Hey. We're probably only going to use one thread for this game; I don't see a great need for extras. One of our big strengths as a team is the fact that Speaker and sunrise and I have been friends for a long time. The downside is that we plan on doing most of our planning discussions on Teamspeak instead of in this thread. I'll try to keep lurkers updated on what's going on.
Here's our thoughts on what to play for this game:
Cyrus (Charismatic/Imperialistic) of Mongolia [Speaker]
Pacal (Expansive/Financial) of India [Sullla]
Gandhi (Philosophical/Spiritual) of England [sunrise]
The idea is that each of us will play one of three general roles: Fighter, Techer, and Banker.
* Not surprisingly, Speaker will be taking the Fighter role. Ideally, he'll build the most units for our team. From the four military-focused traits (Agg, Chr, Imp, Pro) we valued Charismatic and Imperialistic the most. The former trait allows you to stack a third promotion onto Mounted units very easily - this is why we also selected Mongolia, because Chr Mongolia can build triple-promoted horse units with the Ger unique building. Having keshiks around in the early game is also a nice little bonus. The other Imperialistic trait allows for faster settler builds, which is not trivial on later era starts. (The cost of settlers goes up in later eras.) In addition to that, if Speaker is building the most units, he'll also be doing the most fighting, which should hopefully produce faster Great Generals. If we could double up on traits we'd probably pick something different here, but since we can't, Chr/Imp feels like a pretty decent pairing.
* I'm playing one of the more obvious power pairings, Pacal of India. This one should be pretty clear. In an ideal setting, I'd be doing most of the teching and infrastructure stuff. Financial is obvious for research purposes, and since we only get 1 Fin civ, we want it to be on the techer. Expansive is more debatable, because Exp is actually somewhat weak for Medieval starts. Every city starts with a granary, which nullifies one of the biggest reasons for picking the trait. However, we still thought that Exp had enough value by virtue of being able to pair up Exp with India, to produce fast Fast Workers (heh). I expect every team will have an India player, and they will all be gifting around Fast Workers to teammates. That's what we hope to be able to do. Why use workers when you can use Fast Workers, eh?
* Our last leader has to include Philosophical. This is pretty much mandatory for late era team games, you need one Phi civ. Early lightbulbs of key techs using Phi civs are commonplace in these games. For the other trait, we thought Spiritual would be more useful than Industrious or Creative. Medieval is generally a pretty weak era for wonders, aside from the Great Library (which used to be disabled for Medieval starts, and was then unwisely re-added for Medieval in Beyond the Sword in a poor design choice). We expect the other teams to go for the Great Library, and are not going to make a play for it, to concentrate on other things. Creative is also rather weak for later eras, especially since you can immediately revolt to Caste System civic and/or Build Culture after researching Music (an important early tech in Medieval). We are thinking at the moment that sunrise will take this role and play "Banker" for us, picking England as the civ (stock exchanges great for this role, plus redcoats later). Still trying to decide before finalizing.
We thought about Inca, ultimately deciding that it wasn't that hard to pop borders in this start, even though free Terraces in every city is very nice. We also considered Elizabeth (Fin/Phi) as a leader, which sounds like a great idea for a pure teching civ. But... Fin and Phi don't actually synergize all that well together, since the former builds cottages and the latter builds farms. We thought that splitting up the Fin role from the Phi -> Great Person role would actually work a bit better. We'll see what happens.
There are tons of viable combinations of leaders and civs to choose for this game, and we're pretty excited to see what others pick. You can go a lot of different ways on this one. Should be fun.
![[Image: biggrin.gif]](http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Smilies/biggrin.gif)
