Genghis Machinates

[The Black Sword]

Settings look correct to me. We're playing with random personalities too! Didn't move anything, I think the scout should check out the north east river first and then circle around. Feel free to make the decision on SIP vs move if I'm not around, I don't feel too strongly on the issue. Password is khan.

In other news:

Obvious
Sitting Bull of Inca for Ot4e.

Reasonably expected
Charlie of Murica for Pin.

Peter of HRE for REM

Comm went for Catherine

Mildly unusual

Boudica of India for 2metra - well, probably not so unusual if he's currently playing Julius.

Whoa
Mack went for Willem of the Vikings - water start?

OH went for Sury over Qin - no Inds.

AGG Zulu is just too good in RtR.

I hope you're right.

[GermanJoey]

In a game this size I think I might prefer Ind to Agg in general actually. But Zulu.

So if the game starts this weekend, what do you think about moving? I rolled a couple of tectonics and it seemed unlikely that we'd hit a new resource. I rolled a couple of B&S and we would have had a pretty good chance of hitting one. I think we need to hit something for the move to be worth it, but even if we don't it's a pretty minor hit to our development. Either option seems ok, I lean toward SIP because of that tundra to the north, suggests we'd be moving away from contested land.

If we have no plans to cottage up the capital 80 turns from now, then I don't see any reason we shouldn't move. At worst we lose about, what, 60-70 oasis commerce (considering we have no plans to work it once we have Imp hammer tiles online), there's no lack of trees even if we move, and, if we get lucky, we could end up with a majorly improved capital.

AGG Zulu is just too good in RtR. As much as I hate the idea of barracks giving culture, I think it is a good change from balance point of view. AGG could still be ok option even without that maintenance bonus, cause games can be played on a more cramped maps.

Edit: sorry, it's probably what I should have written in lurker's thread.

Don't see why that would need to be in the lurker thread; we've already long locked into our pick at this point.

And yeah, you have a really good point regarding balance. There's nothing saying that every trait needs to be equally good on every game type. For example, Fin has a big advantage on watery maps, Ind is more advantageous if you're the only one, etc.

[GermanJoey]

Settings look correct to me. We're playing with random personalities too! Didn't move anything, I think the scout should check out the north east river first and then circle around. Feel free to make the decision on SIP vs move if I'm not around, I don't feel too strongly on the issue. Password is khan.

You don't think we should move both settler and scout NW, in order to get a bigger picture of the map for our move? That bare grassland tile 2N1W would give our scout some options on the second turn.

In other news:

Obvious
Sitting Bull of Inca for Ot4e.

Reasonably expected
Charlie of Murica for Pin.

Peter of HRE for REM

Comm went for Catherine

Mildly unusual

Boudica of India for 2metra - well, probably not so unusual if he's currently playing Julius.

Whoa
Mack went for Willem of the Vikings - water start?

OH went for Sury over Qin - no Inds.

AGG Zulu is just too good in RtR.

I hope you're right.

Knew Com couldn't resist Cre!! I wonder how dtay felt about that, or if Com railroaded him into it. dtay is RB's #1 super Protective fan. Very surprised about Mack w/ vikings, and that Harry passed up Ind, wow! Makes me feel a little more confident about the Oracle idea... looking at these choices, the only teams I'd expect to be able and willing to compete are OT4E and Pindicator, although Pind would rather have Henge, I think.

[GermanJoey]

lmfao, did you see the quote of the moment? looks like Commodore has a "good" start too.

[GermanJoey]

Another thought, re: move. Instead of moving, we could tech Mining -> BW -> Myst -> Med, with the idea of using the oasis to accelerate us towards founding Med in our first city for a fast border pop. That would help us pick a really nice BFC for a replacement capital. Rivals' starting techs:

Us - Ag/Hunt
OT4E - Ag/Myst
Com - Fish/Mining
Mack - Fish/Huting
Harry - Ag/Wheel
2metra - Myst/Wheel
Pind - Ag/Fish
REM - Myst/Hunt

There's 3 civs starting with Myst - OT4E's Inca, REM's HRE, and 2metra's India. OT4E wouldn't care about a religion, and 2metra needs worker techs badly. So, our one competition would be REM, but, if he has a slow start too, we might be able to beat him. (especially if he also needs Agriculture)

I think I'd still prefer to move, but, its an idea.

edit: bam, 4 posts in a row, I'm so cool.

[Borsche]

imo it would be cool to play with random personalities once in awhile so montezumaJowy doesn't get constalty stuck in an unwinnable ancient age war

[GermanJoey]

it'd be fun to do an anonymous pitboss game, i think, but we'd need a special, custom tracker to do it.

TBS, I logged in just to make sure I could but didn't touch the scout. I was interested in 2 things:

1.) to see if you were right about that fog-gazing of what seemed to be tundra that you noticed to our north in our starting screenshot, but for some reason we no longer have our BFC revealed. Ceil, can you confirm that's the case for everybody?
2.) the map is 1871 land tiles. The dimensions were 104x64, which means that 1 - 1871/(104*64) = 71.9% of the map is water! Also, 1871/8 is freaking 234 land tiles per player, which is a completely ginormous number. Who knows how much of that is pre-astro accessible, though.

If you're right about the tundra, then, given the map size and the large water content despite our land-lockedness, then there's a chance our start will be reminiscent of plako's in PB22. Lots of ice, very little food. IIRC he had insane troubles with barbs; I'm very happy we'll have our Impis if we have to deal with a similar situation. What was the PB22 mapscript again? Big and Small IIRC?

[Haram]

AGG Zulu is just too good in RtR. As much as I hate the idea of barracks giving culture, I think it is a good change from balance point of view. AGG could still be ok option even without that maintenance bonus, cause games can be played on a more cramped maps.

Edit: sorry, it's probably what I should have written in lurker's thread.

Don't see why that would need to be in the lurker thread; we've already long locked into our pick at this point.

I meant, that saying Hey guys, you are having overpowered combo can sometimes take away part of the fun from actually riding it and that is not what I intended.

[The Black Sword]

Zooming in, the north looks like tundra hill, grass hill, tundra forest, tundra to me. But that is almost certainly a flood plain to our east. There's still a bunch of people to play so I didn't move the settler yet. I'm going to run a quick sim of the eastern plant.

It's possible the map has a lot of tundra/ice tiles(a la PB22) and the actually usable amount is a lot lower. That was indeed B&S by the way.

Haram; don't worry, the +2 post count was easily worth it.

[GermanJoey]

tundra next to floodplains eh? That's probably not Totestra or Tectonics then... and man, that is one really long river! by the eastern plant, did you mean the PH 2east of the settler?

edit: we got the PB29 crew in here - TBS, me, Haram, Borsche, Dreylin... we need to get Scipio, Jowy, and Tsargon posting here too so we can really freak wetbandit out...