[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[scooter]

This game, courtesy of Epoxy:

[Sullla]

Looks like you inherited the first pick from Commodore. Montezuma of Germany redux, here we come!

(Okay, not really. I've got some thoughts to add tonight.)

[picklepikkl]

Curses, my attempt to stack the deck in favor of Commodore has backfired!

[scooter]

Later date edit: Game password = "caesar" with no quotation marks

Let's talk about plans a little bit here since I think I'll have a couple ded-lurkers - at least at the start. This will be a little more of a solo endeavor than 33 due to Sullla's drop in Civ-available time, but I think I've got at least 1-2 ded-lurkers to toss around early ideas. I mostly just need to get thoughts written down to start making sense of them.

The main reason I agreed to take over Commodore's spot is the #1 pick he scored via dice roll. I don't actually think #1 is really the best position in the snake here. #2 or maybe even #3 might be a bit better. That said, #1 lets me decide in advance exactly how I want to play this game, and that appeals to me a lot. I was pretty fatigued off the air/naval/rails slog in 33, so I want to make sure I'm not in a position where that type of thing will be necessary. I've pretty much decided I don't really want to play the long game here. I always do that. Besides, Mackoti is playing in this game. We all know how the long game will end in a game with him and Plako, so why play it?

My plan is pretty much win in under 100 turns or die trying. (I'm not going to win.) So I'm almost certainly going to take a military powerhouse and try to conquer someone early, or maybe I'll try the Ren version of the Gandhi stunt. Going into a game assuming you're going to rush is almost always a bad plan that fails, and I'm okay with that. I'm definitely going to do my best to win, but my goal is just to actively override my risk-averse nature and roll the dice early and often. The reality is I'm very unlikely to win a game with Mackoti and Plako, but a very fun game is entirely within reach here.

With that said, I see three choices that fit my criteria with the #1 pick.

1) France. Musketeers are amazing. Gunpowder is techable off the start. We start with a Forge + Merc specialist like we did in Industrial, which means free Engineer early. Of all things, that Engineer can lightbulb Gunpowder, which lets us slow-tech something else. Pair it with Best Imp Available at the end of the snake, and do your thing. It's not impossible that Genghis could fall to me here which would be amazing, but even without that there's plenty of other options.

2) Byzantium. Cataphracts exist. This was my first thought, but I'm actually leaning away from this now. My main concern is we're far enough into the tech tree where there's a host of counters easily available to straight Phracts. It seems weaker than the Musketeer/Knight stack. Plus the France play hasn't been attempted in RB games nearly as much as the Phracting, so let's have some variety. I'm open to being convinced otherwise. The big upside may be your ability to ignore the top of the tree for awhile and go heavy on naval techs to increase your military edge.

3) Gandhi. Purely for the novelty of it. Like Industrial, Gandhi gets to dictate the first-to bonus game and everyone else has to work around it. A lot of similar tricks to what Dreylin/OT4E employed in 33 are on the table here too in a slightly different manner. For example, Gandhi could get access to Cuirassers very quickly by winning the Taj race.

There are almost certainly stronger options available. Julius and Suleiman for example sound very powerful to me, but they require a more traditional long game which is the thing I'm specifically trying to avoid this time around. I'm very confident I could pick one of those and pull off yet another respectable podium finish, but as of right now I'm not really interested in that type of game. Maybe I'll change my mind between now and starting screenshots, and/or maybe someone can convince me of something else that sounds exciting.

The other appeal of taking France/Byz is I feel pretty confident I can still come away with a good leader with only 5 other players in this game. Here's a list of leaders that may be taken, and I'll rank them in rough likelihood of them being taken. Even if you eliminate 5 of these, you end up with workable options.

* Gandhi (spi/phi)
* Julius (imp/org)
* Suleiman (imp/phi)
* Genghis (imp/agg)
* Victoria (imp/fin)
* Asoka (spi/org)
* Montezuma (agg/spi)
* Cyrus (imp/chm)

Genghis would obviously be amazing to power-up the Musketeers, but I suspect someone will take him. Victoria is actually pretty good here. I still don't think cottages are a winner here (open to being convinced otherwise), but if the map is water-heavy like 33 was, coast becomes a pretty good tile early on which would let me skimp on workers a little bit.

That leads into my other thought: the tile improvements available here are significantly weaker than they were in Industrial. Basically, the workshop eco is further away here, but I think it's still too late for cottages. So with that in mind, heavy farming & whipping that converts into a workshop economy seems like the way to go. That's what I think opens up FIN coast as respectable where maybe it wasn't so much in 33.

One final note: I think IMP is slightly softened here relative to Industrial start with the lower settler cost, and SPI is slightly boosted relative to it due to certain civics not being available T0 like they were in Industrial. IMP is still better, but my gut feeling is the gap isn't quite as large. Interested in hearing any other thoughts on this.

---

There's a lot of other things to think about, but I'll end this post here and revisit this later.

[Cheater Hater]

I like the idea of France--one key is that it's resourceless, and if there aren't resources right at the start like in the industrial game (though they weren't nearly as necessary there), a Musketeer rush (bulbing Gunpowder with an Engineer) paired with researching Nationalism for drafting feels powerful when everyone else is fumbling around with expensive settlers looking for resources. If we wanted to go all-in, we could try for another AGG civ (even AGG/PRO if you're really crazy and want to mortgage everything on the Musketeer rush succeeding), as nothing effectively counters double-promotion Muskets.

[scooter]

I like the idea of France--one key is that it's resourceless, and if there aren't resources right at the start like in the industrial game (though they weren't nearly as necessary there), a Musketeer rush (bulbing Gunpowder with an Engineer) paired with researching Nationalism for drafting feels powerful when everyone else is fumbling around with expensive settlers looking for resources. If we wanted to go all-in, we could try for another AGG civ (even AGG/PRO if you're really crazy and want to mortgage everything on the Musketeer rush succeeding), as nothing effectively counters double-promotion Muskets.

My general feeling is that IMP is pretty crucial to making a Musketeer play stick. Need to save hammers on getting a couple early settlers out for one. That and getting yourself some extra land via warring is a little hollow unless you've got the ability to furiously fill in the land with settler spam.

[Sullla]

Let me provide some thoughts here about a Renny start in the abstract first, and then see how that fits with scooter's proposed gameplan in today's earlier post. There will be a lot of comparisons to Pitboss 33 since that's the closest gameplay setup we've had to this start.

I agree that having the first pick in a snake draft for these settings is probably not the best place to be, but it's really nice in terms of getting to decide what type of game to play. From a pure power perspective, I think that taking a leader first is the way to go, even with only six players and a lot of good choices available. Justinian (Spi/Imp) would be the best possible, which is banned for this game. Based on what we saw in the Industrial game, I think the next tier of power picks look like this:

Gandhi (Spi/Phi - Dreylin redux)
Julius Caesar (Imp/Org - yes, REM convinced me this is a very good pick!)
Suleiman (Imp/Phi)

And then I think there's a dropoff to the next tier of picks, in the Asoka (Spi/Org) and Victoria (Imp/Fin) range of leaders. So let's look more closely at those three leaders:

Suleiman (Imp/Phi): Both of these traits are very good. The problem is that they have anti-synergy with one another. Philosophical trait relies on having large enough cities to work specialists, which suggests a "tall" approach. Yes, I know that Philosophical trait can often do the opposite and get more out of the few specialists that the civ does run, but you get the idea. Imperialistic is the classic expansion "wide" trait. While this is a workable combo, it doesn't have the natural synergy that Gandhi (use Spiritual to access Pacifism civic on demand) or Caesar (spam cities and whip the cheap courthouses) have at their disposal. As a result, I value both of the other two leaders more highly.

Gandhi (Spi/Phi): Well, we pretty much know how to play this guy in a late era start! Dreylin and OT4E showed us how to do it in Pitboss 33, landing the Taj Mahal and snowballing from there. Taking Gandhi for this game would suggest doing the same thing in this game, using Caste System/Pacifism to pop a Great Artist for the Nationalism lightbulb, followed by a Great Engineer for the Taj Mahal itself. Then use the Golden Age for more lightbulbs / Golden Ages. Note that Representation civic is not enabled at the beginning of a Renny start, but Constitution is very reachable at only 2 techs away. Furthermore, Philosophical trait has a lot of value here, with the cheap universities coming almost immediately at Education, and Oxford University likely to be more useful than in an Industrial game. I think the State Property mass workshop spam is too far away from the beginning of this game to be able to ignore cottages completely. The capital, at least, would seem to want some cottages to me.

Anyway, Gandhi is a really good pick, and if you're looking to get more value out of Spiritual + do fun stuff with lightbulbs, this is the way to go.

Julius Caesar (Imp/Org): I think REM's pick would work really well for a Renny game like it did for the Industrial one. Imperialistic looks extremely strong again; in my test game, settlers cost 248 production for a Renaissance start. That's still a huge amount, and furthermore, cities only start with 2 population under these settings, not 3 pop. Furthermore, costs are only discounted by 90% for the late era, not 80% (so libraries are 81 production, catapults 45 production, etc.) That makes it harder to get the initial foodbox filled, with fewer population to work tiles at the start, and slower to get new cities up and running. So my rough sense is that settlers are almost as expensive here as they were in the Industrial game, and the triple forest chop into triple Imperialistic whip (size 6 -> size 3) remains by far the best way to expand. In fact, an Imperialistic 3 pop whip creates 157 production all on its own, which means you don't even need 3 forest chops for a settler; 2 forest chops will get you there pretty much all on their own. For all the trickery that Gandhi can do with specialists, I'm really wondering if Imperialistic settler spam is just better. It might very well be.

So Imperialistic still feels really good to me in this setup. One of the things that REM must have seen (and we didn't) is how well Organized synergizes with the trait. Cheap courthouses are exactly what Imperialistic needs to keep the economy humming along while expanding. (There's even a pretty good chance to grab a courthouse-based unique building like the rathaus or sacrificial altar to pair with this combo on the second half of the draft, making it even more appealing.) Organized loses out on factories coming later on the tree, but it gains by having the courthouse-relevant period of the game last much longer. One reason why I devalued Organized going into the last game is because I figured everyone would reach State Property civic relatively quickly, removing distance-based maintenance costs from the economy. Here in the Renaissance, that's a lot further in the distance, and cheap courthouses will certainly be a bigger factor.

If I were doing the pick, I would probably go for Julius Caesar, in part because I think there's a good chance that this is the best available, and in part because it would lead to a profoundly different style of game than the one we just played, since we'd have two completely different traits. If you're tired of crazy micro, well, this is also a much more straightforward combo to play: just expand expand expand and whip workers/units/courthouses. No need to fool with lightbulbs here. Kidding of course, but it would be a different style of game to be sure.

Civilizations: There are a lot of good choices available for the civs, which is part of the reason why I wouldn't suggest taking a civ with the first pick. I already mentioned the civs with courthouse replacements for the synergy with an Organized leader; here are some other good choices:

* China: Cho-Ko-Nus buildable from the start with iron
* England: Redcoats and stock exchanges
* Khmer: I would seriously think about grabbing them for the Baray's +1 food (cities still get free aqueducts)
* Mali: Mints come free in each city, could do worse
* Mongolia: always an option for rushing with their Ger's 4 XP
* Ottomans: ditto with Khmer for having free Hammans (although RB maps tend to have enough happy/health to make this non-important)
* Russia/Spain: Cossacks and Conquistadors
* Vikings: free Trading Posts are always terrifying

France is a solid choice for a civ. France is not worth using the first pick of a snake draft on. The musketeers aren't that strong, at least not outside of a ladder 3 vs 3 setup where each player builds a few workers, two or three settlers, and then units for the entire rest of the game. I strongly recommend against taking France immediately; there's a good chance they will still be there on the second half of the snake, and if not, there are lots of strong civ picks available.

There are only two civs worth picking immediately in a Renny snake draft. One is India, which is banned for this game. The other one is...

Byzantium: I honestly don't know why Byzantium is enabled for this game. On the old MP ladder, Byzantium was a universal ban in Renny games. If Speaker ever has a chance to drop back onto these forums, he can post some stories about the absolute destruction that cataphracts dished out in unregulated Renny games. Forget about cuirassiers (which take 4 techs to unlock) and cavs (which take 6 techs to unlock). How long is it going to take to reach those units - 30 turns? 50 turns? Cataphracts cost the same as a knight (81 production here, just a 2 pop whip!) and they have strength 12. As we know, there really aren't any units that counter them in this era, and for a late start, cities won't have 100 turns worth of accumulated culture to prop them up. You're going to be looking at a lot of cities with 20% cultural defenses guarded by longbows, pikes, or muskets, and cataphracts aren't too bothered by any of them. An attentive player will whip walls/castles and can slow down an offensive that way, but with luck, you can hit someone checked out on the game and run right over them in a heartbeat. If you want to go for the rush route, Byzantium is *THE* pick. It's boring, yes, but it's also infinitely stronger than France.

Now that said, I do not advocate for this in the least. Picking Byzantium and planning to go for a rush is almost certainly a losing strategy. We've seen this over and over again here at Realms Beyond, and while there are a few cases where an early rush worked, the vast majority of the time it's been a losing strategy. Even in Pitboss 33, Dreylin/OT4E overran an entire neighboring civ, and almost a third one in the form of Donovan, yet they still lose to REM's careful, methodical buildup. The most likely outcome of trying this will be ruining someone else's game while simultaneously ruining our own game in the process. You don't want to be the one rushing, or the one being rushed, you want to be the guy *NEXT* to the guy being rushed.

Of course, scooter is the one who's going to be captaining this ship. It's his call on what he wants to do. If the decision is to go all-in on a crazy plan, I'll be happy to watch and cheer along from the sidelines. I just don't think that's a successful strategy, that's all. Seems like a setup to plan an entertaining but losing game - much like a certain Viking team in an ongoing Pitboss game right now. And yes, mackoti is probably a better Civ4 player than we are, but so what? Mackoti can make mistakes too. Maybe someone rushes him and ruins his game! Weird stuff can happen in these games. Opting into a reckless strategy feels like giving up before we even begin.

I don't know quite where I'm heading with this post. If you want my current thinking, I'd take Gandhi or Julius Caesar, whatever sounds more interesting to play, and go from there. I also think we'll want to see a starting screenshot before making any decisions. But please do feel free to pick whatever you think would be the most fun to play - that's what really matters!

[scooter]

I definitely appreciate making the case for sanity . I pretty much agree with your analysis on leaders - I think Gandhi, Julius, and Suleiman are clearly the top tier. You did manage to at least capture my attention a little bit on Julius. Let me counter a few of your comments and see if it makes any sense.

Byzantium: I honestly don't know why Byzantium is enabled for this game. On the old MP ladder, Byzantium was a universal ban in Renny games. If Speaker ever has a chance to drop back onto these forums, he can post some stories about the absolute destruction that cataphracts dished out in unregulated Renny games. Forget about cuirassiers (which take 4 techs to unlock) and cavs (which take 6 techs to unlock). How long is it going to take to reach those units - 30 turns? 50 turns? Cataphracts cost the same as a knight (81 production here, just a 2 pop whip!) and they have strength 12. As we know, there really aren't any units that counter them in this era, and for a late start, cities won't have 100 turns worth of accumulated culture to prop them up. You're going to be looking at a lot of cities with 20% cultural defenses guarded by longbows, pikes, or muskets, and cataphracts aren't too bothered by any of them. An attentive player will whip walls/castles and can slow down an offensive that way, but with luck, you can hit someone checked out on the game and run right over them in a heartbeat. If you want to go for the rush route, Byzantium is *THE* pick. It's boring, yes, but it's also infinitely stronger than France.

FWIW, the fact that we have #1 pick and you're still advising against taking Byzantium with it is probably why they aren't banned . The rationale for leaving them unbanned is there's about 3ish uber leaders and about the same number of uber-ish civs. Including Byz seems to make the snake a bit fairer as everyone gets something strong. Although in fairness, the decision to leave them available was made back when 7 players was the expectation rather than 6.

I'd like to push back a bit on the idea that Byz is significantly better than France, and maybe you can poke holes in my thinking. When I've seen Cataphracts be successful in games here at RB it's when they catch someone whose defense is mostly longbows and cats. In an ancient start, assuming you can burn through Byz's horrible starting techs, you can compound their strength by picking on someone who is lagging behind a bit in tech.

My concern here is it'll be too easy for someone to just whip a never-ending stream of Pikes since everyone will have near-instant access to them. Taking France counters that a bit because you've got a Knight stack that isn't really easily attackable due to the Musketeers. I've played with Musketeers a couple times (most notably in the duel league awhile back), and it was completely unfair. Am I simply under-remembering the odds straight Phracts get? I might be now that I think about it.

I'm also very skeptical they would still be around at the last pick. I think the civs that are locks to be chosen are Khmer, Byz, and France. Maybe Vikings if it looks like a water-heavy start like 33 did.

We've seen this over and over again here at Realms Beyond, and while there are a few cases where an early rush worked, the vast majority of the time it's been a losing strategy. Even in Pitboss 33, Dreylin/OT4E overran an entire neighboring civ, and almost a third one in the form of Donovan, yet they still lose to REM's careful, methodical buildup. The most likely outcome of trying this will be ruining someone else's game while simultaneously ruining our own game in the process. You don't want to be the one rushing, or the one being rushed, you want to be the guy *NEXT* to the guy being rushed.

In fairness, Dreylin/OT4E barely missed winning that game. I'm not done reading their thread yet, but from what I see they were like 5 turns from being downright impregnable. I think saying they lost is possibly learning the wrong lesson here, when really what we saw was them embarassing players who were running the usual farmer's gambit. They were so successful that it took a multi-team dogpile to bring them down.

One of the things I've thought about since 33 was an odd what-if: What if we had used that early Nationhood stint to get a few more rifles, stuck them on a couple Galleons, and sailed to Gaspar and taken his cities? I remember early on that literally nobody was building any defense, and judging from screenshots he was wide, wide open. The military units were cheaper than normal, and the settlers were more expensive than normal. It wouldn't have been insane if we had better map intel at the time.

Sometimes I wonder if "rush bad farmer's gambit good" is so ingrained into the RB meta that early aggression has become more viable. Another prime example was REM's destruction of Commodore in PB27. Commodore went with the usual strategy of paperthin military (rightfully so), and REM called it with horse archers and completely stomped him. That game is ongoing, but it propelled him into an extremely strong position. By conventional wisdom, that was a horrible play (HAs vs a strong player at tech/city parity), but it still worked really well because "rush bad" is so ingrained.

So there's my contrarian case for the aggressive play. How many crazies out of 5 do you award it?

[scooter]

Thinking about this a different way... Let's project our choices picking a civ vs leader. I kind of already did it for civ. Let's say I take France/Byz/etc. I'll pick 4 that are the most likely to be gone, and then highlight the next 3 choices (of which 2 should be available since there's a 5th choice before us).

* Julius
* Suleiman
* Gandhi
* Genghis
---
* Victoria
* Montezuma (lol)
* Asoka
* <couple others are doable>

--------

Let's say we take Julius. Civs are harder to project. Likely civ selections:

* Khmer
* Byzantium
* France (maybe I'm wrong)
* Vikings
-----
* Dutch
* England
* China
* Mongolia
* Aztecs
* <couple other marginal choices>

The options certainly are deeper at this end of the spectrum.

[Sullla]

Well, I don't think that your analysis is wrong when it comes to early aggression. It's the very definition of high risk / high reward gameplay. Either it turns into a game-winning more or a game-losing move, with little in between. I do wonder what would have happened if we had tried to load up units on galleons and attack in the prior game. Either a spectacular success or a spectacular failure, most likely. Anyway, I tend to be risk-averse which is why I don't like going for the big gambles early on. I still think those kind of dice rolls fail a lot more often than they succeed, but hey, that might be the kind of game you'd rather play here.

I think that kind of strategy works better with a late pick in the snake draft though, for what that's worth, as you're less likely to get a top leader and you can tailor the leader/civ synergy a bit better. First pick in the draft generally suggests an ethos of "take the best leader on the board and figure out the rest later." Either Gandhi or Julius Caesar is probably the best leader here, and I have a slight preference for the Imperialistic leader just because we played a Spiritual leader last time.

I'd like to push back a bit on the idea that Byz is significantly better than France, and maybe you can poke holes in my thinking. When I've seen Cataphracts be successful in games here at RB it's when they catch someone whose defense is mostly longbows and cats. In an ancient start, assuming you can burn through Byz's horrible starting techs, you can compound their strength by picking on someone who is lagging behind a bit in tech.

My concern here is it'll be too easy for someone to just whip a never-ending stream of Pikes since everyone will have near-instant access to them. Taking France counters that a bit because you've got a Knight stack that isn't really easily attackable due to the Musketeers. I've played with Musketeers a couple times (most notably in the duel league awhile back), and it was completely unfair. Am I simply under-remembering the odds straight Phracts get? I might be now that I think about it.

Musketeers are great for covering a knight stack, agreed. But what units are you attacking with when picking France? You're stuck using generic knights, and that's not what you want with a rush strat. Much better to take Byzantium and do the rush using cataphracts, while relying on fog of war / misdirection to hit your desired target, right? I mean, if someone can whip pikes to defend against cataphracts, can't they just do the same thing against knights? You wouldn't be using musketeers to attack pikes / longbows / muskets behind city defenses, right? How does France actually help you conquer an enemy civ in this scenario? I'm not that worried about the defender attacking out of his cities to hit an invading stack, and heck, cataphracts with C1/Shock are pretty freaking good in the open against pikes anyway!