Uncommonly Good: A Story of Elves

[Gaspar]

I really want to say the Elohim are being besieged by mister 64k soldier points and have turned off all tech, but that doesn't make sense. They're the Elohim for crying out loud.

Yeah, pretty sure the Elohim just have an odd plan. The problem with C&D and FFH2 is that there really are about a billion possibilities for everything, with all the randomness built in.

<snip>

I'm afraid I don't know much famous stoner references, so I can't really help on city names (unless you're willing to go with basalt, quartz, something like that? Didn't think so).

But we are down to 4 turns to Education and the need for at least that much of a plan. I'm starting to think we may want to go for Calendar, both for the cotton as well as for Agrarianism, to get the Remnants site started a little faster. We won't want it permanently, of course, but with only cows and farms, we're going to need one or the other to have that city contribute anything in the near future. And especially if we want it to work the Remnants before we make it to WoTF.

The problem, as oft discussed re: FFH2, is that its very difficult to get everything you need by the time you need it. Agrarianism would definitely help with the necessary worker production to get cottages up and running, and Calendar would improve our happy cap as well. I'm just not sure we can justify the beakers. The problem is the T100 deadline. As I said, while I can try some diplo, I think it fairly evident that T100 is not our deadline. I suppose I could have gone T120 or something in retrospect, obviously the later the better as far as the elves are concerned, but getting these 100 turns of peace was quite the coup at the time, so I'm not going to fret not getting the extra 10-20 turns we'd really like. Nyk was able to put together a serviceable army against Mr. Yellow by T110 in PBEM3, I think we can do the same, we're just going to need to push. I'll run some numbers before Education comes in.

Re: City naming, my current favorite is White Castle, as it has some synergy with the Remnants. However, I'm just going to throw some ideas out there for potential city names and perhaps the lurkers can chime in with what they like or new ideas(even the non-dedicated variety.)

[Disclaimer: This is all in good fun, I haven't smoked pot in 17 years.]

White Castle
4:20
Sticky Icky
No Stems
Half Baked
Dime Bag
Magic Brownies
Phish Concert
Contact High
Kind Bud
Bongwater
Cheetos

And... I'm out. Well, all my other ideas are basically plays on the above. I think we'll stick to wrestlers for units, though I never got any good ideas on workers. Do we want to stick to Keebler elves? Keebler products? Junk Food references? Wrestling Managers? Worker 1,2,3... Help me out here.

[pling]

@fire&ice - have you seen Commodore's signature? I couldn't stop laughing for five, ten minutes!

I finally read that closely enough to get the joke

[Disclaimer: This is all in good fun, I haven't smoked pot in 17 years.]

I don't really have anything to say, I just wanted to note that that's a verrrrrry precise disclaimer you've got there, Gaspar

And... I'm out. Well, all my other ideas are basically plays on the above. I think we'll stick to wrestlers for units, though I never got any good ideas on workers. Do we want to stick to Keebler elves? Keebler products? Junk Food references? Wrestling Managers? Worker 1,2,3... Help me out here.

Surely it should be junk food references? Unless you wanted 3 different themes? The names of Tolkein elves, reduced to farm labourers would amuse me in that case.

[Man Behind the Mask]

[Disclaimer: This is all in good fun, I haven't smoked pot in 17 years.]

Looking at the timings, I’m glad Papa Shango was a mark-out not a flashback.

Re: City naming, my current favorite is White Castle, as it has some synergy with the Remnants. However, I'm just going to throw some ideas out there for potential city names and perhaps the lurkers can chime in with what they like or new ideas(even the non-dedicated variety.)
<snip>
And... I'm out. Well, all my other ideas are basically plays on the above. I think we'll stick to wrestlers for units, though I never got any good ideas on workers. Do we want to stick to Keebler elves? Keebler products? Junk Food references? Wrestling Managers? Worker 1,2,3... Help me out here.

I’m also not going to be much help for a stoner theme (especially one reliant on Americanisms), and I’d never heard of Keebler before this thread. Wikipedia lists a good number of names for their elves. One possible alternative for workers could be an elfy theme of species of tree (other types of foliage are available).

[Various earlier comments on diplo...]

The problem is the T100 deadline. As I said, while I can try some diplo, I think it fairly evident that T100 is not our deadline. I suppose I could have gone T120 or something in retrospect, obviously the later the better as far as the elves are concerned, but getting these 100 turns of peace was quite the coup at the time, so I'm not going to fret not getting the extra 10-20 turns we'd really like.

I think an important point for diplo is going to be around Turn 80 (sadly over a month away!). We can go to Nicloae with the NAP running down and ask for a 20 turn extension. If he says no, we are all war, if he says yes then we’ve got an extra 20 turns to get our buildup right rather than rushed. Turn 80 is about when I suspect WotF will be in, and we’ll need to choose between a Priesthood beeline or filling in a couple more economy techs. I do think it’s important that you keep a presence in Nicolae’s ear in the meantime, especially now he has somebody else to talk to.

And my usual final thought… what the hell is that polar bear doing wandering through the jungle? If he beelines to the plains hill and then stops, I’m going to be joining paranoid squad.

[Gaspar]

Since it seems like nobody else finds my original stream of ideas particularly fascinating, and I'm not especially wedded to it, perhaps I can name the cities off songs/movies/books that either reference contraband or are well known to have been written under the influence of such? Since the capital references a Dr. Dre Album/Song, that's a pretty convenient divergence. I always forget that I'm just about the only American here.

For the workers, I hesitate on trees simply because while I can reasonably marry marijuana usage with pro wrestling, I'm at a bit of a loss how to join those two to redwoods and cypreses.

And the polar bear in the jungle, yeah, definitely weird. It can't be another players though, because even hidden nationality units give contact. Mostly a polar bear in the jungle made me think of Lost.

[Man Behind the Mask]

I have no strong opinion on themes – especially as I’m pretty close to going totally insane (see below). Hopefully something interesting will turn up in the game soon, so I can stop filling my free time with this gibberish.




We’re back for a second episode, with the initial intention of answering the BIG question. Just who is wandering around with a high-powered army?

We’re still slowly filling in the demographics information. I picked up a couple of early gaps from dropbox, but it gets a bit blank once we get excited about dotmapping, Mistforms and so on. Although I’ve pieced together a lot, I think I have actually uncovered another big mystery. I might have to rename this series “Fumbling in the Dark (Arts)”.

We know that on Turn 8, the rival best soldiers jumped to 21k, from 9k. The turn before, the respective armies in the world were 4k (us), 8k (Nicolae from graph), two at 9k (from best), two at 5k (from worst), so that the average works out right. The two 9ks are for warrior first and size 2 (Elohim and Grigori) and the starting 5k for the other worker firsts (Hippus and Bals). That might be the most satisfying bit of C&D I’ve attempted. No score changes at turn 8, so the only shifts in power will be for units. To make the demos all add up, the armies of Erebus are: 4k (us), 5k (the unlucky one out of horsies and clowns), 8k (Sheaim), 9k (the less cautious of monks and adventurers), 12k (somebody who went double warrior), and then the scary 21k. I’m pretty confident that narrows it down to either the Hippus or the Balseraphs getting 16k of power, which is either 2 lizards or 2 dwarf axemen. To really confirm this, the Hippus and Balseraphs BOTH had a first pop increase on Turn 14, and sure enough the top soldier count rises by 1k.

However, it goes all murky again when the soldier count does its next big jump. Between Turn 17 and 18, average power moves from 10,200 to 14,400. Over six civs, that’s a global increase of around 24k (not sure how the rounding works on that stat). The rival best power number only increased by 12k, and neither us (still third in the demos at 8k) or the rival worst moved. It’s therefore possible that this jump was not the same civ who had the first jump, and was actually someone picking up three 8k units, to move from second on the demos (on 16k=5 warriors and 1k for pop) to first with 40k. I think this would work with the two averages if armies after the jump were 40k, 21k (same as the turn before for the leader), 8k (us, in third), 7k, 7k, 3k, with only the one change from 16k-40k between the turns. There are some other permutations, with a number of civs all making units the same turn, but 12k is a weird number to jump if it is the first big army again. It does get confusing as 40k increases by 1k in each of the next 2 turns, before a long period holding steady.

Now, one army has gone on to grow significantly larger, now standing at 64k. It’s difficult to say what happened to the other, but “unaccounted for” points in the average suggest a total for the two unknown civs of about 60k – impossible to say whether that’s 45k and 15k or 30/30. The conclusion is that one of the Hippus and Balseraphs had a dwarf/lizard event. It’s possible they had another, but also quite likely that somebody else had the same event also, and got more from it. We’ll need to fill in some gaps to have a bit more certainty, but I don’t think we’ll know until we get the graphs.


And finally, to ram home today’s lesson on the importance of the complete picture and also provide something else to ponder. I pulled out a few “top cities” screens, so that I could confirm that those totals tally with pop expectations based on score.

Top cities for Turn 30 are size: 6 (us), 4 (probably Clowns as their culture puts them ahead despite lower population), 5 (Hippus, based on score), 4 (Grigori, likewise), and 4 (Nicolae’s New York).
However for Turn 33, the top city screen shows: 6 (us), 5 (likely Balseraphs who have “pop points” on T32&33, the latter probably City 2), 5 (?), 4 (Sheaim) and 3 (???).

That would suggest one of the Hippus or Grigori “lost” a load of culture or some population during those turns, but they gained 11 and 6 score points respectively during that time. I’m thinking something screwy with Cassiel’s Crew, as they had three 6 point rises in a row (pop score should alternate 6,5,6 etc), but I need to fill in the missing demos/top cities to check. I’ll just quote our glorious leader for emphasis!

The problem with C&D and FFH2 is that there really are about a billion possibilities for everything, with all the randomness built in.

[Mardoc]

Well, I went ahead and filled in the missing demos (from saves, so it doesn't capture any micromanagement Gaspar did). Hopefully that helps save a couple

Also, I noticed an error in your assumptions, MBTM. Averages are only Rival Averages, not including us.

[Man Behind the Mask]

Well, I went ahead and filled in the missing demos (from saves, so it doesn't capture any micromanagement Gaspar did). Hopefully that helps save a couple

Thanks very much, although I think I've gone a long way past

Also, I noticed an error in your assumptions, MBTM. Averages are only Rival Averages, not including us.

And so this noob goes from to
Conclusions about the first soldier jump being Balseraphs or Hippus remain valid. I'll need to rethink a lot of the other trash. Not right now, though!

[Mardoc]

Something that suddenly occurs to me - Gaspar, you were looking for something to talk to Nicolae about, right? Suppose you just ask him if Kyan's the one with the ridiculous soldier count?

[Gaspar]

Good idea. I'll comment on the rest later as I'm in a bit of a rush.

Hey Nicolae,

Thanks for the heads up. If you'd like to direct Kyan towards me when you chat, that would be much appreciated. Also, the rival on 64k soldier points has caused the Ljosalfar C&D department no end of frustration, can you check graphs and let us know if its the Clowns? Much appreciated.

I'd love to tell you I have anything else interesting to say, but other than the Lost flashback from seeing a polar bear wandering around in the jungle between us, I'm pretty well still in the mash enter phase of the game. Hope to have news of a new settlement soon, looks like you and I are last to that particular party.

Regards,
Gaspar

[Gaspar]

Turns starts with an event. I don't know that I've ever had this pop up where I could use it. I suspect you have to be evil, and I'm always good/neutral when this pops up. Regardless, I have little interest in giving up 3 pop unless it gave a GSage or something.



Score changes: Kyan (11), Rawkking (12), Grigori (5), Elohim (5) Two other civs have hit size 6 cities.

No response yet from Nicolae btw, can't but wonder how much Kyan/Krill have him diplo dancing. If he didn't hate us already, Kyan's probably got him convinced that he'll only find true love through the blood of elves. Friggin' Kyan, really would have been happy if he were much further away.

Otherwise, LLP continued following the machinations of our polar bear friend and the Brawler continued his retreat to the new city site. Settler and Worker are en route, capital is started on another worker. I'm going to have the new city pump warriors for a bit, both because of the Lizardman baring barrow, and because of the fact that Kyan has something presumably strong enough to make a long trek in the area and is a [strike]douchebag[/strike] opportunist.



Nonetheless, we're probably most vulnerable to something unfortunate ruining our game over the next 4T, which is how long it will take to get the new city settled since you guys talked me out of the road. Current ETAs: Education (T45), City #2 (T46), Great Sage (T51)

Nicolae adopted Agrarianism this turn, so we know his last tech was most likely calendar. Also, we know he's not very good at this game, because as a non-spiritual civ, single revolting for Agrarianism is a pretty stupid move. Faster settler production is nice and all, but given he started with AC, why he wouldn't grab Mysticism and dual revolt God King is beyond me. Perhaps I'm overly critical.

EOT Demos:


And note this drop in power...



Barbs or Balseraphs, you be the judge.