[Spoilers!] Dave Versus Financial

[oledavy]

Welcome to my spoiler thread for PBEM30

[oledavy]

I took a long walk the other day, thinking about how I’d like to play this game, and eventually arrived at this general strategy. Nicolae, rejoice, it involves cracking lots and lots of skulls.

General Idea: Beeline Cuirassiers/Conquistadors, KILL EVERYTHING
Tech Priorities: Music, Liberalism, Military Tradition, Communism, Steel
Wonder Priorities: The Great Library, The Taj Mahal, The Kremlin

Tech Path:

1. Music (Bulb)
2. Civil Service
3. Machinery
4. Engineering (If Needed for Defense)
5. Philosophy (Bulb)
6. Paper
7. Education (Bulb)
8. Liberalism
9. Nationalism (Libbed)
10. Gunpowder
11. Military Tradition
12. Chemistry
13. Scientific Method
14. Communism
15. Steel
16. ….

Step by Step Plan:

Step #1 – Pop out a Great Artist
Step #2 – Bulb Music
Step #3 – Use the Music GA to claim lots of juicy territory
Step #4 – Chop out The Great Library
Step #5 – Expand like crazy
Step #6 – Bulb Philosophy, start running bursts of pacifism
Step #7 – Build Academy in main commerce city (capital?)
Step #8 – Bulb Education
Step #9 – Research Liberalism for Nationalism
Step #10 – Chop out the Taj
Step #11 – Research Gunpowder and Military Tradition
Step #12 – Build a horde of Cuirassiers
Step #13 – Go kill someone
Step #14 – Research up to Communism and Steel
Step #15 – Start whipping cannons
Step #16 - Build the Kremlin
Step #17 – Win.

I can’t claim originality on this plan, as I believe it is a variation on what Team #1 is trying to do in PB6. However, given the AW setting, I believe it may be my best bet for pulling out a victory. Of course, “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” I’ll need to adapt as the game proceeds to what my opponents do. However, this will be my overall approach to the game and a good starting point for picking a civilization and leader.

So, civs/leaders I thought of, in rough order of preference:

Spain (Cuirassier/Citadel)
Mongolia (Keshik/Ger)
HRE (Landskecht/Rathaus)
Ottomans (Jannisary/Hamman)
England (Redcoat/Stock Exchange)
Korea (Seowon/Hwacha)
China (Cho-Ko-Nu/Pavillion)

Justininan (SPI/IMP)
Gandhi (SPI/PHI)
Rameses (SPI/IND)
Asoka (SPI/ORG)

Sensing a spiritual theme with the leaders?

Possible Synergies:

Asoka of the HRE
Gandhi of Korea

I'm a huge fan of spiritual - plus I regard it as the most powerful trait on a medieval start - thus it appearing in all four of my leader picks. My first impulse is Justinian of Spain, no real synergy, but good traits and a solid UU and UB for what I want to do. However, I don’t expect Justinian to be up when I get to pick. Mack and I spoke several weeks ago regarding leader/civ choices for a medieval start and both agreed that Justinian was the best. Since he's ahead of me in the snake pick, I expect him get Justinian. I started typing up my thoughts on how traits are revalued for a medieval start yesterday, but probably won't get around to finishing and posting it until next week when I have more time.

So, lurker team, you see my gameplan, what do you two think is the best leader/civ pairing to accomplish that goal? Completely open to ideas from outside my little pool - these are just all the leaders and civs that came to mind. We've got a few days to figure it out.

In the meantime, let's crack some jokes, spam some smileys, and just generally try to have a great time along the way. I'm eagerly looking forward to this game

[Nicolae Carpathia]

An ambitious plan! Though we'll need PHI to guarantee the Great Artist.

A shame you're not allowed into Spulla's PB6 thread, I'll crib whatever I can and file off the serial numbers.

By the way, my email is nicolaecarpathia420, it's a gmail address, hit me up in chat.

[oledavy]

By the way, my email is nicolaecarpathia420, it's a gmail address, hit me up in chat.

Invite sent. Looking forward to chatting with you

An ambitious plan! Though we'll need PHI to guarantee the Great Artist.

This would point to Gandhi, arguably the most powerful leader left with Justinian gone.

Which brings us to an interesting point:

[SIZE="3"]Why Music First?[/SIZE]

Music first through a GA bulb essentially allows you to get a tech for free by leveraging a great artist into another great artist. The benefits of the tech itself aren't amazing, but still noteworthy:

1. You can build temples and a cathedral to run three priests somewhere for a GP for your shrine. (spiritual temples anyone? )
2. You get first stab at the Sistine Chapel.
3. You can build culture to pop borders in your new cities vs. running artist specialists (weakens spiritual a little as a proxy effect).

To auxiliary benefits are that it opens up an artist bulb on nationalism and is a pre-requisite for Military Tradition. So, I need this tech for cuirassiers, and at the same time get a lot of fun additional perks. However, probably the biggest effect here is the utility factor and intimidation effect of Great Artists:



Great Artists dominate medieval start games. Normally, great artists are unobtainable until about ~100 turns into a game. With immediate access to CS, you can pump them out right off the bat. Since culture from enemy cities hasn't had 100+ turns to accumulate on a medieval start, bombing on enemy cities becomes significantly more effective.

PB6 Spoiler

We all saw Team #1's well-played combat bomb on Team #2 in PB6

In MP games, they're usually used to inflate your score by acquiring lots of land tiles. This is still really effective in an Epic environment, as you can claim a lot of land that might otherwise be contested with an artist bomb. This is what I'll hopefully be doing with mine in this game. They make pink dots very defensible, with 80% defenses and LOS on any incoming attack for at least a six-tile radius. Settling them is also a decent option, as it provides more cultural pressure for the long-term, especially when paired with a multiplier. Additionally, you get +3 gold from them, which is always nice Aside from their utility, they serve to intimidate your opponents and keep them worried where you might use the bomb. You probably won't have anyone settling up on you when you have an unused GA on hand.

The drawbacks of this option vs the traditional Civil Service bulb for medieval games are twofold.

1. Longer without bureaucracy/maces
2. Artist specialists are not as economically beneficial as merchants or scientists.

Slower to Civil Service and machinery means increased vulnerability to an early rush, and less time in bureaucracy. However, the reduced time in bureaucracy is not as bad in this type of game. Your capital hasn't had 80 turns to grow cottages and probably isn't very amazing yet, so the benefits aren't as huge.

Artist specialists also aren't economy boosters like scientists and merchants are: they produce culture (and 1 gold). For this reason, I'm going to try to pop out my Great Artist in my second city (which will be lacking any culture producing buildings, unlike the capital), so I can get a border pop or two while pumping out the Great Artist.

And Mackoti has taken back his Justinian pick? I wonder who he will be selecting instead.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

If we want to guarantee our early GArtist, we'll pretty much need to announce it by picking a PHI leader. Lemme push for Gandhi. Pumps out workers, our 2nd city grows. We can safely put the first couple of turns into running the culture slider if needed, as it's not like we'll be getting any real beakers.

The risk of running super early specialists is that it eats up food that could be put into worker whips. It's a reasonable risk though.

[Commodore]

Okay, I have to ask, if you are valuing Spi and Phi so highly, why aren't Mansa and Lizzie on your list? Just curious about the thought process here.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Why not do both?

I guess we're simply not used to using FIN leaders on RB these days . But yeah, we have a plan, and I guess we just want to see it through. Even if FIN is a more stable trait than a high risk GArtist bulb strategy.

[Commodore]

Okay, fair enough, and Gandhi got picked often enough even in the days of Fin unbanned that I can see the appeal. I just had no clue why Financial appeared nowhere on the list at all.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

The thing about FIN is that it encourages you to work cottages. Everywhere. Even in newly built cities.

This could be a good or a bad thing, depending on the map.

If there are a ton of rivers a la PBEM25 or those Inland Sea maps, then every FIN cottage is instantly a 0/0/3 tile.

If there aren't tons of rivers everywhere, then FIN cottages are a junk 0/0/1 tile for 6 turns, and only later does it become a good tile. It's still decent.

If we're not FIN, then non-river cottages are junk tiles for a good 20 turns, which would push us towards a wealthbuilds or specialists outside of a couple of core cottage cities.

My thoughts about Medieval starts is that there is a much briefer period of time between laying down our core tile improvements and having to deal with decisive military/economic actions. In the usual Ancient start games, we usually start laying down our cottages from approximately T30-80, and start pushing outwards around T120 or so. I haven't been examining PB6 in as much detail, but I'd suspect that we need to get our economy booming as soon as possible, which means that our oldest cities may as well start growing cottages, while our youngest peripheral cities need to instantly start contributing to the empire, which calls for rapid growth off farms and sinking of excess food into mines and specialists.

So yeah, if you want to make FIN uber yet again, flush the world with rivers. If you want to make it trickier, quench those rivers.

[oledavy]

Okay, I have to ask, if you are valuing Spi and Phi so highly, why aren't Mansa and Lizzie on your list? Just curious about the thought process here.

This:

The thing about FIN is that it encourages you to work cottages. Everywhere. Even in newly built cities.

This could be a good or a bad thing, depending on the map.

If there are a ton of rivers a la PBEM25 or those Inland Sea maps, then every FIN cottage is instantly a 0/0/3 tile.

If there aren't tons of rivers everywhere, then FIN cottages are a junk 0/0/1 tile for 6 turns, and only later does it become a good tile. It's still decent.

If we're not FIN, then non-river cottages are junk tiles for a good 20 turns, which would push us towards a wealthbuilds or specialists outside of a couple of core cottage cities.

My thoughts about Medieval starts is that there is a much briefer period of time between laying down our core tile improvements and having to deal with decisive military/economic actions. In the usual Ancient start games, we usually start laying down our cottages from approximately T30-80, and start pushing outwards around T120 or so. I haven't been examining PB6 in as much detail, but I'd suspect that we need to get our economy booming as soon as possible, which means that our oldest cities may as well start growing cottages, while our youngest peripheral cities need to instantly start contributing to the empire, which calls for rapid growth off farms and sinking of excess food into mines and specialists.

So yeah, if you want to make FIN uber yet again, flush the world with rivers. If you want to make it trickier, quench those rivers.

Nicolae sums up my opinion pretty nicely. For a medieval start, financial just isn't as awesome because you've had less time to grow cottages and need to get your economy going faster. It's still an uber trait, don't get me wrong, just not quite as powerful. If this map is like the PB6 map, it won't have tons of really good cottage terrain (knock on wood). Sure, you'll want to cottage your capital and a couple of core cities, but for your new cities you'll want to be working farms, mines, and later, workshops. For a normal BTS game, I rate financial as the second best trait, only behind expansive. For a medieval start I rate it 4th best, behind spiritual, philosophical, and imperialistic. I'm eventually going to get a post up on how I revalue traits for a medieval start game, but currently it's laying around on my hard drive until I have time to finish editing it.

Besides, I hate financial It's boring. I just finished a game with it. It's powerful, but requires no creativity to use effectively. Even though I'm playing as Gandhi in PB6, I honestly wouldn't mind using him again here - he's my favorite leader.