(December 14th, 2015, 09:57)Alhazard Wrote: I would like to see screenshots for every city and unit counts. Thank you.
Sure I guess. I already posted my unit counts in my last report, but I guess you want to see F5 rather than statistics. I usually just scroll past when people do a city dump, but if you're interested then I'll be happy to oblige. I'll do a mini-report for T102 before my foreign report then.
News:
Haram AND Fennbandit throw GAs, switching into OR and Caste and their religions. I feel like the GA for Fennbandit is premature; they're underdeveloped. I also don't understand why they wasted 450 beakers teching Monarchy for some reason. Calendar is about the same price and better in every way for them, right?
Unit Counts:
Decided to get 1 more worker on the island, for 17 total; I'm just stretched too thin there right now, wading through all that jungle.
And your city dump, in order of settling. No comment on these, other than to say I let out an Anakin-esque NOOOOOOOOOOOoooo upon seeing MW was unhealthy; forgot to road one of our corns. So, it will be 1T slower getting to size 14.
89 pop this turn, FWIW. Should easily clear 100pop for the GA.
Demos and Counts:
Demos:
City counts:
19: Us (T98)
15: Dreylin (T101), Haram (T101), Fennbandit (T102)
14: TBS (T102)
11: Jowy (T98), Borsche (T100)
9: Tsargon (T96)
5: Scipio (T80)
Whip Counts:
The Blues Brothers: 72 pop total; 22 doublepop whips, 28 singlepop whips
TBS: 70 pop total; 6 triplepop whips, 20 doublepop whips, 13 singlepop whips
Fennbandit: 37 pop total; 4 triplepop whips, 7 doublepop whip, 11 singlepop whip
Haram: 36 pop total; 5 triplepop whip, 7 doublepop whips, 7 singlepop whip
Dreylin: 35 pop total; 2 triplepop whip, 6 doublepop whip, 17 singlepop whip
Jowy: 31 pop total; 4 triplepop whip, 5 doublepop whip, 9 singlepop whips
Borsche: 22 pop total; 1 triplepop whip, 5 doublepop whip, 9 singlepop whips
Tsargon: 14 pop total; 5 doublepop whip, 4 singlepop whip
Scipio: 0 pop total
Players are ordered within-tier, but position within-tier is pretty close, I feel. What I mean to say is, I feel like Haram, our, and TBS's chances to win this game are pretty closely clumped together, while TBS has a much better chance than Dreylin. Make sense?
Next, lets look at an updated MS Paint World Map:
Areas in medium-grey is land I haven't explored yet, and thus colored territory in these areas represent my guess of how borders fell out, based on city timings. Hatched white areas are land that is still unsettled/unclaimed.
My conclusion from this map is that, once the dust has settled, I dont think we'll end up way ahead of Haram, Dreylin, or Fennbandit in terms of total land claimed or self-settled city count. So, knock a feather out of my hat. However, I do feel like we've claimed a few very strategically important spots, and of course getting cities down quicker leads to a population advantage.
Before we get to player-by-player thoughts, I'll say (for the tldr crowd) that my overall impression of how this game will play out is that important events will revolve around the weakest person on the map rather than the strongest. That is to say, it won't be about "What will contender X do next?" nor even "What will contender X do about contender Y and contender Z?" but rather "What will contenders X and Y do regarding lunchmeat Z?"
Thus, the next big story isn't really this recent slew of Golden Ages (including our upcoming one, TBS's presumed upcoming one, etc), but rather "How will TBS, Haram, and Wetbandit handle the dogpiling of Scipio?" After that it will be about Tsargon, and then probably Jowy or Borsche, etc. I think this narrative will continue for about the next 50-60 turns or so, because all wars on this map will be naval by nature (even against our supposed "land" neighbors, due to logistics) and I really can't see a top-5er successfully navally invading a top-5er before Frigates. A galley-based invasion would require a lot of effort for very little gains and result in dragging down both sides of the conflict. So, the name of the game is gonna be PROXY WARS, or, in other words, "PB29: Krill vs BGN from PB18, the book of the movie."
Ok, now let's get to player-by-player. All first-to bonii and Great Person births so far are accounted for, I believe, except for the owner of the Confucian holy city.
Haram - Qin Shi Haung of Sumeria (Ind/Pro/Vulture/Ziggurat)
Wonders: Stonehenge, Oracle, Colossus, MoM, Buddhist Holy City, Buddhist Shrine, Moai Statues Great People: 2 Great Prophets (most recent born T102) Civ/Trait power remaining: fairly significant
Haram is doing spectacularly. He's the score leader and IMHO the game-leader too. 15 cities, most with borders popped - we're dead even with Haram on land area despite having 4 additional cities! I bet he's got at least 1 more spot up his sleeve. Dreylin and Fennbandit have 15 cities now too, but Haram was at 14 for quite awhile and thus his cities are better developed - city-count isn't everything. Haram's also built 3 of the top-class wonders on this map, plus the Oracle, plus a spectacular early Moai, the game's sole shrine, and a crushing MFG lead due to early half-priced Forges. He just started his first MoM Golden Age and his graphs are looking quite intimidating.
The wonders Haram has landed are 3 of the 6 best pre-Ren wonders on this map, I think. He really chose his path well. The MoM, of course, needs no introduction, as the game's best wonder. About half of the games on this site see a non-contender ruining their civ to get this sucker, and the truly scary thing here is that Haram clearly has not. This is the situation where the MoM shines. His first MoM GA was well-timed, closely after the wonder's completion, he's got what appears to be tech parity (perhaps even a tech lead), and is quite competitively under-REXed. Next, Stonehenge. Stonehenge was amazing on this map; we'll have built about 10 monuments overall, which means SH payed for itself almost 4 times over for Haram so far, not even counting the pair of prophets it helped create nor the fact that his border-pops were faster than mine, coming 10T after city founding rather than needing chops or what-not. Finally, the Colossus. To get an idea of how good this wonder is for him, lets look at Haram's Size 10 Colossus/Moai city. It's currently working, I assume, 8 of 9 water tiles, meaning he gets +16cpt from the wonder. That's basically equivalent to all the bonus commerce we get from all our hamlets and villages combined! And, all of that is in one city, meaning its quite easy to amplifiy with markets/libraries. So, pretty fucking spectacular.
Going forward, what I would do if I were him would be to a.) keep the Mali at arms length, as we're both big enough that no easy progress could be made unless we get embroiled elsewhere, b.) contest TBS and Fennbandit for Scipio, and c.) somehow protect Tsargon from Dreylin and the Mali. If Haram can get to the modern era with tech-parity and an equal-sized empire as his best rival, I think he wins by virtue of late-game Pro's overwhelming power. GPP will also be important to him, as he'll want to keep the MoM GAs rolling, put down an academy (I guarentee you he switches his capital from his current size-7 hammer-pump garbage one; I mean, it'll only cost him 80 hammers so why not?), and finally throw a couple of GS bulbs on the Chemistry path for his all-important super tech. I figure that's, what, like 10 Great People by about T200? Quite a lot. Thus I'd expect him to veer towards Literature to pick up his NE ASAP, even if TBS has signaled that he has all the important Aesthetic-line wonders (and possibly even Music) on lock by finishing the Parthenon.
The Blues Brothers - Victoria of Mali (Fin/Imp/Mint/Skirmisher)
Wonders: None (although Moai is almost there!) Great People: None (Great Scientist due to be born T104, GA either 104 or 105 based on Bureau timing) Civ/Trait power remaining: significant
The Blues Bros are at 19 cities, a crushing CY lead, and a parity economy that will soon blast past everyone else like a rocket. Fabulous! We have no fancy first-to bonuses to show for ourselves, but considering that our "main" trait is only starting to wake up, our position is about as good as I could reasonably have hoped. I'd have loved to have the Mids, for early cash rushing, or even THG or TGW, but actually competing for those wouldn't have been worth it.
At any rate, in 20 turns from now I expect that we'll have a completely insane economic edge, and so the question will become "what the hell do we do with that?" I believe we have two real choices: either chase one of Lib/Economics/Taj with plans to invade someone with Ren-era units in 40-45 turns, or invade Tsargon's mainland with Knigs in 20-25 turns. It's too early too decide one or the other right now; what Dreylin and Borsche do regarding Tsargon will be the biggest deciding factor. One thing for sure is that we don't want to let those two split him without taking anything for ourselves, so our hand might be forced here. How TBS/Haram contest Scipio's mainland will also be a factor; I'd love to be able to get over there and run interference on them both, but right now that's only possible if we control most of Tsargon's current territory. If we had gotten just one additional city on Haram's island, we could secretly fort our way through, but alas... at least we do have Chinook, without which it would be much more difficult to attack to our south. It was unlucky that barb city spawned at all, considering we were about to send a settler down there, but we were lucky that we were able to capture it without interference, whew.
At any rate, we don't have to worry about any of this too soon, I think. I think the focus of our GA should still be building, broadly, important infrastructure in our cities - forges, markets, libraries, barracks, courthouses, and wharves - so that we're in a better position to Do Thangs later. We don't need all of those in every city, but it'd be nice to have about 14-15 cities with the basics of granary+forge+CH+barracks by T122 (350 hammers of infra) with 5 or 6 additional markets, libraries, and wharves, each, sprinkled around on top of that. And, of course, 19 granaries in 19 cities is assumed... that should be done by T110 at the very latest. A few of the weaker cities will need to be just granary+barracks, and some granary+forge+barracks. Global power is rising and we can't putz around in full builder mode forever. At any rate, considering we have many hammers to go in front of us... we're just gonna have to keep hitting the whip hard for awhile yet, I guess.
Our current planned tech path is be CoL (finishes end of next turn), Civil Service, Compass, Construction, Calendar, and Machinery, by around T120ish. The order of Compass/Construction/Calendar is a not set in stone. Grabbing Polytheism at some point, for a couple of Monasteries in our big commerce cities, isn't a bad idea either.
TBS - Bismarck of Japan (Exp/Ind/Samurai/Shale Plant)
Wonders: Pyramids, The Hanging Gardens, The Great Wall, The Parthenon, Temple of Artemis, and 99% sure that he has a Moai, based on score, even though I haven't actually seen it. Great People: 1 Great Engineer T92ish (used on the Parthenon perhaps?) Civ/Trait power remaining: very little
If another player was in this spot - a city behind, Bismarck of Japan, beaten to the best wonders and instead built "bad" wonders, apparent blood-feud with a neighbor - I would count him out. However, this is TBS, and if anyone knows how to dig himself out of a hole it is him. I mean hell, look at all the bullshit he had to deal with in the ancient/classical/medieval eras of PB18, with another junk civ, and yet still became a game leader by the Ren era there.
So, what is he doing? Well, he's still competitive with population it seems, using Exp to build very tall cities, has presumably a competetive pre-GA MFG to Haram, and he's scored a bunch of wonders revolving around GPP - Parthenon, ToA, Mids for Rep. I presume we'll also see TGL fall any turn now. I think that his plan is that since his island got ruined, and thus he can't compete with the other leaders on land, he will burst a bunch of GP to create a timing rush - maybe 6 or 7 GP, I'm figuring like 2 GAs plus a couple each of merchant missions and artist bombs - to quickly capitalize on his one remaining advantage in this game, weak neighbors. That is, I think he's about to completely clobber Scipio very soon (hence his 100k power advantage), probably with Swords and/or HA, galleys, and a trireme or two, and then wheel around and clobber Jowy (with a lower possibility of Borsche) with some sort of more advanced unit, probably Knigs or Samurai. The world's first-ever Samurai rush, lmfao... and I bet it will work!
If all goes as planned for him, he'll end up with about 30 nicely developed cities by the Ren era with a good position to mess with any of Me, Haram, Fennbandit, or Dreylin. That's what he needs to do and so that's what I think he's gonna do. What need to keep a watchful eye on Jowy and protect him if we need to. (or dogpile him if we don't, heh)
Dreylin - Charlemange of Rome (Imp/Pro/Forum/Praetorian)
Wonders: The Great Lighthouse Great People: 1 Great Merchant T101 (I think this is him? GLH was around T51ish so that would make sense?) Civ/Trait power remaining: Significant
Dreylin is doing prety well this game, but I'm not amazed by his performance... I think he should be doing better with that combo. Like, he's got 15 cities, tieing him for 2nd place, a high MFG, and decent CY. So, that's all pretty good. But... only 15 cities despite cheap settlers, workers, and workboats? This map wanted you to spam all of those things, so he should have been able to make more than anybody. How did he end up falling behind? I've thought about this a bit... one thing I've noticed is that even though he's whipping pretty decently recently, he whipped very little in the first 75 turns or so. Thus, I speculate that his Sailing beeline greatly delayed Pottery, and thus late Granaries put him behind the expected growth curve? I'm really not sure.
Still, perhaps the Great Lighthouse was worth it. It's probably generated about a billion commerce for him and his first GP. He was second to Currency and his economy has looked very healthy to me... I wouldn't be surprised if the Confucian holy city was somewhere in his borders.
Dreylin's next obvious play would be to head towards construction and dismantle Tsargon with Praetorians and Catapults. Tsargon is very weak, and, based on what I can see of his borders, settled a very stupid border city on the banana between him and Dreylin that is just begging to be captured. (see Tsargon's section) However, I haven't seen any spikes in Dreylin's power that would indicate a military buildup. However, his MFG is quite good, possibly due to an early MC plus a few Pro tiles, and he's been whipping up a relative storm. It's possible he's just hiding stuff in the queue, but who knows. Dreylin also has a fairly weak northern neighbor in Jowy, who has committed himself to his own northern border with TBS. Based on Jowy's city count, I don't expect that he has more than 1 or 2 cities on his own island, and thus Dreylin has the opportunity to completely bully him off of it. So, what will he do? I'm sneaking over an over-land scout via Tsargon to try to get some more info.
Fennbandit - Wang Kong of England (Fin/Pro/StockExchange/Redcoat)
Wonders: Jewish Holy City, surprisingly o_0 Great People: 1 Great Scientist (a few turns ago, I wasnt sure who but it must be them) used for a Golden Age Civ/Trait power remaining: Tons
I've been exploring their land recently; here's a screenshot:
These guys are doing ok, but, like Dreylin, I feel like could be doing better. They've got a competitive city count, and are, along with Jowy, the game's presumed tech leaders based on being a close second to Currency despite being the Judiasm founders. However, it appears their population is quite low overall, and their low whip-count (and Pro's tendency to be chop-happy early) means that their infrastructure is likely very poor. I've noticed Fenn playing more of the turns than wetbandit, which is unsurprising since Wetbandit has a big civ to manage in PB18 but... it is a mark against them. wetbandit is the much more skilled and experienced player of the pair.
I honestly don't understand what's with their tech path. Why bother founding Judiasm only to just sit on it for 40ish turns? Why bother teching Monarchy at all? I feel like if you're gonna focus on economy early (and they definitely did, from the number of villages I'm seeing in their land) then you need to target Big techs and not putz around on the religious tree, because otherwise you're gonna end up under-developed compared to your rivals.
England's still got a few major things going for them, however. First of all, they're Scipio's southern neighbor and thus are in a position to essentially claim all of his island. It is almost unfair how easy they have it there... it should be trivial to just push him off, as if they were school bullies on a playground. They could easily top out at 20+ self-settled cities 20 turns after we settled our last. Next, they have a shitload of trait/civ bonuses remaining. Half-priced Stock Exchanges, Redcoats, Fin cottages and coast, and Pro super-workshops... there's so much for these guys to look forward to. I still don't like their trait-combo due to its anti-synergistic nature, but the fact remains that they still have it in their pocket. The question then becomes, however, will this special stuff come in time to win the game for them? This isn't an RtR game, so I'm not so sure. We'll have to see what they do when TBS presumably comes a-knocking on Scipio's mainland.
Jowy - Hannibal of India (Fin/Cha/Mausoleum/Fast Worker)
Wonders: Hindu Holy City Great People: None Civ/Trait power remaining: a decent amount
I've explored Jowy quite well, although the info might be a bit dated.
A very weird thing is that he ignored both the corn/gold spot AND the 2cow/fish spot on his mainland for a very long time.
He's bordering, on his cardinal directions, us, TBS, Fennbandit, and Dreylin. I don't see what he can do except wait for one of us to make a mistake. His one apparent opening is a possible invasion path through Borsche's island but that seems super difficult with TBS and I right there.
Regarding his performance so far, Jowy's strong point this game is his economy. He was first to many of the key classical techs and his income still seems comparable to other leaders, so I'm guessing he's up 2-3 classical techs compared to us. He's made quite good use of his Fin trait... lots of villages in his land. OTOH, I feel like he's made poor use of Cha, however, and on a map that Cha would be weak on as it is. I think he needed to settle Pig/Sheep/Crab as his second city, grab a fast monument (or found Hindu there), and then whip that and his capital as often as he was able, 1 and 2 pop whips. This triple-pop whip thing he's been doing the last 20-25 turns is not the way to play Cha. His idea to invade the northern island wasn't a bad one, but he probably needed to be faster about it. It was also definitely a big gamble... looking back at T60ish, I'd have expected at least 4 players to be able to reflect a T75ish invasion (which is when it must have been), which puts his success odds at 50%. Two of the remaining four wouldn't require an invasion at all, as I'm pretty sure neither Scipio nor Tsargon have island cities at all at this point. Well, it is what it is.
Borsche - Julius of Vikings (Imp/Org/TradingPost/Berserker)
Wonders: None Great People: None Civ/Trait power remaining: significant
Borsche is behind. Honestly, I don't know what's going on with him. He was doing fine earlier... IIRC he was even first to 8 cities, but then he stalled out badly for reasons that are not apparent to me. It's possible that he's on tilt in this game, as well as his others, because of all the drama in our offsite badgame pitboss #4. (BGPB4) Which was epic, btw. Or, it's possible that he's just playing in too many games. I know for a fact that he didn't sim this game at all (yes, he let that slip to me recently when I was talking to him about sims for BGPB5; he said he hasn't simmed for any RB game ), nor has he for PB27 or PB28. This is despite simming extremely heavily and obsessively in our badgame pitbosses. Maybe he just cares about those a lot more? I dunno. *shrugs*
I'm also guessing that he over-chopped his land early; I know that is a bad habit of his but he can't ever seem to shake it, no matter how often I tell him that those old Sulla youtubes where he does that are no good. He's also barely used the whip and yet is far behind on pop, at least from what I can guesstimate from his crop yield. One guess is that he settled all 8 of his mainland cities and then took forever building a galley for off-shore? That would explain why he was stuck at 8 for awhile. Perhaps he crashed his economy that way too? His currency timing seemed similar to mine despite his smaller city count, so this seems like another a likely possibility... ours was kept afloat by a few crucially-timed fin hamlets, ICTRs, and the gems, so if he didn't have any of that stuff he would have a problem.
Borsche has recently switched into Monarchy, without a GA, which makes absolutely no fucking sense on this luxury rich map. In fact, that whole line is pretty worthless to him right now. Why not CoL or MC? I wish we had aggressively settled his island, as we could have probably gotten all of it. But, too late for that now, I think. I don't want to mess with him as that would make us quite over-extended and vulnerable elsewhere. Borsche was recently declared on by Tsargon, probably over Tsargon's island. This might induce Dreylin to dogpile on Tsargon earlier than he might otherwise be inclined, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to be prepared for this possibility. Our iron is hooked soon, so perahps we could pump a few swords out?
Tsargon - Willem of Greece (Fin/Cre/Odeon/Phalanx)
Wonders: None Great People: None Civ/Trait power remaining: moderate
What I can see of Tsargon's land so far:
My friend Tsargon is certainly on-tilt in PB27 and PB29 because of the insane blood-feud drama that he and Borsche are in the center of in BGPB4. He passed on signing up for BGPB5 as well as our FFH pitboss, so I know he's feeling down on civ right now. But, he's finally started whipping a ton in the past few turns, ever since he wardecced on Borsche, so perhaps he is re-invigorated.
Unfortunately, I don't see any chance for Tsargon to win this game. I'm not sure what happened to him early... he did indeed border Scipio, as I predicted, but there have been no wardecs between them, according to F4. At any rate, Tsargon is so far behind that he joins Scipio in the lunchmeat category. Sorry Tsargon. We probably need to invade him at some point out of necessity, although that does make me feel quite queasy because I don't want to be the nail in the coffin that sours him on civ pitboss forever. I am still hoping to see some alternative path that may lead to his salvation rather than his certain destruction at our own hands... but I still want to win this game too.
Scipio - Cyrus of Khmer (Imp/Cha/Baray/Ballista Elephant)
Wonders: None Great People: None Civ/Trait power remaining: a little
Scipio has 6 cities and hasn't posted in his thread since he made it. Yet, he still diligently playing his turns, and this is obviously not his first pitboss game, seeing how he knew how to rename his cities, units, and civ. Some people do the former-two in SP or ladder games (although its rare), but there'd be zero reason to know how to rename your civ via Game Details unless you were playing a pitboss.
So, I'm really confused as to what his deal is; my first theory was a Mack smurf, then I secretly thought he was a badgame smurf, but now my current theory is that a bunch of the FFH guys are doing another one of those PB succession games like they did with BarryLyndon in PB18. Blugh.
At any rate, his chances to win are negative infinity percent, and his presense in this game is only interesting in the context that TBS, Haram, and Fennbandit each have major opportunities to claim a big share of his land and thus will soon, I expect, be fighting a big proxy with each other in his land.
Any questions? I wrote this over a period of a few days, so I apologize if the text is a bit disjointed and stream-of-consciousnessy.
note: "Civ/Trait power remaining" means how much bonus I think remains on a player's picks. For example, Haram's Sumeria pick has very little remaining bonus to give, as CoL is becoming a common tech and the Vulture will soon become an irrelevant unit. OTOH, his Qin pick still has some good late-game potential because Productive can become insane with Chemistry, Caste, and State Property.
It takes an IQ somewhere around room temperature to figure out how to rename your civ, particularly if you see others do it in your pitboss login screen. Sometimes newbies are just newbies.
If only you and me and dead people know hex, then only deaf people know hex.
Quote:my current theory is that a bunch of the FFH guys are doing another one of those PB succession games like they did with BarryLyndon in PB18. Blugh.
I wish! That was a one-and-done event though. No way I could assemble another crew like that again. Plus it would have too much of an impact in a game with a normal amount of players.
So, it will be 1T slower getting to size 14.
), nor has he for PB27 or PB28. This is despite simming extremely heavily and obsessively in our badgame pitbosses. Maybe he just cares about those a lot more? I dunno. *shrugs*
