[PB29 Spoiler] In which Joey, then mackoti, swing happy go lucky

[GermanJoey]

Dude it has got to be. I mean, come on. First, he tried to get in PB25 as "reddog" but then backed off. He's also expressed that he's gotten frustrated by people judging him by his reputation rather than playing the game in front of him. Smurfing here wouldn't be too unexpected. And, I mean, with a name like Scipio? To make fun of people always thinking every smurf is Sulla? And he's so curt in his posts and doesn't seem mystified by RB conventions? And then he picks freaking Cyrus of Khmer in a ToW game? Mack is a real jokester, this is all right up his alley.

[GermanJoey]

FUcking Borsche logged off steam like 5 minutes before Haram posted his pick, so I can't even harass him about it, arrgh. So, I'll start doing some pick analysis, basically to keep my mind off my civ pick because I still can't decide whether to gamble on a myst civ or not.

Jowy - Hannibal of India (Mining/Wheel/FastWorker/Mausoleum)



Hmm, I don't like this pick. It's like the slowest possible combo in a field full of very fast-starters. His leader, Hannibal, is kinda weird. I dunno. Fin and Cha are both support traits that work together awkwardly in practice. If you try to REX hard, you'll have trouble making Fin worth anything. If you try to get the most out of Fin, then you'll end up with less land and cities than everyone else. Like, the "synergy" idea here is that you're concentrating tons of cottages/commerce early in an pampered super city in order to leverage a big tech advantage of some kind. You know, grow it up to a big max pop, throw on a library/market/academy, and bam. You get all this extra commerce from early cottages and its all getting multiplied. The rest of your cities are responsible for doing all the work; expanding, making military, etc. It's like, the multiplayer version of the 6-cities-to-Lib SP Deity strategy. But, that kinda shit is so damn WEAK in MP. Being an era up in tech does not matter if you're down 2:1 in units and behind in cities by the same. And of course, other players won't just let you get away with it. You can try to whip your secondary cities to oblivion, thanks to Cha, to try to keep up, but in my experience its never enough. It's a very high skill combo to make the most of, IMHO.

Jowy's civ, India, doesn't do him a lot of favors either. I think India is still viable but it really needs Pro to compensate for the slow starting FW, which costs 70 hammers in this mod. To me, this pick indicates that Jowy does not intend to be (or perhaps won't be able to be) aggressive early, possibly feeling down because he slipped back into old habits in PB28 after REM (and also Bob, heh) punished his more peaceful REXing approach in PBEM61. In any case, I wouldn't mind being his neighbor here, despite his well-deserved psychogamer reputation.

TBS - Bismarck of Japan (Fishing/Wheel/Samurai/ShalePlant)

A Japan pick..?!? S-s-sugoi...

Seriously, what the hell is going on here? I'm a bit baffled. Ok, maybe you want Fishing for a workboat start (I guess he has a different BFC than me?) but... WHY JAPAN? Essentially no UU, no UB... you get the wheel over mining, but that's what, exactly 15 beakers? 1 turn, maybe 1.5 turns of research? Is that really worth it over the amazing and/or the unique synergistic toolkits of Rome or Exp Carthage or Exp Portugal?

Man, so what is he doing? I'm not sure. The one thing I can think of is that TW-first is better for a faster Granary for optimizing Exp in order to beat Haram to The Oracle. I don't know if that's actually true, because I didn't sim it. Seems like it might true though. In fact, it may even be a telegraph to Haram to not compete with him on it, to go after Henge instead. Haram's Pro should be fairly unbeatable on that, as he could just grow to size 4 or 5 working big hammer tiles and finish it before his first city, if his start is anywhere similar to mine. However, Exp, in addition to Imp, really really likes Henge because your fast growing cities want good tiles to work right away. That's a big reason why BTS Sury is so damn good. And, on top of all that, TBS specifically picked Exp/Ind *after* Haram's Ind. So, who freaking knows. I'm still shocked that he picked Ind, as he's talked down on that trait on many occasions. ToW Exp has also been considered a bit weak by many, and he's not taking advantage of any special synergy for it with his civ pick. At any rate, I am 100% sure that TBS has a good reason for this bizarre pickup.

At any rate, IMHO TBS is perhaps the #1 civ player this season, or at least who I'd vote for if we were to do rankings like the NCAA or whatever, and I'm very excited to play against him. He's recently beaten me in three straight games ending in the last few months: PBEM63, PB18, and PB22. In PBEM63 and PB18, I subbed in for someone else, while in PB22 TBS didn't take over until the game is almost over. So, while I haven't lost a game where I played against him from T0 (although PB18 is pretty much that, tbh), it is indisputable that I have not beaten him once. In fact, the main reason I proposed ToW as an option for this game, despite prefering RtR myself, is because he mentioned to me in a PM a few months ago, when he backed out of PB27 for time reasons, that if he were to play a PB again he'd want to play a 9-12 player ToW game. I'm looking forward to the challenge!

So let's see how it goes!

[GermanJoey]

Brick told me he couldn't care much about our civ, so I've been wrestling with this decision myself. It came down to these 5 options:

1.) Mali (Mining/Wheel/Skirmisher/Mint) - If you've seen the tech thread, you saw that I originally took Byzantium as our civ. I then sent a PM to get the game started, then came into this thread and started writing this post, which started with its first words as "Mali - this was probably what I should have taken." At that point, I was like, well if I shoulda taken Mali why don't I just take Mali? Basically, its the safe choice and the smart choice, in more ways than one. The techs allow the strongest opening and yet still has an option to veer and pick up a holy city circa T28ish, just in time to pop borders in a newly planted second city, without committing to it beforehand. The Skirmisher is a big FUCK OFF to neighbors that might want to take advantage of a late BW, while the Mint works nicely with our eventual cash-rushing idea. It's not glamorous, like the other options I was considering, but it works the best for what we want.

2.) Byzantium (Mysticism/Wheel/Cataphract/Hippodrome) - Ah, but a boy can gamble and a boy can dream. Byzantium has the insane Cataphract available but is awkward as hell to open with. We'd be potentially looking at a T50 copper hookup first of all, and Byzantium also needs to gamble on having a farmable food (corn/wheat/rice) or a deer on any of these tundra tiles by settling on the ice tiles:




Food around one of the iceflows would be OK, but prevents sharing one of the nice improved tiles. The combo of "sharing an old food while claiming a new one" makes for the ideal second city in general, but is especially important for Imp because Imp tends to be short on worker turns early trying to expand wide quickly.

The best scenerio is sharing the fish while claiming a wet corn or something, because Imp absolutely loves it when it can have a high-hammer capital for pumping settlers while a high food city makes its workers. However, this is a gamble. It could be we have only sheeps and pigs in the 3rd and 4th ring, in which case we'd have a comparatively garbage opening while we scrambling to get AH late. Some early granaries wouldn't be bad either, but getting Pottery early delays BW even further. Blugh. On top of that, I see at least two other civs that might be competing for Buddhism - TBS with Ind Japan and Haram with Sumeria (Myst/Agr in this mod). The Ind Sumeria pick makes me think that Haram will aim for a very early Oracle. TBS's Japan is comparable with my Mali pickup in terms of its ability to net a T26-T28 Buddhism without skimping on worker techs. In the end, I like to gamble in this game sometimes, but I think I've learned my lesson by now not to do it this early. I'm more confident hedging my bets a bit.

Portugal/Netherlands - these start out just fine but lose any chance at a shrine, beyond conquering one of course, but make up for it with very good late-game options in the Feitora and the legendary Dike. They've also both got killer aquatic UUs, the Caravel and the East Indiaman. However, I'm concerned about having the hammers for all those goodies later on. If we're spamming banks and observatories and universities T150ish, where do I find the hammers to also spam 260h feitoras? And the dike is so, so so far away... it just makes me worried that we won't get much out of it. Fin is already a greedy late-game pick, I shouldn't double down where I'm already covered just fine.

Carthage - There's some synergy here, with the Cothon coming at the same tech as the Quay, but its the same problem as the Feitora. How can I possibly justify spamming markets+forge+quays+cothons everywhere in the classical era? That's 355 hammers of infrastructure all together, and that's not including libraries or courthousen! At least 20-30 turns of straight production per city. Can I really expect my neighbors to just let me builder about like that? Probably not!

so, in the end, its Mali for us.

[GermanJoey]

T0.

AHHHHHHHHH! A GREAT FEELING TO BE STARTING A GAME AGAIN!

SIP, of course. Of all the lessons I have learned, I've learned this one the best. Plan for the scout is to scoot around clockwise; we only get 1 move per turn until T5, when Hunting finishes. Tech path is Hunting -> Agriculture -> Fishing.

[GermanJoey]

Going away for the weekend, might not have internet access and Brick might be too busy to play... can anyone move our scout around? Just move him NE. I'll be back sunday afternoon, PST. Techs are already queued, but if there's a misclick or something then the next tech is Agriculture.

Password is blues.

[GermanJoey]

Ah, we have internet here! So, we're all good. Our borders expanded this turn but I won't be able to report until Sunday.

[GermanJoey]

T10.

Ok! Here we are! Turns out there was a fine spot had we decided to go with a religion, at the deer. Oh well. Still, other than that, everything else needs AH. That sets our opening in place now.




I'm gonna post in detail about openings either tonight or tomorrow, but essentially there were three options, each defined by which of the Capital BFC resources you hook first: Ivory-first into fast BW and a settler at size 1, which requires a Hunting/Mining start, Imp, and was chosen by "Scipio," reminiscent of his clever start in PB20; fish-first into settler at size 2, which was best for Pro but required a Fishing start, and was chosen by Haram, Fennbandit, and Dreylin (they grew last turn), and finally wheat-first into settler at size 3, which was chosen by the remaining 5 players, including us. By the way, I'm 99% sure that all players have mirrored starts due to there being consistent ties in the demos.

Our theme this game is The Blues. Our capital is named for the legendary Muddy Waters, known as Mister Blues, who invented the Chicago Blues sound, was one of the first blues musicians to play an electric guitar, and pretty much became synonymous with the blues itself.


(here's another version; you can barely hear the piano in this one, but instead you get some totally sick harp by James Cotton.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT_4TP_LLVE

[GermanJoey]

I like Muddy's slow stuff the best, as there's nothing else quite like him there, but he could totally tear it the hell up too:


GOD DAMN

[Donovan Zoi]

Aw man, I love that song! Looks like you got me...I'll be stopping by occasionally to flesh out my Blues playlist at the very least.

And to witness destiny fulfilled:

[GermanJoey]

sweet!