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Kurumi · September 6th, 2020, 15:33

What does PYFT mean?

NobleHelium · September 6th, 2020, 15:51

PYFT is similar to RTFM.

Kurumi · September 6th, 2020, 16:06

Play Your Fucking Turn. Why didn't I get it earlier?

NobleHelium

Okay so thanks to superdeath wasting the day I am completely bored. Here was our final thought process to arrive on our leader pick.

We saw that most people were taking FIN and/or PRO. I thought about whether we should pick one or the other to keep up and in essence reduce variance in the leader pick, based upon the idea that we would be able to outplay our opponents in the other parts of the game. (If you think you are the better player, you should reduce variance. Conversely, increase variance to increase your odds of winning if you are decidedly the weaker player.) While I think this would have been a very reasonable strategy to pursue, there were some issues:

1) PRO would've been better than FIN for us because FIN is worse with late Pottery.
2) IMP/PRO was taken by Lewwyn so that wasn't an option if we wanted IMP.
3) Gaspar hated the strategy anyway because it hurts his ego, even if he isn't consciously acknowledging this. I don't care and I just want to maximize our chances of winning.

Why did we want IMP? Well, we looked at the various expansion traits and considered them:

1) EXP is similarly hurt like FIN by the late Pottery.
2) CRE mostly sucks in its current nerfed state. It is worth considering on tight maps and it's good if you suck at dotmapping and/or worker transitions. I do not think we suck at those things.
3) CHA is kind of an expansion trait and it's also kind of an economic trait and it's also a war trait. Over the course of our discussion I came to realize that CHA is the most jack-of-all-trades trait. So I guess you can't really go too wrong by picking CHA, but it's not a particularly good choice when you specifically want an expansion trait.

So we really wanted IMP because we wanted an expansion trait. Once IMP was locked in, we wanted some way to compete with the FIN and PRO players economically that makes sense with our start and our civ. And make no mistake, the Byzantium start techs still really suck and voided a lot of choices for us. Both Charlemagne and Justinian were taken so in the end the decision was made to put our money on Augustus and plan to compete with some sort of wonder strategy (specifics to be determined later), aided by the cheaper Metal Casting and associated forges.

Bonus chat snippets!

NobleHelium

(September 7th, 2020, 11:37)superdeath Wrote: Would be alot easier if this was played like pb50. Just saying.

By the way, I also asked everyone to check that the game settings were correct and apparently nobody did that until the save got to me. Maybe you should try reading next time. rolleye

NobleHelium

Okay folks, the game has officially started. We settled and moved the scout 2NW.

[Image: t000-overview.jpg?raw=1]

Next turn we probably move N-NW. Then we'll see where we're at. We are not scouting the area immediately west of our capital because the border pop will take care of that for us.

[Image: t000-demos.jpg?raw=1]

Demos are VERY interesting. Since we are last in turn order we see what everyone has done on their first turn. (This is mostly a disadvantage because it is basically impossible for us to deduce which demo numbers belong to whom.) The most interesting takeaway is that nobody is working a PFH like we are, which means that we may be the only team doing a work boat open! Not entirely sure what to make of that, I'll have to ponder it some more. I honestly expected multiple people to be doing work boat opens because it seems obviously better than a worker open for our start. One possibility (for people other than us) is teching BW with a worker open and chopping the work boat. Three people start with Mining (Maya, China, Russia), so that is something they could all be doing.

One thing we do know for sure is that pindicator put a 3f tile in the inner ring for somebody but not us, so presumably that player does not have our super awkward resource placement. bang

Gaspar · September 8th, 2020, 17:49

If everyone could please take a look at the horror show that is the resource placement at our capital and gape in awe, I'd appreciate it.

Kurumi · September 8th, 2020, 17:59

(September 8th, 2020, 17:49)Gaspar Wrote: If everyone could please take a look at the horror show that is the resource placement at our capital and gape in awe, I'd appreciate it.

*notes*

Players do not like when their resources are much apart, make sure they don't have enough resources for this to be a problem...

Gaspar · September 8th, 2020, 18:57

So I promised Noble a final pregame post, which technically is a fail, since the game has started, but here it is nonetheless.

I mostly want to talk about how I see the game going and what our plan is, generically. Let me do the second part first.

Basically, we expect a slow start. We're going to need to accelerate our development with strong micro in the middle-to-late early game to stay competitive. If we achieve that, the idea is to catch our economy up to the FIN & PRO guys with IND - both through Forges to juice wealth builds and then with wonders that create an economy on their own. What wonder do that? Well, Colossus, GLH, Pyramids and the Monk Quartet (Sangkore, Spiral Minaret, AP and Sistine.) I think Colossus and GLH are probably out for us - Colossus almost always falls to the Oracle guy and that definitely isn't going to be us. After that PBEM where I talked myself into it, I'm never doing that bullshit again unless its sitting around super late. Also, I've always sort of called Oracle the noobtrap wonder anyway. If we need to turn hammers directly into beakers, we'll just build wealth and save our forests. GLH is going to be way more valuable for the PRO guys, so while again, I'd build it if it were just chilling, I expect it to fall sooner than that.

No, the wonders that make sense for us are Pyramids, the Monk wonders and the MoM/Taj pair that makes sense for everyone. Now, I'm less than sanguine about our possibilities for building medieval/early-Ren wonders because we are likely going to be building a whole bunch of 12 STR national wonders instead. devil

Which mean Taj might not happen. I think a lot depends on what happens in terms of our competition and the map. We aren't going to sell out for Mids because that's how you lose games, by eviscerating yourself to get early wonders. If they're buildable at a reasonable time and we have the forests to do it, then obviously they are super good for the type of economy we like to run (production based.) I do believe workshops have been nerfed by splitting up State Property's bonus with Emancipation, so I doubt we'll end up with as many workshops here as we did in say, PBEM38. But I'd still expect us to end up with a more production based econ than our rivals, given IND and given that most of them have either FIN or PRO. That said, the monk econ can keep you afloat as well and that might be a less contested route to go down and in fact probably is the most likely result.

So that's really the game we'd like to play - a slow but steady early game to set us up to bang an econ boosting wonder or two in the late Classical period to boom towards getting Guilds as early as is feasible and then shoving several dozen Cataphracts into the gullet of an opponent to allow us to expand enough to take advantage of a couple of MoM-boosted GAs where we get a tech lead and then salt away the game however is feasible. Do I expect that go that smoothly? No. But I would like it.

What do I expect? I expect us to run into an aggressive opponent somewhere in the turn 40-50 range who forces us to make some unpleasant decisions that we'll have to navigate. I expect us to feel hopelessly behind at some point in the t70-80 range and for us to have to stay positive to hulk out of it and enjoy the midgame, which is where we should be strongest. I expect one or two of our opponents to play better than we expect and one or two to play worse than we expect which should balance things out. I expect to have to convince NobleHelium that all is not lost and I expect the lurkers to have to convince me that all is not lost. I expect to find someone new to make fun of in the thread. I expect myself to regret inviting Lewwyn to the game and I expect to also regret Noble inviting Serdoa. And ultimately, though I would not at all call us the favorites, I expect us to win.

I do wonder who the lurker consensus on winner is, though? Feel free to share if you can do so without any spoiler information, I would be curious.

Gaspar · September 8th, 2020, 19:05

Note most of what I said about Colossus is moot since MC is way cheaper in CtH (which is part of why we chose IND, so duh) so idk who is going to build it.

The point that I don't think its a priority for us stands, however.

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