[SPOILERS] Lurkerloos and map discussion

[Nakor]

Jester and Nakor, would you like to see a more lengthy discussion about how your game played out? I can give you some suggestions, but would completely understand if you're not in the mood right now. Losing a game always sucks, and criticism on top of that isn't much fun.

Hope that you had fun and learned a lot.

I'd love to hear criticism. Losing only sucks if you don't learn anything from it.

Agreed! Like to hear your thoughts, Sullla!

[Brian Shanahan]

It was one game. Seriously, we got beat due to poor decisions (farmer's gambit for too long, not protecting our metal, bunch of stuff really). Can't we just acknowledge that Scooter/Pindicator pulled off a brilliant gambit?

The way I see it is that you lost to a Joker Gambit, i.e. a plan so insane and so far out from left-field that even your average insane criminal mastermind would see it coming, never mind the rest of us.

It happens sometimes.

[Sareln]

Oh Serdoa. Logic is great, but not everyone runs on logic...

[flugauto]

In 10 turns Serdoa will have knights and most likely attack brick and xenu. If xenu attacks brick after the peace is over, they both will be easy to whip out. With the taken lands Serdoa might be in a good shape to take over Azza and Bigger-Lewwyn. If Commodore doesn't stop his sim city mode soon he will have alot of trouble.

[Gavagai]

In 10 turns Serdoa will have knights and most likely attack brick and xenu. If xenu attacks brick after the peace is over, they both will be easy to whip out. With the taken lands Serdoa might be in a good shape to take over Azza and Bigger-Lewwyn. If Commodore doesn't stop his sim city mode soon he will have alot of trouble.

I think Serdoa is already in a good enough shape to take out Lewwyn / Azza with knights right now. A huge disadvantage of taking Xenu's / Brick's land instead is that all reinforcements from there should be transported to his mainland via navy bottleneck. Hence, it will be difficult to use the production potential of this land for the war with Commodore.
On the other hand, Azza's core is close enough and can be transformed into excellent unit-pumping machine. Lewwyn has a powerful production city nearby too.

[Sullla]

Alright then, here are some thoughts on the India team in this game. Don't say I didn't warn you. *Goes into paper-grading mode*

For the opening, I recorded my thoughts in a video that I just put up on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZWYOBAs2...e=youtu.be

The opening I played out could be further optimized, I think; there are still too many wasted worker turns in what I put up. I also made a mistake in the sandbox, since there was another crabs resource southwest of the grassland hill by your city of Crabs Galore. I had one crabs resource where there were actually two of them located there. This means that placing the second city on the grassland hill was even better than what I demonstrated in the video: the second city should have gone there, and then the third city placed on the tile south of the sheep, where it could borrow crabs from the second city and still have sheep + silver in first ring.

Anyway, there are some mistakes in the video then, but I stand by the main points. This was a start that was crying out for worker -> worker as its opening, with its 11 forests to chop playing as India. There was also no reason to open with Fishing tech, as your team didn't even start building a work boat until after Bronze Working was completed. I feel pretty strongly that the optimal opening was worker/worker on the build, Bronze Working -> Fishing -> Agriculture on the tech path, and the worker micro involving two chops with the first worker to build the second worker, then two chops each from the two workers to knock out three work boats, then farm the corn, and then chop out the first settler. In your game, the capital was very slow to get the two crabs resources improved:



54 turns into the game, and the crab resources are still completely wasted. Your team also had the second city working the unimproved crabs tile to start, rather than borrowing an already-improved fish tile from the capital as I did:




There's the second city down at the bottom, clearly working the crabs resource. Crabs Galore also needed a borders pop before that sheep would ever be useful. Now as it turned out, your team went on to found Hinduism in that city, but you can't assume that you're going to land religion. Some other crazy team could beeline it first. Crabs Galore couldn't work sheep or its second crabs resource until popping borders, whereas a second city on the grassland hill could have worked both crabs immediately, plus borrowed the fish from the capital. It's simply a stronger, better location for a city. Every turn is crucial in these cutthroat Multiplayer games. You can't afford to be sitting around waiting on a monument build and then borders to pop to work a new city's best tiles.

As far as the Great Lighthouse plan goes: I didn't particularly like the play, but I think it was a defensible call. Here are the four reasons why I didn't like it:

1) Way too early in the game, that production would have been better spent on expansion, turned into settlers/workers.
2) Great Lighthouse has been nerfed in RB Mod to +1 trade routes instead of +2, making it inherently less valuable.
3) Open Borders have also been nerfed in RB, pushed back from Writing to Alphabet tech. You can't make the Great Lighthouse work for you until later.
4) Human players are smarter than the AI, and most of the RB people are very good players. I would almost never sign Open Borders with an island team that had rushed the Great Lighthouse. They'll always get more out of it than me. So there's a chance that you could build this wonder and have the other teams not even help you with trade routes.

With all that said, this was a situation where clearly every single city was going to be on the coast, and there were small offshore island where it was easy to get the "intercontinental" trade bonus. As a result, I think this was a very defensible play, even if I wouldn't have gone for it. However, I do think that the team should have waited until later to push for the wonder (there was absolutely no competition as I understand it) and rushed an offshore island city much sooner. The team didn't get an offshore city until about Turn 100, which was highly wasteful if you were going to push for Great Lighthouse so early. Seeing the capital configured like this:




Working three mine tiles, completely wasting the corn + crabs + crabs resources... well, it was painful to watch. You guys have this amazing quadruple food resource capital, and the team barely did anything with it for the first 60 turns. I think that it would have been very easy to push out 3-4 settlers, share some of the food resources with other tightly packed cities, and then still easily land the Great Lighthouse in the T75-80 range. But who knows, maybe not.

Here's where you stood as the Great Lighthouse finished:




Crabs Galore still doesn't have two improved tiles to work. It's also still at size 2, no infrastructure, almost 20 turns after it was founded. Yes, I know, the team was building the Great Lighthouse, but that's kind of my point. The wonder build meant that the team was sitting there with four unimproved food resources (!!!!!) going completely unused. This dropped the team into dead last place in the global Food demographics. I would argue that this was not particularly well played, Great Lighthouse or no Great Lighthouse.

Now at this point the team belatedly began to expand, and there's no nice way to put this: your city placements were simply terrible. I'm sorry to state it so bluntly, but it's true. They were really weak locations for cities. Let's look at them one at a time.




Here's the settler about to found the third city (T66 after chop). I mean, what in the world is going on here?! Despite starting on this lush, verdant island with food resources everywhere, the team somehow managed to pick a location without a single food bonus. It actually does an impressive job of missing all of the high food tiles in the area. It would require grassland farms or a lighthouse + lake tiles to get any kind of food surplus going. There's simply no reason to settle here with so many vastly superior locations elsewhere. I read that the logic was to connect horses quickly, but come on, seriously? Were barbs really *THAT* big of a problem starting on a small, deserted island? It looked like one warrior and one scout were fogbusting about 70% of the island and keeping anything from spawning. In the very worst case, you could have researched the super cheap Archery tech and whipped out an archer or two. There's really nothing else I can say about this spot. It was poorly chosen and remained a weak city until the end of its days.

Then the fourth city was just as bad, if not worse:



This city was settled on about T75 in a very foolish location. It's 6 tiles away from SM and fully 9 tiles away from the capital, no road connection whatsoever, defended by a single warrior. Isolated island or not, this was a sitting duck location from a military perspective. Why settle so far away? There's no need to "claim land" or whatever on an empty island! Just the turns spent walking the settler up here through the wilderness were thoroughly wasteful in and of themselves.

Then there's the location of CC itself. I almost feel like this city is some kind of deliberate trolling attempt. The location of CC very careful avoids claiming the best tile in that region, the 6 food grassland pigs under the jungle. It also takes care to have the clams resource and both of its floodplains in the second ring, where they are completely useless until a border pop. And there was no missionary on its way up here to CC; the city would be stuck with these borders for the next two dozen turns. In the meantime, CC would spend about 20 turns working... a 2/1 grassland forest tile. None of this made any sense at all, with bountiful food resources all over the place on this island. Instead, this city of CC carefully avoids every food bonus tile so that it can work hideous unimproved forest stuff and build a granary at minimum production. This is just a terribly weak way to develop a civilization. Cities should claim strong tiles (normally resources) and begin working them immediately - that means having resources in first ring if your civ isn't Creative. You can't waste turns in Multiplayer against good opponents putting down these cities which are useless until they expand borders.

Another question: why research Iron Working? Just to spot iron? There were no resources under jungle tiles that any city could work, and there were no barb issues or enemy players to contend with. Research should have been pushing towards something more useful, most likely Monarchy or Currency techs ASAP.




Here's CC again a few turns later, with a worker chopping a jungle tile. What is the purpose of chopping this tile? Is the 2/0/1 grassland tile underneath really that useful? Surely there has to be a more useful task to be doing somwhere else. It's still painful to watch this taking place as the 6 food pigs tile sits there completely unused right next door.




Turn 88 now, over a dozen turns since CC was founded, and its sitting there at size 2, no infrastructure completed yet, working a 2/1 grassland forest and a 2/0/2 grassland river cottage. There's a missionary finally trickling in from the south to spread religion, and then it will take another 10 turns after that for the borders to expand. CC will finally be able to use that clams tile and the floodplains on roughly T100 - 25 turns after it was founded. Yikes.

On a side note, most of the pictures in this thread looked like this, with the Demographics info blocking nearly everything useful. It was hard for me to see what was going on most of the time. Sitting at dead last in Food, 11th out of 11 teams, despite a perfect builder's paradise start and nearly every other team going to war in the early game, well, it was not a very good sign for this team. With this start, India should have been crushing everyone, not sitting near the bottom of the pack in everything other than GNP.

There was a big picture dump on T89:



Is there some reason why you guys hated these food resources at the capital? The crabs were very often not being worked in these pictures.



Baby Jesus cries to see the second crabs resource not even connected here 50 turns after the city was founded. No lighthouse either!



30 turns after its founding, SM has no buildings completed and is sitting at size 2 growing at +3 food/turn. Again: the team isn't working the 5/0/3 crab tiles at the capital, but it is working the 3/0/0 grassland farm here at SM. See how inefficient this is?



This is the fifth city in the far south. Why did you guys keep planting cities with no food resources in the first ring? Another location that's completely useless until the borders expand at 1 culture/turn. And this city should not be sitting there at zero growth having to build its own work boat at 3 shields/turn over the course of 10 slow turns. Surely another older city could have supplied a work boat for this location?



The sixth city founded to claim iron. Noting a pattern yet? WHY DO YOU HATE FOOD RESOURCES SO MUCH?! All of these cities are terrible moneypits until they expand their borders, which took most of them a long time to do. For heaven's sake, poor IM is working a 1/0/3 coastal tile in this picture. Your team did an unbelivable job of dotmapping some of the weakest possible locations to place these cities. I know that Jester was doing a lot of simming work, which is why I was surprised to notice these mistakes. Early game is all about working the highest yield tiles as much as possible, as quickly as possible. This civilization... wasn't doing that.

OK, I don't want to keep going on about CC, but I had to mention this too:




After finally, laboriously reaching size 2 at +2 food/turn, your team then chopped a granary... and whipped it right back down to size 1 again. Back to growing at +2 food again on a 2/0/2 grassland cottage. Ugh. This is one of the saddest cities I've seen in a long time. (And this wasn't an emergency whip due to barbs either; the team specifically said it was out of fear of a possible attack from Xenu. Getting an axe wasn't the worst idea, but this was the wrong city to whip.)




Last in Food, Production, and Soldiers despite no warring and no competition for land. Very, very, very bad sign.

I don't have too much more to say for a while after that. Great Lighthouse + Currency + intercontinental trade routes carried your economy to a strong position without any need for too much further input. And with so much warring in the rest of the world, India slowly climbed up towards the top of the scoreboard. It's really a shame that this didn't turn into an even stronger position; some of the later city locations were put in much better spots than the early ones. With cities 3-6 placed in stronger locations, this civilization could have put itself into a very dominant position.




And then the Zulus showed up. To be honest, this was an invasion that shouldn't have had any chance of succeeding. I didn't expect the India team to have seen it coming, and I think just about anyone would have been caught just as off guard as they were. But once it was spotted, the attack should have been beaten off without too much trouble. The Zulus had one initial invasion force. They had no homeland behind it to supply more units. The India team needed to play for time, simply stall for as long as possible to keep whipping more units. Even losing iron was not the end of the world; archer spam to buy time while whipping out more defenders, then research Horseback Riding and Construction to create an unbeatable combo of units (cats + horse archers). Even chariots and archers can get good odds against impis once they're weakened with collateral damage. But the main thing was to stall for as much time as possible to convert population everywhere into units.

Let's look at what happened. The first mistake happened on the first turn:




With iron sure to be disconnected, axes instantly became priceless units. They were desperately needed for mixed stack defense in cities. For no reason whatsoever, the team left two axes here at IW to be cleaned up without losses. The one inside the city died to a chariot at something like 75% odds for the attacker. Even worse, the other axe started the turn on the grassland forest north of the oasis, and moved west onto the iron tile to do... umm... something? It died to a 95% odds chariot without achieving anything. Those were immensely valuable units thrown away for no reason at all. They both should have retreated and lived to fight another day; the one inside the city could have made it down the capital with ease, rather than dying here uselessly. In our pretend scenario, we'll pull both of these units out and use them to protect the capital instead.

So IW was destroyed immediately, and the Zulus moved here:



Note that although the Zulu stack was highly mobile, it didn't have many units that were all that good on the attack. It's all chariots and impis, units that only have 4 strength. Archers inside a city start defending at 4.5 strength even before adding fortify or cultural bonuses; what your team needed was to pile as many warm bodies into the capital as possible, and force the Zulus to either slowly bomb the city down via siege (a good result) or waste most of their army on the attack (also a good result). They had no reinforcements coming, so time was completely on the side of India.

This was the crowning mistake:




Whipping walls in a city that already had 60% cultural defenses?! That was the move that probably cost this team the game. Jester wrote that after walls they could overflow and finish an archer, then whip as many archers as they needed. True enough, but those turns never materialized, because the Zulus simply blitzed their way through. As I said above, India needed as many warm bodies as possible inside the capital, not walls (which did precisely nothing!) In the end, it was 3 axes, 4 chariot, and 6 impis against this force:



1 axe, 1 spear, and 3 archers. That's all?! Remember, the boats showed up on T116. Whipping an archer per turn alone out of the capital should have been enough to get 3 archers in there. If we pull 2 archers up from the crabs city to the south, and 1 each from horses and silver cities, that should have been 7 archers at the very minimum. But wait, we also could have saved 2 more axes that were thrown away uselessly up at iron location, so add them to the potential defense as well. I believe it would have been very possible to get 6-7 archers, 2-3 axes, and the 1 spear in this city; the attack force full of impis and chariots wouldn't have done anything at all to that defense. Instead, the Zulus got some lucky combat rolls (winning twice at 65% and then at 40% odds) and then cleaned house, losing almost nothing in the process. But that again goes back to the real problem: not enough defenders. More archers in the city would mean fewer chances for the attacker to get a lucky dice roll and then get down to the weak back lines. As it was, the three archers were all removed in lucky rolls, and then the rest of the defense folded like a house of cards. Just a couple more units could have been enough to swing things completely. (See for example the brutal losses the Zulus took in capturing CC later.)

Then there was this bizarre play:




Again, the Zulus had no cities left on the mainland. They were throwing everything in a last ditch attack. Stalling for time, to whip out more units, needed to be the strategy for India. Instead, the team attacked *OUT* of SM, throwing away an archer and warrior to kill this impi. This was another major tactical mistake; with the whipped walls in SM, it would have been easy to turtle up and force the Zulus to attack while continuing to whip archer after archer. They had no more catapults left, they had to go in without softening things up or dropping the defenses. Instead, the team effectively traded 2 archers + 1 warrior to kill one impi, an atrocious unit exchange, and then the Zulus walked into SM because it only had one unit left to defend it:




Why is the axeman attacking out of the city? He gets 50% defensive bonus inside and forces the attackers to "wrong foot" themselves by always hitting the top defender, the one with the best odds for the defender. In total, five different units (2 archers, 1 axe, 1 chariot, 1 warrior) attacked out of this city instead of defending it. If they all just sat behind the walls, they could have made the city a very difficult nut to crack. Look at what happened when the defenders DIDN'T attack out of CC:



Bloodbath for the attackers. This was poor unit tactics.

There were some nice moves at times. Capturing this city was a good play:




Really stupid play by the Zulus to leave this city completely undefended, when a single impi would have been plenty to hold it. Good catch. And sinking some of the Indian galleys with triremes was also a good idea. Still, even there the team allowed India to isolate and kill several triremes by sacrificing galleys in the process:




These triremes should have been stacked one atop each other. Two of them together on the same tile would have been basically invulnerable to the Zulu galleys. Instead, they were taken out one by one in piecemeal fashion.

I also noticed that the Indian workers weren't doing all that much in this war. They should have been frantically chopping forests, third ring or no third ring, anything to get more production going. Remember that you can chop a forest to completion and then delete the worker afterwards to prevent capture.



Building a settler at the last minute to go settle another city was... puzzling. I would have built more archers to make the conquest as painful as possible. For some reason, the team also managed to move the one remaining trireme in such a way that it couldn't sink any of the incoming Zulu galleys (which you guys had to know were on their way). And then the Drill III promotion on the Great General archer instead of City Garrison III, along with Leadership promotion... like, what? Huh? Call me confused. Was this a subtle form of trolling the other players I didn't catch?




So that's an overview of this particular game. There were some good plays in here, but a lot of mistakes as well. I didn't agree with a lot of the city management, many of the locations chosen were poor, and the tactical handling of the Zulu invasion was not very good. Despite all of that, I hope that everyone involved had fun and was able to learn a lot from the game. Hope to see you again.

PS Try using Google Doc spreadsheets for micro planning in the future. You can collaborate as a team on projects and it's infinitely neater / easier to read than what Jester was posting in this game.

[SevenSpirits]

Just want to point out that in RBmod, India is supposed to start with Wheel/Myst not Mining/Myst. CFCJesterFool and Nakor took this into account when doing their initial micro plan (i.e. BW right away actually isn't possible!) and only realized they had been given the wrong starting techs (namely Mining/Myst) after finishing Fishing research.

Essentially, a BW start wasn't an option - if they'd realized they had mining, the game would have been restarted with the correct techs. Now obviously they should have realized it, though I think not realizing it was actually a better "strategy" (it let them get BW faster than if they'd had the myst/wheel start!).

Given this, I think their start makes more sense than you gave it credit for. They started on what is probably the best tech, fishing, as it gives them food, and agriculture (which does this too) isn't very good since you have to build a worker and he only has one thing to do. After this, they would have gone mining BW and I would hope they'd build a WB in the meantime. But instead they realized that BW was closer than they thought, which enabled the worker whip plan, which I think was actually pretty good. Whipping from 2 -> 1 is strong if you have zero improved tiles and the whip production is the bottleneck for improving said tiles.

That said, I don't like their choices after that point.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

A few problems with the analysis. The reason for working low food tiles is because the whip is nerfed in Krillmod. Still not a bad idea, but not as good as it used to be. I'd still chop granaries and whip like crazy. Plus, JF could have gotten around the low happy cap by packing in satellite cities around the insane number of food resources around the capital. And part of me wonders if Scooter could have simply bypassed the capital and started razing peripheral cities (but of course, this will be at a hammer disadvantage, Scooter's forces get worn down, the capital lives and remains productive, and eventually JF reconquers his continent. In the best case scenario, JF gets crippled and spends a long time rebuilding as Commodore and Plako build up for a naval rampage. As is, JF lost all his production very quickly).

The biggest problem I had with JF's play was that there wasn't a road connecting the northern cities (CC and GA) to his southern cities. That meant no mobility, no way to easily recapture lost cities if Xenu really did decide to go insane and attack.

[SevenSpirits]

Btw I did enjoy the video.

[Qgqqqqq]

Same
I don't think whip is nerfed THAT much, and the point is that some of the food could've been shared out.
Commodore did some math on whipping off (the equivalent of) a bare GL tile with rbmod, and it was better then mining (or something).