[NO PLAYERS] Lurker Thread #115

[AdrienIer]

I think REM will value things differently. I noticed that he is playing the CFC pitboss game going on right now. There he picked Ragnar of English where Darius of Egypt was available. I see that as suboptimal.

Hey, first post on RB but with my teaming up with REM in PB22 there will be more soon !

I don't think you can treat a team game like the game you're referring to as you would a normal game. We discussed civs as a team, and neither of us would have chosen those civs and leaders on our own I think.

[The Black Sword]

Edit: I thought about a little more for Bob's start. I think he can grow to size 2 working the Ivory while slow building a work boat and then whip the worker. He will need a Fish/Mining civ for this to tech BW first and he can even get value out of Expansive for the first worker.

That start does look pretty nice, but you need to get BW and Hunting in 14 or 15t, not sure that's doable, I can never remember the tech costs.

Doesn't look like Bob is even considering a Fishing civ anyway, but worker first and growing on a workboat can work nicely too. He doesn't need Agriculture though, so I think China is a bit of a red herring for him. Mali would probably be pretty nice, assuming he can make Fishing/Hunting in 11t. Mongolia or Japan would be pretty nice too, since he picked Fin. I wonder how well Japan and WB first would work actually, not whipping off the 4 yield Ivory wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

[Commodore]

I think REM will value things differently. I noticed that he is playing the CFC pitboss game going on right now. There he picked Ragnar of English where Darius of Egypt was available. I see that as suboptimal.

Hey, first post on RB but with my teaming up with REM in PB22 there will be more soon !

I don't think you can treat a team game like the game you're referring to as you would a normal game. We discussed civs as a team, and neither of us would have chosen those civs and leaders on our own I think.

Welcome! It's a good point...and even if he'd picked Ragnar of England over Darius of Egypt, that's nothing at all like we've seen, say with Hammurabi of Sumer...

[The Black Sword]

Not sure about Bismark of Byzantium. The worse your starting techs are, the harder it is to chase wonders usually. I suppose you could try leverage Myst at least and get Stonehenge.

[Commodore]

Not sure about Bismark of Byzantium. The worse your starting techs are, the harder it is to chase wonders usually. I suppose you could try leverage Myst at least and get Stonehenge.

I think it's just about perfect, actually. A determined cataphract beeline really loves Oracling Metal Casing or, if he can indeed hack it, Feudalism. Forge/granary and Vassalage gets a solid whippy cataphract factory nice and fast.

[AdrienIer]

Hmmm I've just realized that I was wrong when responding to Gawdzak, I was thinking about our Rag/Vik and Eli/Eng PBEM team game while you're talking about another pitboss game.

I guess he really wanted those aggressive redcoats.

[Gawdzak]

Not sure about Bismark of Byzantium. The worse your starting techs are, the harder it is to chase wonders usually. I suppose you could try leverage Myst at least and get Stonehenge.

I think it's just about perfect, actually. A determined cataphract beeline really loves Oracling Metal Casing or, if he can indeed hack it, Feudalism. Forge/granary and Vassalage gets a solid whippy cataphract factory nice and fast.

Hmmm, that sounds good in theory. But in practice he might fall really far behind in expansion and losing a lot of contested land as a result. Would Cataphracts make a difference if his opponents have 20% more land and cities?

Hmmm I've just realized that I was wrong when responding to Gawdzak, I was thinking about our Rag/Vik and Eli/Eng PBEM team game while you're talking about another pitboss game.

I guess he really wanted those aggressive redcoats.

From his posts, he seems to value AGG highly. For me, AGG is almost always bad. But if he feels he can get value out of AGG, I can understand it.

[GermanJoey]

A bold choice from Jowy, Pericles of Egypt. I like it. Fast-starting, highly aggressive, a chance to make big plays, and lets him get back in the game if he happens to take just one step too far. (but not two! )

[GermanJoey]

From his posts, he seems to value AGG highly. For me, AGG is almost always bad. But if he feels he can get value out of AGG, I can understand it.

I tend to agree, and I'm very interested in what he does with it as it sounds like he has a lot of gamespy-lobby style multiplayer experience. Personally, I agree with you in that my view of Agg places it barely above Protective on the usefulness scale. Like, RtR Agg is, maybe, at least twice if not three times as good as base Agg, and yet it still only feels mid-tierish unless you manage to get an exceptionally huge empire like scooter/pindicator did in PB13.

[Commodore]

Kind of a threadjack for a moment...

So here's the map, as a whole...it's cramped, but that was decidedly the directive. I don't see any screaming pockets of safety; there will be distortions based on who Jowy Jowies, of course, but hopefully its decently balanced as other people neighbor each other. Philosophical is ballin', here, but I'm okay with it moving up in value.

Actually, this looks really fun, kind of makes me want to play something like this too. Anyone else?

This was Full of Resources Lakes (with the largest body of water setting), 32% water, world wrap a toroid, snow/tundra removed, 50% forest, 30% jungle. I rolled several maps until I got a decent split and moved lakes around to ensure roughly equal land tile split (via Novtool and Mk.1 eyeball). Then I buffed/balanced caps, resource balanced, and made sure no foodless zones cropped up (plains areas set food issues a lot). A couple lakes were 18-19 tiles, I added a couple tiles to make them navigable. Then, finally, I gave each player a small IC-TR island.

What I would do if this was quick would be draw back the caps (8fhpt start!) and probably manually move the size to standard for cost. Of course, if this were RBmod with toroid's maint normalization, Prince level difficulty at least!