Gavagai manages his personal GULAG

[Bacchus]

The "Hey, what a turnset!" prize goes to our sadly distant neighbour HAK, religion-first-researcher and now Oracle-before-settler-completer.

Sumeria is going to be pissed. I fear we might not get Monotheism after all, see what I meant?

[Gavagai]

Fuck

[Gavagai]

I think, I understand what HAK is up to. He is philosophical and wants an ultra-early early Engineer/Prophet or even both. It's quite plausible that he would be able to rush Mids somewhere around T60. And he isn't even our direct neighbor . Speaking of which, I really hope his neighbors are some of greener players or the game is already seriously imbalanced given his actions.

[Gavagai]

[Bacchus]

Now that we have a bunch of map knowledge, some thoughts on trait strength. This is a lush, but tight map, affording a near-ICS settling pattern, with massive rewards to the players who can carve out a larger field to ICS for themselves. Settling quickly and wide is massively advantageous here, so, I think without question, Cathy (Imp/Cre) would have been the strongest leader here. Fortunately we don't have her, but there are a bunch of leaders who have the individual Cathy traits, and well-paired at that: Suryavarman, both Caesars and Willem are particularly stand-out.

Continuing on the same theme, but alien to the RB meta, Agg is useful in this situation. Not to actually fight but simply to plant units which have 60% field victory odds in key zones and create threat areas that others will thus avoid. Looks like most people have multiple options for settlement, so just seeing an Agg unit in one direction might well be enough to motivate to plant somewhere else. We are actually fortunate that Grimace isn't doing this to us. It also helps by letting you build barracks in place of monuments of course, and later with maintenance.

Fin and Org, the economic stalwarts of BTS are as fine as always. However, the increased yield from Fin, coming late as it does in RtR, is really not enough to create a significant advantage by the Knights era. Org helps even less with this, and on a seemingly land-focused map, the Lighthouse bonus starts looking irrelevant too. Both traits will be huge in the end-game, but that's only important to people who remain relevant in the endgame, and Fin/Org do little to get you there.

Then we get into "meh" traits. Exp is fine, there is a lot of worker labour required for all these resources, and markets work well will all the happy, assuming everyone has this forested ivory or sugar. We have the whales too, but not sure how widespread these are. Still, this all more in the "nice to have" category, rather than really powerful on this map. Same goes for Ind and, dare I say it, Pro. Sure-sure, granaries are going everywhere, so 30 hammers per city are going to be saved whatever. Thing is, this is a map on which granaries are going to have as little use as they can possibly do -- which still means a lot of use, to be sure. You don't really want to be building granaries early here, you don't want to be growing tall, you want to be settling like crazy. Pro will still help though, both with getting these cities taller quicker and later with defending your cities against Knights with Muskets, and then even capturing cities with Grenadiers, Rifles, etc. Given how warfare works, the Drill line is superior to the combat line anyway (more resilient to collateral, less damage taken when cleaning up after your own siege deals damage). Exp, Ind and Pro are all ok.

Chm and Phi are next-to-useless. Both do one thing only, really -- create a brief window of advantage that you must exploit to the full before it closes. Very difficult to pull off, even with all the appropriate planning in place. Grimace has the best possible combination for Chm here, but even for him I don't think it will be enough. Phi gives an advantage that's easier to exploit, but then dies off completely after the Rennaissance era, unless you are going for culture victory. Chm retains a long-term advantage of having your units slightly better promoted, and RtR has messed with promotions potentially opening up something interesting here, like entire March armies, but I don't think it will be enough. How much of an opponent's economic advantage can Chm really help you erase in a war? Surely not the ~50gpt that Fin will be getting him, and strictly behind Agg on land until you get into 4-5 promos average per unit. Slightly better naval, but that's only relevant until Battleships are on the scene, after which whoever hits first wins anyway.

Spi is special, with RtR's civics I can't even rank it. Probably great in competent and attentive hands, and a non-trait otherwise.

[Bacchus]

Do we want Libraries or Mints first? Looks like everyone has mineable happy available for trading, and setting up a gold for gems with Grimace would be really useful. But then we are not so happiness constrained.

Not to be forgotten: market+mint gives a 4g yield per merchant specialist. That 10% on the mint is larger that one might think at first glance.

Really want Pyramids, we've got everything we need for them, except that our development is already pretty slow...

[Bacchus]

Here is something for lurkers to chew on:

We are getting Monotheism (let's say that's a given). Ideally, this would be founded in Kolyma, not only is this city great for a shrine, but that way we will split early culture production across three cities, all boosting each other, helping defence, and saving us from having to spend hammers on a monument in Kolyma. Unfortunately, Monotheism is getting researched a turn after we would found city 3, ITL Construction. Religion in ITL Construction isn't too bad, but it's not nearly as good. The city is already getting a wonder anyway and we don't really want to build commerce-multipliers in it.

We can grow Kolyma to 3 before Mono is researched. This will give us a 72% chance of founding Judaism in Kolyma. We can also delay the city plant by a turn, just by making the Settler stand there looking stupid. Is losing a turn's worth of production worth it to cut 28% of the risk? Discuss.

(The correct answer of course is: "you should have built something before the Settler." Moving on.)

[spacetyrantxenu]

You should have built something before the settler.

[Bacchus]

Can someone remind us of the end-of-turn resolution order again? Is it techs -> growth -> production? Where does religion-founding fall? Not that we can do anything by this stage, but nice to know whether we have a 64% chance or a 72% chance of favourable outcome.

[GermanJoey]

AFAIK its production -> techs -> growth.