[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Yeah, I guess the dtay toppling in a 33 player game is the best we've got. He really drew the short straw in that game after an amazing opening.

Turn 262



We opened by meeting Boldly Going Nowhere as expected. He's played an interesting opening. He was the only person not to settle on T0 for one. He followed that up by not whipping the first 5 turns, then whipping 3 times, and no whips since then. He's also Spiritual (Asoka/Aztecs) We see now that he's in Serfdom, so it seems like he started in Serfdom, swapped to Slavery for 5 turns, and then back to Serfdom. I asked him for Open Borders so that we can pass through (also since we aren't crazy about map swapping for the short term), but I wouldn't be surprised if he says no. In that case, we'll backtrack a little and head south of Dreylin I guess. Doing so would let us meet ReallyEvilMuffin I believe.

* 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.

For reference, here's exactly where Pindicator is:



So he is our neighbor, but due to the fact that we apparently didn't settle towards each other, we've got quite a bit of breathing room there.



We do need to decide what we want to do with this Explorer. We could fogbust around our potential city site to prevent a barb city from spawning on the wrong tile. Overall we'd be pretty happy with a barb city saving us some hammers, but if a city spawned on the wrong tile and have strong defenses, that could be a pretty nasty headache.

Alternatively, we could do a bit of an Explorer swap over here.



Our eastern Explorer is on the Galleon now. We could drop this Explorer on mainland to the east, then return the Galleon and have it pick our our northern Explorer and have him take care of the island. I'm leaning towards the former, but they're both options.



First watermill complete.



BGN is the lone owner of a size 7 city, and we'll join him end of this turn. He seems to also be going vertical in his cities.



It turns out that leaving Bureau AND ignoring your best two commerce resources do bad things to your GNP . I think it'll be worth it with time.

[darrelljs]

This thread is like old school RB, where its hard to keep up due to the volume of info...and that's a good thing .

Darrell

[Sullla]

Yeah, I think we're both enjoying the chance to try a different setting and experience new Civ gameplay. Thanks again to Brick for this great concept. Seems like we're getting a lot of readers too, which is always nice.

Agree with your scouting idea, let's go meet pindicator with the eastern scout and explore the island with the western one. Hopefully we can keep the galleon hidden for the time being.

Demos are not as bad as I was fearing, actually. This might be an idiotic opening for all we know, but it's been fun to play. One other fun consideration: if Dreylin doesn't take Taj Mahal this turn, we have a decent chance of claiming it ourselves.

[scooter]

Yeah, I'm definitely having a lot of fun with this game, and that always translates into better reporting. I really don't understand why it's taken 33 PB games for an FFA advanced era start, and why it's taken 27 PB games since the PB6 game for any of them to take place in an advanced era, but I'm glad we finally did it. Hopefully the game delivers on its potential.

* 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.

I didn't comment on this yet, but I'm really interested to see how this plays out. Looks like we're going to get another early wide vs tall game. Given how quickly cities contribute, I think this could work pretty well for REM. I think he pretty much has to play it like this if he's Imperialistic. I bet we'll see him try to dump some overflow into another settler so that once he gets back up to sz 6 he can do another triple-whip to get out another one. He might very well get to 5 cities before we get to 4 if he's aggressive about it. Anyway, all that to say, out of our opponents that we've gotten visiblity on so far, I like his game the best. Whether he can make it pay off or not is TBD, but he's definitely someone to watch.

Agree with your scouting idea, let's go meet pindicator with the eastern scout and explore the island with the western one. Hopefully we can keep the galleon hidden for the time being.

Sounds good. I'll try to drop it back on the mainland in a way that lets the Galleon slip away unseen.

Demos are not as bad as I was fearing, actually. This might be an idiotic opening for all we know, but it's been fun to play. One other fun consideration: if Dreylin doesn't take Taj Mahal this turn, we have a decent chance of claiming it ourselves.

The Dreylin/Taj thing crossed my mind briefly. I would happily take Taj and delay Steam Power slightly if he decides not to, but I've just been assuming that he will.

I'm not worried about the GNP figure for the record. We know the trade-off - we're giving up a relatively small number of beakers (akin to delaying Steam Power by about 1-2T) to get a settler out sooner. I think that's absolutely worth it. The Nationhood/Bureau thing is debatable of course (I still think it's the right choice), but if it results in us snagging an early barb city and saving on settler costs, we're going to look like geniuses.

[Kurumi]

Obligatory post by a lurker complaining about lack of any sign of incoming bloodshed.

I think the Galleon build was an amazing choice. Is there any punish for going greedy for spots i.e. settling away from your core to get better spots/make sure you get border cities? It seems like it should be easy enough to get a good garrison to protect from any half-baked aggression, bar someone going cavalry. On the point of Cavalry, do you see any merit in getting one Mounted unit to become a Texas Ranger of Borders?

[scooter]

Obligatory post by a lurker complaining about lack of any sign of incoming bloodshed.

Patience, patience. It's only been 12 turns . I'm sure there will be plenty of combat before this thing's done. I was thinking a little bit today about this setup... and if it wasn't for the rifle -> machine gun swap done for everyone, it would actually be sort of appealing to try to surprise Gaspar (or Dreylin) by sea right now and try to double our land early. I bet it would actually be pretty easy, especially if pinch rifles were drafted. I'm thinking this is exactly why were were all given a machine gun. As-is I think it's still a viable play (especially for Pindicator), but it requires betting your entire game on it. I'm not too interested in doing that for this game.

I think the Galleon build was an amazing choice. Is there any punish for going greedy for spots i.e. settling away from your core to get better spots/make sure you get border cities? It seems like it should be easy enough to get a good garrison to protect from any half-baked aggression, bar someone going cavalry. On the point of Cavalry, do you see any merit in getting one Mounted unit to become a Texas Ranger of Borders?

I'm not totally following your last question. So to speak more generally... I don't think Cavs are going to be super useful on this map. Part of that is definitely because they'll obsolete quickly. I don't really think there will be any serious fighting pre-infantry, and by then Cavs are pretty worthless for anything other than maybe flanking away Cannons. If this were a Ren start, I think we'd see a lot more Cav usage. I also think aggression in this game will be very water-centric. I'm not too concerned about an opponent trudging a big stack across land to attack us, but I am concerned about someone boating an exposed coastal city from out of the fog.

[Kurumi]

I meant a single unit used for the sake of choking an opponent. I am not sure how feasible is this, but you might delay the settlements (huge thing for late start), steal workers, kill settlers or maybe even clear a city. I think people are going to be very farmer gambit-y because of the huge pay-off presented. But then, I might be undervaluing Riflemen!

[Sullla]

I don't want to speak for scooter, but I don't think early aggression is in the card for us this game. While we might be able to slow down or cripple one opponent, that starting machine gun will make it almost impossible to get a quick kill, and without the ability to finish someone off, I don't see the point. For example, let's say that we could trade away our three drafted rifles to take Noble/Gaspar's exposed coastal city of Richard Nixon:



OK great, we've crippled one of our neighbors, very nice. But then what? We can't keep the city, there's no way we could hold it at the end of over-water supply lines and the city being right next to their capital. And how much does razing a city like that actually help us? We've sunk a good chunk of precious early game resources into hamstringing one team... but there are five other teams out there, several of whom will equally benefit from Noble/Gaspar being weakened, without investing any resources into the effort. I've written this a couple of times before, and it bears repeating: early war is almost never worth the effort in Civ4. Only if you can get a quick and easy kill of an entire civilization, or if you can secure a huge strategic objective (land/resources/etc.) at minimal cost to yourself. On a Toroidal setup like this, we have neighbors on four different sides. Hurting one of them just doesn't help us all that much... not to mention, making a permanent enemy who will spend the rest of the game trying to spike our wheels. I don't like that call.

Pitboss 30 Spoiler:

2metraninja and OT4E may have done a good job of ruining the game of about four other teams with their insane Viking act, but they certainly aren't going to win themselves, are they? Still researching Calendar tech while the game leader is grabbing Liberalism = entertaining but losing strategy.

By the way, scooter is correct about cavalry units on Renaissance starts. (And when this game is done, Realms Beyond *REALLY* needs to do a Free for All Renny or Medieval game!) Cavs completely dominate in the Renaissance era, and there's essentially nothing that can stand up to them. But Industrial era is a bit different, and while I think we will see cavs in this game, machine guns and infantry just come along too soon for them to truly shine. I expect this game will be decided by tanks, navy, and air power. Scooter's also right about naval power being absolutely crucial. No one should be walking land units around if it can be avoided - too slow! Use City Raider tanks directly off the boats; if you can't control the seas, it's almost impossible to defend your cities from being boated in this era. At least we get cheap drydocks from Aggressive trait; I expect that to be a useful bonus in this game.

In non-military news, I'm really jealous of Dreylin's Spiritual/Philosophical + Khmer combo. I think I wrote before the game that I thought that was the best pure combo available, and it wasn't worth picking only because we'd have to win a dice roll with other teams to get it. But we could have played the identical start we're doing now and been so much further ahead with that setup! Start with the unique building barays, which means +1 food in every city, forever. That's extremely nice to start, and then pairing that with Spiritual trait makes for an even better combo. We could have used Philosophical trait to get the same early Great Engineer, turn that into Taj Mahal, use the Golden Age to get a second Great Engineer out of Telegraph (Philosophical + Pacifism + Golden Age = 300% GPP generation) to lightbulb Steam Power, followed by a third Great Scientist out of Cotton Gin for the Scientific Method lightbulb. Plus the Golden Age commerce pushes us to Steam Power / levees faster while the production gets us our first settler sooner. All the benefits of what we're doing now, only with a faster and more explosive start. I'm kicking myself for not being able to play that setup right now - argh!

Fortunately, Dreylin's not playing this quite as well as I think he could. He was sitting in Universal Suffrage doing... something for some time. Looks like he spent about 75 gold cash-rushing a library in the capital last turn (?) I don't really understand that decision. I mean I get it, he finishes the library while saving gold, then rushes Taj Mahal this turn and has the library there for extra research in the Golden Age. It makes sense. But if I'm spending gold in UniSuff, it's going into workers or work boats or settlers, something like that. Not a library! I don't want to knock Dreylin too much, he's a talented player and he could very well end up beating us here. I just want that combo for myself, and I think it could likely be played a little more strongly.

Hopefully we'll get another turn roll before the end of tonight.

[scooter]

I'm not quite as cold as Sullla on the idea of aggression (though totally agreed on uselessness of merely maiming someone for no value to ourselves), but I still do agree 100% that it's not right for us right now at all. If I had known from T0 that Gaspar specifically was on our capital's water and easily reachable, it may have changed things a little bit... Could have probably grouped together enough fast enough to totally conquest him and tried to play with 6 cities early and see if we could break the game open that way... But no way we could have known that. In fact I explicitly guessed that was not the case. By the time we could get the numbers together, it would likely be too late and it would definitely be way too risky. It wouldn't be a guaranteed win either because it would delay us in settling all the other very high quality spots nearby that would all be far easier to improve/manage. It's fun to imagine though.

By the way, scooter is correct about cavalry units on Renaissance starts. (And when this game is done, Realms Beyond *REALLY* needs to do a Free for All Renny or Medieval game!)

I think there's a very good chance of this happening. I just hope Brick can hold off on launching it until this game is done so I can play in that one too.

In non-military news, I'm really jealous of Dreylin's Spiritual/Philosophical + Khmer combo. I think I wrote before the game that I thought that was the best pure combo available, and it wasn't worth picking only because we'd have to win a dice roll with other teams to get it. But we could have played the identical start we're doing now and been so much further ahead with that setup! Start with the unique building barays, which means +1 food in every city, forever. That's extremely nice to start, and then pairing that with Spiritual trait makes for an even better combo. We could have used Philosophical trait to get the same early Great Engineer, turn that into Taj Mahal, use the Golden Age to get a second Great Engineer out of Telegraph (Philosophical + Pacifism + Golden Age = 300% GPP generation) to lightbulb Steam Power, followed by a third Great Scientist out of Cotton Gin for the Scientific Method lightbulb. Plus the Golden Age commerce pushes us to Steam Power / levees faster while the production gets us our first settler sooner. All the benefits of what we're doing now, only with a faster and more explosive start. I'm kicking myself for not being able to play that setup right now - argh!

FWIW if I had known only one person would rank Gandhi 1st, I would have ranked him 1st so fast. I really wonder if nobody else rated him so highly or if everyone outguessed themselves like we did and bumped him down as a result. I'm still very happy with what we've got, though. Our opening plan seems very solid to me, and the combo of cheap drydocks for strong ships + free C1 on rifles/infantry will make it far easier for us to take advantage of a lagging neighbor. Considering all 3 of the neighbors we've seen so far are doing odd things, I like our chances.


I will say about this game's turn pace - it hasn't been blazing, but it's at least rolled at pretty much the same time every night give or take an hour or two, and we've yet to miss a turn since the timer scaled down. I don't think this game will ever accelerate beyond 1T/day because the turns are just way more involved right now than they are even 80T into an ancient game, not to mention the lack of familiarity. 1T/day is pretty great on a game that probably will end before summer does.

[scooter]

Turn just rolled. Scoreboard suggests Dreylin did take the Taj. Logging in now.