RBP4 [SPOILERS] - Shaka of Zulu (sunrise089, regoarrarr, and friends)

[regoarrarr]

Only one mistake (well actually I think you linked to the wrong picture for the "meeting Moogle" shot) - you say you're EST but we all know you're really CST (maybe MST).

All right you and I are going to have to rumble here!!!

And that was the right shot for the meeting Moogle picture - his scout is there I just wanted to zoom out to give the lurkers a shot of our lands too.

In any case Moogle replied to us

Our border can indeed be found a few tiles north of where you spotted our Warrior, and it is good to finally meet our neighbor to the west (in fact, Cicero was trained specifically to find you guys, so I'm guessing his mission was succesful somewhat faster than expected :-) ).

On behalf of my people, I would like to send you friendly greetings. This address is where I can be reached pretty much 24/7, but if you prefer to communicate via chat I'm generally available during evenings on CET (GMT +1). This may make setting up sessions outside of the weekend rather tricky, but it should be possible at least.

Thank you for offering to get us in touch with Locke's scout, but we already came across him some time ago so that will not be needed. We cannot claim to have met the numbers that Ioan and Mackoti have (their starting location does appear to be a nexus of sorts), but we know our neighbors at least. :-) Adlain of Arabia can be found to the far south of us for example and depending where you'd like to go that might be your best bet to meet someone else in this direction.

As for the map, I would be very interested in comparing theories at some point. It does appear a Lakes script was used (although it was definitely modified), but there's a number of quirks that still raise uncertainties. With the weekend near, this could be done through chat or email, as preferred.

[regoarrarr]

I have to say, after I checked CivStats to see that luddite had a 16 point score (aka likely wonder) increase this turn, I was not amused. There goes the Great Lighthouse . I did also note the additional 12 point increase after he logged in. That was throwing me for a bit - what could that be? Maybe he got a tech trade? But nobody has alphabet! Usually a mid-turn score increase indicates settling a new city. But 12 points would be 6 cities. Could he have queued up that many settlers, not wanting to settle them all until he got GLH since it would cost him maintenance? Who would DO that??! (not to mention where would he have gotten 6 settlers by now )

Then, like a bolt of lightning, it hit me! The Oracle! And the mid-turn score increase was him picking his free tech.

Indeed, luddite has completed The Oracle



So that's some good news for us - while it's certainly possible that he's trying for TGL in his 2nd city, that's a lot of hammers that he wasn't spending on workers to chop it out, and a lot of commerce that he wasn't spending on Sailing and Masonry.

Less good news is that someone has already circumnavigated That was ... fast? And I thought we were fairly competitive in that but obviously not even close.

[regoarrarr]

Also as you can see, one chop came in at Vine - next we'll move SE and chop the 2nd and last forest - GLH in 5. Crossing my fingers

And the corn farm finished at Reading so I swapped our worker over to it. That dropped ETA on wheel by 1t (due in 5)

[regoarrarr]

And after living for years in the Sahara Desert of contacts, we met WarriorKnight in the south

Looks like we've met in the Pitboss game. I'm not quite sure what your official team address with sunrise is (I quickly scanned through the tech thread and couldn't find it), so hopefully this will do. If you do have one we should probably talk through that.

Probably not much else to say right now other than hi. As the two civs at the bottom of the scoreboard, we should probably work together to try and catch up.

I'll send him off a reply a bit later

[regoarrarr]

Email to WK

Greetings from the wonderful world of Last-place-ia!

Not much else to say? Who do you think you're dealing with?!?! Don't you read my threads? :-)

As for contact email addresses, this one will do, at least for now. You can also reach sunrise089 at his username at this same domain name, but he's not quite as talkative. Well, he's talkative, but just not on as regularly. I'm limited to exactly HOW many bad things I can say about him since I post all these emails in our spoiler thread ;-)

You can reach us on Google Talk with the same screen names also. We are both in EST (GMT -0500).

So to lend some creedence to the thought that (at least SOMETIMES) I can post things of substance rather than just spam, here's a few of my thoughts / questions.

* I know I'd love to hear some details on what went on with the plako / War(lordDr)riorKnight war. We've heard only bits and pieces and would love to know what exactly went on. Is it true that you gave plako a city for peace?

* Do you know who circumnavigated? Seems awfully early

* If you want to meet SleepingMoogle / locke and I think Lord Parkin and Luddite, you'll want to move your scout 5 tiles north through the jungle and then head east near our borders. If you go north then west that is a dead end, but to the east, you'll meet Moogle shortly (he has a warrior nearby) and Locke is quite aways further to the east.

* Can you direct us to any other civs? That little fork to the east of our units looked to be a dead-end, is that true? What's to the west?

* How far away are you / plako from where we met?

* Okay that was a lot of questions. Sorry for the third degree interrogation - I am happy to share as much as I've asked - you just didn't give me much to go on as to what you wanted :-)

Emphasis mine and not sent in the email

[regoarrarr]

Reply off to Moogle

Hey SleepingMoogle,

Thanks for the reply. We actually just met WarriorKnight this turn also, so I can direct you that way. If you continue in a general westerly fashion you will see our borders in ~5 turns. Skirt the coast to the south and you'll go through the jungle to meet him (and I believe Plako). Further west and north from our city is unfortunately a dead-end (which is why we have met so few people as to now).

I was confused when you said Adlain was to your far south - did you mean south, and if so, is there a connection if we were to send our scouts to the south from our current position?

Seems like T55 was a busy turn for world events - I believe it was luddite who completed the Oracle, but I don't know who circumnavigated - do you? I thought that we were doing okay in that regard but we're still maybe 20+ turns from completing that (due to the dead-ends to our west)

Sounds like we should be available for chat in the late afternoons my time / evenings your time - I'm usually online and generally available while I'm at work, depending on what's going on - so that should work for the most part. Are you from Germany then?

So let's talk map - I'm sure you've noticed the existence of these "peak blocker" tiles that seem to be all over the map. We've found probably 4 or 5 of them - they're all over our west which is why we haven't met anybody yet. At first we thought that it was going to be completely made up of those blocker tiles - and there would be no land contact available at all, but obviously that is not the case. Do you think that the general area where our scouts met is kind of a central "nexus" of sorts? I was chatting off the cuff with Lord Parkin who said that he thought he had the map "solved" but we didn't really pursue that because we haven't met and so we weren't really "supposed to" talk so we were just kind of shooting the breeze about non-game topics.

Are there any openings to your north or is that area a dead-end like our north is? Or are you still uncovering things? One thing's for sure - I'm glad there's no barbs here or that would make all this land a giant pain. (Though I will confess my heart did skip one beat when I spotted Locke's "barbarian" warrior :-) ).

In any case, hopefully we'll get in touch later on today and keep the relationship of our two civs moving in a friendly direction!

[regoarrarr]

So from a relationship perspective, I thought I'd revisit my "initial" rankings of the civs, back in posts 12-14 of this thread, based on who we have met so far.

Mackoti and WarlordDr (now WarriorKnight) were 9th and 8th respectively (out of 9), and WK specifically is going to be hamstrung even further if it was true that he gave his 2nd city to plako.

Locke was 3rd and Moogle was 1st in those rankings.

So I think I lean towards trying to "ally" with Moogle - he's our neighbor but it's not like we're really going to be competing for land any time soon. He has good picks and showed himself to be at least competent in PBEM3 (I didn't follow it closely enough to know more than that). We'll want to have friendly relations with everyone else too, of course, at least for now.

Plus every time we see him (Louis) I can needle sunrise about how I wish that *we* were Louis

So going back to this old picture because I can't get into the game right now and even if I could, I'm certainly too lazy to go in, take a screenshot, upload it, and post it here



So I think we want to put another border city (certainly not our next one but before too terribly long) down here - I think 2S of the rice tile. Lot of jungle, but it has the rice for food, and also copper 4 tiles south of the rice. It's a 2 tile neck of land, and once borders expand there and at Reading, we're essentially insulated to anyone going in our back lands.

Surely we'll want to expand further south than that and further east than Reading if we CAN (and we may not even be able to get that rice / copper city depending on where WK / plako borders are), but that enough should give us enough land peacefully that we can be competitive.

[regoarrarr]

Reply from Locke

Oh hi glad to see you too. I log into game after you yesterday and not even see your unit cause it was under our warrior LOL. And I didnt check email until this morning. Sorry about that will respond now.

Yes we have barb color so we just call ourselves barbarians this game. T-Hawk give us list of barb cities in our thread and we use that for city names. Do you have naming theme? I see your city is named Reading. What is capital name? I get curious about these things cause they are fun.

OK yes we would definitely like to try and figure out more about map. So you say you have scouted far from west, interesting. We have scouted in circle around our start. We have Adlain to our west and Nakor to our east. No one seems to be north where we find you. Just a lot of jungle up there. Let me ask you this: do you start down at bottom of map? Because we start near southern edge and all other teams we meet so far start there too. We thought half teams would be at bottom and half teams at top, with jungle in middle. But so far find no one at top just jungle. So maybe - maybe- everyone start at bottom edge of map and there no one up in north. Just 10 teams in a big line at bottom. Cause if you go north to explore early then you would find no one cause there no one up there! I dont know if thats what happened but maybe? plako get circumnav bonus this turn so world must wrap around east west somewhere.

We are looking for Mackoti team for some time now so if you can give directions that would be great. If your warrior go south you find our capital (eventually). Your warrior is NE of Adlain you actually already go past him. Nakor is south and then east but you need OB to get there.

I hope this give you something to discuss. If you are far away as I think then we should be easy friends this game. :D

Locke

[DaveV]

Do you have naming theme?

Pick me! Pick me!

Cincinnati street names[SPOILER]Pretty easy guess for someone who lives within a mile of Reading Road

[/spoiler]

[regoarrarr]

Reply to Locke

Hi Locke!

I was glad to see your email, and doubly glad that it had a lot of good things in it to discuss! We do have a city naming theme but it's currently top secret and I wouldn't want to give the lurkers any hints :-). Our capital is named Vine, so if you can figure it out first, there MAY be a cookie in it for you ;-)

I do think that we should be pretty good friends since we are so far away. I'm not sure how or where the map wraps, but we may actually be closer if you go east than the other way around.

We do start at the top of the map (well not the very top, but definitely on the top half vs. the bottom). We just met SleepingMoogle the turn after you, and I believe (if I understood what he was saying) that he also started in the top half (somewhat to our east i.e. closer to you than us). Bummer about us missing Adlain - SleepingMoogle said that he was to his south (where you described) but we must have just missed him. We have another unit heading that way so hopefully we'll get him before too long.

That's bad news about plako getting the circumnav bonus. It's not like he needed any other help in this game! I believe (though I have not confirmed) that he and WarlordDr were in a big early war, and I believe that when WarriorKnight replaced him that he gave him (plako) a city for peace, so I think plako already has 4 cities (which you probably already know if you've got contact with him)

I'm kind of thinking that this "central" area where we met is kind of a "conflict" zone, with everyone's lands branching up and down from that. Does that make sense to you? Have you found anything that would disprove that? Have you seen the "peak blocker" tiles - where there appears to be a 1-2 tile narrow neck of land that connects 1 area to another, but it's blocked by a peak or two? We've seen 4 or 5 of those near us.

Anyway hope to hear from you soon!