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As a French person I feel like it's my duty to explain strikes to you. - AdrienIer |
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RBPB3 - Gandhi of the Egyptians
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I'll post pics when the game is up, but I suppose I'll start with the standard opening post:
If you are playing in RBPB3, please either stop reading this thread, or continue reading it after you gift me all of your cities, tech, workers and army. Thanks.
So, pre-game thoughts: Everyone wants to tech, but teching don't matter: funding does. Any idiot can run the slider at 100% with gold from 3-4 other civs, but it takes know-how to run the slider at 100% and make 400gpt by t200. And if you make the gold, you can always decide to up your own slider and tech for yourself if you have to. Which is the crux of the matter: make yourself self sufficient asap, never rely on anyone else for tech.
--- 17 players means it will be a cramped map. I need to be capable of protecting myself in the early, with ancient era units, and not HA/swords. I also need to be able to expand and grow without crippling myself with defence. And I need to be able to tech. Well, the good FIN civs went early, so that was out. It's on Emperor and huge, which means the tech costs are insane (216 adjusted beakers for BW! That's like 18 turns for the civs that start with mining), so I stopped looking at leaders and picked my top 3 civs (and later top 7) on starting techs and UB (I don't care about UUs). It worked out as Egypt>Arabia>China. Reasoning was thus:
More coming soon. This thread is going to get spammed into the ground today....
I can see a problem with the UU. The map like you said is going to be cramped so you may not get horses in which case you'll have to fall back on melee.
However the shrines will be extremely strong if you can manage to spread your religion. Though again the map is going to be cramped so it may be a little difficult to get a huge income from them like you can with less people. Agriculture and the wheel are both expensive starting techs those so that can buy you maybe 1 or 2 turns teching time but agriculture isn't immediately effective like say mining so it's a bit of a drawback. The bonus is that it's a pre-req for pottery and AH (for the horses) so it isn't completely useless I suppose. My $0.02
The other choices I lined up were Ottomans, Rome, England, and Japan (that would have been extreme). I was tempted to take Rome and then pick Shaka on the way up and just create a blackhole of worry, but that would have screwed up game balance and no way would that have been a winning strategy. And IW is 360 beakers, Pottery 144, BW 216, Agri 108, Wheel 108, AH 180. That's nearly 1200 beakers! Now, next post is for the leader decision, that I picked first, but happened after I whittled down my list of civs. StellarOmega Wrote:I can see a problem with the UU. The map like you said is going to be cramped so you may not get horses in which case you'll have to fall back on melee. The map will be cramped, but that just means I need to focus even more on getting the required resources and stopping anyone from annoying me. AH is cheaper than BW, so I'll get more time to grab horses than anyone is going to have to grab copper. And with a map this cramped, I can't see Sullla screwing teams over by only giving some horses and others copper, that wouldn't be an acceptable map design. They'll be accessible, it just depends on how much you'll dedicate to their procurement. Shrines are a very long term investment, and with so many players they are all going to want a religion so combined with free spreads I can just gift missionaries, or trade them...it's not just my cities that I want religion in, it's everyone else's. Agri is a lynch pin tech. It opens up pottery, AH, allows grains to be immediately hooked. Without it, you rely on hunting for AH, which is a scout start, which is Bad™, just ask Speaker why in RBPB2 if you want, critical if you have animal food), fishing for pottery (easy to research and only critical if you start with fish), and you need to research it anyway if you get grains. It's probably the #1 starting tech IMO on this difficulty level, as I've just said there is only one instance in which you can get both mining and BW and be able to slave out a worker to improve grains. So any start that gives you grains and you don;t start with agri you are forced to research in a specific order if you start with grains, and if you get animals you have to go through agri anyway to hook them up unless you go via hunting which has it's own drawbacks. It's best to consider the cost of BW when considering agri: the more expensive BW is, the less useful early slaving is if you have to research another tech to hook up your food. Mining and fishing is a great combo if you start with seafood, but otherwise I'll take agri and wheel everytime.
Leaders: After deciding that I wanted to aim for a shrine based economy, I knew I needed a Phi civ.
Fin/Phi went first, which was to be expected. I don't rate Fin myself, in an MP game where commerce is effectively shared via trading, I'd rather get commerce by another method and get a tech that works solely for myself. (NB. bulbing is the same, which is a counter argument for bulbing as a PHI leader, which doesn't apply to me as yet). Then Cre/Phi, which is the ultimate early academy leader. Again, I don't see the point in early academies unless you can keep the slider high, which you can't do until you land currency, but by that time you could have gotten a GS with any civ. And if you want to bulb maths all that much, be my guest. Otherwise it's a nice civ, if a tad slow, but after playing CRE in the MTDG (and FIN for that matter), I wouldn't have picked it. So, this left me in a quandary. I knew I could take Peter. EXP is like the best trait in the game, cheap workers and cheaper granaries, but they need BW to really be taken advantage of (chopping is the only way to get a granary done before the food box is half full at size 1), and slaving is the best way to take advantage of cheap granaries in the early game. But I'd done it before to the extreme with Joao of the Incans, and with this being a crowded map I couldn't take it to an extreme, so I thought I'd move on. The remaining choices were: SPI, AGG, PRO, ORG, IMP, CHM. None of them are really top tier traits anymore. Agg would have been useful, it allows some cool stuff to be done with melee and gunpowder units, so while it's just as slow as SPI, it's "fun" to play with if you can get a good setup. PRO...no chance. ORG, I may have taken if we'd allowed spies, I might have gone for a spy economy. It would have meant I rely on this being a toroidal map to up the costs, but I think that there is a good chance that is true, so it didn't seem a risk. But the spy vote just killed the idea for me. IMP, would have meant I got only unis as cheap buildings, and IMP kinda sucks without EXP to keep up with the vertical growth. As we saw later, Joao of the Incans is out there, so it will be put to use, but I don;t think it suits my gameplan. CHM is a risky choice. You really need to get the second and third cities out asap and get them worked, to grab strat resources and valuble land, and forests for crash chopping projects, and CHM drags your attention to vertical growth, delaying workers roading out, delaying settlers being built. I was considering Boudicca at one point, but rejected the idea of playing the mercenary - the map is too big for me to meet everyone, and that is a major requirement of the strategy (public posting is a necessity, so you don;t get ganged up on, or called a liar so your rep gets destroyed). So in the end I took good old Gandhi, SPI/PHI, and plan on heavily abusing the civics as the needs arrive. It's critical that I get CoL and Fued, and Mono/Theo so that I can start micromanaging the civics. It feels like slipping into an old comfortable pair of slippers, but those slippers won;t help me into the lead in the first 100 meters of the race.
My bible for this game: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=140952
Great Prophet: Meditation Polytheism Priesthood Monotheism Theology Divine Right Mysticism Masonry (Warlords patch & BTS) Code of Laws Civil Service Monarchy Literature Music Writing Philosophy Printing Press Drama Aesthetics (BTS) Alphabet Paper Education Liberalism Calendar Masonry (Vanilla & unpatched Warlords) Animal Husbandry Construction Future Tech
So here is a brief list of the strategies I've considered:
Thoughts on what I should do are much appreciated btw.
Is going for an early religion, via Priesthood for example, as your first tech a good strategy in MP?
I ask, because in the pitboss 2 game - no-one went for a religion at the start. In fact, just about everyone spoke against even considering it. The opening religions went unclaimed for quite some time. Assuming you do go for it, do you think it's likely that you'd have competition for the religion? By the way, I really enjoyed following your aggressive diplomacy in your Pitboss 1 thread  Looking forward to seeing how you play Gandhi, as getting the best from PHI is something I've always struggled with!
I would think #2 would be the most straight-forward roleplay. Having an early shrine will let you expand more quickly and provided you have enough food will allow 5 priests in the second city, so generating an "extra" prophet to bulb CoL (relative to #3) shouldn't take too long. It might force city #2 into the highest-food location (as opposed to towards a resource), but I'm not sure you wouldn't want to do that anyway.
I would be disinclined towards #1 (unless you have Marble) because you'd be effectively giving up a city for the wonder and you don't need a measly 2 GPP/turn when you have the Obelisk. #4 and #5 aren't really strategies to decide on before the game, rather they are responses to the situation/terrain you actually find yourself in. Planning on #4 a priori is a great way to lose the game, and #5 is fairly boring. But what do I know anyway ... 
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