LURKER THREAD- No Players

[Miguelito]

Also PB 49 was mainly won with horse archers and featured some pretty big phant/cat stacks, although the final decision came with knights. But that map was super tight, as in I saw my neighbour's capital borders over water from my own.
I think the main difference are the deity costs.
I think hardly any player will have guilds by t150 (Spain could but is in another route, and has 6 or 7 cities only). So if you wait that long, other players will have made 1-3 conquests already. HAs are underrepresented in this game imo (next pic of the day will feature a nice counter example), but ultimately against an adequate defense they can't break through and you're left with cats&axes or phants if you can get your hands on some ivory (this map has (somewhat) realistic resources so only Africa and Asia get ivory, although the eastern Siberian guy (yup, Stalin) also has some, somehow.

Edit: and alphabet bulb I see as a valid strat to build research inn order to arrive at Currency, in particular with PHI. There are a few civforum players who imo should have considered this, Qin evidently, maybe also Joao? All those guys who expanded well and had crippling costs, and then has nothing to build but ancient units, increasing their costs further. Why Donovan researched it I have no idea, but he has always been a bit unorthodox? You don't need it for the Astro bulb or do you (according to my source, no)

[Charriu]

... if you can get your hands on some ivory (this map has (somewhat) realistic resources so only Africa and Asia get ivory,  although the eastern Siberian guy (yup, Stalin) also has some,  somehow.

Mammuts

[civac2]

In a game this big you quite simply cannot afford to not wage at least one ancient war. Others will and they will be much bigger and stronger than you. There are also a bunch of weaker players around you can take advantage of with some luck.

As for elephants, they get traded around quite a lot. Pretty much every strong leader that wants them can get them for gpt and/or a bunch of happiness/strategic resources. Weaker empires without substantial trading chips may not be able to aquire them but some of them managed anyway.

Is the alphabet bulb actually good in a typical slavery/cottage empire? You need production to take advantage of it. I do agree that it would have been a strong play for Qin in particular, however. Starting a ga with the scientist and going mathematics -> currency should be faster and better for most players in this game.

[Miguelito]

Civac, what I try to express is that game pace is vastly different between a deity game and monarch where we usually play (rarely emperor). In this game your point about ancient war is correct. In RB games we've seen people bringing knights onto the field by turn 110, and in that case it makes sense not to put your money on a painfully slow axe/cat stack (case in point, Peter's war against BaII had been an absolute stomp, but still I think it's been going on for >10 turns already?)

[scooter]

Anyone here understand why BaII did not defend this differently? He basically gave up right away. Letting all troops sit in their cities waiting for the catapults to start massacring them? What kind of strategy is that?

And researching calendar prior to construction...?

Could it be that "your" PB games are usually a lot more peaceful than "ours"?

None of the Civforum players has even considered researching Alphabet, for example, but two RB players already have. What for? Doesn't it make more sense to research currency and "produce" wealth while researching something? Especially since you need currency desperately to survive on deity difficulty, anyway?

So, I think a couple things are happening here. First, none of the RB players playing in this game are especially strong players. Some of them can defend themselves OK and keep players honest, but honestly I'm not surprised at all that they're falling early. As far as I'm aware, none of them have ever come close to winning a game here. Superdeath can do OK in spurts and might be the best player of the group that signed up, but he's very tilt prone and spreads himself thin with way too many games and clearly lost interest here very early.


Also, I think the turn pace is a huge issue. Typically our games average like 1.5T-2T a day in the ancient era and that slowly veers down to 1T, and they often pretty consistently stay at the 1T/day threshold or higher pretty deep into the game. So a game where you play every few days and the tech pace is super slow is probably sapping interest from players. If I had to guess, I bet he's just bored and autopiloting the game. I definitely would be in a game that slow.


I don't think the more peaceful thing is a huge part of it. The game I'm in right now (PB53) was only a 6 player game, but 1 player is already dead, and the 5 that remain are all at war with someone. In PB52 Old Harry is controlling a civ that spent I think over 100T consecutively at war with various players, and right now every player in the game has been in a war in the last 10T. It's definitely true that the settings are shifting the time/era that's ideal to invade people, but beyond that I mostly attribute it to player skill/interest.

[NobleHelium]

Of course the game is vastly different on Deity. Ancient units last much longer and I would expect nearly every player to get into a war with them. We don't play under these settings because it drastically changes the game balance. However for a game with this many players it can make sense to use the highest difficulty setting so that the game is as long as possible to avoid a silly resolution like a 20-way space race.

Alphabet is generally teched on RB under the following conditions:
1) You need to bulb Astronomy.
2) You need to research Printing Press.
3) You want to build spies (rare).
4) You really want to see other people's list of techs (rare).
5) You've completely mismanaged your economy and you can't make it to Currency (very rare).

[Miguelito]

If alphabet is required for the Astro bulb then my bulb order link is wrong and I'd appreciate a correct one, but in that case it makes perfect sense for Donovan, who is sitting in NZ and whose endgame is to somehow invade Australia from that position.
Also 5) happens pretty often under deity costs it appears (also apparently they play all games with that setting)

[Papa Bear]

Oh, we DO use other & shorter Turn Timers over at Civforum, too. But only in "smaller" settings. Both map-size- and number-of-players-wise...

Remember that we are talking about a game with 52 players on a "super-sized" map here... In the first 50-60 turns or so, one maybe could use a quicker timer, but any later than that players just need more time to do their ingame stuff. Anything beyond turn 200 or so means that 15-25 players will manage anything between 10 and 50 cities with all corresponding unit movements, checks on their / other players' foreign relations and whatnot... 

If all are at peace and can join the game at the same time, that might work on a shorter timer, but there sure will be wars all over the place, which will also force people to allow each other time to sync their turns with their opponents. 

The players are a mix of students and guys with "normal" day jobs and even in "our" player portfolio we have guys who live abroad (wahl-profi lives in the U.S., for example), meaning that three-way-wars will get all the way more complicated to organize / synchronize with people's real lives. Particularly in the later stages when player stacks exceed 50 or even 100 units.

I am thus fairly certain that anything "quicker" than 48 hours per turn would simply not work in the second year of the game (the predecessor lasted close to 2 years, if I remember correctly).

[civac2]

If alphabet is required for the Astro bulb then my bulb  order link is wrong and I'd appreciate a correct one,  but in that case it makes perfect sense for Donovan,  who is sitting in NZ and whose endgame is to somehow invade Australia from that position.
Also 5) happens pretty often under deity costs it appears (also apparently they play all games with that setting)

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/g...es.140952/

Donovan researched Alphabet much sooner than needed for the astronomy bulb. He could have made some use of spies maybe. He was at war with the Mongols sitting in Australia but they had periods of peace in between.

[Miguelito]

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/g...es.140952/

I was actually using that same link, but somehow thought that the lists in post #13 were the correct ones. Of course they can't be, because that post is from 2006

Donovan researched Alphabet much sooner than needed for the astronomy bulb. He could have made some use of spies maybe. He was at war with the Mongols sitting in Australia but they had periods of peace in between.

maybe he just wants to monitor Genghis' tech and went for alpha early since he'll need it anyway?


Picture of the day, by Ramk's suggestion (alhough it was already high on my list):


The Arab Americans (oh so many snarky comments offering themselves here) have not had a great game, but so far everytime we see them on the way out they bounce back. First they were chariot rushed around t60 (!) by Asoka in Persia. Turns out they had delayed Hunting and were completely pants down. It came down to Asoka not consequently occupying their copper hill, and them finishing a spear last minute. They then managed to drive the Indians back over the hills, who proceeded to chariot rush Justinian (the guy with the axe stack), now in the 70s, with surprising success but ultimately stalemating.
Now the actual Arabians have the Constantinople start, which must be among the top 3 positions on this map. Lots of green land, lots of room to expand into, surprisingly few neighbours - because the catch is that Anatolia and Mesopotamia are sealed off against each other by mountains. Saladin did a lot of comitted, if a bit aimless, peaceful building, and then decided to make his first conquest over sea in Syria, seeing as Lincoln had left all those floodplains undeveloped due to his early war. In terms of city count, it was something like Saladin 15 - Lincoln 3. But Lincoln had just gotten to his first horse archers, and Saladin was only half comitted and had to supply over sea, so he got the coast but not the juicy inlands.
Now we're at round 2 of that war, and the Arabs are bringing a (half?) serious stack. There was recently a change in leadership, as RL took over for former Saladin Suite (he has posted here), so the civ was handed to Maugitar, who so far had been doing euthanasy for civs abandoned by their owners when being invaded. So now he's all excited to get his hands on something real, and proceeds with the plan his predecessor had prepared.

The green is for Lincoln. Ultimately it turns out that going with just 4 spears against an enemy known to field Horchers isn't a winning strategy, even if you have cats and he doesn't (also some lucky rolls). 8 cats killed by flanking! Arab America stands yet again