[SPOILERS] Margarita and the Lurkers

[Maga_R]

   

MASTER AND MARGARITA

by Mikhail Bulgakov

Chapter 1: Never talk with strangers

At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with a tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.

The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, editor of a fat literary journal [...] and his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev, who wrote under the pseudonym of Homeless. [...]

Ah, yes, note must be made of the first oddity of this dreadful May evening. There was not a single person to be seen, not only by the stand, but also along the whole walk parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street ... to be continued .

[Maga_R]

Welcome to the Team Master and Margarita Spoilers thread .

If you are not Slaze, Maga, Jovan, our new dedlurker or a global lurker, you will have to wait with reading this thread until the game is over . Although you can continue reading The Master and Margarita but elsewhere .

[Maga_R]

The Master is - of course - Slaze. I do not know him well, so I let somebody who knows Slaze better to introduce him.

Slaze is nice, charitable, handsome and helps old ladies cross streets.

From what I have seen so far, this characterization is spot on

[Maga_R]

My RL name is (close enough to ) Margarita, hence the team name. Not much civ history, so I have to introduce myself . I am a complete MP civ n00b, only subbed in the late stages of one MP game so far. Although I have been playing BTS for a couple of years now on and off, and Civ III before that. But my skill level is still Noble . In terms of character - as quoted above - I typically plot evil schemes, but often end up doing good . You will see .

[Maga_R]

I was trying to convince Jovan Kukic to take part in this Pitboss game as one of our oppononents, but as you see from him dedlurking us, I failed. Now I am kinda glad I did . I did not fully realized at the time how a good player Jovan is . Let us just say that he learnt Polish solely from playing civ on a Polish civ site and his Polish is very good now .

[Maga_R]

We still have a couple of didicated lurker positions opened. If you are interested, please send us your civ resume and a brief motivation letter, and if we think you will be a good fit, we will invite you for an on-site interview soon.

Seriously, everybody interested is very welcome to dedlurk us . So you can skip the resume part, just report for duty in this thread .

[Maga_R]

This is gonna be very loose, I do not know some of them - and those I know are also not easy to evaluate. I have met most of them in the Pitboss game I was subbing - but some of them were subbing, too, so the state of their civs may not be a good indication of their skill. OK, everybody will hate us after reading this thread anyway , so here it goes without any further disclaimers:

1. Lord Parkin's team

Big gap

2. Yossa Blames Cal + very experienced ded lurkers
3. Yuufo + Bisons (Yuffo has been playing MP ladder civ since 2005 or something like that)
4. Master and Margarita (us)

some gap

5. Aivo + Bowsling
6. Classical Hero + Halvgut
7. Dick76 (he will not play alone, so his partner can change his ranking substantially).

I think places 2-4 are pretty close and perhaps should be ranked differently, same goes for 5-6. Any opinions on the ranking?

[Maga_R]

Here is the catch: Slaze likes random leaders and that is all he plays. But in this game it is supposed to be snake pick. So what do we do? We decided I would just pick for us . Moreover, Slaze told me what his favorite leaders and traits are and I promised not to picked them , so he would get his thrill of unexpected that normally goes with random . Sounds crazy, I know, but it was supposed to be double fun, right? And we like challenge - not that there will be lack of it - but we decided to do it both for our and lurkers' entertainment.

So that is the explanation why I will be monologuing about leader's and civ choice here - hopefully with some lurkers advice and comments.

[Maga_R]

Let us use the RB’s usual banned list as a starting point (devil)

Leaders:
All Financial
All Expansive except, Pro, Agr
All Creative except, Pro, Agr, Cha
All Spiritual except, Pro, Agr, Cha

I generally agree except for spiritual - I still do not understand what is the appeal . I mean, I know the idea is to perfectly micromanage civic choices, but still. Civic switching missions are banned, which makes SPI weaker, and the discount building (temple) is blah, imho. I would put organized in the place of spiritual here.

I understand it all depends on the difficult and the map - although do not understand how . Anybody would like to explain?

[Krill]

Various bans are used in different games. I've never seen that ban list before though.