[LURKERS] PB27 Map & Lurking: Walking in a :weed: wonderland

[Krill]

OK, I'm kinda back after 6 months away, what's happened?

[GermanJoey]

hey, welcome back!

well, after you left your replacement ended up getting dogpiled by 3 civs, after HAK decided he was bored and just randomly invaded you or something like that, and then you slowly and painfully died over the course of like 60 turns. eventually, gavagai ate both HAK and you, and some of Adrien, but took so long to do so that he fell behind somewhat.

if you read one thread, definitely make it taotao's, as he reports very frequently. unfortunately, the turnpace of this game is still very slow for some reason, and I guess that's muted lurker interest a bit, as compared to the frenzy of PB33, which is too bad because this game is bananas. (in a good way)

anyways, the long story short is that:

taotao (dutch) and REM (russia) are *extremely* close together in first and second place, and have been intermittently warring with each other. taotao/mack killed Donovan of Zulu and then CH of Inca, while REM killed Commodore, Elkad, and some of NylesStandish. REM shot way ahead on tech at one point, very likely due to early access to Rep from the pyramids and the russian UB, but taotao has recently clawed his way back to near-parity via MoM golden ages and the new dutch dike. they both have been reporting really well, especially taotao.

behind them, with just-as-large empires but behind in tech, are dtay (who first beat up AT and then had a really crazy war with ichabod, all while expanding ridiculously huge out into the new world) and gavagai (who conquered like the entire bottom half of your continent). they've just recently been warring over each others' possessions the new world. it seems gavagai invaded dtay to take some of his new world holdings, and, in typical gavagai fashion, is angry that dtay won't just let him keep them and peace out. gavagai just recently started reporting again after a long hiatus, and dtay reports intermittently, but neither of the two of them report anywhere as frequenty or as in-depth as REM or taotao.

of the rest, 15 are dead! the other remaining players are barteq, who is still reasonably strong but will likely eventually be split by dtay and gavagai, donovan (originally Serdoa and NH), plako, and borsche. REM has been propping up donovan against taotao, and will likely eventually eat plako. borsche might end up surviving to the end, if only because donovan has a purpose to REM, but who knows? maybe gav will invade him!

at any rate, it looks like we'll be heading into an early space race soon (tech pace in this game is very fast), with 2 players trying to build a ship while two other players try to stop them, so that should be pretty fun.

[Krill]

Wait, the end game techs were made a bit cheaper (like 20% cheaper) than PB18 because people complained that PB18 tech costs were too high, and now they are too low?

You guys are impossible to please!

[GermanJoey]

I have no idea if they're too low!

the tech/turn ratio probably just seems high to me because the ancient era was much shorter in this game compared to the past.

[Krill]

You know, I actually felt like the ancient era was sound this game. It lasted the same length of time it takes to get the economy up and running to the point where the interesting decisions were made. T50 with IW or HBR via beeline and a couple of cities just seems about right for interest levels. Much better than only getting BW and Pottery by T50 IMO.

[The Black Sword]

Good to see you Krill.

I've sort of had this game written off for a while as a REM win, but reading the latest updates taotao seems a lot closer than I had assumed.

[Mardoc]

I've sort of had this game written off for a while as a REM win, but reading the latest updates taotao seems a lot closer than I had assumed.

As best I can tell, this is the direct result of Taotao continuing to have time and energy and initiative, while REM has been somewhat forced to put this one on autopilot. Tao keeps finding little opportunities to grow: a city here, two there, a wonder sniped from over here...no single maneuver is enough to catch him up, but they just keep stacking up.

Being Dutch helps, of course. But part of that is that he's spent the effort to get full use from East Indiamen, which in turn provided him a lot of island cities which could benefit from dikes.

[Krill]

What is completely insane about boak is that Chesterton is better protected than his capital.

Clearly, Boak was just not expecting an attack from Adrien, and once it did come, the Chesterton force was simply too far to bother bringing it back.

Bacchus is dead-on of course, but this phenomenon happens a lot, and it always seems to frustrate players in the position that Gavagi is in right now. There's really nothing a player in Boak's position can do but defend the cities he has units near and just futilely do his best on the other front. It sucks, but Gavagi isn't entitled to a lighter garrison just because the other side got piled on after the fact.

Of course, Gavagi did decide to fight a land war against then-Krill-with-a-pop-edge instead of picking on the wealth of nearby softer targets, so he kinda got what he deserved here. Never fight a tech-equal land war against a competent opponent and all. The fact that someone else capitalized on a dogpile opportunity is just good play by them.

Wasn't it Krill who initiated hostilities to stop Gav getting too much of Tsargon? I don't remember either side discussing the choice though, I think they both just presented it as a fait accompli.

Whichever way it was probably the decision that ruined both of their games - if Krill had gone for Astro (which I'm sure he was talking about doing) or one of his other neighbours rather than playing great artist chicken with Gavagai he'd probably have been better off, and if Gav could have just finished Tsargon quickly and focused on his next meal he'd be a contender...

Yeah, Krill started it. He may have discussed why in his videos, but I can't remember in how much detail.

IIRC, Gav was the one who declared war, Krill was just ('just') hovering on Gav's new borders with 20 HA and a Great Artist and settling aggressive cities. I think Krill's reasoning was something about keeping Gav from getting borders with HAK and Adrien, so that those could be Krill-food instead of Gav-food. Basically both of them wanted to get 2/3 of Tsargon's land, and neither was willing to blink.

I don't quite understand why Krill preferred to push Gav as a stepping stone to conquering HAK, rather than just going directly for HAK, though.

Yeah, they definitely took themselves mostly out of contention with that sequence, but either of them could have de-escalated it by just accepting a city or two less and eating somebody else.

Yeah, they definitely took themselves mostly out of contention with that sequence, but either of them could have de-escalated it by just accepting a city or two less and eating somebody else.

This is it, 100%. Two large, powerful neighbors can coexist peacefully. Just leave a handful of crumple zone cities with non-threatening garrisons and let your large army do its work elsewhere. A competent player would (or should) know that aggression against a non-aggressive but powerful neighbor will meet with limited gains initially and then end in a mire of blood and tears for both sides with the omnipresent "meanwhile, across the map" situation where yet another opponent steams ahead unencumbered. Both Krill and Gav ought to have been able to see this but instead chose to square off in a rooster fight over a middling 2-3 cities. Trust and reliance on mutual benefit among relative equals is a much cheaper defensive strategy and provides a much greater return on investment for your army. It is a calculated risk, but you have to take chances to win.

One problem with the above is that both players are ruthless and so could have decided to punish the weak border garrison anyway with the result being what actually occurred,mutual bloodbath, just with a few less cities to defend for the player who tried to trust the other. But the short term gain only buys a permanent enemy when otherwise it could have been a cheap border to defend and more neighbors to consume elsewhere.

tl;dr of the situation: the land bridge between Tsargon and Adrien is what made long term peace difficult. Gav with control of that would have been able to threaten two sides of a wide empire with a single stack cope Engineering. Without that land bridge (and a single huge insland sea rather than two separate ones), I feel best choice was definite to settle to Chesterton position and then hold there. Basically turn that part of hte map into a fake inland Sea map.

As it was, I agree that the posts in this thread are right. Should have used a GA to catch up on infra, settle and hold and Chesterton. I don't think that would have changed much long term versus EIM though. That stupendously long coastline was almost impossible to defend. I think whatever a player did following the rapid demise of TheWannabe here, was going to have difficulty finishing the game, ruthless or not. It's still a pyrrhic victory though.

I want to go on record and state that I think the continents are generally sound, but I do think that if you going to put that much land into a New World you really need to make it known at the start of the game and please ban Netherlands along with Portugal. There are variations in map quality but it's nothing to complain about, but should still be acknowledged. Taotao's second city is, for example, has 6F, 5F, copper and fur. I had no copper (accepted mistake), awkward happy but similar food. I think that the variation is fine but the copper was annoying. All you can do is play the hand you are dealt and nothing I have seen from taotao's thread makes me think he doesn't deserve plaudits.

Oh, yeah, also Dikes should only be +1 hammer, not +2, that's actually a bug.

[GermanJoey]

tl;dr of the situation: the land bridge between Tsargon and Adrien is what made long term peace difficult. Gav with control of that would have been able to threaten two sides of a wide empire with a single stack cope Engineering. Without that land bridge (and a single huge insland sea rather than two separate ones), I feel best choice was definite to settle to Chesterton position and then hold there. Basically turn that part of hte map into a fake inland Sea map.

As it was, I agree that the posts in this thread are right. Should have used a GA to catch up on infra, settle and hold and Chesterton. I don't think that would have changed much long term versus EIM though. That stupendously long coastline was almost impossible to defend. I think whatever a player did following the rapid demise of TheWannabe here, was going to have difficulty finishing the game, ruthless or not. It's still a pyrrhic victory though.

I want to go on record and state that I think the continents are generally sound, but I do think that if you going to put that much land into a New World you really need to make it known at the start of the game and please ban Netherlands along with Portugal. There are variations in map quality but it's nothing to complain about, but should still be acknowledged. Taotao's second city is, for example, has 6F, 5F, copper and fur. I had no copper (accepted mistake), awkward happy but similar food. I think that the variation is fine but the copper was annoying. All you can do is play the hand you are dealt and nothing I have seen from taotao's thread makes me think he doesn't deserve plaudits.

Oh, yeah, also Dikes should only be +1 hammer, not +2, that's actually a bug.

Well, we did think about telling people about the new world at the start, and if this had been a more "serious" game we would have. However, the flavor of this game was more along the lines of a big crazy adventure (if you look in the early pages of this thread, you'll see that even the lurkers didn't even want us to spoil what the map looked like for them!), so we thought it'd be ok if there were some surprises. That said, there were some clues:

1.) Before the game started, we tried to really ham it up to tell people to explore the damn map. (you actually did a really good job of this, I thought)
2.) There's no coastally-available ICTR... in order to push people towards Alphabet for this very purpose! (and also slow down classical-era tech pace a bit)
3.) If people did explore, than they'd notice that they were on a big continent with exactly half the players and yet only about 1/4 of the world map was visible! wouldn't it be way too lame if there were just two continents? why not just make a Pangaea if that was the way the map was gonna go?
4.) We specifically made a big deal about Circumnav being turned on so that people would be motivated to get some damn Caravels out there and look around.
5.) Several people figured out from demographics that, around the point that most land was "filled up," if they compared average land per player vs total land tiles, about 800 tiles were missing...

So, there's three ways to figure out that there's a New World out there pre-Astro: a.) deduction via thoroughly exploring your starting continent, b.) demographics math, and c.) building Caravels and then sending them out to sea. None of these three make it a sure thing that there's lush islands out there, but, so they say, fortune favors the bold...

The two civ bans we decided on were Phi Portugal (as they'd have a very easy time of bulbing Optics for pre-1AD new world settlements) and Pro Inca. We discussed Netherlands a bit, and decided that if one of the experienced players got it then we might reroll it, but otherwise leave it in because only a fairly skilled player should make it to Astro anyways. In this case, it was von Adlercreutz as the primary player and taotao as the dedlurker. I knew that the former wasn't very experienced or skilled from reading his CFC game (no offense vA), while taotao was a brand new MP player, so we thought it'd be OK. Well... taotao ended up being very very good, and then mackoti joined his team for awhile. Welp. On top of that, we didn't think of the fact that Cre+Netherlands actually has some significant synergy because of half-priced Observatories on top of already having a strong inclination to rush Astro. FWIW, Circumnav was supposed to be turned on and taotao should have won it, so you can fold that missing bonus into what he got from the EIM.

As far as the Dutch Dike goes, it's obviously amazing here for taotao, especially with the MoM, but I think the Russian UB has been just as good to REM, especially with early Rep from the mids. Note that the Dike seems to be bugged to not give any hammers on river tiles in this version so it's not like he's breaking the game here; taotao even said that he thinks he'd be doing even better with the original dike compared to this new version.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Tao can just lib economics.

You probably haven't read the beginning of their thread, but taotao is no chump either. He was in pure control of the first ~60 turns and played them pretty much perfectly, and was still in primary control until T100 at least. (he also reports a lot better than Mack, so, no offense to mack, I'm excited to see taotao take over again)

I dont wanna dismis Tao here ,but when i joined he was near math and he had 5 cities with 6th to be plant and he had like 4 workers , first thing which i done when he was away for several days was to get that number to 7 and 2 more to complete.Sayin he played prety much perfect is far from the truth, for example he wanted to plant anew city with just 1 worker suport in 20 turns that worker will had produced 1 library and 1 worker, of course i couldnt agree with such a thing so in 20 turns that city produced granary, librarry 2 workers, 1 setler 1 archer and 1 axe.

Him beeing primary control first 100 turn again doesnt stand , all the preparartion for war with Dz were done by me. tech path was chosen by me , see for example picking something else and not COnfu(he was prety mad about that).I let him to came the plan for MoM so i let him involved but was a litle to slow for my taste.

Seeing all those i tryed to made him to participate more even tryed several time to chat with him over Gmail but he didnt answered, and from that point i realy tryed to make him participate more and even done things which he wanted, for example I stoped army building to conquer Ch cause he wanted us to consolidate.Later i wanted to get him on board with preparing a conquest against REM(yes here is true if was my game right now rem would had like 10 cities less as i would had prepared an atack from fog with a force like 30 knigs, i kept my EI's hidden so he didnt seen them till i was playing turns), but he was against i a listen and played more for astro islands.

And after that i seen his sadness when he said you play the turns anyway and i decided to step out to let him enjoy his game.The truth is I am not very good for team play(although with seven i thnk we played prety good toghedre in pb7 and 10),but i can say here wasnt all my fault was tao as well well becasue he was never disponible for chating and for taking decisions togheder.