[SPOILER] Asoka of the Vikings (Nakor & Gaspar)

[Nakor]

You never mentioned your temper to me... maybe drink something soothing?

Okay, did the worker and unit shuffling. Really don't get why Luddite went to war with a lot of land to fill still.... hmm...

Okay, here is the city count:

Plako: 19
Rego & co: 18
LP: 17
Locke :15
Us: 13
Moogle: 12
Luddite: 12
Adlain: 8
Mackoti: 5
WK: 3

Guess we need to settle those filler sites soon to keep up!

Tech wise after Calender - Feudalism - Civil Service - Philosophy - Machinery - Compass - Optics?

[Gaspar]

So, Nakor asked to do a new city count, so here it is:

plako - 19
rego - 18
LP - 17
Locke - 15
Us - 13
SM - 12
luddite - 12
Adlain - 8
mackoti - 5
wk - 3

That actually doesn't work terrible as a long term scoreboard for the game, other than I'd bump luddite above SM, and probably swap Locke and rego. Interestingly, I think Locke is about at the sweet spot for cities right now, with 15. 19 is overexpanded, unquestionably, and the post-war recovery is going to be painful for plako. Don't get me wrong, I think he'll manage, but oddly enough, 20 turns or so would be a great time for someone to invade him, if they felt so inclined. He will no doubt be deleting some units and such. rego can get away with his 18 because any coastal city he settles is getting settled at a net profit with at least 8C per city coming in from trade routes. We are all idiots for giving him OB. In fairness, he doesn't have any TR from us at the moment, and we also have an interest in seeing a strong-ish rego, as he will be plako's other neighbor after WK gets cleaned up.

As far as the others... a bit of underexpansion. We would be at a greater city count, except, check out the neighbors. #1, 3, 4 in city count. We definitely fucked ourselves with that border agreement with plako. LP beating us to the jungle site was painful as well. Locke has actually been a decent neighbor re: settling, except that he just took a key site from us. We have a few backfill locations to settle - we can probably get to 19-20 cities peacefully. A few of those are stub cities though, and will only minimally add to the empire.

luddite obviously hurt himself in the war, but probably has absurd amounts of land to expand into. SM... dunno, we've really not interacted in any way with him in this game. Adlain is... out of his depth here. The thing about this game, while there are no OMG stellar players in it, its a pretty competent group. Everyone except Adlain in this game would be a threat to win a game all other things being equal. WK gets a pass because he came into a bad situation, and he's obviously a plenty competent player judging from his PBEMs. mackoti... underestimated luddite. He's also a plenty competent player.

But other than those 3, I'd say anyone, given the right combination of circumstances, could compete long-term. Ultimately, I think Locke, LP or plako will win, but they all have circumstances that can change that. The positive for us, is we've gotten this far with minimal use of our traits. Our traits start coming into their own now, especially Spiritual, so I think we'll be able to stay competitive. Ultimately though, we just don't have enough land to win. We're going to have to take some from someone, and unfortunately, we're bordered on all sides by players who will be difficult to take land from.

Hopefully, plako's economy really tanks after the WK war, because oddly enough, he seems like the best target. We don't really border LP well enough, and Locke is still out-teching us and he borders Adlain. Ask yourself this: Would you rather team up with rego to double team plako or Adlain or luddite to double team Locke? Thought so.

I'll do a post on some observations from demos and such later. That one will be slightly more visual.

EDIT: heh, interesting cross-post.

[Gaspar]

RE: Techs, I agree with Calendar -> Feudalism -> CS -> Philo.

After that, let's step back and reevaluate. Caravels and Whaling Boats have some value, but happiness won't be very limiting for a while, and if we're not going to war, who cares about better boats. But we might be going to war, in which case we'd care about better boats.

Instinctively, I think we might just want to beeline(ish) Knights after Philo. But lets see where we stand after we finish settling our filler sites. Definitely like to see at least 3 cities settled in the next 10-12 turns: Iron, Horse/Clam, Southern Fish.

[Gaspar]

Let's talk about tech-rate/GNP for a bit.

Here's the GNP graph for the most recent turn. If you can unravel the spaghetti a bit, its fairly instructive:



What's illustrative there? Firstly, Lord Parkin's graph is a bit deceptive. Given that he has built every crap wonder in the game, his culture is going to be through the roof. I'd say if you stripped out the culture from his graph, his graph would be much in line with the Locke and Us. Of course, he most likely has an Academy and he's in Bureaucracy right now, so there's no doubt he's generating a decent amount of commerce. Unfortunately for him, with his 17 cities and no Organized, his breakeven tech rate is probably similar to ours. Sadly, he has ridiculous amounts of land, so ultimately, his commerce potential is significantly higher than ours. I'd be very surprised if he wasn't teching significantly faster than us in 50 turns. I'd also be very surprised if we weren't teching reasonably faster than him in 10 turns.

plako's graph tells a story as well. Again, culture is deceptive here. As Cultural and with his own early founded religion, he's probably generating something like 60 culture per turn just from trait and religion spread, not even considering things like lots of cheap libraries. Still, that spike circa 450 BC is pretty impressive. You can see him flatten out leading to the WK war, probably a combination of increasing unit maintenance and running breakeven tech instead of binary to camoflauge his true research power, as a dominant team should do. Then you see him crater a bit during his war with WK. That's some serious maintenance problems right there. I have no doubt he has a ridiculous number of units, and he's at 19 cities, and he can't have that many CH's up. He has strong early game economic traits, but they frankly are pretty much over. While I suspect plako will come back fiercely, there's no doubt in my mind he's going to struggle for the next 20 turns or so. Rego would be wise to settle aggressively into what would have been WK's lands.

Interestingly, our graphs and Locke's are virtually identical. Now, he's achieving that GNP with more cities, so his long term potential is pretty nice. But I think we did a nice job of getting the economy going after a slow start. The key here is to not make the mistake of PBEM12, and keep pushing. All of our neighbors are plenty keen to ignore us, as our slow start belied our future potential. That can work to our advantage, as we can probably have war on our own terms, rather than theirs. I think if we can push towards Education, Printing Press and Banking with similar vigor as we pursued Currency and CoL, we'll reap the rewards. And then lose because we don't have enough land, but hey, gotta try. I'll comment more on other stuff later. FWIW, here's the demos:

[Gaspar]

Lurkers make no sense. Pie and Broccoli - lurker posts. Detailed game analysis - dead silence.

Anyway, the turn rolled over. Nothing completed or was researched, so fairly mundane stuff. I actually feel a little bad I keep leaving the workers for you, but I don't want to screw up whatever it is you might have planned.

In tile micro news, I think we probably have to not work the gold mine at Dorestadt for a few turns. There's no food of consequence there, so we really need to let it get onto a couple more tiles before watching it die, IMO. Switching from the mine to another cottage loses us a bit of commerce, but we'll grow next turn instead of the one after. I'd probably work the second cottage after growth before letting it go back to the mine, but that's really just going to be sort of a quiet city. Likewise at Horseland with the Horses v. Cottages. Lot of food poor cities we have, unfortunately.

I cancelled the chop w/1T left at Crossing II. It can whip the TP for 2 pop with max overflow in 2T, which is conveniently when we can revolt back to slavery. That chop should be saved for Moai. In the meantime, I had it build a road, since connecting those two cities seems like a good idea eventually.

I didn't quite know where the workers for Paradise/Dashboard Light were coming from, so I didn't move any boats/workers other than what I've described here. Nothing much else going on, though both plako and WK have played, so I suspect this turn will roll over quickly. Looks like Adlain got a prophet for the Buddhist shrine. Really wish that was the religion that spread, hate that Locke is going to get a pile of commerce from us when he finally gets the shrine. So it goes.

[Nakor]

Hey Gaspar, I enjoy reading your anlysis. Always! Don't always agree, though. And I don't have the time to reply as eloquent as you do, since two young kids take up most of my spare time...

Anyways, don't worry about the worker job, you did most of it in PBEM12. I'll see if I can get to your level.
What I do like to know is what Fish site you want to see settled first. Not sure about it.

Took a look at everything and microed Greenland to finish the Missionary and grow next turn. The eastern Galley is going to collect 2 missionaries and then 2 more, first for Paradise and Dashboard Light, then for Crossing and Crossing II. Greenland can build 3 of them while growing. Need to remember to micro Greenland back to the cottages next turn.

Agree with you on Dorestadt, let's not work the Gold mine untill it's size 7.
Changed a cottage being worked in Horseland away from the border with Locke. Need to get our other cottages matured faster in case of a cultural battle or a possible real battle.

I think Beaverpass can start our third settler after growth next turn. Market will be done there as well then, so that comes nicely together.
Don't forget to put Riverland back on Settler duty next turn after growth as well.

Then some pictures for the lurkers (you know they can't react to everything you say due to the lurker code, right?):





You can see how much we scouted of the map already....

And one for Krill:

[Ellimist]

If it helps, there were a few things I've wanted to post but didn't. When in doubt I don't post anything. Non-game related topics are easier to reply to.

[Nakor]

Thanks, Ellimist! I know that, now we have to make Gaspar understand... :neenernee

Maybe he should start a cooking column in here to get more responses. Don't know if our game will go better, but it should be fun!

Honestly, if you want to ask for a screenshot (or something else), please do, we don't need to know why you need it or a reaction, we can read that afterwards in the lurker thread.

[zakalwe]

Ok, at the risk of breaking the lurker code of conduct...

Broccoli sucks. It's only good if you mask the taste, for example by steaming it to death.

[Krill]

It's only good if you feed it to people you don't like.