to Pause the game during a dispute, rather than have everyone continue moving forward and wipe it all out with a reload!

Now we have to re-move exactly as we did previously, plus there's no guarantee that the other teams will do the same, and we waste at least 24 hours in delay moving forward. What a mess.

[Sullla]

Alright, re-moved units the same way as before. Double-checked to make sure all the worker actions were correct. (This is when it pays to type up elaborate development plans.) I also responded to Dantski:

Dear Dantski,

We figured that you had been busy over the last few days. I was going to send you another email today, until I saw your message in our inbox. Speaker and I are both very pleased to accept an extention of our Non-Aggression Pact; another 15 turns will take us up to Turn 90 overall.

Thanks for the information on Broker/plako and Whosit. We actually came to the exact same conclusion on where everyone was located, so you know what they say about great minds thinking alike... :) Our scouting unit ran into one of Whosit's units right before the reload, and hopefully we'll meet up again by doing the same moves. We also saw one of Nakor's cities in the same area. Has he been trying to crowd you with his city placements? It looked like a pretty aggressive spot to us.

Our citizens will take as many whippings as needed! :) Cheers.
Sullla
The Killer Angels

And sent off something quick to Whosit:

Dear Whosit,

Just letting you know that we are moving our warrior in the same fasion after the reload as we did previously. We can "remeet" in the same spot if you do the same with your scout.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

And with that, we should be good for the moment. I'm out for the rest of the night, have a nice weekend everyone. :jive: