[SPOILERS] By the Rivers of Babylon, FIN has no effect (on krovice)

[Krill]

T215 report: up to 2675bpt now. Joey cancelled the first loan repayment as expected, I reoffered him another 5000 gold loan at 19% interest. Doubt he'll take it but at least he can see that the offer is there at present.




Finished the Levee at Role Call. Can 1 turn Inf from this city now, but not quite 1 turn Marines. We will be able to 1 turn Arty, and we may be heading to Arty next because dtay just keeps on increasing his power and I'm getting paranoid. We could go Al for draftable Inf but that delays Destroyers, Artillery would allow us to defend cities fine with stack defense whilst destroyers blockaded every one of dtays cities.





I've started swapping a few cities over to cottages, because why not? If we had Emancipation I'd actually be using that as well, but I'm getting bored of building rifle after rifle every two turns; maybe if I only have to do it ever 5 turns it won't be so bad. FP has all relevant cottage infrastructure, the market and grocer aren't needed.





Only city that benefits from Caste for the specialist slots. After we get out this Artist we have 2 GA, 1GS and 1 GM and only need 3 of them for the next golden age. Probably going to work merchants for the gold as we have a 100% gold multiplier in this city but only 75% science multiplier.





No reason to post this but I always liked the productivity that seemingly naff city locations can reach.





Cos it's beautiful.





Same as with HS two pictures above, but MP is going to finish the observatory then the library whilst waiting to unlock destroyers. I can't really pressure BGN at the moment, he is 2 turning Combustion and so could likely start build destroyers in about 6 turns, whereas I'm at least 14 turns from them if the gold holds out.





I'm doubling up on the ironclads to defend the single tile approach to Plano from the sea, then I'm going to focus on building defenders for PE/WL which are the more important of hte three border cities with dtay-south. They are all large productive cities though, but Plano is going to be 2 turning destroyers.





The second cottage city. I kinda screwed up here, should have let it grow one more pop to round out at 20hpt base. Need to irrigate that last grassland and work that.





Almost there, just 2 more pop to grow and build a harbour and forge.





That dark green line at the bottom is Joey, not dtay. If dtay had managed to take over this entire continent for any reason (say, ruff and I we swapped places) he'd be making BGN look like an amoeba right now. Our continent is probably teh most productive one in the entire game, including that overgrown double island that BGN started on.





Our breakeven right now is around 60%.

[Krill]

The rule assumes dropouts are replaced and the game isn't strangled in the cradle.

At what point do games get too large and become liable to explode in startup? Incidentally, there's this odd gap in the numbering of the active PB games...

It's not about the numbers per se, it's about the people that join a game. A 5 player game with a couple of the people that have played on RB is going to die in the first 50 turns anyway and a 25 player game with others would be fine. If I could draw from the 75 or so people that have played on RB (even though some have disappeared) I could probably draw up a list to play a 25 player game that wouldn't collapse. We try to be open when we set up games though, that keeps the community healthy, but that sockpuppet shit was fucking poison.

Another issue is that the more people that are playing in a game, the greater the chance that one of them has an unexpected RL issue that means they need to drop the game, and we have never really put together a method of subbing into a game to keep it moving until LP/Gawdzak in this one.

This game is so slow because we've gone down to a 2 days per turn play rate even though we readily vouch that this rate normally kills games. The only reason I don't think it's happened yet is that the sheer number of players has created this inertia that we can't stop. Imagine that for every 10 turns we have yet to play, we have to add 3 weeks to the finishing time. If this game needs another 60 turns, then we would be playing it until mid August. 75 turns and we'd be lucky to get it finished by Thanksgiving.

If BGN wasn't being so dumb he could have had it finished by May though, which is another reason I'm pissed with him.

[Krill]

Don't worry, not defending you. The map is terrible and resource distribution sucks. That make you feel better?

Seriously though, I remember a lot of doubt initially that the game would ever get off the ground or survive the first 50 turns.

This map needed a number of things:

1. Slightly more space: some players like HAK and Jowy got crammed in, so more space needed adding to stop this from happening. Average of 150 tiles per player is enough, less than this and you end up in a PB15 deathmatch again.
   
   
2. Toroidal: stops players having a safe backline and gives more opportunities for territory acquisition. We've not attacked anyone this game because the only targets would could reach were taken by dtay before we had a single chance to move units out of our land to take a city.
   
   
3. Not be continents: there should be land bridges between the continents to make it a pangaea to enable said territorial acquisitions. Otherwise you end up having to wait until Astro in most cases to be able to take land and by that point players have a stupid number of units: we killed over 60 units from Ruff in 2 waves and look how easily we were pushed off that continent by a stack of 15 cossacks? We've reverted to a metagame that is over 5 years old: take over your own continent, then start eating others until you reach domination or enough land to win the space race. It's fucking atrocious.
   
   
4. 2 hammer starts: Seriously, why didn't we have a 2 hammer start? This is why we couldn't deal with dtay until Steel. Hell, you can ignore everything else, this is the single reason why we were never going to have much opportunity to stamp authority onto this game.
   
   
5. Balanced late game resources: Nuff said by everyone, nothing new here. I've made this screw up before.

The land size thing should have been calculated prior to generating the map dimensions. Torusworld is good just for making hte map size: 33 players *160 tiles = 5280 land tiles total.I'd expect roughly 30% more tiles to be water, so need 6864 tiles total, so you could generate a 108 tile wide by 68 tile tall map and have a leeway to add more water. Then change everything to oceans and start adding in the continents that you've generated on a separate map script and add the land connections, leaving enough space for the forts to connect the bodies of water. Like I said before the map was even made.

[BRickAstley]

Do I hear pangaea? Sounds like I need to get the mashed earth map ready for MP

[Krill]

There is a difference between a pangaea, what essentially is a filled donut, and a Torusworld map that has choke points from mountain ranges, lakes and interior bodies of water. You get very different playstyles due to the varying costs of defending different areas of the map and the costs to expand into them.

donuts you settle a city, you get that cities worth of land. Torus world, you settle a city, and that city may lock off another 2-3 cities worth of land.

[fluffyflyingpig]

The rule assumes dropouts are replaced and the game isn't strangled in the cradle.

At what point do games get too large and become liable to explode in startup? Incidentally, there's this odd gap in the numbering of the active PB games...

It's not about the numbers per se, it's about the people that join a game. A 5 player game with a couple of the people that have played on RB is going to die in the first 50 turns anyway and a 25 player game with others would be fine. If I could draw from the 75 or so people that have played on RB (even though some have disappeared) I could probably draw up a list to play a 25 player game that wouldn't collapse. We try to be open when we set up games though, that keeps the community healthy, but that sockpuppet shit was fucking poison.

Another issue is that the more people that are playing in a game, the greater the chance that one of them has an unexpected RL issue that means they need to drop the game, and we have never really put together a method of subbing into a game to keep it moving until LP/Gawdzak in this one.

This game is so slow because we've gone down to a 2 days per turn play rate even though we readily vouch that this rate normally kills games. The only reason I don't think it's happened yet is that the sheer number of players has created this inertia that we can't stop. Imagine that for every 10 turns we have yet to play, we have to add 3 weeks to the finishing time. If this game needs another 60 turns, then we would be playing it until mid August. 75 turns and we'd be lucky to get it finished by Thanksgiving.

If BGN wasn't being so dumb he could have had it finished by May though, which is another reason I'm pissed with him.

Good observations. I generally agree. But I note you didn't answer original my question. Did you think going in to this 33 person game with this mix of players that the game would make it to coal and oil?

Also, you certainly aren't helping BGN wrap things up by May.

[Krill]

I don't like it when players benefit form making stupid decisions, they deserve to be punished.

And yes, I did believe that this game would not die, I believed that it would play out until there was a front runner or a victory condition was met. I wouldn't have played in it otherwise. I thought that was obvious (and implied): why would I ever spend my time on something that I didn't think would actually work?

[Krill]

I think BGN is about to have a stroke. I think he needs replacing.

[Qgqqqqq]

Based on?

[Krill]

Concern for his health, mainly.