[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[williams482]

As mentioned in my edit, there's more to Jongs that timing. Most likely this game is decided while frigates are in play,and Jongs are really good frigates.

[ljubljana]

yeahhh and there is indeed a solution to the thing i said too, which is: after the first jong wave, indonesia keeps building jongs while their partner uses all the gold and niter on frigate upgrades. and then that's more frigate production than any niter-limited civ can match, ok, fair enough

and it means indonesia does want to be partnered with another vaguely credible naval civ, i imagine, which luckily portugal, spain, and china all are :D

[williams482]

Of course I could we'll be underrating zevens relative to Jongs. Less niter instead of no niter, +5 strength regardless of embarked units, additional +7 strength against districts. PBEM20 made clear that being able to kill the enemy fleet is great, but you still have to take the cities, and zevens are better at that than anything in their era. Econ benefits are probably a wash between them too.

[ljubljana]

yeahh zevens are probably great too, and in retrospect i think it's sort of shocking that a frigate UU civ went unpicked in PBEM20. one key advantage Indonesia (and China, for that matter) has over the dutch though is the ability to faith-buy a classical Great Admiral with no investment in faith infrastructure, at least in theory - I don't really know how the Dutch can get their hands on one in the face of England/Phoenicia, plus it would have to be a more expensive Medieval one. If the Dutch are paired with Portugal the answer is to just throw money at the problem, of course, but otherwise i fear the Zeven's ship-ship combat advantage will go up in smoke against the likes of England

[williams482]

The big problem with the dutch on this sort of map is that rivers tend to be pretty rare, although I suspect there would have been some nice spots for polders on the PBEM20 map. I'd be extremely tempted to take the dutch at 7 if we got Portugal at 2 and they fell that far. Although there's probably some slight antisinergy between fedoritas and polders, we likely won't be focusing on econ in that era anyway.

[ljubljana]

Yeah, I'm not too worried about polder anti-synergies, since we only want to put feitorias in the 1-2 best trade route destinations and the rest can be polderized. The river point is unfortunately a really good one though, we might just not have any sites for strong Dutch campi that don't require paving over important productive tiles

However, the Dutch DO have another big advantage as a Portugal-partner that hasn't come up in a PBEM before - Wilhelmina's Radio Oranje ability. +2 culture for each trade route to OR FROM a foreign civilization! With Portugal that is literally better than Rome's free monuments and means we can just go crazy with campuses and harbors to rush up to Square Rigging

I think my current tier list for Portugal-enabled civs that could plausibly fall to 7th is as follows:
- China (please please please)
- Netherlands (likely very strong in its own right)
- Japan/Korea
- everyone else

edit: oh and dutch harbors are a culture bomb too, so we will actually have room to upgrade 20 zevens on the turn we discover square rigging

edit2: one really nice thing about the picking order too - if thrawn sees us pick Portugal, they will fill their whole thread with analysis about all the civs they could enable, desperately want to take the best one themselves for denial purposes, and then be totally unable to do so

[ljubljana]

In a similar vein, we should add Egypt to the list of abusable Portugal-partners, which adds 2 gold and 2 food to all the Portugal TRs in addition to having boosted TR yields themselves. The idea there being that Portugal funds its own navy by bootstrapping growth onto productive tiles (with bought lighthouses/granaries), then goes off with Naus and frigates once they hit the tech.

Egypt also has a nice culture bonus in the sphinx, which I think translates to a financial and research bonus like with the Dutch since you can use the hammers you don't spend on monuments to get a head-start on the harbors.

[williams482]

Ooh, excellent points with the trade route bonuses. Those UAs are usually crap, but in a teamer with Portugal they shine.

With Egypt, though, is it enough? War chariots will never see action, Egypt will arguably suffer more for lack of rivers than the Dutch do, and spinxes don't really make up for much either. I think this kit is a little underrated in general, but this doesn't seem like their kind of map.

[williams482]

Actually, can you sell me on why China is your top choice for a Portugal partner?

[ljubljana]

We'd have to test the Egypt thing for sure, but I do think it's worth testing. Egypt itself would be the "small" civ and would basically just build harbors and lighthouses like anyone else to help fund upgrades. But the food bonus, and the effect it has on Portugal's growth curve, is crazy and reminds me of the Cree. +2 food per TR is not in the same league as +4/5 food from a super-Cree TR....but Portugal would get 8 of those +2s, for free, and independent of terrain! And while they don't have the Mewekap to fix housing, they DO have bought lighthouses to fix housing and give even more food and even more TRs...

...speaking of the cree. Do I dare to ask whether their bonus applies to international TRs?