[SPOILERS] Novice and SevenSpirits play Suleiman of Korea

[Serdoa]

I don't think that is true Commodore. Not too long ago nobody cared about the Pyramids because cottage economy is pure win. Then in several games we saw mackoti and other strong players get the Pyramids. And suddenly Pyramids are the new "I-win"-button. But you have to factor in that many games featured opponents which were vastly inferior in skill to the Pyramids-builders. When I played in PBEM10 I was a pretty bad player (still not good, but anyway). I got the Pyramids. I still didn't win. Because I fell back extremly in terms of land-grabbing and had to claw my way to some more land. That doesn't happen to novice and Seven because a) they are better players and b) their opponents don't even try to counter what they do but just wait till it is too late. And that is making imo much more difference then the Pyramids. Thats also why I don't think that this game is boring now or already decided. mackoti and also Lewwyn will surely put up more of a fight.

[spacemanmf]

Nearly everything can have such a distorting effect so where would you stop with removing things? What happened here was
a) great skill in CD and acting accordingly with the information. The correctly guessing that the race for the Great Lighthouse ould be lost and switching to the Oracle was a move not many would have done here.
b) Oracling MC and using it to pop a GE was also great skill in utilising of PHI. For me this is also highlighting the great civ-skills of SevenVices

And IMO the game is far from decided.

Many PBEMs are played with restrictions on leaders and civs, so why not wonders. I'm not saying it should be the norm, but there's nothing wrong with variants, even if this particular variant might result in more uniform behaviour. I carefully used words such as "can", "some" and "maybe".

I agree part of the skill is managing to land the right wonders for the right maps/scenarios under competition. But removing the wonders would arguably mean more reliance on pure civ-playing skills.

And I'm certainly not saying that this game is over. It's still very early days. (And I'm unspoiled outside this thread so I've no idea how the other teams are doing.) The comments in this thread merely prompted memory of those thoughts.

[SevenSpirits]

I think neither Pyramids nor Financial are as good as you say. I'm pretty sure I prefer EXP to FIN, and it's hard for wonders to be broken as people will just race/compete for them harder and sacrifice more to get them.

What's happening is that the groupthink is that FIN/cottages are the best, so everyone does that. This automatically increases the popularity of both FIN and cottages regardless of merit, and then when someone plays intelligently and doesn't necessarily follow the groupthink, they do well.

Now add on top of that the fact that we ban FIN in almost all games now. That makes cottages worse. It's really not surprising that a bunch of people blindly going cottages regardless of conditions will lose to people who choose a conditions-appropriate strategy using wonders that other people ignore.

[novice]

Is this the mid-game discussion thread?

That's good, keep it up. I have nothing to report from turn 54 anyway except we spent it in anarchy revolting to Representation.

[Commodore]

Is this the mid-game discussion thread?

That's good, keep it up. I have nothing to report from turn 54 anyway except we spent it in anarchy revolting to Representation.

Nah, it's the post-game. In other news, though, having gotten the Pyramids, what's the plan now?

[SevenSpirits]

* We want Great Library, National Epic and Oxford in Attach Mimes.
* I would like to get Mausoleum (and then get Taj via Liberalism) but Mackoti loves it, so I'm afraid we don't have much of a chance. I'll get back to C&D when we get closer to GL/Mausoleum in tech, so that if we get another engineer next we can use it wisely.
* In support of the above goals we should claim a source of marble, probably the one towards Mackoti which we've already scouted.
* We will try for a nice mix of working specs, Colossus coast, and food/production in order to catch back up in tech while building some carefully selected infrastructure buildings and continuing expansion.

[regoarrarr]

like getting invaded by a gazillion knights or neglecting some unusual victory condition. And we have three strong opponents.

Or all the other players declaring war on you and killing your first GP?

I do like some of Seven's thoughts about the fact that FIN is (usually) banned.

[SevenSpirits]

A bit of C&D:

* 2 opponents have Math. I'm assuming Mackoti and Gnob.
* No one has any classical techs other than Monotheism (Lewwyn), Writing (all three), or Math.

[SevenSpirits]

Let's re-offer the 10t peace treaty to NobleGaspar next turn. If their bowmen went for Lewwyn, they moved into his sight last turn anyway, so no use being sneaky for his sake. And if they accept it they would be delaying any potential attack on us by at least 4 turns, so they clearly would not be coming for us and we can breathe easy.

[novice]

An exploring Korean warrior gazes from The Great Lighthouse towards Mackoti's gold mine outpost and across to the rapidly growing Korean empire.

The central marble island has two clams and will be settled on t61 by a settler from Dominate It.

The happy cap with furs hooked up is now 9 in our top five cities (10 in capital).