Gaspar & Noble make their triumphant? return; mostly just get asked about "The List"

[Kaiser]

I think Superdeath will win this.

Statistically he has to win one of his games at some point, maybe you are lucky and he wins PB48 instead?

[mackoti]

If rusten doenst neighbour SD  my bet is on that team. SD will destroy the game for someone.

[NobleHelium]

I think Superdeath will win this.

Statistically he has to win one of his games at some point, maybe you are lucky and he wins PB48 instead?

From reading his posts his idea of statistics is that if you have a 20% chance to win (a combat), then you should always lose.

[The Black Sword]

My money would have been on Rusten even without the lurking Hitru. 

Obviously the rest of you are washed up. 

[Commodore]

If a 6-person PBEM on normal speed with these time zones resolves with a victory you've all won.

I don't bet on you winning. 

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 1.



Found some interesting stuff this turn. Now a city in the northeast looks a lot better.



Only change in demos is our rank in GNP. Most likely explanation I can think of is that somebody didn't pick a tech last turn and now they have, and it's a prereq tech. I rate superdeath as the most likely person to forget to select a tech the first turn. So I'm going to say that he is teching BW.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 2.



Found silver.  So it looks like the setup is such that each player gets multiple copies of one luxury with the idea that they will be traded between different players.  Most likely there is at least one other ivory somewhere, possibly also in the northeast. This was the setup in 45 which pindicator and I played.  I assume the luxury tiles will be balanced a little better here than in that one.

1S of the cow is the most likely second city spot, but we are still considering the northeast area or possibly the south. But we will probably not be able to scout the south for a good while so it is unlikely we go in that direction.

Next turn we MUST swap to working the plains forest. Scout moves S-SW.

No change in demos.

[NobleHelium]

So I just remembered that you can easily see the total number of land tiles from the score tooltip.  There are 721 land tiles which is 120 per player.  I have to say this is substantially smaller than what I expected which was something like 150-160 land tiles.  It's possible that the overall map size is pretty close to what I envisioned - especially since I didn't describe the map in terms of land tiles per player - and that there are fewer land tiles per player because there is more water than what I was expecting.  In any event, we should be prepared for the possibility that we won't be able to easily settle two rings of cities towards all our neighbors.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 3.



Just defogging some more tiles.  Next turn we ignore the jungle tiles in the fog and go 2NW, since we can't do anything with them anytime soon anyway. The map appears to be made out of snaking 1-tile wide canals. Not sure whether this makes FIN better or worse than on say an actual water map.



Swapped to the plains forest.  Next turn we swap to the grass forest by turning the governor on.  Perhaps our tile swapping will confuse some people doing C&D, although I doubt anyone is doing that since Lewwyn and Serdoa don't really do it (Serdoa a little bit maybe) and the Pitboss players aren't going to be in the habit of doing it.

[Gaspar]

I feel like I've seen this map before. There appears to be more water on it than we were expecting, but it is a bit too early to tell if that's an issue. I can't psyche myself up to speculate heavily until borders pop as that adds a fair bit of map knowledge.

Noble and I have been debating the dotmapping a fair bit, the current dilemma is that I favor sites 3W of the cap, 3N1W of that spot and 3N1E of the cap whilst Noble favors 3W1N of the cap for the first city. The reason there isn't a longer post on the pros and cons here is that we'll get to see what is in a decent bit of that fog shortly and we may want to adapt our settling plans to account for the jungle that is clearly peeking out from under it.

Other than that, we're going to sally forth in search of known tech bonus our opponents with the scout. We also have to figure out what comes first between Agriculture and Bronze Working. Yes, Byzantium's start techs really suck.