[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

To update the readers: Gaspar/Noble did not accept our map trade either. They haven't ended turn, so perhaps they'll re-propose after discussing.

Here's a question for discussion while we're waiting on other teams to play: what are your thoughts on offering one of these teams a Defensive Pact, scooter? Let's say that we get a map trade accepted from someone who isn't right on top of us, like Gaspar and Noble for example. Do you think they would interpret an offer of a Defensive Pact in the spirit we have in mind, which would essentially be "let's establish a pseuo-NAP and use that to pressure our other neighbors"? I think scooter is much better at reading other players than I am, so I'm curious if this is a ridiculous idea or might have some kind of merit. It would very much be in our interest to try and have some of relatively safe border instead of having to defend on every side at all points in time.

Idle thoughts while the turns have been a bit slow lately.

[picklepikkl]

What's your current map trade proposal to map trade acceptance ratio? The only people who've accepted are Dreylin and co?

[scooter]

What's your current map trade proposal to map trade acceptance ratio? The only people who've accepted are Dreylin and co?

Gaspar is playing his turn right now, so I guess we'll wait and see if they re-offer or not. But yeah, just Dreylin's said yes so far. I'm not sure if we're being treated differently from others, or if we're simply next to people who aren't too interested in handing out their maps.

Here's a question for discussion while we're waiting on other teams to play: what are your thoughts on offering one of these teams a Defensive Pact, scooter? Let's say that we get a map trade accepted from someone who isn't right on top of us, like Gaspar and Noble for example. Do you think they would interpret an offer of a Defensive Pact in the spirit we have in mind, which would essentially be "let's establish a pseuo-NAP and use that to pressure our other neighbors"? I think scooter is much better at reading other players than I am, so I'm curious if this is a ridiculous idea or might have some kind of merit. It would very much be in our interest to try and have some of relatively safe border instead of having to defend on every side at all points in time.

I don't know, I think a defensive pact wouldn't do a whole lot. At this stage, everyone wants to be friends with everyone, and it's not like they'd be under any illusion that we'd come running to their rescue if someone attacked them, so it really wouldn't be any better than those infamous "fish-for-fish" type deals you see occasionally in AI-diplo games. I think friends and enemies will unfold very organically here. Every player has got no fewer than 5 directions possible to settle (3ish by land, 2 islands). People we settle towards won't like us, and people we settle away from will be fine with us.

True dogpiles are incredibly hard to pull off in no-diplo (or AI-diplo in this case) games, so it's not really a fear of mine. Look at all the pitboss winners since we've switched to no-diplo - nearly all of them were leading or in a tie for the lead at the 100 turn mark. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen a dogpile topple a clear leader in AI diplo before. The biggest difference between full diplo and AI diplo is that AI diplo encourages the sharks to eat the minnows as fast as they can to build a big lead, while full diplo encourages the sharks to convince the minnows to help them take down the bigger sharks. So that's really why I enjoy AI-diplo - it allows you to be a little more aggressive with neighbors with less fear of retribution because they can't exactly spend hours chatting with someone else complaining about how mean you're being.

As an example, take PB19. Gaspar/Noble were attacked early by The Black Sword, who was playing a heavy expansion game. He wanted a key border city to secure his land, so he just took it. They weren't too happy about it, but they recognized they couldn't do much about it, and they peace'd up after losing the single city and coexisted just fine afterwards. I think most players in this game are pretty likely to react like that. Gaspar, Dreylin, Donovan, and ReallyEvilMuffin all strike me as players that aren't likely to hold grudges if they're given a reasonable out. Pindicator and BoldlyGoingNowhere do have histories of grudge wars. As always, it's best to totally kill someone rather than maim them and leave them with no goals other than make you bleed.

So for general foreign policy, I'd like to let our leader/civ combo do the talking. We are probably the second-worst team in the game to want to fight early (if not the worst), because aggressive boosts our units, and SPI lets us swap civics to draft/whip ourselves silly at a moment's notice. So I think ruling with the stick may be more effective than the carrot in a lot of cases. Like... what is Peter of India going to do if Montezuma settles a spot he wants? I think he's going to say "well okay, I guess that's just yours now" and go settle something else . Pindicator is really the only other player with early military abilities equal to ours, and we haven't met him yet. As long as we don't totally neglect military, I think the strongest contenders will naturally look elsewhere for potential conquests, and we should take advantage of that position to not be TOO generous so that our neighbors think twice about settling up on us.

If nobody is going to want to attack us early, the only real risk is that someone will attack us 75T from now because we're a threat to win... and at that point, no mountain of resource/map/pact trades from us will ever prevent that from happening.

So I'm not against defensive pacts... but I doubt they'll make any difference in the long run. I think players will be fairly rational here. If we're an attractive target (low military, lagging behind in expansion/tech), they'll kill us. If we're unattractive to attack (keeping pace with expansion/tech, being Montezuma), they'll look elsewhere. Typically in games I've played with a tight border (like the long Commodore "Canada" border in PB13), gradually demilitarizing borders, sharing resources, and splitting land fairly does a fine enough job of communicating friendship. If we want to think about friends/enemies, we should think about prioritizing which contested land we care about most, and which contested land we're okay with not prioritizing heavily. I think our friends/enemies will unfold pretty naturally from there. Once we've seen what's on this island, I think we'll have a really good idea of our settling priorities should be.

That's a very long-winded reply on my part, and I hope the thought process makes sense. Any thoughts or things you agree/disagree with? I'd like to hear what you think here.

[scooter]

ALSO. I just checked and Gaspar did re-offer maps. Screenshots coming shortly.

[scooter]

Map Bonanza

Before I get too into it, I've been watching Dreylin's treasury. He's still running 0% science (he just played his turn an hour or so ago), but during his turn he spent 84g rush-buying things. I think he may be planning to do quite a bit more rush-buying before getting into Rep. Anyway, to the maps.



Here's Gaspar's core. Very... interesting dotmap. Tiger Woods is a mile away from the other cities. I guess I can appreciate placing it in the middle of a huge forest. Here's a couple closer shots to show city development.





Here's a few shots to show Gaspar's land in relation to ours.





We won't really touch borders with him much by land, but honestly I mixed up how the Toroid would wrap in my head, and until I saw this it hadn't clicked with me that he's the person we'll be competing with for that northeast island. All the more reason to figure out what's on this island ASAP.



Gaspar also apparently got ReallyEvilMuffin's maps. I assume these aren't fully up-to-date, so we can't conclude a whole lot about the lack of tile improvements. He's very far away from us, which is probably a good thing - we won't have to compete for land against an IMP civ.



Finally, an obligatory flying camera shot to help make sense of the world wrap.

[Sullla]

More excellent posts. I appreciate hearing your thoughts on how the diplomacy in the game will likely shake out. I should probably point out that most of my experience in past Pitboss games came in the earlier period of Realms Beyond MP, when there was lots of talking and a very different metagame environment. At least we don't have to worry about anyone gifting away cities or thousands of gold to other teams, right? Heh. What you said makes sense to me, and it's likely a better idea than some kind of meaningless show gesture.

Now as for looking at other team starts... It seems that the corn/iron spot to our southeast was a very popular location. Donovan, Noble/Gaspar, and REM all went for that location. Let me discuss Noble/Gaspar first. They went for the plains hill plant, which makes a lot of sense for a non-Spiritual team at first glance. But that spot has some real weaknesses: the +1 production is a lot less relevant in a game where every city starts with 3 population (not 1 pop), plus a granary, plus access to powerful lategame tile improvements and civics. By planting their capital on that spot, they gave up access to the spices resource and they wound up with a lot of water tiles: 8 of them in all. Normally they wouldn't be able to build a levee there either, except that they are the Dutch and they can still build their Dike unique building. So that redeems what would otherwise be a subpar capital location.

The Richard Nixon corn/iron spot is pretty weak overall. It has two good tiles and that's basically it. 12 of its 20 tiles are water-based. Again, I understand that they're Financial Dutch and water tiles are a lot better for them, but I still don't especially like that plant. I feel that water tiles are inherently weaker than land tiles for these settings. Maybe they will prove me wrong, I dunno. The Tiger Woods location is ridiculously fertile, no doubt, but 6 tiles away from the capital is a bit odd. They haven't even begun a road up there, and it will take them a while to improve those tiles with non-Serfdom non-Fast Workers. Great long term investment to be sure, but a slow starter, even with a lot of forests to chop. They were also somewhat unlucky in getting the religion to pop in their much weaker coastal city instead of their land-based one. Note that Gaspar has no religion spread yet while all our cities are converted, plus as a non-Spiritual civ, they haven't swapped into their religion or adopted a Religious civic. This is one of those small advantages that we have which will hopefully add up over time.

REM, on the other hand, planted the same capital as we did. Same second city as well, and he landed the religious Holy City there as well. I'll have to log into the game to see what tiles he has improved via tile hovering. Another cool thing is that with visibility on REM's cities, I can track his builds via C&D mathing and get a good sense of whether he's building a settler. I'm not going to do that for every city every turn, but it's probably worth seeing if anyone is building a wonder or an early settler. (We can also see what buildings anyone completes via zooming in on the center tiles.) REM's third city is another corn/iron plant, but he managed to get sheep in borders as well by moving another tile east. That makes the location a lot stronger.

Overall, I'm glad that REM and pindicator are two of the teams furthest away from us. They are the ones most likely to wreck someone else's game, either through Imperialistic settler spam or Agg/Chm craziness. With our neighbors and our traits, I think we'll have a relatively peaceful early game. Hopefully we can develop for a while and see how things go from there.

[Sullla]

Oh, the obligatory One More Thing post: Now that we have a naval unit out, we might not want to trade maps again. I think it might be better to avoid giving that information away, and letting other teams sit in the dark for the time being. No reason to accelerate the naval race on the waters sooner than we have to either.

[scooter]

Overall, I'm glad that REM and pindicator are two of the teams furthest away from us. They are the ones most likely to wreck someone else's game, either through Imperialistic settler spam or Agg/Chm craziness. With our neighbors and our traits, I think we'll have a relatively peaceful early game. Hopefully we can develop for a while and see how things go from there.

Well, I've got some bad news. The only person whose spot we haven't found yet is Pindicator, and we also haven't scouted out our eastern neighbor (where Donovan -> us == us -> ??)... Process of elimination means that is Pindicator over there. So he is a neighbor of ours. We probably won't be settling up on him, that's for sure.

Oh, the obligatory One More Thing post: Now that we have a naval unit out, we might not want to trade maps again. I think it might be better to avoid giving that information away, and letting other teams sit in the dark for the time being. No reason to accelerate the naval race on the waters sooner than we have to either.

Been meaning to mention that, but kept forgetting. But yes, we may want to put a hold on map swaps for awhile now. We've got all the info we really need for now, and I agree on the value of exclusive knowledge of what the island contains.

[Sullla]

Early turn roll highlights:

* Dreylin lands a Great Engineer in his capital. Taj Mahal incoming next turn? Dreylin also built a library in his capital.

* REM has triple whipped his capital. That can only be a settler finishing there, and he's going to have a fourth city long before anyone else. The good news for us: I suspect that he chopped his forests at the capital to pull this off, and his capital has been knocked down to only 3 population. But it's still troubling for the rest of the field that he can turn a 3 pop whip into 200 production (3*30*2.25 = 202 shields) at the capital. Fortunately REM is quite far away from us, and the Imperialistic + Bureaucracy + whipping will be weaker and weaker the longer the game goes on. I mean, we'll be rocking 5 turn settlers ourselves in about 20 turns from now. If REM keeps whipping for settlers at his capital, he'll have the early lead but crash hard down the road. Hard to say how big of an advantage he'll get from the early fourth (and fifth?) cities, but probably significant.

* We can actually see pindicator's borders if you zoom out on the world map; he's over near BGN and REM. Fortunately not very close to us. Donovan, Dreylin, and Gaspar/Noble are our closest neighbors.

[Rowain]

True dogpiles are incredibly hard to pull off in no-diplo (or AI-diplo in this case) games, so it's not really a fear of mine. Look at all the pitboss winners since we've switched to no-diplo - nearly all of them were leading or in a tie for the lead at the 100 turn mark. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen a dogpile topple a clear leader in AI diplo before.

Maybe the OH + Krill + pindi stopping dtay in PB18 can count as that.