[PB48] TBW

[Borsche]

Finally read this thread - it sucks to say this when everybody (included me) beats the drum regularly that early aggression never pays off but the settling of DoW was so fucking egregious that the one right play is to beeline HBR, whip/chop 10-15 HAs and dump them all on that plains hill 1E of the mountain. Its not so much 'would the attack succeed' as much as it is 'giving up that much territory loses you the game'

I just felt like I couldn't get far enough ahead of him to make an attack succeed when he beelined Stonehenge on the stone hill, by the time I could have marched up enough axes he would have had third ring borders and if he'd seen my power start skyrocketing from 10 HAs he could have just put 10 cheaper spears in the city. I'm not going to say I lost at civ select and I'm not mad at the mapmaker or anything but starting next to an IND guy with a stone hill like that definitely sucked. A no score/no graphs mod would definitely be interesting, I wouldn't mind making espionage totally superfluous in multiplayer.

It BGPB13 juri has dumped around 200+ EP into me and its one of those eye rolling things. As on board as I am with the closer to home mod, Espionage is one of those mechanical elements that feels a lot better when you eliminate it entirely - ala corporations, religious diplo, events etc. Rebalance or remove the jail/intelligence agency/security bureau if you need to. The whole system is ridiculous.

I mean the graph system as it exists now just sort of relies on people being 'fair' regarding 'oh im only going for graphs!' but then you get guys with early UB courthouses, great wall, or they're just an asshole and dumps 4 EP/turn into you the second they meet you (for lurkers, i am nowhere near juri in bgpb13 and there's no reason for him to put this many EPs. and also yes they are intentional). May as well have graphs enabled or disabled.

Like with me and Aztec in BGPB13 and the way espionage works, there's nothing reasonable anybody can do to catch up to me because of total espionage points making missions cheaper for me/more expensive for everybody else, so I can pretty much box everybody out of ever getting research visibility. There's no strategy or any kind of counterplay, you can spend gold on espionage points but that's just putting the guy with more espionage further ahead. If there was some strategic tradeoff that had to be made for espionage I could get behind that, like if you had to build spies and keep them hidden in someone's territory to get information and they could be actively defended against that would be meaningful gameplay instead of bucket filling. Maybe even do something like base game privateers, enabling spy units at some medieval/renaissance tech, giving them hidden nationality, and having security bureaus/intelligence agencies as buildings that would reveal them in some area around the city. I feel like some kind of stealthy reconnaissance unit has a place in this kind of game but the espionage bucket is dumb.

Sumeria is even worse lol. I think in BGPB12 or 11 I actually ended up getting city vis on Juri for a couple turns. Let alone the graphs, why are city vis or research vis still in the game? And the lack of counter play, as you mentioned, is is truly wasteful. I agree that there can probably some sort of place for this espionage, but I think that it just needs to be removed in total and then reintroduced in a newer form.