[SPOILERS] Louis of Aztecs - One of those industrious

[plako]

Yet another member of industrious alliance signing in. I'll keep my normal updating style so you better look elsewhere for really entertaining threads.

Competition:
Commodore - Gilgamesh of the Khmer
Azza - Napoleon of Rome
Pindicooter - Huayna Capac of Zulu
Merohoc - Augustus of Arabia
Ichabod and the Brick - Genghis Khan of the Vikings
Plako if RBmod - Louis XIV of the Aztec
Xenu - Churchill of Portugal
Catcheetah - Suryavarman of France
Lewger - Qin Shi Huang of the Netherlands
N-core - Mansa Musa of India
Serdoa - De Gaulle of Maya

[plako]

Louis: Creative+Industrious. Not bad in regular BtS, but Creative got further nerfed losing Library bonus in RBmod.

Aztecs: Hunting is now decent starting tech. Mystisicm is still bad, especially for Creative leader. Sacrifical altar is nerfed because of changes to slavery although might enable 1 pop whip a bit more often. Jaguar's are one of the weakest UUs. I probably won't build more than 2-3 of them throughout the game.

I haven't yet thought how these compare to competition, but my gut feeling is that with so many industrious leaders here it is clearly below average here.

[plako]

So there seems to be only 2 combos really standing out i.e.
Mansa Musa of India
Huayna Capac of Zulu

Financial is still very good in NTT game and both of these got a useful nation too. Otherwise we've a pretty even group. IMO mod has done a good job equalizing all other traits than Financial.

[plako]

What about teams. I haven't lately followed very closely the ongoing games so this is a bit hard, but here is some categorization.

Tier #1 (top):
Pindicooter - Both pretty solid players and talkative. I suspect together bigger than playing solo.
Commodore - Assuming he can stay out of his excessive warring ways he is pretty solid.

Tier #2 (good):
Serdoa - He is good, but easily gets distracted to his C-game, if things don't go his way. He is probably going to sacrifice a lot to get wonders. This game has too much competiton on wonders so probably can't grab that many of them.
Lewger - Lewwyn is almost in toughest category, but based on pre-game discussion he is agains playing his warring ways. Might work, if he gets lucky with neighbors. More likely costs him the game.
Ichabod+Brick - Ichabod is good. Close to tier #1 players. Brick didn't play too well in PB5, but seemed to have distractions and was learning a lot.

Tier #3 (Below average or unknown):
N-Core - Might be higher, since I really don't know who else besides Nakor belongs to this team. Nakor usually plays very fast and I suspect doesn't pay enough attention to play on higher level.
Azza - Developing, but so far haven't been able to keep up with the competiton here.
Merohoc - Don't know Merovech, but ad hoc haven't played too well in his past games.
Xenu - PB7 played badly with Commodore. I Belive Commodore can do a lot better, but not so sure about Xenu.
Catcheetah - Catwalk is quite a charachter. He has basics right, but has too many wild ideas to follow. Don't know Slowcheetach enough to say, if he can direct Catwalk to right direction.

So Pindicooter with skill and 2nd best leader are biggest favorites to win. I would rate myself either 2nd or 3rd at this point. Of course starting position dominates more than traits so this is very preliminary.

[Mardoc]

Starts may still change.

[plako]

Pros: this best start that I've got in these random pitboss events. Cons: this is probably still below average.

Scout moves to plains hill through ivory. Might settle on top of ivory or even plains hill, if there are something to compensate fishes/cows.

[plako]

Based on tile bleed there is probably water in the west. I might be better of scouting the tiles from the hill that is SW-S.

[Krill]

[plako]

Seems alright. irrigated Corn, river, forests and it is green. Not much of an upgrade from previous start, but several tiles are not visible at the moment so I've still hope finding out more resoure tiles nearby.

No plains hills or other 2 hammer/3 food plants near Corn so settling in place is probably in order. It seems mostly forests in the S-SE region so moving scout towards east makes probably most sense. That is most potential direction to consider moving settler from where it stands now.

There is probably hut in the forest tile 1E from the starting spot. Some graphics settings hide them in the forests.

[plako]

2 food tiles revealed. This is a very good capital location. I wonder how there is jungle both in the south and north. I might need early IW and maybe Jaguars are a bit more useful than I initially thought.