[spoiler] Azza hits them for 6

[Zed-F]

They solved puzzles on the battlefield? Must be why so many died.

[Gawdzak]

Turn 200

Captured Goldilocks down south:




Power Graph:




This more or less confirms what I'm suspecting: Jowy's not defending at all against Dick, while he stacked 80 units against me. I know this sort of stuff seems to happen every game, but it sure sucks when it happens to you.

I turned on tech, Steam Power in 4 turns, demo:

[Gawdzak]

Anyways, with the latest set backs I'm willing to concede to Zanth/Gavagai (but not Mardoc). They've played a good enough game and they deserve the win. Victory for me is basically completely out of my hands.

If others wants to play on, I will be happy to do so. There are still a few things I want to achieve in this game.

[Gawdzak]

Dick captured more of Jowy's cities than I would have liked. Probably not worth an all out war just for 2 more cities. I will wipe Jowy off the mainland next turn.

Will post screenshots next turn.

[Gawdzak]

Here's the land:




Jowy is down to one island city which I have no interest in capturing, offered a ceasefire.

Will there be war between me and Dick? It's up to Dick.

[Gawdzak]

Made peace with Jowy, and Dick didn't declare war. Well that's disappointing.

Peaceful building it is then.

Steam Power is in. Good thing I went the aggressive route. I have 2 sources of Coal. One is in former Yuri territory and the other is next to a former Jowy city that's still in revolt.

[Gawdzak]

Nakor, Jowy and Donovan (former Slowcheetah) are all down to 1 city.

My tech rate is getting better, it seems that growing cities instead of whipping them actually helps your tech rate. Who would've guessed?

I get Railroad in 2 turns. I think I'm going to take the former Jowy cities away from Dick. Machine guns should be enough to hold off any counter attack.

Why? I felt great injustice by land gained vs investment when compared to myself. In addition, he recently settled a city where its first ring border borders the 2nd ring of one of my cities.

Most importantly, I feed on the blood of my enemies.

[Gawdzak]

Base BTS Meta Analysis: Does snake pick order matter?

I stumbled upon the set-up thread of this game, Pitboss 17, today. I noticed the fact that Zanth was first pick and Flugauto was second pick and their civilizations are currently number 1 and 2 on the scoreboard respectively. I thought to myself: I wonder if there's a correlation between snake pick order and their position in the game?

x value= position on the snake pick

data= (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12)

y value= position on scoreboard turn 209

data= (1,2,10,12,7,6,11,9,4,3,8,5)

Coefficient of correlation: 0.0699

Well that's a dud. A coefficient of correlation so close to 0 implies there's little to no correlation between snake pick order and a player's position in the game.

However, I decided take out 3 of the biggest outliers from the data set:

Jowy (3rd pick, 10th highest score)
Yuri (4th pick, first to die henth 12th position)
Azza/Myself (10th pick, 3rd highest score)

Coefficient of correlation: 0.5115

Now we have something. A coefficient of correlation of 0.5115 means a moderate positive correlation. Which seems to imply pick order does matter to some degree.

This method assume a few thing:

a) All the players know what the best picks are and that they are taking the best picks. Looking at the pick list, I would say almost everyone made good decision on their picks.

b) Position on the scoreboard reflect a player's position in the game. This is obviously not true, but it's the best metric of measurement we got.

In conclusion, player decisions ultimately is still the strongest indicator in how they will do in a game, as expected from a strategy game. However, the snake pick order is certainly not a non-entity in a base BTS game with the current set-ups.

[Commodore]

Jowy nuked himself on Yuri early, so that's kind of consistent.

Interesting analysis. Now go analyze a couple dozen more games and see how your theory stands up!

[Gawdzak]

Well in other games the player skill disparity is simply too big to be able to draw anything meaningful. I'm thinking about these snake pick base bts games:

PB2 (Spullla)
PB12 (Serdoa)
PB16 (Seven)

In this game, I would say the field is actually pretty balanced until Gavagai semi-took over for Zanth.

Anyways I got Railroads now. I can defend my land efficiently against anything until tanks and artillery.

I'm going to get Education next to build Oxford, yep no Education at 1500 AD.

After that I want Communism, then Assembly Line. My techs, got everything to the left:




You can see here I went for the cheap/efficient techs with strong emphasis on military. That's about to catch up with me because I would need a bunch of "useless" techs like Philosophy, Nationalism, Constitution, Economics in order to get to Assembly Line.

Zanth already have AL and have just teched Combustion.

On the other hand I got another Great Engineer, and I can start my 2-man golden age any time I want. I will probably save it until it's time to swap to State Property. My empire is big enough that it takes 2 turns to swap a single civic.