OK, sweet. I started playing Civ4 a decade or so ago and welcomed new releases as a way to disrupt my typical routine of Starcraft, Starcraft, and more Starcraft. After I left Seattle for college I was shocked at how stupendous a gaming education just growing up here was, though I guess there was nothing else to do, so it made sense. In New York I became very sick and disillusioned with capitalism so I got a degree in English literature, came home, played poker for a living, had that banned by the government, bounced around a bit, revisited my old Magic: the Gathering addiction, went to the Pro Tour, won a tournament on shrooms, and started tutoring for dollars. Thus I find myself with huge amounts of experience in the three precursors to eSports—and a skill set and dilettantism utterly at odds with the boosterish and corporate environment of modern gaming (and Seattle). When I had major surgery this last October, it made a lot of sense to download a retro game with absolutely no commercial or social benefits and play obsessively for the duration of my recovery, except, aided by excess opiates, I kept playing beyond that, and beyond that too. And so we find ourselves here.
Over the last few months I've also generally ignored my only real talent, which is writing and not gaming (of course, my tutoring job lets me do both). This will be great news for the lurkers as long as I am able to survive. To this end I:
—Have written some stuff below which deserves a harsh critique
—Could use an experienced dedlurker to yell at me, tell me whatever below is just wrong, etc.
OK, dope. Here's where I'm at with the picks: since my entire experience consists of playing Deity base BTS I started by doing a few trial runs using the PB25 and PB34 maps. The main objective of the early game seems to be just getting improved tiles and a granary up at each city, allowing for exponential (quadratic?) growth (I guess this is what a "snowball" is—if we're Napoleon we can pasture the pigs? Whatever.) We can expand pretty aggressively compared to Deity because maintenance costs are much, much lower, but we do run into two constraints that are less of a thing in SP:
—Other people will kill us
—Happy cap
The happy cap in particular is tough to deal with because we do want to whip pretty hard but there's no tech trading and a number of the resources require AH, which is awkward to get when we're focusing on researching every economic tech ourselves / popping borders / hooking up copper / not dying / what have you. In particular this makes IMP and EXP harder to leverage, since the extra food doesn't trigger the production boni and also means we're supposed to whip more frequently to do so. Possible solutions include playing Charismatic, which seems really bad, or playing the Aztecs, which seems really good (and synergizes with the tripping-balls theme). In no particular order here are my thoughts on traits:
FIN—Nah, I'm not materialistic enough
CRE—I'm playing this game instead of writing a screenplay or reading some novels, so nah
CHM—I'm an awkward White guy, not happening
SPI—In Seattle only Russell Wilson believes in God; the rest of us just believe in Russell Wilson. I also have a lot of trouble conceptualizing hallucinogens as anything other than a deeply subjective and atheistic experience. All these hang-ups aside I don't think I'd be able to play this like not a tard
IMP—Bleh. Goes well with ORG though, and since we have the second pick we could burn it on JC and have him be good with whatever Civ we get with the penultimate one
EXP—Like IMP but usually worth a couple time walks (2-hammer plant) at the beginning, less prone to maintenance issues in the early-midgame, and more snowbally in the midgame due to hella cheap buildings. I'm into it
PRO—Highly contingent on how quickly we can find luxes to power up the granaries. Maybe, probably not
AGG—Is this trait as awesome as it looks, or as terrible as the stats indicate? Multiplicative 25 percent maintenance reduction is a bit of an anti-synergy with ORG. Good leaders (Shaka, Hammurabi) tend to go early, meaning we'd have trouble getting the crucial civ (Zulu?) on the wheel. Even though it's dope for the self-roleplay, I'm probably not playing this, but I might just be wrong
PHI—Everyone says this is a stronger SP trait, and that it's better with six-city empires than sixty, but that doesn't make any sense to me, since higher pop = more specialists with proportionately less investment, much doper GAs, and equally sweet bulbs. Decent for self-roleplay. I'd give it a try
IND—If we pick a civ at the beginning we can pick an IND leader at the end if nobody else did!
ORG—I wanna play ORG real bad
I want to play one {EXP, PRO, maybe IMP} and one {ORG, maybe PHI, maybe IND}. How does this play out with our snake-pick order? Well, I tried to peruse the other PB forums for precedent but couldn't really come up with anything. Maybe someone here has some ideas.
CML
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