[SPOILERS] - Gandhi of Mali - Krill

[Krill]

Well, thank god someone decided that war was a good idea for this game.

[Krill]

You know, Mali wasn't actually my first choice of civ. My first choice was China and to try to a CV win...never pop a single GS, just pop straight GA and bomb front cities. Now it looks like I'm going to have to do that anyway...

[Krill]

OK, so, why Gandhi of Mali?

Well, the answer is quite simple: the only traits I think are useful in a limited city game are CHM, SPI, PHI, and IND (specifically to grab the Pyramids). The early game expansion traits in IMP/EXP/CRE are useless as you only need to get 2 other cities up and running (though if we were told it was a low resource map I can see a point to EXP if you really try to make the MM work). ORG can just go to hell though, I value PRO higher than that PoS here. FIN doesn't help with expansions because that is limited, and it cannot apply to more than 63 tiles, probably not gonna give you than 55 commerce/turn, which is basically the same thing as 5 settled GS. Lizzie is probably the only good FIN civ.

That leaves AGG, CHM, IND, SPI and PHI. AGG really does need to be leveraged, and Cyneheard picked hte perfect civ to make that work, but otherwise, I think it isn't as needed as it's going to be hard to build enough units to go on the offensive late game without a dog pile. CHM makes sense, it's +6 happy in a game with limited early population, and settled GG are almost certain to occur. IND for Pyramids, as mentioned, but Scooters pick has a little extra to it that I'll explain later. SPI is always decent, especially as golden ages are nerfed into the ground, and PHI is generally considered the best OCC trait, and a 3CC is just an OCC variant.

Gandhi of Mali uses two of the decent traits, but Mali was just a straight forward answer to Rome, and only because of the starting archers getting upgraded. CG3 skirmishers with fort bonus, in a hill city and behind walls (not unreasonable if planting towards Rome) have strength 13.4, or 12.4 against cover preats. And they have free strikes. Even plain old CG1 Skirms are 8.0 or 7.0 against cover and are almost half the price of preats. Add in some axes and I'm not actually concerned about a rush from Cyneheard considering he can't plant his third city until after he has discovered IW. A choke would set me back but is by no means impossible to handle. Especially if I can throw a few early skirms at him to choke him and stop him easily hooking his iron.

Now to the snake pick:

Scooter made a good early choice of De Gaulle. He basically said that he is going for the Mids, and made IND a really bad pick for everyone else (they could have picked it but then they committed themselves to a race, leaving 2 other players to have a better trait pair). CHM as the supporting trait is really good because scooter has the choice of going for Henge, which a lot of us are potentially considering dropping into our second cities as good early culture defense, but could also give him a GP as his first GP (I hate these abbreviations sometimes). A GP isn't a great outcome, but it helps him with getting Mids with the extra production, and it will benefit from Rep, and the gold will come in useful eventually when we all have huge armies that we end up paying costs for. Plus there is the extra happiness.

I picked second for Gandhi. TBH this was a bit of a riskier pick, but I went through every leader in the game and I wasn't interested in any thing that wasn't PHI. I value the ability to generate the GP too much, because of hte flexibility it gives. Same reason I picked SPI, I want the ability to swap in and out of Pacifism, and Caste to throw out the GP I need, and back to Theo or OR as required. Because the margins are so small, that flexibility is really useful. I could have taken Alex, but would have left Rome open to someone else to like, like Cyenheard did. Lizzie could work, I suppose, but lacks that flexibility of SPI. Lincoln was actually my second choice, but I thought I'd gamble that Commodore isn't going to give us starts with little happiness around, because that will basically be incredibly slow We'd hit 3 cities by T50 and have nothing to build but huge armies and that's boring. I cold have picked Brennus and did consider it for 5 seconds, but I won't play him twice at the same time, even if PB5 is RB mod which plays out very different.

Then Dazed picked Brennus. What can I say, I think it wasn't a great pick because it lacks PHI, but after considering Cyneheard pick I'll take that back and reserve judgement. The biggest problem as I see it is that it'll be slow to get the GP out, but I suppose if he focuses on getting an Academy down and then just focuses on cottages it could actually work out a lot better than we realise considering the amount of whipping that could occur, and SPI will help him deal with that and not get stuck in bad civics. Could have done worse, I suppose.

Cyneheard then dropped "The Bomb" on us. AGG/PHI Rome. This was the point where the game went from an OCC variant to an AW variant. Cyneheard changed the metagame and is going to make us play this game out with a lot higher focus on units than economic growth, but with PHI he still has the ability to keep up in tech output quite reasonably. I only expect him to fall off when civic swaps become too much for him to deal with, and he lacks the flexibility to both keep us under his thumb and keep up with mine and scooters economic output. It's a really good pick IMO, and kudos has been given already about deciding to play a more aggressive game.

Dazed replied with Mongolia, which seems reasonably, highly promoted Keshiks are probably one of the better ways to control an approaching preat army in no mans land. And a Hunting start isn't that bad due to the starting archers.

I replied again with Mali. I've already explained why I chose them, but the other choices I considered were: Inca (anti archer UU to choke with, would still have been viable IMO, and a UB that doesn't suck even if not amazing). China (go for the culture win with the UB, and the UU still works against Preats really well, because I don't need to build cats which saves me really valuable hammers). Egypt wasn't an option, the UB is crap and the UU whilst strong isn't strong enough to fight preats straight up. I'd have to rush Cyneheard, and I hate being shoehorned into a single strategy, it is too easy to be counter. Maya would have worked, it makes a Construction beeline work better as the UB costs 53 hammers and gives +3 happiness, which is only 5 hammers costlier than 3 archers and Monarchy but the tech line is stronger. Actually, thinking about it, I think Maya would have been a stronger choice than Mali economically, but the UU is weaker (costlier, means C1+shock preats counter everything they come up against) and the techs are worse (start with Myst). So...I'm happy. Kinda. My UB does suck, which is something I usually focus on when picking civs.

scooter picked the Natives. Obviously, you can see that we are all paranoid about AGG Rome, if he is expecting to rely on CG2 archers and CG3 LB for defence. OTOH, 8XP LB are gonna make him a complete bastard to deal with...and it does support a Henge build. Dunno, I think I can see this working out.

[Commodore]

Your start, enjoy all the choices!



All the usual caveats; management reserves the right to change things, etc, etc, apply.

[Krill]

That land is a lot worse than I expected.

[Krill]

Also, you've nerfed player 1: they won't be able to move that southern archer, but the rest of us should be able to...

[Krill]

Fuck it, I'm going for culture victory if the land is this crap.

[Krill]

Also, please reconfirm: the starts are mirrored: that means all the tiles we can see are mirrored?

[Commodore]

Also, please reconfirm: the starts are mirrored: that means all the tiles we can see are mirrored?

All the tiles you can see are mirrored except for orientation (ie, your NE might be his SW). I'll be resetting archer movement points, etc, before it starts.

[Krill]

I just don't know what to say, but Commodore, this is a really bad map for a limited cities game. I honestly think you need to remake the map from the ground up, coastal maps are too broken for these types of games.