[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[Sullla]

I would offer the map trade. There's no telling if mackoti will accept but it's worth the offer. More thoughts to come later tonight.

[Tohron]

Did you make sure to allocate all your EP to mackoti? You'll definitely want to keep an eagle eye on his military power graph.

[Sullla]

Good question Tohron. Fortunately the game automatically assigns all EP to the first civ that you meet.

OK, some thoughts on meeting mackoti first. It's definitely not the best result from a scouting perspective, but it's not all bad either. For one thing, I'm not convinced that he's our closest neighbor, or the one that we'll be competing with the most for land. I think there's some kind of chokepoint in the center of the map, and mackoti must be on the other side of that. I would be more concerned if mackoti was our immediate neighbor to the east or west, and it doesn't look like that's the case. If there's a body of water between us with a chokepoint (chokepoints?) bridging the gap, we can probably live with that and not have too much tension. Obviously a map trade would help here if it went through.

We're also going to be the EP leader for the early game with our setup here. With that in mind, meeting mackoti first does help us grab his bar graphs early on and monitor his progress. So yeah, I would rather meet Alhazard or RMOG first and have them as our neighbor, but there are some upsides to all of this.

In the Demos, we are starting to slip as expected. That's expected and not a cause for concern, not yet anyway. If we're still lagging on T201 after we've grown 6 pop point and planted our third city, that's when I'll be concerned. We shall see. I will point out that Nicolae's team is doing very well for themselves, with two pop point growths this turn, cities of size 3 and size 2. Like I wrote earlier, I think mackoti and Nicolae will be the more dangerous opponents in this game.

[Sullla]

One more mackoti-related thing to point out. I logged into the game to see if I could spot anything interesting in the various Demographics screens. Mackoti is running the expected civics: Hereditary Rule, Bureaucracy, Serfdom, Mercantilism, and Pacifism. And hello, what's this:



There's 26 culture in his capital city of Titan. OK, mackoti is playing a Spi/Fin leader and he founded his capital on the first turn, so he should have 2 more culture than our capital. However, that still leaves him with 10 more culture than us. Something has to be accounting for that difference. The most logical guess is that he finished a library and is getting culture that way. That would certainly fit with scooter's guess of an early Academy, since why else would mackoti be saving gold right now?

Anyway, we'll be able to tell next turn by looking at the same screen. If the culture in the capital goes up by 4, that's almost certainly the palace and a library. If so, it's a very early library build from mackoti, and a very early incoming Academy in a few turns. Is that a good strategy? I honestly have no idea. It didn't work that well for Donovan in the last Pitboss 33 game, but who knows here.

[Tohron]

I suppose if conflict proves inevitable, you could always park pikes on that jungle hill landbridge. He'd need galleys or galleons to route around that.

[Cheater Hater]

Weren't we saying someone popped their borders a turn early, and that was probably from building culture? Couldn't that be Mackoti?

[scooter]

Turn 194

I logged in eager to see Mackoti's maps!



NOPE.

My guess is he parked his Explorer on this Jungle hill tile and declared to prevent us from scouting him a little longer. I guess it's also possible he's hoping to dash our chances at landing circumnavigation.



Sigh. So help me if Plako is our other neighbor. I was really hoping Alhazard's Gandhi would be a neighbor, and failing that RMoG would be nice. He was logged in at the time. I tried to open the diplo window to make a map trade, but he never acknowledged the window open, and he finished and logged out before I could get anything. I did offer it after that though.



He's saving gold too. No surprises in the civic column.



I can't check on Mackoti's culture because Nicolae's capital has even more. I'm wondering if they both elected to slip in a library in between whips/chops? Even if Academy isn't the goal, it's likely that extra 25% could help them in the race to one of the early techs. It's not a bad idea.



Alright, silly Mackoti/Nicolae groans aside, let's talk serious map theorizing.

From the fog it looks like there's an icy land bridge up here of some sort. It also looks like there's narrow channels separating fingers of land that we're each on, and land bridges connecting them all at the edges. So I'd expect it to look something like this:

-X--X--X-
--X--X--X

The land bridges increases player access (separating us by water would be silly), and offsetting the players would be the logical mapmaking move to give us 4 neighbors (or 3.5ish) rather than 3. Of course, all neighbors aren't created equal. We had 4 of them in 33, but the access to each of them was definitely not equal. We'll have to wait until we get more map intel to figure out who is closest to us.


Finally, I'll talk about Mackoti a little bit since I've actually played a lot of games with him and closely followed other games he's played in. The thing to understand about Mackoti is he does not make macro mistakes. If he makes a mistake, it's likely to be a minor micro thing or more likely he goes on tilt. And both of those things are fairly uncommon. Sort of anyway - he'll appear to post something very tilt-like in his player thread (threats to quit come once a month or so but rarely actually happen) and then do the opposite, sane thing in game. But the point about the lack of macro mistakes is key. He doesn't start wars unless he 1) literally has no choice - like we had no choice being at war with REM late in 33 or 2) is guaranteed to win comfortably. That actually makes him an okay neighbor in that sense. A predictable but strong neighbor is often preferable to a loose cannon. The problem comes in if you have nothing but predictable, strong neighbors, but we don't know just yet. Early returns: not great!

The main problem with Mackoti as a neighbor is two-fold. First, he's not a valid conquest option because he's never weak enough to be a soft target. Second, if we do get into a winning position, he will not let us get away. This is the other half of not making micro mistakes. He knows when a player has gotten into a strong enough position to play it zero sum, and he knows when there are > 2 players capable of winning where he should focus on bettering his position. These seem like basic things, but games are won and lost on stuff like this. Part of why I find Mackoti's play to be pretty inspiring is because the key to what makes him really good is pretty simple: he seems to always make the correct strategic choice.

Finally, it's noteworthy because if Mackoti is seemingly doing something unconvential, it's wise to assume he's making a good choice and try to fill in the gaps from there.

Anyway, when I started this post I got the notification that Mackoti rolled this turn, which means in the 20 minutes or so it took to write this, I'm sure I'm already the last one to play.

[scooter]

Turn 195

35 minutes into T195, 3/6 players have already ended turn. Yeah, we're getting another turn later today.



I pulled this scout back to see if maybe Mackoti will let us through now. I've also shuffled the longbow forward a little bit in case he walks into range mistakenly.



Spotted some seafood off the west coast. 1W of the marble seems like a promising early option.



Ugh, not a fan of foodless desert landbridges. Our main challenge here is that with IMP we really need to get more than our fair share of land. That was more doable in 33 where the landbridges were habitable. Here it seems each player has their own unique continent, which means we're going to have to settle on to someone's in a nearly indefensible location. This type of setup leads to super static borders which isn't so fun. Hopefully this is an anomaly and not representative of everything else. I haven't actually seen any other land connections yet.



Time to grow.



Nicolae is up to 7 pop total. Settler whips incoming.



Corn farm completes next turn.

[Tohron]

It seems like for this map, the immediate advantage of IMP will be the ability to fill in your "continent" before anyone else can, letting you gear up for war while everyone else is still trying to catch up in expansion.

Regarding Makoti's war, I wonder if he's trying to secure the landbridge's jungle hill tile for himself. If you could get pikes fortified on that tile, it would be a major obstacle for a Cataphract strike (he'd likely have to ferry units past them with Galleys), so getting his own units on the tile would help him keep his options open. Of course, if that's what he's going for it would be hard to stop him at this point - an explorer on that tile has an effective strength of 8.6-9.6 and a Longbow has an effective strength of 12-13.5 (depending on how long they've fortified), so dislodging him would be very expensive.

[Sullla]

Did we offer a map trade to Nicolae? And set all EP to mackoti, I think. More thoughts to come later.