[PB74 SPOILERS] scooter's Bluey Adventure

[scooter]

Oh and just a reminder to top off this disaster of a draw for me, some reminders.

* North of me is Rome. Conveniently blocked by Jungle which means likely no contact right up until they get the tech that wrecks people. The Jungle belt means expanding north early does not work

* East of me is Zulu. I'm sorry, I was not clear. East of me is Kublai Zulu. So, much harder to rush with free promos, and can't settle up on him or else I get smoked by their culture.


Honestly this is one of the more hopeless starts I've drawn in awhile.

[Cheater Hater]

Can't you settle past that bridge to the West?

[scooter]

Can't you settle past that bridge to the West?

I don't know, maybe? I don't know what's over there. But imagine I have a neighbor about as far that way as GT is in the other direction, which seems like a reasonably safe assumption. This is what that looks like roughly:





Really doesn't look like that adds too much more. I'd be stunned if that got me to even 85 land tiles, let alone the 129 average. Also, this is logistically a nightmare. Normally during expansion there's a natural flow to it. You settle sort of in the most efficient way to use and improve tiles. For example, look at the blue/brown dots here. That's a pretty natural way to expand - settler/worker travel is minimal, you can defend all 3 of those cities with just a couple units, and you can share tiles pretty freely. All that goes away on a land bridge like that. If I settled right on the "4" for example, that is on paper just 4 tiles from the capital, but in reality it would take 13 turns of worker labor to hook it via road, and then once roaded a one-mover would take 4 turns to travel between them pre-Engineering. And that's just to build a city to "bridge" me over to a hypothetical real land that I don't even know if it exists. (Though obviously I will soon if that Lion I saw last turn doesn't eat my Scout.)





Think about how different this would be if the land actually arced out like this green curve and everything inside it was land. I might actually have choices. I'm frustrated because this starting area is like firmly on rails because it feels like I spawned in southern Italy. All I can really do is pray GT/Xist don't settle my direction becauses the other directions are all just ocean.


It doesn't help that I also get the strong suspicion my starting area is artificially hand-drawn. The conspicuous total lack of huts near me pretty strongly suggests that, and it would explain why this is so cramped. It's also definitely pretty weird seeing Oasis 2-3 tiles from Jungle on a huge map, for example. If the map was mostly left alone I'd be more willing to chalk this up to randomness like PB69 or PB71, but I don't think that's what happened here at all given how long the map took.

[Old Harry]

A thread title that hooked me immediately. Good show!

Have your kids tried Hey Duggee?

[scooter]

So about that land bridge.





Bad news: there is no land to bridge to. Good news: uh, I guess I have a backlines after all? More seriously, it’s really good I picked FIN as these backline spots are very coast-heavy. However, none of this may matter.





It appears Xist may be about to axe rush me out of the game. The first spike is 8k soldiers, so that’s clearly Bronze Working. There’s a 2k bump right after that, which I guess is a Warrior. 4 turns after that is a 6k bump, which seems likely to be an Axe. The thing that’s weird is that 4-5ish turns is extremely fast to locate and hook Copper and then whip/chop an Axe. So I’m not sure what’s up with that. Now that I type it out, it sounds impossible, so maybe this is actually Warrior + Tech (Wheel would fit). But if that was an axe 4T ago and he beelines it at me, I’m just dead. Which I guess I wouldn’t shed too many tears as I’ve played a bit casually thus far, and my start feels really slow as a result. Although I do remember simming this pre-game and feeling like everything I tried was super slow.

A thread title that hooked me immediately. Good show!

Have your kids tried Hey Duggee?

I’ve never heard of this! This looks like something my 1 year old would like - she’s very much in the “colorful + musical == interested” stage.

[scooter]

Ok this game has generally gone very poorly for a variety of reasons. It became clear as I explored that I got the severely short end of the stick as far as capital and surrounding land goes, so that sapped some interest from me, and then I generally just did not have time to devote to this game. Also it felt very bad being next to Rome and Kublai Zulu. This was compounded by the fact that the Zulu player (GT) appears to be a maniac. Allow me to demonstrate.





He just randomly sent an Impi at me despite me being like 12 tiles away. Okay. I mean this was partly because I took forever to get Copper hooked, so maybe he noticed that, but still. Anyway, I don't remember the exact numbers, but at the time vodka indicated 3 warriors would have a good shot at killing an Impi, and I had no choice but to bank on that. I stuck a worker on the Ivory thinking it would prevent him from attacking a second time into The Show, but I realized later that does not work. Again, my attention level in this game has been quite low. Also having to pause to spam out some warriors right before Copper really set me back once I realized the Impi was going to arrive like 1T too quickly for me to complete an axe.





However, he elected to capture the worker and sit on it. I think he got greedy and thought he could keep the worker?





However I got tremendously lucky and the first warrior did enough to bring me into coin flip range with my second warrior, and I won it. Because the third warrior was produced EoT, GT never saw it and likely thought I got insanely lucky on a very foolish attack, which amused me at least.





However he followed up by planting this city. WTF. That is 4 tiles from my capital and like 12 from his. Look at all that land between! This is amongst the most bonkers plants I've seen in a long time. However, the problem is it claimed my horse so I couldn't build Chariots. And he parked a couple axes in there, and the city is protected by a River and he's Creative, so he'll get a border pop and 20% culture. So there was really nothing I could do. (FWIW I had a settler completing on this very turn to walk towards this spot.)


At this point this at least gave me an objective for this very doomed game - exact revenge on the guy who 2v1'd me along with the mapmaker(s). So I got myself trade connections with players and started begging. Just asked for horse constantly. Everyone constantly said no. Until.





Yeah baby, let's do this.





Thanks to my warrior I know he has no Impis in the area at least, just the axe pair. Some whip/chops real quick and we're ready to roll immediately.





Won. Left the Chariot there - what's he going to do, attack out?





City is doomed I think. As long as he doesn't complete a unit end of turn. I played second, so he can't whip responsively, so it's really just a matter of whether I'm severely unlucky on his unit completion timing.






Wouldn't mind this, we'll see what he does.

[Mjmd]

[Sullla]

Completely deserved treatment of an exceptionally foolish city plant. I don't get to break out this graphic from Pitboss #2 often but it actually fits here:



By the way, has the community started to swing back away from these random maps yet? They sound great in theory, then half the players realize 25 turns after starting that the map gives them no chance to be competitive and they get to spend the next 6-12 months engaged in a hopeless endeavor through no fault of their own. Seems less than great to me but what do I know.

[T-hawk]

I think the random maps got popular because players got tired of playing outguess-the-mapmaker. You don't want to feel like you have to correctly guess whatever the mapmaker intended in order to get ahead or keep up.

[Mjmd]

I think random maps got popular because Commodore has started 3 games recently and he likes them. The cheat code for things like events and barbs is just to start a game and dictate them from the start. But you have to know to judge when to start and help organize which not everyone wants to do.

About all I can say without being too spoilery is that I did post some thoughts on your start specifically in the lurker thread. You had also mentioned that you felt like this map took a while, and I on the other hand felt like this map was rushed and I feel like that impacted certain things. Sorry you aren't having much fun, although I am glad you are getting a little pleasure in beating down.

Did you capture a worker on the horse?