[SPOILERS] Dhalphir PB13

[Serdoa]

Thanks Krill. I do hope we can live up to these expectations, but even more I do hope we will have some fun with this game.

[SevenSpirits]

I'm in favor of having fun!

Interesting tidbit: I believe (so far) that the biggest difference between my playstyle and Serdoa's is he builds a lot more mines. Well great, now that we are playing with RBMod, I will be in favor of building those mines too. Now what?

[Serdoa]

I'll try to put some comments forward to those draws. But it is kinda hard with those many teams tbh. What I already can see is:

1) Just 3 IND-civs in the whole pool. If you look at PB8 with I think 5 out of 10 teams being IND that's really great for those that drew IND. That's suttree, slowcheetah and m_h. If that trait is helpful at all though is mostly decided by how near or far there neighbours are.

2) Jowy has a great draw with FIN/EXP India, even if EXP doesn't have the cheap Granaries anymore, but I doubt that he can use it effectively.

3) pindicooter on FIN/ORG Vikings is something to keep an eye on. I can see them going for an early Astro and wrecking someone with there fast boats.

4) Commodore has a nice synergy with IMP (giving +100% production on Custom Houses) and Portugal and their Feitoria.

5) Bigger/Lewwyn most likely will try for a specialist-economy with workshops and farms. He was quite a few times already telling how great that is in RB-Mod, so now he has the chance to show it.

6) 3 PRO-civs. retep, Nakor and again m_h. retep has it coupled with PHI and Khmer and I have a feeling he will do very good. Nakor has it coupled with FIN and that should actually be one of the best draws together with Jowys. I still don't think they'll do all that good, as they tend to ignore expansion for too long and are to set on their plans without being able to change them if necessary. m_h is a wildcard I think. If he really puts his mind to it, he probably can do very well, but I don't think he will be able to keep focussed on this game.

[SevenSpirits]

My take - I think top traits are SPI, PRO, and ORG, and rest are relatively balanced at 70-80% of the top traits' power level. I do think CHA is the worst trait by a little, and people were right to veto it heavily. Having not played with RBMod before, I could be way off on my trait evaluations. In particular, Serdoa seems to think more highly of FIN than my estimate. So take this with a grain of salt.

I will group resulting combos into three tiers:

WORST:
Ichabod/Wetbandit: Shaka of Greece
dtay: Alexander of Germany
Germany is improved in the mod, but I think not by much.
Plako: Ragnar of Maya
Jowy: Pacal of India
Remember, India has awful starting techs, which are worst on a huge (er, wow, did people seriously not vote on the map size setting???) map.
Azza: Joao of Dutch
Commodore/Kurumi: Victoria of Portugal
Very synergistic, with cheap cities, doubly cheap feitorias and stacked Feitoria/FIN boost. But I think the traits are pretty low-powered.
suttree: Huayna Capac of Spain

MIDDLING
Serdoa: Mansa Musa of America
Pindicator/scooter: Darius of Vikings
How many times has scooter had Vikings now?
Nakor/CFCJesterfool: Wang Kon of Rome
Bacchus: Suryavarman of Carthage
Carthage in the mod was buffed heavily - now they have a good UU and Cothons are cheaper, too. With the Cothon discounted by EXP, and CRE allowing a Currency beeline for cheap markets, this is another wonderfully synergistic combo.

BEST
retep: Sitting Bull of Khmer
Slowcheetah: Ramesses of Mongolia
mostly_harmless: Qin Shi Huang of Sumeria
Fintourist/Old Harry: Montezuma of Babylon
WilliamLP: Isabella of Inca
Yuris: Mehmed of Ottomans
Look at those EXP Hammams.
Bigger/Lewwyn: Gandhi of China

[darrelljs]

You know, reading that analysis reminds me a lot on Blake's work with the better AI for BTS. It started as a little project at Apolyton to make the Workers less retarded, and then expanded to city tile management. Just those changes alone made a huge improvement. Blake kept taking on more and more areas, but they didn't really make the game any better. In the end the real value was that it played different than Warlords, and (at least for me) added longevity to the game on par with FFH.

Yes the game is significantly more balanced for MP, but a minimalist approach would have likely gotten just about as much balance as the significant changes done to date. There are still top traits and bottom traits, top leaders and bottom leaders, but its all shuffled up. It makes the game feel new and fresh, and that's real value for something that's been around so long.

Darrell

[BRickAstley]

[Serdoa]

Fishing / Agri start, gets Clams and Pigs. Shall we move onto the PH? Can't see anything speaking against it on the first look.

[Serdoa]

Ok, after some first stabs (starting at the PH), it seems better to start with a worker than a workboat. I got the first settler at EOT33 instead of EOT34, but we have 5 improved tiles instead of 3 and will be at size 5 instead of 2. I did my sim with AH though (for the camps on the ivory) but that delays Mining and BW till after T40, which is really late, especially as we also don't have The Wheel and therefore the worker hasn't really anything to do from T31 on. Depends a little bit on the second site, but from my knowledge now he only could mine the hill in the SE, to have him "used" till EOT36. It stands to reason how much that usage is really netting though.

I think it is better to ignore AH for now and go Hunting -> Mining -> BW.
Build Order for that: Worker -> Workboat -> Warrior(s till size 5) -> Settler

Worker improves Pig on the Hill, Grassland Pig, Grassland hill in the SE -> chopping (not sure if that works out or if he will sit around uselessly though)

As soon as the cap is size 5 it will produce 17 FH (4 city center, 2 from imp. clams, each 4 from the pigs, 2 from the mined GLH and 1 from an ivory). That's a 6 turn settler or 4 turn worker. Seems ok for the capital on normal speed. Would only be better if we could get the Ivories improved and a road on them (so we can grow to size 6) as that would push us to 20 FH. That's theoretically achievable around T39-40. But would mean we would only start at T38 with BW, which would take around 10-12 more turns. Might change slightly if we meet other players and depending on our second city of course (we'll need roads for that sooner than later thinking about it...), but I think it is safe to assume that it will be around T50 before we have it. Doable? Probably (we might have Horses after all), but risky. Though we probably could push in Archery instead of BW if we feel that someone is overly aggressive or too close. Would take 3-4 turns only at that point. What do you think Seven?

[Serdoa]

And all these timings of course change if the map-size is in the worldbuilder-file set to Large. Hope that is soon clarified as it changes the timings a little bit (though checking in my excel-table, not by much really, ~7 less beakers for every 100 beakers.

[SevenSpirits]

First thoughts:

Scout onto ivory and then pig? Settler probably onto plains hill. Hunting/worker sounds good.

Might be good to try to get away with late BW, since we are spiritual so the slavery revolt timing is irrelevant. I'm told that archery is cheap in this mod. So AH before mining might turn out OK. (But we could decide later.)