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

[regoarrarr]

Pick me! Pick me!

I forgot about you from PB1 where you talked about the "coveted Skyline Chili resource"

So you're close and probably close enough for the cookie but that's not COMPLETELY accurate

[regoarrarr]

Reply back from Locke

OK I have no idea what that means so I guess you can save that cookie LOL.

Oh so you are at top then? Then I guess map is like other idea we had, with 5 in top and 5 in bottom. It sound like you and Moogle start above jungle cause we are definitely south of jungle. And so are Adlain Nakor.

We also heard that plako was in early war with WarriorKnight. And it looks like plako win. plako does have 4 cities we contacted him a while ago. He is supposed to be east of Nakor but we not explored this yet. WarriorKnight supposed to be even further east of plako. We think 5 teams in south are us, Nakor, Adlain, plako, and WarriorKnight. But so far we only explore Adlain Nakor territory.

Central jungle does look like contact zone. We also see land branching up from south to jungle. And we seen blocking peaks too. Actually there are blocking peaks southeast of your warrior. You will have to come south to our land even if you dont want to LOL.

I like your messages. You actually write us back. Most teams send us nothing for weeks. So I really hope we can be friends in game. I will send you our best guess at map. Attach to this message. If this not fit with your stuff then let us know. Also if you have directions to Mackoti territory then it would help uis.

I;m not on Gchat but I check this email every turn. Good luck!
Locke

He also attached this map



Obviously "Our start" in the map is him (Locke). That jives with all the data that we have at least - meaning I don't know if this is true, but I don't think that there's anything that I can say for sure that makes this false.

[regoarrarr]

I'm digging all this "meeting people" stuff - it's really helping the post count fly!! Hopefully it's entertaining to the lurkers as well

Reply back to Locke

I'm totally telling sunrise that you like my messages :-). I just like to talk I guess. I got yelled at (well, not really *yelled at* but more it was used against me in a previous game) that someone didn't like reading my "carefully crafted" diplo-speak. But really that's just the way I talk - I don't spend tons of time carefully crafting all these messages - I just start typing and then hit send.

I like the map example that you sent. I can't confirm whether that is the case or not, but I definitely don't have any information that disagrees with it (if that makes sense). I also think that there are the peak blocking tiles between each civ's area. So like between you and Adlain, and you and Nakor, etc. The only thing that I might change (and I don't know for sure) is that I think maybe you should shift the top civs over 1 to the left? So us over plako, and the question marks over you and Nakor. Though it's certainly possible that the entries to "Centralia" don't perfectly line up from north to south.

As for Mackoti, I don't know where his land is - we met a scout of his all the way over near us, and that scout has since moved over to near the Plako / WarriorKnight area. I will write him a note to see if he has any other scouting units nearby that could find you.

How do you think the world wraps? You mentioned blocking peaks to the SE of our warrior, but do you know if we go straight east if we'll wrap around? It seems like we should, right?

Anyways, thanks again for the map drawing - that helps visualize things a lot!

[novice]

So you're close and probably close enough for the cookie but that's not COMPLETELY accurate

Streets along your daily commute then.

[regoarrarr]

Streets along your daily commute then.

Nope.

[novice]

Nope.

That's not how it goes. You're supposed to follow up with a hint.

[regoarrarr]

Okay two things that I divined while in the bathroom, which along with the shower and right before you go to sleep are the world's greatest idea incubators

Okay first thing - I think that we're not going to be able to be tight allies with Locke, due to him saying that he doesn't get on chat. It is unfortunate, but my past experience with these big PB games is that if everyone is chatting with everyone, if you're not chatting, then you're going to get left behind.

I think Speaker / Sullla mentioned this in PB2 - that they didn't really want to have real-time chats with the other players. And while it didn't really hurt them because they played far and above the best game there, not all of us are up to their status. You definitely saw them on the "outside" of everyone, though I'd say their reluctance to chat was not the only (and probably not the primary) reason.

In any case, I don't know what allies this far away are supposed to do anyways other than exchange pleasantries and kind of "work the rooms" behind the scenes. So in that case, I'm happy to do that. I guess this was a long way of saying "let's see how it goes with Locke", so I guess it was a pretty pointless post.

But hey, with me, you're used to that, right?

[regoarrarr]

That's not how it goes. You're supposed to follow up with a hint.

Hmm I'm not sure what I can say that wouldn't just give it away. I probably should just give it away anyways...

[regoarrarr]

Okay interrupting our "city naming scheme" sidebar, the second thing I thought of is that I finally figured out what the problem was with Locke's map. There was something about it that just wasn't sitting right with me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but then it came to me.

I don't think that "Centralia" world wraps. If you look at what we've discovered, there's nothing to our west. It's all peak blocking tiles. I think that explains why we haven't seen anything from our west.

So something like this



(Exact alignment of the northern / southern civs TBD). Also, if I wasn't lazy, I could probably go back through my conversation with Ioan because I think he indicated which of luddite / Lord Parkin was where.

I think this explains the interest from Krill and other lurkers about wondering how many contacts each civ has made (asking for screengrabs of the F4 screen for T50, etc.)

<begin total hypothetical making things up>
So when they came up with the map, they were worried about it being balanced as far as early contacts go. But the thought was that in a no tech trading game, that wasn't really as important, and would be balanced out by having less potential fronts in the later game (probably true). But still they wanted to track (for future map-making) the rate at which different civs accrued early contacts (perhaps to see if this type of map was suitable for a tech trading on game?).
<end total hypothetical making things up (well, returning you to your normal levels of making things up )>

You'll note that the mackoti team, who by all accounts is leading the "meeting folks" game, is right in the middle, right where you'd expect him.

So, how did plako circumnavigate? Well, you'll see that under the "regoarrarr map projection", he (like us) start at the far end of the map. So he'd be one of the 4 civs that really have a vested interest in exploring to the far reaches of the (land part of the) map. So you send one unit to scout your area, and the other one east through Centralia. Similar to what he did, but he must have gotten luckier - we went north first - if we had sent our initial scout through Centralia (where our Locke-meeting warrior is now), we probably would have been pretty close to circumnavigating by now.

[regoarrarr]

Hmm I'm not sure what I can say that wouldn't just give it away. I probably should just give it away anyways...

Okay DaveV was pretty much on the nose - it's (non highway) streets in Cincinnati. But I'm trying to think of it as *the* major streets of Cincinnati, in rough order of their importance.

My only rule for city naming schemes are that I have to be able to think of a new one without too much trouble and without looking them up. Of course we violated that in PB2 (Olympic host cities), but that's okay - because we were eliminated after the first 2 which I already knew . I probably could have gotten city #3 (St. Louis) without resorting to Wikipedia but after that we'd have been in trouble. Good thing I just randomly moved warriors out of cities there!!

So here's my list so far - DaveV or any other Queen City-ites feel free to chime in

* Vine
* Reading
* Montgomery
* Colerain
* Hamilton
* Columbia (Parkway)
* Beechmont
* Batavia (Pike)
* Paddock
* Kellogg
* Harrison
* Madison
* River
* Glenway
* Galbraith
* North Bend
* Princeton (Pike)
* Glendale Milford
* Kemper
* Tylersville
* Winton
* Kenwood

I tried to make the US and State routes first for the most part, but it was tricky for some of the ones where either the name changes several times (US 50) or nobody calls it that name (OH 32 = Batavia Pike). And I'm not sure about some of the cities that have what I'd call "dumber" names (Glendale Milford? )

Order subject to change later on, plus if we have more than 22 cities (and I think that's certainly a possibility if not likely) we'll have to keep going down the list!