RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Speaker]

Sullla, if you have a minute, can you hop on AIM? Need a quick chat.

[Sullla]

Diplo message on the previous page sent. Now we wait... Kinda thought these early turns would move a little faster...

[Sareln]

Diplo message on the previous page sent. Now we wait... Kinda thought these early turns would move a little faster...

Early turns go quickly in general, but on some edge cases they start to demand serious attention and thought -- say trying to figure out if your opponent's capital is empty and you should just run in and raze it, or threatening to do so in order to squeeze diplomatic / territorial concessions out of them... definitely not something to worry about in the early game with the AI!

Even against only AI though, I've spent a long time thinking about doing push-settles against the AI with some weird random maps, where I took a picture of the map, printed it out, and spent some time mulling it over.

[Sullla]

Response back from Jowy and Yaz:

We are eager to know more of this world. Scouting exchange is an interesting idea. I'm afraid we can't take any screenshots before paper, or define our lands in too much details since that's not really acting in good faith towards the rules However I'm positive we can exchange some facts about the lands.


You are our first contact. We have scouted to north - northeast of our position. Our scout "Cigarettes" is on his way to west. I'd suggest you move somewhere in east / south (atleast by the looks of it you're on your way from west) There is nobody else to find in the north.


Please do deliver on your part of an information trade I know we didn't exactly settle on what to reveal, but we trust you will reply with as valuable information as you received.

So according to their message, the Greek capital is due east of our starting position, not northeast. Apparently the north is a dead end. That suggests that the other teams are to the south of us. This is important information to have.

I'll start thinking about how to draft a response message back.

[Speaker]

That is quite interesting news. There is a *lot* of space to our north, so if we plant a city east, and another south east, we'll effectively lock off all the land above us, securing a pretty nice chunk of fertile, green territory. What information do we really even have to share with them? We haven't really found anything yet with our slowpoke warrior.

[Ashain]

Hrm, thats interesting, if they're coastal like I think Sullla summed up in his earlier posts and they're east of you and no one is north... how does that jive with you're earlier thoughts on the map script?

[Speaker]

Hrm, thats interesting, if they're coastal like I think Sullla summed up in his earlier posts and they're east of you and no one is north... how does that jive with you're earlier thoughts on the map script?

To be honest, I think it's really too early to try and guess the map script. We have uncovered so little of it!

[Sullla]

I waited for Jowy to move their scout first and see where it went; looks like it headed west, because we didn't get any further sight of it. Our own warrior moved SE and discovered a lion:



In a forest, across a river, with the Monarch animal boost, we should win the battle easily. Let's hope that we can get 2XP for Woodsman I promotion. I think moving south onto the jungle is the next move for our guy, who may or may not have to spend some turns healing first.

In the Demographics, Broker/plako and DMOC/Nakor and sunrise/regoarrarr all discovered Agriculture tech this turn. (We know from the 9 turns of research that the tech had to be either Agriculture or The Wheel, and the lack of any Soldier count increase means that it had to be Agr for all three.)

This reinforces the notion of balanced starting positions: it seems very likely that all teams began with one seafood resource and one Agriculture food resource at the starting position. I'd even go so far as to guess that things were balanced with either a clams/crabs + irrigated wheat/corn start (like ours) or a fish + irrigated rice start. At least, that's how I would do things. Six teams now have Agriculture, and at least five (possibly six) teams have Fishing tech. That's not a coincidence - everyone is trying to hook up their food bonuses.

The fact that only two teams have grown in pop thus far also suggests a lot of worker builds to start. Good for our early game, bad because that will accelerate the starts of the other teams. (You'll never see anything like the Templar opening here, where they started with THREE quechua builds, then worker, then settler! Unbelievably bad.)

Since every team other than LiPing (and us) has finished at least one tech, that means NO ONE went for the starting religion out of the gate! These teams are all playing too smart! With five different teams starting with Mysticism, that's a definite surprise. Someone will get lucky and grab Budd/Hinduism fairly cheaply. Not us though! We've got our hands full going BW -> Agr -> AH -> Wheel -> Pottery. That tech path is pretty much locked in stone.

Ashain, all I can say right now is that this isn't a standard Pangaea. That script has roughly ~1500 land tiles on these settings, and our map is 10% larger, with ~1660 tiles. I might try running some others to see if anything matches up.

I'll try to post a draft response to our latest email here later on tonight. I think I can craft something that says very little while sounding like it says a lot.

[Krill]

I'll try to post a draft response to our latest email here later on tonight. I think I can craft something that says very little while sounding like it says a lot.

Q: How do you intend to differentiate this from teh Templars style diplomacy?

(Yes, it had to be said...)

[Sullla]

Ha! That's pretty funny. Well, I would respond by saying that I'm not Aidun, and I have no training in game theory or working in the EU parliament. Although I should give fair warning that as an academic, I can spew copious amounts of BS on short notice.

Let's give this a try as a first draft:

Greetings again to the Greek people!

Our warrior Chamberlain waved goodbye to Cigarettes and sent our best wishes before venturing further into the wilderness this turn. One piece of information that we can pass on is that we have seen some lions prowling around in the brush, so you may want to be careful with your scout. (You may have known this already, but we've come across two different animals thus far.) [1]

We greatly appreciate the information that you shared with us, and are happy to reciprocate in turn. We have not met any civilizations either so far. If you pledge to let us know of anyone you meet, we'll be happy to do the same with any teams that cross our path. How does that sound for starters? [2]

Since we started with a warrior and not a scout, we probably don't have as much map information as you, but we can tell you what we know thus far. We have also generally scouted to the north and northeast of our start. (One quick question: you said "We have scouted to north - northeast of our position." Did you mean north *WEST* here? Otherwise, it sounds as though our capitals are on top of one another!) Our best guess right now is that we will find the other teams to the south, as we haven't done much scouting there either. The land we've passed through looks very fertile, lots of grassland tiles and rivers. Should make for some fine cities for both of us someday![3]

As part of the trust-building process, we'd be willing to give your scout directions to our capital in return for directions for our warrior. We understand if you'd rather not reveal that information just yet, but we wanted to make the effort as a show of good spirit. [4]

We await your next reply with great interest,
Speaker and Sullla
The Killer Angels

[1] They almost certainly know this themselves already. But it sounds good to make the offer.

[2] As a team with a scout, this offer inherently favors us, because they are more likely to make contact. Plus, we can probably get more out of information than they can, as stated before.

[3] The goal here is to pump them for more information, while trying to conceal that. Don't know how successful that is, but I stuck the questioning part into the middle of some innocuous stuff to hopefully make it not stand out.

[4] This is rubbish on my part; their scout will find our capital in about 4t regardless. There's no possible way the scout can miss it. If we can get info back from them, this would be a minor gain for us.

I'll wait on sending anything until tomorrow to get feedback and thoughts. I already sent Jowy a confirmation that we received their message, and that we would reply soon.