RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[ej801]

No post is to long.
No wall to strong
And no problem to hard 2:
For us.

[Kyan]

My first post

As a newbie to these forums (i actually found my way via sullla's site), i REALLY appreciate the detailed analysis you're providing here so thank you for that.

I'm going to spoil myself and read all threads (not that my input would be of any use whatsoever haha) so won't be posting much, if at all, but will be taking an avid interest in this game. I've read all reports i could find so far and hopefully this will prove to be another great read.

Good Luck in the game.

[Speaker]

Hey guys. Thanks to everyone for lurking our thread. I hope we'll be able to give you an interesting read, and ultimately an overwhelming victory.

For those of you who don't know me, I was very active with RB in Civ3, in the Epics and the succession games. I played Epic 1 and a few adventures and succession games, and then I got heavily into multiplayer, and decided I liked it better. The games were quicker and faster paced. They blended both strategy and tactics, which I found more interesting, and more challenging. And really, who hasn't imagined what it would be like to play other humans, while watching the AI dance like a puppet whose strings you control? I think I got burnt out from playing against the AI at the end of my Civ3 days, when I played a "Sid"-level game which took me 200 hours to complete. It wasn't hard, but the level of babysitting required, with a one-turn worker pump to build every other city's population, and a four-turn settler pump. Sheesh, Civ3 was micromanagement hell. After I beat that by following the Deity/Sid formula, I stopped playing Civ3, and SP in Civ4 never really captivated me. But anyways....

I'd like to give a little bit more behind my thought process when ranking the civs, to give you guys a bit more perspective about how a MPer goes about it.

Unique Unit: The Fast Worker
India's unique unit is without a doubt the best in the game. I see advantages in CIV build exponentially. Get your 2nd city founded 4 turns faster than your neighbor and by the time you have 4 they have 3. By the time you have 8, they have 5, and so on. For that reason, Fast Workers are amazing because they can enter a forest and chop right away, making your chops take 3 turns rather than 4 (on quick speed), for a nifty 25% improvement. Later, in serfdom, or with hagia sophia, or once you hit the Renaissance era, when worker chops take just 2 turns, you get them a whopping 50% faster! Similarly, the ability to move 2 turns and then cottage or farm is tremendously powerful in the early game, before you have a good road system. This allows you greater micromanagement freedom as you move your workers around your land, which is key in the early game to speed up your development, which as I mentioned before, snowballs.

Also Considered: Cataphract, Janissary
The cataphract is the best non-Fast Worker UU in the game. It is slightly better than the Praetorian because the extra movement point more than balances out the Praetorian's extra 13% strength improvement over its replaced unit. Not to mention that the Praetorian is actually more expensive than the unit it replaces, while the Cataphract costs the same as the Knight. Two-movers are much stronger in multiplayer games than they are in single player because of the increased importance of tactics, and the "city-elimination" rules. Most multiplayer games are played with "2-city elimination," meaning if you lose 2 cities, you die. The beauty of two-move units is that they can effectively "fork" (threaten) two or more cities, stretching the defenses, far more effectively than single move units can. Combine that with the ability to move a chariot/horse archer/knight/etc one tile and pillage a road, and you have a very effective mobile force, which is even stronger in the early game, before 3-move roads.

But before you think that two-movers are overpowered, consider that the majority of them (exceptions: Impi, Immortal, Musketeer, Conquistador in Vanilla and Warlords, can't remember if it was removed in BtS when the Conq was changed to a Currasier replacement) do not receive a defensive bonus, and there are no two-move collateral damage units without using a great general until the utterly-broken mobile artillery. This is why I had a great chuckle at this thread on CFC. The musketeer is uber in multiplayer because it can be combined with knights to protect them, and it is an amazing mobile defender, able to move across 6 tiles to reinforce any city with the defensive bonus a knight can't provide. Attacking an enemy who has a significant number of protective musketeers is lolz unless you have *overwhelming* force.

So anyways, we were interested in using the Cataphract, which is very strong, and actually has no counter, since it is 50/50 before bonuses against the pikeman, but with combat 1 + shock is actually stronger than both a pike and a knight. So yeah, it probably should have been strength 11, not strength 12, to be more balanced. But Sunrise's team had the same thought, so oh well.

The Janissary is decent enough. It does well against Longbows, Knights, and Maces, and you can give some of them the "pinch" promotion to defend against muskets, so you have a versatile unit which is strong against every unit of the era. But it isn't a particulary great offensive unit, and I don't expect us to be defending in the Renaissance era, so it wasn't really a big part in my rankings...

More to come soon.

[Sareln]

I'll probably be lurking only this thread this time around. I lurked all the threads in the PBEM and while it was kind of cool to see everything going on, I had a hard time doing analysis in my head and separating knowledge (which lead to no commenting by me).

With both Speaker and Sullla writing in the thread, it should be a fun read, and since I learned alot from both's Epic Reports, I'd love to see how they handle things in "real-time".

[Sullla]

As Speaker said, he doesn't play Single Player (SP) much, but he is a longtime friend and Civ player. Speaker was on the "Scouting Sid" team, the first-ever reported Sid victory in Civ3. Trust me, he knows as much or more than I do about this game. Now, let me finish up my take of our opponents:

Team #7: Mortius, Ragnar of the Zulu. I don't know a whole lot about Mortius; he played in a couple of our SP games a while back, and did quite well, but he had been very quiet until recently with the start of the Pitboss activity. I'm not sure what to expect from his style of play.

The pairing of Ragnar (Agg/Fin) with the Zulus is a mixture that has potential both for early rushes and longterm development. Impis can be a total terror in the early game: hook up copper immediately, chop out a swarm of them, and choke your nearest neighbor to death. But that's likely to be a losing strategy in this game, as even if you do defeat another team, your own development will be slowed to the point of gaining no advantage. Aggressive impis are more dangerous, but only slightly; as spears, they will still lose to axes with or without the Aggressive trait. It's almost an unneeded addition, really, as impis aren't units that will be attacking cities anyway. But of course Aggressive applies to more than just impis, and drafted Gunpowder units with free Combat I could be a real danger later on.

The Financial half of the leader pick provides some economic boost, as does the Ikhanda unique building (which is rightly paired with Aggressive for the cheap bonus, since Ikhandas are slightly more expensive than regular barracks). Like the Rathaus, however, I've found the Ikhanda to be somewhat overrated in terms of fighting maintenance costs. 20% reduction is at most 1gpt saved in the early-to-mid game, and while every bit counts, that's hardly a gamebreaker. The Ikhanda actually gets the most benefit later on, with things like corporation maintenance reduction, yet by then you've probably either won or lost the game already, haven't you? Anyway, this is still a pretty good pairing, but (to me at least) the impi rush is the biggest threat, along with late Aggressive conscripts.

Team #8: Dantski, Julius Caesar of Mali. Dantski is another longtime veteran of Realms Beyond, with some Pitboss experience from the first RB game (although regoarrarr has done most of the work there). I would probably say that Dantski's Civ play is neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad, but rather very solid, usually without any big mistakes. Unfortunately, Dantski has the single worst leader/civ pairing in this game!

Julius Caesar (Imp/Org) wasn't even remotely on the list of civs that we were looking at. While it's true that being the only Imperialistic civ might help in an early settling race, there just isn't that much value in this trait for a long, epic-style game. Organized helps, but only so much. Much as I like the historic Caesar, this leader gives up Financial, Creative, Expansive, and Philosophical: every single other leader in the game has at least one of these four traits! And that's no coincidence, as these are the best traits for economy and early expansion. Out of the six possible combinations of these four traits, we have four of them present here (Willem [Cre/Fin], Pacal [Exp/Fin], Liz [Fin/Phi], Peter [Exp/Phi]) lacking only Suryavarman [Cre/Exp] and Frederick [Cre/Phi]. These weak traits are going to drag down Dantski.

Furthermore, there was no reason to pick Mali, especially with with #2 civilization pick!!! Honestly, this was probably the worst decision in the whole snake pick, guaranteeing the #9 leader selection in order to take a weak civ which unquestionably would have still been there on the return trip. Mali's skirmishers are decent units, but they have two real uses in a MP setting: to choke someone else, or to defend against a choke attack. Since rushing and choking are likely to be self-defeating strategies in this game, the skirmisher doesn't have great value. Mali's unique building (Mint) is OK, but no one is going to be raving about +10% gold, which is another 1gpt boost at best in the early game. There's a reason why civs usually get picked by unique units, not buildings...

Dantski might end up doing well, but he has a major uphill climb ahead of him. I anticipate this team struggling a lot, unless there is some mystery super-plan that I'm not seeing.

Team #9: LiPing, Shaka of Rome. Well, here is your rush civ for RB Pitboss game #2! Shaka (Agg/Exp) has the max aggression early rush traits, while Rome provides the Praetorians for the smash power. LiPing is making an awesome power play for typical Ancient teamer MP game. Only problem is that this isn't an Ancient MP game, and once the Classical age is reached this team has nothing left going for itself. (Just look at how not successful Imhotep has been in the first Pitboss game, where he followed this picking strategy.)

I think that LiPing has simply gone about approaching this game the wrong way. Even in a MP Free-For-All epic game, played Always War style, the winner is invariably the person who can out-tech the others and establish a military lead that way. You simply don't win these types of games by loading up on Ancient age power units, because even if you do manage to take out an opponent, you've simply managed to maintain parity with the other teams who are expanding peacefully. Early aggression is a zero-sum losing game, in my opinion: the only way to win is not to play that game.

Speaker and I simply have to hope that we don't start next to LiPing and be subject to an early attack! By the medieval period, this team should be starting to fall behind technologically and no longer remain a threat.

Team #10: regoarrarr, darrelljs, and sunrise, Peter of Byzantium. The team of all lower-case names! Here we have what looks to be by far the most dangerous opponent in the Pitboss game. darrell is very good at all-around economic stuff, regoarrarr is excellent at diplomacy, and sunrise knows the military side of the game quite well. All three of them were on the Apolyton team, and regoarrarr and sunrise were highly influential in our eventual victory there. Their picks show that they know what they're doing, and will pose a major threat to win the game. In an ideal scenario, this team would join with us and we would carve up the map together!

For a team that had the seventh leader pick, they did very well for themselves. Peter (Exp/Phi) is a leader that Speaker tabbed for us to consider if we ended up down at the bottom of the snake pick, tagging up Expansive's worker/granary power with easy access to Great People. Speaker and I were divided on where Peter was better than Suryavarman, but we both agreed that this was near the top of the non-Financial leaders. As far as civs go, Byzantium was my #1 choice, which they stole away from us! The cataphract unique unit is one of the best in the game, and completely dominant in the medieval/early Renaissance period. There's literally nothing that stands up to it; even a pike only gets even odds. Everything else in that era is slaughtered. I want no part of this team when the cataphract first appears on the scene! The hippodrome unique building is quite good as well, with +1 happy innate and another +1 happy from horses. I wish that Dantski would have taken this civ with his pick, just to deny it to sunrise and crew. (Although then they probably would have taken India, which would also have been a good selection.)

Overall, this would be my top prediction to win the game - after our team, of course. It's just a very strong combination of players, leader, and civ.

Some last interesting tidbits... After the run on SEVEN Creative leaders in the first Pitboss game, there's only one in this game, and that turned out to be Willem. No Industrious leaders at all, meaning everyone is on the same level for wonder-building (good news for us). Getting to techs first will likely decide who gets the wonders, although we have an edge for the early ones with our Fast Workers' ability to chop chop chop. The big increases were Financial and Philosophical, as everyone pushed for the leaders with traits that boost economy. Most of the selections were pretty good, with only the Broker/Plako and Dantski teams being on the weird side.

Next up, we'll tackle some of ideas about where Speaker and I would like to head with this game. As always, the comments and feedback are appreciated.

[Speaker]

Unique Building
Happiness in multiplayer is key. In single player, you can get multiple religions, take the time and production to spread them, build lots of temples and cathedrals, and easily trade with the AI for as many happiness resources as you can get. One of my favorite lines of text in the game is the polite way of making a demand: "this sure would come in handy!"

Hereditary rule is really strong early because it allows you to blow past the early happiness cap. If you have properly prepared and have made a few cheap warriors for each city when you finish researching monarchy, you can get into hereditary rule, click the "max growth" button, and watch your tech blow up, as you grow like a weed and work a ton of cottages. Later in the game, however, there are much better government civics. Representation will be awesome for us, being philosophical, for the synergy between the two concepts. Police state is great to build units quickly, though the High Upkeep is not particularly great. And universal suffrage is probably even more valuable than police state once all your cottages have matured into towns, especially when combined with emancipation and free speech. So, suffice to say, with so many juicy options, you want to get out of hereditary rule as soon as you can. But if you aren't blessed with many happiness resources, and remember, in MP, the human players are a lot less likely to hand over valuable happiness resources, which let you grow your cities and produce more commerce, more units, or both.

This is where a few Unique Buildings really shine.
Hammam: Aqueduct replacement with +2 happiness
Mausoleum: Jail replacement with +2 happiness
Ball Court: Colosseum replacement with +2 extra happiness
Hippodrome: Theatre replacement with +1 happiness from horses (instead of dyes) and +2 happiness per 10% culture rate (instead of the theatre's +1)
Odeon: Colosseum with +1 extra happiness

The Hammam is the second best unique building in the game, after the Terrace (as Sullla has already mentioned) because it provides its bonus so early, and the building is so utterly useful. In essence, it allows you to raise both the happiness and health cap in every city! Like the granary, it's the sort of building you should put in nearly every city, and it is available in the classical age! The only downside is that it is pretty expensive at 100 hammers on normal speed. The Ball Court and Odeon are both pretty good because they are available pretty early, but the Colosseum is a pretty weak building overall. Using the culture slider for anything other than a quick happiness fix or border pop is suicide in multiplayer, as you fall behind technologically, which usually translates to military might. The Mausoleum provides the same bonus as the Hammam, but it comes much later, and is not such a crucial building that you would build anyways. However, it is very cheap, at just 120 hammers, considering it is available in the Renaissance/Industrial era, with Constitution. The Hippodrome is sort of weak because like the colosseum, it really needs the culture slider to shine. But the +1 happiness from horse is nice since you won't always have access to dyes, causing you to lose that +1 happiness bonus with a regular theatre. One small feature...er...bug? of the Hippodrome is that it does not give you the ability to work two artist specialists like a regular theatre does. This wouldn't likely be an issue for us, as I imagine we'll make plenty of use of the caste system civic, being philosophical, meaning we won't be needing the two artists from a theatre, but it can be an annoyance in other situations, and I don't think the building is so strong that it needed to be weakened, like the poor 5-strength Jaguar was.

So taking India, the Mausoleum will be a nice bonus to replace the hereditary rule happiness, but it didn't play a huge part in our decision to choose this civ, and missing out on the Hammam does make me sad.

Still more to come...

[Imhotep]

(Just look at how not successful Imhotep has been in the first Pitboss game, where he followed this picking strategy.)

Of course the pick was a gamble, and in retrospect I would have picked otherwise. The reasons why it didn't work:

1) The size of the map, which made it impossible to really rush
2) Having Agg Rome as neighbor
3) The fast teching with the forming tech blocks

The reasoning behind rushing is that you will make up for the advantages of the other traits by shere size of quality land. Of course the plan will fail if there is no opponent to rush, or no quality land in the first place. My game was lost in the staging room, so to speak.

That said I didn't quite grasp the nature of the game before picking, I was too much thinking in terms of ladder play. My fault. Still it would have worked if India or Persia would have been my neighbor instead of Agg Rome.

I don't see how you both could lose this game if you don't get screwed by the land. Good luck nonetheless.

[Speaker]

Starting Technologies
And finally, the last piece of my analysis of our Civ selection. I imagine this is not something that you think about in single player, where the game moves at a more leisurely pace (unless, of course, you are playing in some sort of *ahem* fastest-finish competition ).

As I have mentioned a few times now, that advantages multiply exponentially, getting off to a fast start is paramount. In this regard, building a worker first can be a really strong play if you are in a relatively safe position, but only if you have something for your worker to do!

Consider a Civ like the Aztecs. They start with Mysticism and Hunting. If you build a worker first, and didn't research Mining (mine) or Agriculture (farm), your worker would sit around twiddling his thumbs. He couldn't even chop, which requires Bronze Working, which requires Mining!

The second consideration is a worker start versus a warrior start. Any civ starting with Hunting gets a scout, while the rest get a warrior. In an always war game, starting with a warrior while your neighbor has a scout is incredibly powerful. You can safely build a worker first, while sending your warrior toward your opponent. He will be forced to build at least two warriors, one to defend his city, and at least one to defend his worker (once he eventually is able to build it, 4-8 turns after you!). The scout's greater ability to find huts and explore your land balances it out in theory, but most multiplayer games (including this one!) turn off huts, because they are pure luck, and have the potential to be pretty game breaking. So in lieu of huts, the scout start is pretty weak.

Here is the breakdown on scout vs warrior in this game:
Speaker + Sullla - India - Warrior
Broker + Plako - Korea - Warrior
DMOC + Nakor - Holy Rome - Warrior
Iamjohn + Kodii + Zevis - Inca - Warrior
Dantski - Mali - Warrior
Liping - Rome - Warrior
Regoarrarr + darrelljs + sunrise089 - Byzantium - Warrior
Athlete + Kalin - Ottomans - Warrior

Mortius - Zulu - Scout
Jowy + Yazilliclick - Greece - Scout

In case anyone is curious, I do have these all memorized. Having played a ton of ancient era games in multiplayer, you come to learn these pretty fast. You have to know if the other team has a warrior or scout start on turn 0, as it has a big impact on your early play. Since techs are pooled by the team, if any single player on the team starts with hunting, the whole team gets scout starts. In an always war team game, having a warrior scout when your opponents have scouts is more overpowered than if your team all had 2 irrigated corns while your opponents each had the dreaded unirrigated rice.

In this game, I don't think it will be as important as in a typical ladder mp game, without the early warrior choking, but it should allow us to feel safe while skimping on early military. Worker-Worker-Settler is a real possibility for us!

The other benefit of not starting with hunting is the ability to ignore it (and archery) altogether, and thus build lots of cheap warriors for hereditary rule happiness. If you can pull this off, and build a few axes or swords for early defense, you can jack your city sizes up when you research monarchy. Without spears, however, you are vulnerable to a chariot rush, so you'll need to build a few swords, since axes fare so poorly against chariots.

So, on to our actual starting technologies with India....

Mining
Mysticism

Mining is a strong starting tech. It allows us to research Bronze Working first, and have the ability to chop right away and switch into the Slavery civic.

Mysticism is much less useful in MP than it is in SP. A player who plays the monk and researches religions first will fall behind due to ignoring worker (remember the snowball!) and military techs, leaving them vulnerable to a choke (warrior or archer) or early rush (chariots or axes).

Overall, our starting techs are average. We have one useful tech, and one meh tech. We will need to research at least one tech to have something useful for our first worker to do. If our food is a pig, sheep, or cow (as much as I love steak, I hope not!), we will be far away from being able to pasture it. We need 3 techs to get pottery and build cottages.

In an ideal world, we'd have Agriculture and either The Wheel or Mining. This provides for the most flexible opening. If we have corn, wheat, or rice for food, we can farm straight away. Starting with Mining, we can research Bronze Working first and start chopping. Starting with The Wheel, we only need one tech to get Pottery, to build early cottages, and tech like beasts! Which Civs start with Agriculture and The Wheel, you might ask?

Ottomans
Egypt
Babylon
France
Sumeria

Incidentally, only China starts with Agriculture and Mining, but their UU and UB are so meh, we never considered them.

So when considering India vs. Ottomans, this is how I broke it down:

Ottoman: Amazing UB, Pretty good UU, Best starting traits.

India: Pretty good UB, Amazing UU, OK starting traits.

Ultimately, we valued the strength of the Fast Worker highest. It will give us a nice boost to our growth rate (the benefit is almost like a free Expansive trait without the +2 health), and depending on the terrain, will allow for a tricky attack or two over hills or through jungles.

Did we make the best choice? Only time will tell.

[ej801]

So when does it start.

I am really looking foreward to seeing the map.

[Sullla]

Hopefully soon! We're ready to go, now it just depends on the map team. There was some mention of having the game up tomorrow, let's cross our fingers...

This was an email exchange with Speaker from yesterday. We're going to try and move our discussions to this thread in the future.

Maybe we should start thinking about longterm game strategy now that we have our leader and civ picked. Since we didn't get Byzantium or Ottomans, the notion of a beeline down the bottom of the tree to Guilds/Gunpowder doesn't hold much appeal anymore. Instead, we probably want to concentrate on economic techs and simply outracing everyone else to superior military units, while also expanding quickly in the early game (with mucho Fast Worker chops). Here are some possible things to target, before we have any idea of what the map will throw out for us:

- Depending on what food resources we have at the start, our early tech path will probably be Agriculture or AH or Fishing (to connect first food bonus), then Bronze Working, then Pottery, then Writing. If we only have an AH resource, we may swap that around to get BW first for chopping, since we don't start with Agriculture or Hunting. I'm guessing that we'll want our build order to be Worker first, then one or two military units, then either a second Fast Worker or a settler (which will get at least one forest chop to speed completion). I'm probably overthinking this before seeing the map, but I'm getting bored with the slow selection process!

- Ideally, we'll have two or more food bonuses at the second city. We would want to chop out a quick library, run two Scientists, and take advantage of Philosophical to get a super-early Great Scientist for an Academy in the capital. We could very easily have library + Academy in the capital as early as ~700BC for +75% research bonus, and since most of the early game research comes from the capital city, that would give us an early boost in chasing the first-to bonuses.

- I don't think we have any desire to pursue any of the early wonders. No great desire for Stonehenge or Oracle (both should fall quickly with this many players), and better for us to use our early production/chops on expanding rapidly. I do think that we should make a serious push for the Mausoleum, since it benefits Philosophical civs especially. Maybe go for the Great Library and/or Colossus, depending on how the map and opponents shape up. What are your thoughts in the wonder area?

- Militarily, we want to have enough units to deter aggression and no more. Our civ is seriously badly positioned for early warfare! We're going to have to work hard diplomatically in this area as well. Ideally, we would make a move in the Renaissance period, working from a position of tech advantage. Rifles or cannon against medieval trash could be a potential opportunity, for example.

- On that note, our medieval tech path will probably emphasize Civil Service and Education, for boosted capital research power and cheap Philosophical universities. This may give us a leg up on the Liberalism race too!

Anyway, these are some random and not particularly well-organized thoughts, but I'll bounce them off you while we're waiting. Hopefully we'll have this thing started by the beginning of next week!

I just wrote a rather lengthy analysis of our Civ choice. I think you did a great job of discussing all the Civs, so I think I'll leave that as is. I actually wish we had reserved a few more posts at the start of the thread, to be able to edit updates in. Ah well.

I think a great long-term strategy for us would be to head along the top part of the tree, build Great Library with the National Epic in our capital, stop in for Calendar and the The Mausoleum of Maussollos, and perhaps start our first extended Golden Age with the artist from Music. Then grab Code of Laws and swap into Caste System and Bureaucracy and we're on our way down the Middle/Bottom of the tree. Once we get big enough, try and string two golden ages together with 5 great people (remember you get more GP points in a golden age), as we build our big stack and go eat somebody.

With India, I love going Bronze Working first. Since we have a warrior start, we can almost definitely build a worker first, and finish it about the same time we complete research of BW. Then we chop a second worker while we research Agriculture. Then we double farm (hopefully we have grain and not animals for food) and we are on our way.

Pottery, Writing and Monarchy prioritized early for tech and growth, before we head up toward Alphabet. Early Academy definitely. This, combined with early cottages, makes the Classical era techs fly by.

I think we are on the same page in the Medieval/Renaissance eras. Emphasize tech, then build a massive army and return home as conquering heros. Hopefully we won't end up as gladiators, but if so, we'll Russell Crowe them anyways! By the way, wtf was with the Joaquin Phoenix character? Did Commodus really have a hard on for his sister, or was that some sort of creepy Hollywood creative liberty?

The last point I want to make pretty much defines my philosophy toward Epic games. This game is going to take up a lot of our time. I'd much prefer to spend that time in a position of strength, not scratching and clawing. So I always play Ironmen/Epic/FFA-type games with a risky opening. If I die, so be it. But if no one calls my bluff, and I am able to go Worker-Worker-Settler, or Worker-Worker-Warrior (to grow)-Settler (slave)-Worker for instance, I am well on my way to a fun game. Are you okay with this? I'd rather someone call our bluff and declare war on us with their starting warrior and kill us then have a slow start by building an early warrior, if that makes sense.

For the curious, the professor of Roman history at my university had this comment when asked about the historical accuracy of the movie Gladiator: "Well, the movie got one thing right: there was a Roman Empire."

I thought your analysis of our civ and leader choice was excellent, so much so that I have nothing to add! Overall it looks like we are on the same page with regards to early/midgame planning. I think we'll be able to play a very strong game if we can avoid getting attacked.

Taking India practically demands that we go with an opening that heavily emphasizes Fast Workers. I'm fine with pushing a risky opening strategy; if there's one thing we've learned from Realms Beyond, it's that this community rarely goes for the quick rush. Your metagaming comment is spot-on: most players will assume that since this is a long game, they don't want to do anything risky at the very start. So by doing the opposite play, you can really get ahead! One thing I will caution is that barbarians are on for this game, thus we can't get too cute on the military early on. But a skeletal force of warriors should be enough, I would think.

I think you should probably start as our initial Turnplayer, since you have probably played out 10x the openings I have. That definitely makes a big difference. We definitely do want one of the two of us designed as "Turnplayer" and assigned the role of moving the units; organization is critical in long-running endeavors like this. Whenever I've seen teams try to go with a plan of "whoever logs in can move the units", it never ends well. It might seem like a meaningless distinction, since both of us will be heavily involved in all of the planning, but having clear responsibilities is the key to success, IMO.