[PB63 Spoilers] Ginger and Lazteuq find a way to peace

[Ginger()]

   
Someone's antsy 
Jokes aside I totally sympathize with pindicator here. I am reminded why I swore off of asynchronous board games, because I end up way too invested and checking the turn clock every hour. This style is bad for an addictive personality, but I'm bored of single player and real-time multiplayer play is pretty sloppy, so I here I am, dangers of attachment notwithstanding. (The solution to speed up turn pace is to sign up for multiple games, right?  )

[El Grillo]

Exactly, just ask superdeath

I’m enjoying your reports and thoughts, I don’t think we’ve had any players with mostly real-time MP experience join these games in a while.

[Ginger()]

   
oh mama, more juicy land. No wonder people adore IMP here; the tiles are made of crack cocaine.
I see the map theory is that each player gets two copies of calendar and mineral to encourage trading, and the spicy wonder boosters are on the islands.
Mjmd will pass through the land I want to claim and its causing me a big headache that if he plants 1N of Cow I won't be able to culturally contest and I'll be forced into a rush. I really want time to build as I've got the better scaling traits, and from IW-Machinery era I'll have that free hand, until then I sweat in fear. If he plants on me it's math bulb and Praet/Cat spam until the end of days. Maybe Rome is enough of a deterrent to him? (or an incentivization to incitation?) This is where a reputation would be useful. I have no clue what he will try to do.
atm i'm just twiddling thumbs for BW to finish so I can dotmap

I'll have to disclaim that most of the real-time games I play are AW and I'm not sure how applicable that is. So far I've been trying to approach this war game (edit: oops, freudian slip) in the exact opposite direction with a pick geared towards longer term growth.

[Ginger()]

Mjmd declared early and moved his scout into our capital. He has the second half of the turn timer I guess because I moved before him that turn. My question now is am I allowed to reassign tiles after someone’s move? Or am I at the whim of the governor? If PB turn rules should replicate turn based whenever possible, then I should have the right to choose what tiles happen before the production step/turn roll right?
My tile use planning is resilient to him stepping on our 4yield “accidentally” For a turn, but not to him camping out on it. Does he have no other neighbors and is this a cagematch island? More pertinently, does he THINK this is a cagematch island with no other neighbors. If he’s met someone else he’s not spending EP on them
Edit: I signed in greeted by a peace offer, I’ll take it, saves the chance of him camping my bananas

[Miguelito]

For future reference, you're allowed to do whatever on your half of the turn, including reassigning tiles. One of the advantages of playing second.

[Ginger()]

Okay thanks Miguelito, that's good to know.

On second evaluation, I don't think we have a neighbor to east, unless there's a peninsula or isthmus, the land is just too barren and too close to the coast that we've spotted (see pin in the northeast and see south) to warrant being someone else's backyard. This is unfortunate. While Mjmd might've been our best possible non-green neighbor (Org/Chm is slow, and he wants to fool around with religious tree and Oracle), I just don't want to fight a duel, because I too wish to fool around with the religious tech tree and wonders. Even if I have the upper hand with proper Axemen and later Praets, I would rather not be alone here, makes it a 0-sum game where I literally have to war, sooner the better. I need that second scout ASAP to see the other side of Mjmd's core, as tempting as getting a warrior and sitting him on the cow would be (to send some unambiguous diplo).

The southeastern food/silver is looking like an absolute hot mess to dot map, so good job to Tarkeel for making CRE sufficiently relevant. Now if only that didn't represent 33% of this game's cast
If you're just starting reading this thread, I love to complain. It serves a dual purpose of relieving some anxiety as I wait for that turn to roll roll on, and it illuminates what I see as my biggest hurdles in setting up my empire this game.

In world demos news, someone is at a size 3 cap (Jessel part 2, electric boogaloo?), my guess is JackRB, the low approval makes me doubt its CHM, and maybe he wanted to wait until BW? or maybe he had a second sea resource? Top CY is only 12 (I'm 10 and there's another with 10)

[Lazteuq]

Scout chokes are so annoying, at least he didn't do that. Maybe he was just looking for map knowledge of our start? A greedy way to approach foreign relations, but not that terrible. Sort of like the early wars we see sometimes to let workboats through pre-Writing. I think it's important to give him the benefit of the doubt here.
I wonder if he would have still offered peace if we had a worker-first opening, or if he would've tried to block a worker if he saw one...

Edit: just saw your post.
If you think there's no neighbor to the east, then I guess the map could be three continents with three civs on each...like PB54? That sounds kind of weird though, I'm guessing there is some sort of land connection at the poles, otherwise the equator civs would be disadvantaged.

Maybe someone with a fishing start is going to whip their first worker?? Or is going settler first?

[Ginger()]

Scout found clams near that river mouth and a lake surrounded by desert and winter forests in the south. Mjmd teched AH last turn which mean he went for it first tech as Agr/Wheel. We need to hook up copper first city and get some spears out. After that we should have military dominance for the next ~20 turns it takes him to research BW. We will get graphs in a couple turns. All of this is pointless though unless we have copper in the capital because our current plans call for double worker to finish shopping the second settler. And turn 29 settler is going to be slow if he has horses in his capital, which could be hooked in 3 turns at the slowest if riverine. Do I get to whine about unfair maps if someone gets strategics in the cap and I don't? Probably not.

[Lazteuq]

I think the PB62 map's strategics in capitols was a rare exception to the RB standard. I have faith that Tarkeel wouldn't do that to us. Map whining would be righteous.
But hypothetically, if Mjmd did have horses in his capitol and went all-in on a rush, what can we do?
Like you said, he would start building it T18 if he's really lucky with the placement of horse relative to his worker and rivers. Even if he works forested plainshills to get more hammers, it will still probably take 3 turns to build even with some overflow. So Chariot done T21. By my counting of tiles, we would see it T24 and it could attack our capitol on T27.
I don't think there's anything to be done about it. If Mjmd is crazy/lucky/coordinated enough to commit everything on a single-chariot rush, we just...die? Doing something defensive like researching Archery or building extra warriors sounds like a sure way to lose the game slowly instead of quickly. So I'd rather just be blissfully ignorant.

If Mjmd does chariotrush, I think it will be much slower, waiting for multiple chariots and probably building a second city. By that point of course we should have spears so it's fine.

[Ginger()]

the map yields slowly yields its secrets like an oyster against our scout
   
Our other neighbor is Bing's Zara Yacob of Mali. Eeuugh, odds were good that we'd run into CRE eventually and Skirmishers are one of the few things Praetorians can struggle against. At least aside from the crab there isn't much in the way of contested territory between us. Starting next to two Org is making early CoL look even more tempting for Gandhi, hopefully a couple courthouses will prevent us from getting fully swamped in EP. Next turn Mjmd and I get graphs on each other, we've both continued to dump EP into each other, and as his scout is fully mapping out my territory, he's unlikely to meet someone else to stack them on.
This might have triggered Lazteuq's PB60 PTSD  
The main attraction to CoL though is unlocking Caste. However Oracle and Pyramids are mutually exclusive IMO*, so that needs to be decided as soon as our sims finish up to Pottery tech. Can always just hard tech CoL if Oracle fails I guess. *Vanrober got both in PB61, but that was with fewer and greener players competing. 

My theory for the map is a toroidal with two sort of strips of land with island sprinkled in between (something looking like this %% ). We are exactly 12 tiles away from our neighbors' capitals in direct line N-S. I propose the two strips as a way of fitting 9 people if they're being lined up like that.