[SPOILER] Krill rambles on

[GermanJoey]

[Krill]

Thanks guys. I've never really been one for player ratings, hopefully these are interesting for you.

One more for the night though. This is the last tier 1 player in this game IMO, I'm not up there with these guys any more.

Plako, Destroyer of dog piles: Peracles (CRE/PHI) of Germany.

What is there to say about PLako that isn’t already known. he’s played in all of the RB mod/RtR main PB games since PB7 ended in face (PB5 he played for about 10 turns before dying to a starting warrior though). Won PB8, Third place in PB13 ie wasn’t going to win but was bigger than opponnets. PB18 he had an unwinnable position but conquered his continent and couldn’t do more. He’s been dogpiled in a base BtS PBEM by mackoti and someone with AGG preats and he still won. People think starting next to me is bad, but starting next to Plako is worse. He just doesn’t die, you can’t rush him, you can’t dog pile him, I’ve never seen him sucker punched. You have to win by ignoring him and taking candy from the other babies on the map. He’s a RB’s version of an immoveable object.

Plako is like the ride hight limit on rollercoasters. You have to be able to handle Plako otherwise you’re not going to win a big game, and you’re probably not going to survive to the end of it either.

Leading this onto the combination though, I think we lucked out a bit. Plako is playing a late game civ with leader traits that, well, don’t terrify me. Germany isn’t bad, and in these larger games I think that the Russias and Germanies start to shine. The Kanone will put Plako in a posiiton where he is more able to roll over people, but he has to reach Steel to do that I don’t see him doing that before T150. The Assembly Plant is available at Steam Power, which is great in that it’s available up to 50, probably more like 35 turns before factories normally can be built, but that’s only +25% production and you still have to wait for the power plant at AL. It’s got 50% bonus production from coal though, that’s decent as well, but it does mean that you have to focus on health earlier in the game than you perhaps would otherwise like to so in some respects the earlier factory affects the power spikes of when you get the extra hammers in quite complex ways. Like if you beeline AL, you only have to build the 150 hammer power plant and not 400 hammers of infrastructure in each city, so you can more quickly get to building Inf and running people over again.

But that’s still late game. It helps on the final push to win, but it won’t get Plako into a winning position. For that he has Peracles, ye olde Academy rusher, faster than everyone and gets free border pops from CRE. Still slow as everyone else, including me, so I know the sort of pain he is going through working on sims. I’m not quite sure what Plako is planning on doing, but the early Academy to try and blitz through to Currency, then grabbing more land, snowball a tech lead and kill someone is the basic approach. Plako is capable of so much more though, like using two early GA to bomb people and ruin their lives and HA rushes, or running a proper GS bulb to Education strategy and trying to scare people away from Lib. Plako has the right combination to contest Lib with dtay even from T0.

My read on Plako isn’t all that great tbh. He will just abuse his neighbours, and until I know whom his neighbours are, I can’t judge it. And with no map trading, that is not happening any time soon. I’ll just have to watch the demographics and score and see what happens. Unless he's my neighbour again.

[Krill]

I'm going to add an addendum here. The three people in tier 1, dtay, Serdoa and Plako are there because I know they are better than me right now. What makes it incredibly easy to write about them as well is the sheer body of work they have, and I've known them for quite a long time on this forum. The rest of the tier list is a lot harder to make, and almost certainly will be sparser on personal details and focus more on he combinations.

I'm also still thinking if I'm going to explain where I'll rank myself, simply because I imagine I may well get a lot of hate for it.

[Krill]

Also, because I'm still off injured and have way too much time on my hands, any questions so far?

[Krill]

Hey, I thought Flug posted a question about whom I want my neighbours to be.

The answer is straight forward. I want slow starting players that don't know how to micromanage, read a map or strategize, and are utterly terrified of me so I can bully them. So anyone that fits into the box, is good.

Here is a picture of the starting location proper:

[Krill]

Main question I have is this: Is that an enclosed 10+ tile "lake" or an opening onto a sea.

[Krill]

The scout started under the settler. I either needed to move to scout as much information on this turn to decide to move the settler, or to scout to maximise information to plant second city. The latter requires planning to scout around expanded borders, which generally means that I'm going to spend at least two turns reaching to a point far enough away that I can scout clockwise or anticlockwise around the capital. The sea to the west means that I want to head either north or south of that and then rotate.

I decided that I want to make sure settling 1N was not better than SiP. That meant moving the scout 89 and then moving north west until I reach the edge of where I want to scout. Moving onto the hill showed a dry corn that could be used if I settled 66 or 63 of the starting location, where the ivory was prior to moving it. I know that moving onto the grass hill puts the city off a river and with at least 12 grass tiles, all of which would need to be cottaged. I also know that the work boat start in SiP is actually faster considering the corn is 5 yield and lacks commerce, and has to wait to be hooked up, on top of the one turn delay (cow T14, corn T20 compared to fish T5 cow T17, up hammers and pop). There are 11 forests though.

The more interesting choice of moving 63 onto the old ivory tile would keep a good chunk of grasslands, but would be slower still due to the lack of first ring 1/3 ivory, but had more forests to chop. I'm quite interested in that because I count 9, maybe 10 forests compared to the 7 I currently have. If I planned to use those forests for a wonder or to spam settlers then maybe it makes sense to move, but I feel comfortable enough with the current SiP plan that I'm going for what I have in place already (and not to overlap the food resources from the capital). That grass corn will be available from the capital 40% culture ring from T50 anyway.

So my current plan is to move the scout 77 next turn, which should be south of a hill, and adjacent to the coast up north. At that point I may move either 41 onto the forest 777 of the capital, and then back 99 onto the aforementioned hill. I think spending those two turns on gaining a bit more information from the north west is a wise idea because there is the possibility that I settle the second city for the grass cow up there.

[Krill]

Micro time table for first 30 turns, for my reference. If you understand it than that's good but it's not well presented at all.

T0: build workboat1, Fishing
T4: Hunting
T5: net workboat, build warrior1
T7: Bronze Working
T9: grow@2 eot
T10: build worker1
T17: build warrior2, pasture cow
T19: wheel
T20: grow@3 eot
T21: Pottery, worker1 move 2,
T22: chop, build worker2.
T23: Chop/cancel
T24: mine
T25: mine/cancel
T26: chop/fin, whip worker2, pottery Fin
T27: build granary (62/60), avoid growth on, worker1 mine, worker2 move 39
T28: build warrior3, worker 1 mine/fin
T29: avoid growth off, grow@3 eot
T30: grow@4 eot

The main points are that I need to land a chop on T26 or T27 and overflow at least 36 total production on T26 to one turn the granary on T27. Getting that a turn earlier means I can use avoid growth to save 5 more food compared to when the ivory was not first ring, and grow to size 4 one turn sooner. That brings forward the date for the first settler to eot T33 provided a single chop occurs on T31 or T32. The micro for the workers after hooking the cow is still up in the air, because until I know where I need to put roads, I'm not sure which forests I want to chop first. I do know I want to mine the grass hill forest first as the first chop to get the granary; that hill is worth using at size 4.

[flugauto]

More tier lists?

[Krill]

Writing tier 2 now.