[SPOILERS] Team Unpronounceable Unicode Symbol: True Grit

[Sisu]

I return from my evening plans with a Build-a-Bear Workshop Pinkie Pie and a high opinion of Iron Man 3.

HOKAY SO

Team ʥ Sisu is Huayna Capac of Russia

Let's talk about Sisu first.

I've been playing Civ 4 for a little under two months. I can beat Prince at a leisurely stroll and Monarch if I pay attention, but haven't tried anything higher because I don't actually enjoy playing against AI who get to run the cheats as compensation for being incredibly stupid. Unfortunately, this means that I have a lot of bad habits from those lower difficulties, to wit:

• I almost never micromanage tiles/specialists, instead leaving it to the Governor
  
• I don't whip/chop enough to speed my growth curve
  
• I settle for 2-3 resources at a time with little to no overlap, leaving land unused
  
• I don't prioritize military enough
  
• I don't prioritize "killing people and taking their stuff" enough
  
• I don't know how to specialize cities
  
• I don't know how to improve non-resource tiles beyond "cottage grass, mine hills, farm plains if possible"
  

There's probably a lot more that can be said, but that will do for starters. Now, hopefully some of this can be alleviated by being in a competition game where what I do actually matters and I pay close attention, but bad habits are hard to break, which is why I asked the honorable Ceiliazul to be a voice of experience for me. I will undoubtedly screw up a ton, but I fully intend to come out of this a much better player than I began.

Now, let's talk leader and civ.
Unmodded Financial means river cottages and fishing villages - anywhere I can grab that base two commerce and turn it into three. Specialists are relatively weaker for me, which implies that "first-to gets a Great Person" techs are relatively stronger. The trick will be securing enough land that I can work the cottages to get that tech lead and producing enough military to defend what I've built. Industrious will help that somewhat, by enabling Forges that much faster, but its more dramatic effect is the bonus to Wonder construction. As I said upthread, my thinking is this: with two other Industrious civs in the game, I can't rely on those bonus hammers to breeze me to Wonder after Wonder. Rather, I need to decide which I really want and let those bonus hammers help me get them efficiently - forests I don't have to burn on Wonders I can use to chop out other things, time I don't have to spend slowbuilding is time I can use making military or infrastructure or foodhammer units or simply Wealth. A lot depends on what the terrain looks like as we start, but slinging Metal Casting with Oracle is a fine snowball play, especially if I have precious metals to hand, and it's my default plan as we go into this game. Then I can run an Engineer specialist and grab whatever's available when the GE comes around. Let other people fight to stack rocks - I want The Great Library in my capital with an Academy.

Russia's Cossack is even worse than I thought it was - I didn't remember the specifics of its UU, so I looked it up, and I found an outdated source (the Cossack was patched to 15 strength at some point), so it's basically just a Cavalry that beats up other Cavalry. Yawn. I expect my UU and UB to be complete nonfactors in this game, which means that if I am to be competitive I need to leverage my traits to the hilt without letting my builder feedback loop take over.

Thoughts, Ceil?

[Ceiliazul]

I return from my evening plans with a Build-a-Bear Workshop Pinkie Pie and a high opinion of Iron Man 3.
...
Thoughts, Ceil?

Build-a-bear is great, and requires more of your brain than does Iron Man 3. The movie was a beautiful vapor. Ben Kingsley was still awesome, naturally. I can't wait to see him in Ender's Game.

It's my bed time, thoughts on the Civ stuff tomorrow.

[Sisu]

I have avoided all the EG trailers and preview information because I don't want to get my hopes up.

Ben Kingsley has the most mesmerizing nose. I can't stop staring at it. There may be something wrong with me.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Map is getting checked over, so hopefully we'll see starts sometime tomorrow and I can start fog gazing.

[Ceiliazul]

Well, one quick thing: City Specialization is key.

It might be worth it to fire up a SP game where you really focus on specializing cities. Designate cities as commerce, production, hybrid or Great People pumps... and see what you can do. National Wonders work wonders*.

...while you're at it, escort every settler, and every settled city must have at least one tile overlap with an existing city.

*and they're IND eligible too!

[thestick]

...why the ʥ team name?

[Merovech]

Build-a-Bear has Pinkie Pie? Huh...

[Sisu]

1) In the org thread, people started registering as "teams," for some reason. Someone was team 1, another was team 2, someone else decided to be a smartass and go with team Alpha, so I decided to be a next-level smartass and call myself Team Unpronounceable Unicode Symbol. teleh chose to abbreviate that as ʥ, which is an IPA symbol (that's International Phonetic Alphabet, not Indian Pale Ale). As to why he chose that one in particular, you'd have to ask him. Edit: Also, welcome to the thread, thestick!

2) Yeah, Build-a-Bear Workshop has been rolling out MLP characters. The first two were Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie - RD sold out fast, so they're reissuing her in August along with Twilight Sparkle, and then November is bringing Fluttershy*.

*This information brought to you by my memory of what my friend who works at B-a-B told me, as I am too lazy/uncaring to actually look it up.

[Ceiliazul]

Sisu, I gotta say that's a lot of memorized pony names... you aren't actually a 10 year old girl, are you?

[Sisu]

What can I say? A friend of mine made me watch the show a while back, and I found it witty, charming, and fun.

Don't worry, I'm not going to be naming my cities after locations from the show. I have a better idea for a naming scheme, and besides, I think someone already did MLP cities.

[Commodore]

Here's your start, anything might change, etc, etc.