NobleHelium posts Hearthstone screenshots & lurkers get annoyed. Earlier: sound, fury

[Gaspar]

My other dream is some other player drops out and Mackoti joins in.

and then another one drops and Seven + TBS team up to get that spot.

Then I'll be forever a happy man!

Putting this out here right now is if someone drops out and Mack joins in, I'm flipping the table

[Gaspar]

Noble and I talked a bit about the game and the start last night but here's some stream of consciousness analysis...

I'm not really sure if this is a good start or not. If this was a traditional ancient start, it would look excellent as the obvious capital 1S of the spot everybody is on gets gold, 1 very good food source and 1 mediocre one, a passel of riverside tiles and a PH plant. On an industrial start where you need 3 good cities? Harder to say. The obvious other two city locations are 1W of each of the irons but both of those are problematic. The southern iron city has a fair amount of overlap with the cap which isn't that great when you're not going to be developing cottages and the likelihood is that you'll have enough happy to grow as tall as you want. It seems more likely that you want to spread out and claim as much land as possible as quickly as possible. It also starts well but also has a ton of water which unless you take the Dutch really isn't that appealing. It is a good strategic location, though, giving a canal. The northern location looks pretty solid but its hard to say where it should really go without a little further northern exploration. There's also room another pretty good site probably 1N of the deer. Overall looks solid but as I have zero experience with advanced starts, so hard to say...

Brick and his team of helpers did a pretty good job with the combos. I'd say there are four you can reject out of hand - Boudica, Monty, Genghis and Lincoln - but the rest all can have arguments made for them. Some of the good pairings are obvious but there's some very cute stuff that is viable - free Cothons on the fast start guy are pretty darn good here, as is Brennus/Vikings, Darius/Dutch gives you a way to not need as many worker turns to get to viability - could be a stealthy way to get established early while opponents are playing slower games, etc. Peter of India looked reasonable before the start showed not as many forests as you might like to make FW very good but they're still the king of combat workers. For what its worth, Noble and I changed our opinion on what the top 4 or so should be about 10 times, so kudos. (I think we need to add SeemsGood or BloodTrail, Brick, I really wanted to put one of those here.)

That said, I might be underselling Agg and Chm here a little bit - there's high potential for early shenanigans when everyone starts with Rifles and which Infantry and Machine Guns look close, its going to take a good long while to research any of those techs and they're both at least 2 techs away. Someone who takes Agg and researches Steel or someone who takes Chm and goes crazy with Cavs could get a quick elim on someone heading towards a more economic solution and feeling like Assembly Line is close enough to ignore Steel for a while. A lot will depend on how close everyone is but someone rolling up with 8 Cavs while you're on 3 cities could be death if you decide to not go Slavery or Nationalism. Balancing establishing your Civ and economic growth with warding early aggression is going to be a real question here. Its not like an ancient start where in the first 50t most of the time if someone finds you you can emergency whip and axe and you're fine, you've got to be taking defensive questions into consideration right from t0.

There's a similar tech based consideration here. It seems obvious to hit the Steam Power -> Assembly Line bit for the production boosts and Infantry at the end of the line but there's no question that Steel out of the gate for Cannon is a very realistic concern. Going the SciMeth route for the first to goodies seems awful - GPs this late really aren't good for anything but a golden age but if only one guy, say the guy who takes Augustus for example zigs while the rest of us zag they could get themselves 2GPs, access to State Property and Kremlin if they manage to get left alone. I wouldn't risk it, but the potential for someone else doing it and getting ahead is real.

Anyway, there's sims to be done and such before we settle on some pairings but I thought I'd get some thoughts out there. Also would love some lurker thoughts on the non-scooter/pindicator/BGN competitors because I don't really know that much about them. There's been 14 pitbosses since my last game and I've basically lurked in any meaningful way none of them so if you want quality opponent profiles, you'll need to give me some pointers. And keep the required reading to a minimum

[Ichabod]

[BRickAstley]

[Gaspar]

For real though, what's the name of this song?

[BRickAstley]

Darude by Sandstorm

[NobleHelium]

Brick, is the sandbox correct, buildings and workers are discounted - 72h for a library? I didn't check the units exhaustively. Or wonders. But the buildings and workers were definitely discounted.

And yes, it's time for a new avatar, Gaspar. Here's the full art.

[Gaspar]

I knew it!

[Gaspar]

This settler stuff makes my head hurt. On the one hand, its really difficult to sim if you can't actually pin down how much your settlers are going to cost, not to mention its difficult to properly evaluate the leaders if by some sort of witchcraft one leader has 30h cheaper settlers. On the other hand, who cares, let's play!

Also, so with Sullla posting in scooter's thread and mackoti in pindicator's, how long until they're both running the respective civs?

[BRickAstley]

It looks like at most there's a 10h variance from the numbers I've given, in the tests I've done. So it should only be a small potential variance there.