[SPOILERS] Small Wunders and Izzy of Inca: The fat lady sings

[MindyMcCready]

Yeah! First Blood!

No, I'm totally ok with offering peace. Like I said earlier, to raze 1 city says that we don't like the location of that city. To go after a second city is to say that we don't like Bacchus. And we shouldn't *say* that.

The Numidian Cavalary has been changed in RB Mod. I think that it's just a regular HA that starts with C1. Like you said the old Numidian cavalry meant that you were probably better off defending a city with archers and you could wipe out a mobile stack with regular HA. They're probably a little more threatening now, but the standard spears means that they have a counter.

Yeah, Ichabod is a little worrying. He's likely to take the low hanging Cheetah fruit, but it's still possible that he sends his units our way since he can afford to concentrate 80% of his units. We'd be hard pressed to defend unless we whipped every city down.

Just to verify -Ichabod has construction already, right? He's going to tear through Cheetah with elephants + cats. At least Cheetah's come alive a little bit. Our time as the regional power is pretty much over.

I see that Retep has continued to build up power. Add at least another HA to his stack.

[MindyMcCready]

Retep's power looks to be 182K.

Fast movers should look like 8 HA + 5 chariots and slow movers at 6 axe + 3 spears + 1 archer. He's becoming dangerous again.

If Retep attacks again I suspect that he won't bother with the forking of the capital & LT. With river + fort or high culture 1 spear ~= 3 HA so I suspect that Retep will not try that again. A straight strike on LT (no river, no fort 1 spear ~ 2 HA); a 1T strike on Barbiere; or forking Manon/Boheme is more likely for him.

So with that in mind, what's the plan with the settler? Only 3 contenders 3W of LT, 3N Turandot and NE of Stranger.


Pros/Cons
3W of LT:
-probably the most productive with wet wheat + plains hill.
-shared silver + denial value of silver to Retep. We don't want that silver helping him to support 6 more units and/or getting to construction.
-shuts down having HA running north of Turandot. Both those cities are fortresses so I'm not sure if this is a pro or a con.

3N of Turandot
-best city for food. Food + commerce
-close to cap for lower maintenance
-far from the front lines, but a vulnerability should Retep get north of us
-currently missing tech to make it productive

NE of Stranger
-3 strong tiles
-If Bacchus signs peace, we should be able to get culture soon after peace expires.
-Desert hill allows for strong visibility against Retep.
-Allows concentration of our army against either Ichabod, Retep probing our weakest spots and Bacchus.
-Vulnerable unless highly garrisonned but helps protect the vital cities of Manon and LaBoheme.

I'm pretty torn, and these 3 are all pretty close to my indifference curve. I'm displaying irrational preferences:
NE Stranger > 3N Turandot > 3W LT > NE Stranger

Guess if Bacchus makes peace then I'd slightly lean towards NE Stranger followed by 3N Turandot followed by 3W LT.

Anyway, have fun deciding. :LOL:

[WilliamLP]

I'm pretty torn, and these 3 are all pretty close to my indifference curve. I'm displaying irrational preferences:
NE Stranger > 3N Turandot > 3W LT > NE Stranger

I think I agree with your reasons. Settling the seafood city before fishing seems dubious. The Stranger site can be defended by a mass of spears which are pretty central anyway, and may be needed to defend against Bacchus or Ichabod too. If we need a lot of spears to the NW, they are too far away from the rest of the fronts to be useful elsewhere.

[WilliamLP]

Commodore got this guy:



And he was born in 1AD! It's a quite amazing bit of coincidence. (And, since it's Commodore, we can't rule out role-playing. )

Central city is dtay, the mysterious score leader! So it's possible to get a religious spread even when we haven't met him. I think the defogged tiles from Scooter are what enabled this? Since we don't need sailing or even contacts to get these spreads, the shrine might be even better than I thought!

Also note Retep's mounted stack headed toward Bacchus. Maybe he smells blood?

Bacchus accepted peace though. The settler finishes next turn. The audacious city plant is 1E of the oasis there, which I'm thinking we'll do.

The great person (probably Prophet) is due in 2 turns. Currency is due in 5 at 100%, with a 60-ish gold burn. But it can't be started until we know if the GP is a merchant - if it is we just grab it for free.




Ichabod passed us and Bacchus is ramping up. I'm thinking we're going to need to turn on the military pump again, with cats and more spears.

[flugauto]

The sad part is that "Stranger in a Strange Land" was probably my favourite book in high school. Sorry Michael Valentine Smith.

It is Valentine Michael Smith.

[WilliamLP]

The sad part is that "Stranger in a Strange Land" was probably my favourite book in high school. Sorry Michael Valentine Smith.

It is Valentine Michael Smith.

Ok, consider my apology to Mike to include mistaking his name order, as well as razing his city.

[WilliamLP]

An interesting turn.




Fintourist and Old Harry showed up with a scout through Ichabod's land, and offered this. The sad part is, it's definitely worth it, but I turned it down for now and just re-offered open borders straight up. (Maybe they could benefit from more overseas trade routes?)

If they don't take it... it might be worth just swallowing our pride and re-offering this - it's only 30 gold after all.




And, Fintourist just got Philosophy! They surely bulbed it, which would explain the Alphabet tech, even if it weren't an interesting idea to try and actually sell open borders. They have 13 cities.




And this also explains some of Ichabod's fantastic tech rate! He's had open borders with Fintourist all along, which is a very large boost of GNP just by the coincidence of starting next to someone with Alphabet.

I think this is an unintended imbalancing effect of RBMod, and it's no secret that I really dislike the switch-ups of open borders and maps anyway.

Check this out:




Retep is attacking Bacchus for reals! I'm getting some serious schadenfreude out of this!

The settler is on its way to the southwest site where the chariot is.




Ichabod's doing some serious ramping up.

[WilliamLP]

I've been thinking about whether I'd rather play my next game in RBMod or BtS. And what's really sad is that the sweet spot for me would be somewhere exactly in between, like RBMod lite.

The brilliant Sirian on another game: "Trimming the tall grass until there's no lawn left is not the best way to balance a game, although sometimes some of the grass does get too tall." RBMod does this: Praetorians just aren't good. The Carthage UU is no longer unique. The quechua is nerfed. Cataphracts aren't that good anymore. These things are all overpowered in BtS for their eras. But... that's the whole point! It makes the civs unique, and gives them a point in time to be feared.

Love it: The leader trait re-balance. Slavery nerf. Rebalancing workshops, whales, and other tiles. The minor buffs to weak unique buildings. Changing the tech curve to slow down after the renaissance. Addressing the things that we have to ban in BtS anyway: nukes, elephants, espionage, coastal blockade, corporations. Weaking GLH.

It's ok: Rebalancing hunting by unthematically putting pastures there. Nerfing flanking, castles. Changing Kublai Khan's traits (um, ok).

Hate it: Open borders at alphabet. Really early map trading makes distant scouting worthless. Barracks giving culture. Nerfing unique units to uniformity.

[Oxyphenbutazone]

I think the problem with a hypothetical RBMod Lite is that nobody would be able to agree on what features should be retained.

[WilliamLP]

Fintourist offered:




I grudgingly accepted this. It's 25 gold, and I'm pretty sure he's gaining from the deal, so he'd want to accept it free eventually. This, because our cities are more distant than Ichabods, and at the very least we have an additional overseas capital for him to connect to, which gets a bonus. But... we need the commerce badly, and 25 gold isn't really that much.

The great person is due:




We got the merchant at 13% odds. Interestingly he even fits our theme! I honestly don't know which was better, the merchant or the prophet. This gives us something we can really use: commerce right now with currency immediately! This puts us near 40% breakeven, and we'll get a lot of additional commerce next turn when the game calculates foreign trade routes, and juicy overseas ones no less.




Fintourist named his scout "lunch", and moved next to our chariot, contacting Bacchus. He double-moved it, and I was annoyed for a bit (and PMed him about it) since we should have had a chance to think about denying Bacchus a foreign trade connection, but I'm convinced he didn't mean to be sneaky and I don't think it's a big deal since attacking would have been a bad idea anyway. At any rate the lunch was not eaten.

Currency up means we can get Mono really quickly, and then we'll probably get Fishing which is a 1 turn tech. After that, it needs some thought. The big question is can we afford to go for techs like Code of Laws and Calendar before having longbows. Monarchy on the way to Feudalism does unlock the wines (and HR for happy caps) which is pretty nice. Alphabet isn't really needed now. HBR seems questionable since Ichabod will have elephants very soon.

We got graphs on Scooter:














Interestingly Ichabod is a little ahead in food and production.




Our demos are... strangely respectable.