[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[Cheater Hater]

Wasn't there a PB that tried to start, got into starting difficulties, got passed over for easier to set up PB and eventually was circled back to? My brain points to a giant game, maybe PB13?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

PB7 - the game that Never Happened because it ended in such acrimony? Described here:

A game proposed in the spirit of casual friendliness quickly turns into a clusterfuck of bad blood and broken dreams. High score of 3 ragequits, including the moderator, Mist. Lord Parkin sneaks up and double-moves the world record for double-moves, shattering it. All told, this was a glorious, glorious failure.

For me personally, I think it was the one that I teamed with Xenu, maybe PB12, and we basically disagreed on everything except how bad the map screwed us.

--

Re: GP order, I believe it is always the same as your city order on the F1 list. Typically (always?) this is order of founding for your cities, but I haven't quite figured out how this handles cities you have taken from other teams. But, generally, I am 98% sure that GP production resolves in the order listed by F1.

[Krill]

Well, if you are scooter and saying that there is only one true answer.

PB5.

[Brian Shanahan]

That report was written this morning. I've since played the next turn. A couple screenshots on that tomorrow, but in the meantime, do your thing.



It's much more vague this time.

I've a vague recollection of there once being a number between six and eight.

my guess is FFHPBEM7, of which we all agreed to never speak of again. I got off lightly in that one, tooling around in my corner until Krill's skelly spam mercifully put me down

[scooter]

PB3 was what I had in mind, but obviously there are others that could apply. At one point I might have said that about PB5, but I ended up having a lot of fun Zerking everyone in that despite the futility of the situation.

[Krill]

PB3 was a fantastic game.

[Tohron]

Going back to Underwater Barb, was there anything unusual about the game besides the submarine itself? Any unusual circumstances that let to part of the map being fogged long enough for a barb sub to spawn?

[scooter]

PB3 was a fantastic game.

I knew you had that opinion of that game, but I'm pretty confident you're an outlier on that . That game was terrible. I was actually planning to save that for a bad city, but the more of this map I see, the more it looks like there will be no terrible cities.

Going back to Underwater Barb, was there anything unusual about the game besides the submarine itself?  Any unusual circumstances that let to part of the map being fogged long enough for a barb sub to spawn?

Funny you should ask! Here you go:


-----------

PBEM24: Underwater Barb

What a strange game. Most of these games are exciting because they had a lot of in-game conflict. This was a 4-player PBEM with very little conflict until deep into the game, and yet it somehow was pretty interesting. I remember the map being an issue, so I glanced at the lurker thread, and uh:

Yeah.  I do want the map to be a surprise though- but scooter is kindly looking it over to make sure that it's not a disaster waiting to happen.

Emphasis mine. I have no memory of this . SevenSpirits did check it too, leading to a prescient comment.

I just want to clarify that I consider this map to be somewhat dubious, and probably different from what some of the players wanted or expected. But hey, they OK'd Bob as the mapmaker so that's their problem. There are definitely some interesting things going on.

And don't worry Seven, if this map bombs I'll be sure to tell everyone that you weren't culpable in any way  

I did take some "liberties" with the design. Gaspar at least expects me to have done so, and Commodore and TT both seemed to want something a little bit out of the ordinary, so I think (hope) the final product won't shock anyone too badly.

One thing did shock them pretty badly. The screenshot is sadly lost, but here is the quote from the moment:

Can someone explain this to me?

<lost image>

In case its not clear, my workboat was destroyed by a 'Barbarian Rip Tide'. I've never come across anything like that before and it can't be privateers either.

4 barbarian subs were apparently added to the inner sea shortly before the game launched as a twist for the players. They were not happy. The barbs were removed via wizardry, and the game continued. Mackoti's reporting game was on point:

P: turn 60 report , our great empire has: 7 cities , 8 workers, 2 setlers and a great engineer;
KK: Woot we got a great engineer we could lighbul bachynery and have maces before Jesus years,no chanse for poor gaspar.

We saw Twinkletoes defend himself fairly effectively with the Big Pile Of Trash strategy:



THIRTY-THREE LANDSKNECHTS. In one city in the industrial era. (There were plenty more elsewhere.) I don't even know if I've built one before.

Anyway, we had a first in this game: the first serious attempt at a cultural victory in a Civ MP game here. This game started concurrently with PB6, but it ended before the PB6 cultural attempt became a source of public discussion. Mackoti was in the midst of lapping the field (Oracle'd CIVIL SERVICE and got to Communism an era ahead of everyone else) as he tended to do in the PBEM era when Commodore elected to go all-in for a cultural victory because why not. And because this was in the full diplo era, he even secured a NAP with Mackoti that would cover the hail-mary attempt completely. I believe he may have coined the term "artist deathcamp" here with his great artist strategy. If not, this game popularized the term for sure.

Of course, a game-winning NAP means it's NAP-stab time.



Tanks vs Cavs = game over.

[scooter]

Turn 227

Well I got an answer from Plako:



I suppose the question will be whether or not Plako would have tilted if I had gone for gold instead. More likely he would have flipped me off and settled my silver in return. I think I'm happy with the choice to simply settle the silver island. In this shot, the galley is insider Underwater Barb, and I must admit I was tempted to declare and snipe his work boat. I would have done it in a heartbeat if it was REM or Mackoti.



He also just settled this city too. Let's update the counts:

scooter: 10
REM: 8
Mackoti: 8
Plako: 7
RMoG: 6
Alhazard: 6

No new techs discovered this turn.



Thankfully, the spread into Masterclass went off without a hitch, so we're right on track to fire the golden age on T229.



YEP.



Whipped the galley in Rage Quit, and I'll take a look at the east island over there to see what we've got.

I'll be getting tech visibility on RMoG pretty soon. I'll of course have to dump occasional EP turns into other players to maintain tech visibility, but I'm thinking of going for city visibility on Mackoti next. I don't really care what Alhazard is teching because I already know he's almost certainly going for Communism, and we're nowhere near him. Seeing what Mackoti is up to seems infinitely more valuable.

[scooter]

New turn just rolled. Short update: TOP OF THE SCOREBOARD.

Until tomorrow when I whip 4 cities right before firing the golden age.