[SPOILERS] Stonehenge First: scooter's thread

[scooter]

Well, that was actually pretty funny. Certainly not a subtle as last time, but hey, I laughed.

Yeah, I'm not sure I like these quite as much as the last one, but they were fun to write. Glad you enjoyed them.

[Mardoc]

Well, that was actually pretty funny. Certainly not a subtle as last time, but hey, I laughed.

Ditto. A little more on the caricature end this time, but still prompted some involuntary laughter.

Still get a chuckle out of "novice: ok, done, I'll e-mail you his first 35 turns"

[scooter]

Okay, so I've been thinking a bit on strategy for this game. As I said, I still believe Pyramids is THE wonder to have. On top of that, I think I probably have a better shot at landing it than the guy with IND. Maybe that sounds crazy, but really, SPI + OR + Fast Workers + Stone is faster than IND + stone IMO. So if I wanted to race AT or whoever to Pyramids, I would like my chances.

However, I also don't want to invest heavily and miss or invest TOO much and sign myself up for death a la V1 of this game. So there's another route I could go that carries considerably less risk: Oracle -> MC -> Forge -> Engineer. I don't think this is as solid as heading straight for Pyramids, but the upside is if I get the GE and Pyramids falls too soon..... well it's not hard to put a GE to use. So a good compromise seems to be to just aim for Oracle instead. The other benefit here is I can focus my early cities on really good locations rather than settling the meh stone location. So just do that, right? Well... There are problems.

1) I'm likely to not be the only person wanting Oracle. It would fit quite nicely for AT actually with Sumeria. I also would have to do this without Marble because I'm not particularly interested in settling for the marble location early.

2) The big one: COMMODORE.


Time to elaborate on #2. This is the reason I think Commodore was crazy not to just take Rome and be done with it. Fine, whatever, he played Rome recently and Greece sounded fun. Yippee? I just can't relate with that, pick the skull crushing civ and go for the win. Anyways, my point is, Commodore's traits are freaking Agg/Cre. That's absolutely garbage traits for this game unless you kill somebody. Surely he has to know that, he has a (mediocore but extant) ancient UU that benefits from Agg, soo... I mean, Commodore's a smart person, so surely he can put 2 and 2 together and start planning who he wants to execute.

I actually think that is a scenario that's doomed to fail, meaning whoever he attacks will also be out of the game, but Commodore will not benefit enough from the attack. UNLESS... the person he attacks builds a shiny wonder for him like, oh I don't know, the Pyramids. Especially if that person had a WORKER for a UU, right?

So is it worth it for me to risk Commodore Angry Bird'ing me? I really don't know. That's what I'm trying to solve right now. One upside of going for Oracle is that if Mids falls before I can get my engineer, I could always use the Engineer to bulb a super early Machinery and go mess somebody up with Crossbows. On top of that, that would give me completely immunity from Greece. As I said, I believe the two people who do not incur Commodore's kamikaze efforts are the two favorites to win this game. I'd really like to be one of those two. I'd also really like the Pyramids which is the BEST THING EVER for Gandhi. So yeah, not sure what to do here - I'm torn. That's what I'm currently trying to process at the moment.

As for actual game content, I've been taking screenshots, so I'll dump some later tonight. It's not particularly exciting though. I'm not being very aggressive in scouting because, who cares really, I have the WBSave and I know what everything looks like. I'm going to try to get visibility on Pin's capital because I can easily, but other than that I'm pretty much just guarding my perimeter.

[SevenSpirits]

Loved the previews. The first one at least wasn't very realistic though. Novice is more polite, Mackoti misspells things in much stranger ways than you can hope to imitate, and I would have talked about completely different things.

[Mardoc]

I would have talked about completely different things.

Such as?

[scooter]

Loved the previews. The first one at least wasn't very realistic though. Novice is more polite, Mackoti misspells things in much stranger ways than you can hope to imitate, and I would have talked about completely different things.

Yeah I agree - I put that one first because I thought it was by far the weakest one. I really only had two concepts that I liked (an Oledavy "...and I was like" post with pictures/gifs and a Gaspar/NH chat), but I needed 3 previews. I had a couple loose ideas, but I was running out of distinctive personalities to imitate. I know Novice more from Werewolf than Civ anyways, hence the werewolf-related joke (my favorite part of that preview anyways). I have noticed Mackoti very consistently spells organized as "organizat" or something close to that - always with a "z" and a "t" - and I find it hilarious because it's remarkably consistent, so that was the primary thing I wanted to mimic. I had no real idea what to do for you, but I felt for completeness sake I needed all 3 of you. I probably should have just had you talking about wonder targets constantly or chaining 25 bulbs together or something just to exaggerate on things you're more known for. I poked through a couple of your threads looking for things you consistently focused on in previews but didn't notice an immediate trend, so I was at a loss as to what to make you say. Yes, I do RESEARCH for these things . Gaspar's "this is probably going to be my swan song" line was direct out of his PBEM29 thread for instance which may have been obvious-ish.

But yeah, these were considerably less subtle than the PBEM36 previews, but those were set up to sound real-ish for Commodore/Krill and then ambush you as fabricated when you got to Locke. Problem is it would be obviously fake this time since I've done this before, so I threw subtlety out the window and just went for goofy caricatures. It was fun to write, but definitely less focused than the originals. Glad some of you enjoyed them.

[SevenSpirits]

Such as?

1) Synergy. Creative + Maya is good for Ball Courts, though there is the price of having a Mysticism start with Creative which is redundant. This map looks happy-heavy so I don't think the result is so great, and I wouldn't pick Maya here.

2) "Kind" of trait: I like having one trait that helps expansion speed and one trait that helps economy (simplistic explanation: your total output is #citizens * productivity per citizen; you ideally want to raise both factors equally). CRE + ORG satisfies this. HOWEVER, it's also worth noting that both of these traits give per city benefits and generally encourage empires with many cities (and I would say that CRE does so slightly more than EXP, and ORG does so more than FIN/PHI/SPI/IND). This doesn't seem like the right plan for such a small map.

All that said, I didn't follow the original 34 that closely, so my read on the map and on what traits will be good is just armchair speculation.

[Bigger]

Loved the previews. The first one at least wasn't very realistic though. Novice is more polite, Mackoti misspells things in much stranger ways than you can hope to imitate, and I would have talked about completely different things.

also it included way more words than novice would actually use. Otherwise, great previews .

[NobleHelium]

Those were pretty funny, but not as good as the first ones. Above all they were not as convincing, but I assume you didn't actually think you'd fool anyone this time since it's been done before.

I use very little capitalization in chat and almost no periods. I also almost never say "in my opinion" because it's redundant - I only use it to express uncertainty or occasionally humility. Well, I actually use it sarcastically more often than both those cases.

[scooter]

Shockingly, the spot I had tabbed out on T0 looks pretty good .



There's another spot just north of the capital that is also really great. Not sure which I'm going with just yet. Playing defensive with Commodore on T4:



He backed away. Southern situation on T6:



AT's warrior poking around and being generally obnoxious. T8 I kill a wolf on the inter-turn, but this ends up being significant.



The reason this is bad is because of 1.5 health and an incoming warrior. Also, notice the timing being off for Bronze Working. When I tested this, apparently an AI contact for known tech bonus or a difficulty setting or something skewed things so that BW ended on the same turn. So this delays a chop by 1T - kind of obnoxious. Anyways, I decided to try and salvage that turn by moving onto the forested hill where I don't get my FW bonus and getting that out of the way now, but yeah, that was a pain. Should have gone the fishing route. Anyways, my first blood:



Unfortunately, here's what Pindicator is hinting at:



Sounds like he killed that warrior. I hope he at least got hurt pretty badly? I can finish that warrior by swapping to max hammers, so I'm ok. But this is obnoxious. Plus AT may be joining the party. Kinda hoping they fight each other and not me..? Hah. Got vision on Pindicator's city:



LAME CAPITAL NAME.