[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[scooter]

Yes, all of that sounds perfect. I was already thinking red dot settler would go east for the corn, but good call on Pocketbeetle supplying the yellow dot settler. That makes more sense than hauling a capital settler north, so yeah, let's aim for the jungle river rice city next.

Also, assuming we also have a fish in the fog at our equivalent location, this is definitely our National Epic spot, yeah?



We could even stick National Park in there and preserve those two jungles to get a couple more free specialists.

The other option is the landbridge triple seafood spot, but that's a little riskier given that it's on a shared ocean.

[scooter]

So how would your micro plan shift around if makoti's military power suddenly started spiking? Seems like you should have plans to smoothly integrate several different levels of necessary military buildup.

Mackoti's power is not going to seriously spike in the next 20 turns because he wants to win the game.

[Tohron]

So how would your micro plan shift around if makoti's military power suddenly started spiking? Seems like you should have plans to smoothly integrate several different levels of necessary military buildup.

Mackoti's power is not going to seriously spike in the next 20 turns because he wants to win the game.

Fair enough - I suppose him building units in the immediate future would just mean you emergency-whip pikes while everybody else continues expanding. I wonder if your seven turns of Caste System in your Golden Age would leave enough of a vulnerability window for him to mobilize and snipe a city or two though.

[Epoxy]

THE DAILY ROLL

TURN 202: THEY ACCEPT

With bated breath the Aztecs awaited the arrival of England's maps, and with tremulous fingers they pondered what they would see on those precious scraps of parchment. The scene: England is nothing special; no chops, no extra cities, only a few improvements—the English have no obvious leg-up over the Aztecs. Moving on. The C&D have prepared a plan, the 8/18 Project to have a total of eight cities in eighteen turns. This is possible because of the Aztecs' productive cities, with a capital that has no issue whipping settlers every six turns, as little net attrition accumulates to its rapidly regenerating population. There is no shortage of good locations for these cities, and among them are candidates for great universities and strategic ports. Pending the completion of this mighty expedition in T220 opponent nations may realise what they're missing, and as this contest turns from positive- to zero-sum so will the midgame come into the fore.

[Sullla]

To repost one of scooter's images from earlier, here's what the terrain looks like between us and mackoti:



That's a 9 tile landbridge, with jungle or forest on every tile (nearly all jungle). The notion that mackoti would choose to build an early army, rather than expand, and then sink something like 30 worker turns into building a road through that jungle mess, again rather than expand or improve his cities... it would be insanity. I can't possibly see him doing that. Besides, mackoti has Alhazard to his south in a much more easily accessible position. Why would he come and attack us when he has a soft target so easy to hit? Like scooter said, I'm not worried about mackoti coming to attack us. I'm very worried that he's going to roll over Alhazard at some point in the midgame, and there won't be much we can do to stop that.

I like that name Epoxy, the 8/18 project. Let's hope we can pull it off. I'm going to do some more work on it in the sandbox tomorrow evening and see what happens.

[rho21]

This all looks promising so far; interesting discussion.
Scooter, would you mind changing the X labels to all be colours? I think it would make it a bit clearer what's going on... and it would be more fun, in an RB sort of way. Possibly add anticipated settling turn numbers, too.

[Epoxy]

I got the name of the 8/18 Project from policy targets like Russia's 5-100 project and China's five year plans.

Regarding the plan: I like the distribution of city spots (particularly Lurker Killer's worker whipping cycles) and how the borders will creep into the southwest landbridge area. Some new city names will be wanting

I'm making some notes for settler contingencies in the post-T220 situation, but I'll leave those for later publication when the future becomes clearer. When after T220 is the capital expected to start transitioning over from settler production?

[Brian Shanahan]

So, the basic plan for the next few turns is to channel the Sakkra?

[scooter]

This all looks promising so far; interesting discussion.
Scooter, would you mind changing the X labels to all be colours? I think it would make it a bit clearer what's going on... and it would be more fun, in an RB sort of way. Possibly add anticipated settling turn numbers, too.

Yeah, I can add a prettier screenshot at some point. The signs were mostly there to save me some time. It's also helpful in-game to have an easy reminder of where cities are planned so I don't have to try to remember or consult a screenshot while in-game.


So Mackoti settled a city last turn. About an hour ago, Nicolae rolled the turn and immediately did some things. Bottom-to-top:

9/14/16 8:51 am Nicolae Score increased to 538
9/14/16 8:48 am Nicolae Score increased to 531
9/14/16 8:48 am Nicolae Score decreased to 523

I cut out the turn roll score increase. Anyway, he double-whipped something (worker-worker most likely), and more importantly he settled two cities. I'm a little confused as to why one city gave him 8 points and the other gave him 7 (maybe something else is going on here?), but it seems like they definitely whipped out two settlers a few turns ago. I can confirm tonight when I'm able to login. So they're definitely off to a very aggressive start on settling. As expected, they are looking more and more like one of our top competition in this game.

Settled cities so far:
T201: We settled city3
T202: Mackoti settles city3
T203: Nicolae settles city3 and city4

Nobody else has settled any cities.

[Sullla]

Brian: The Sakkra would have been a good naming scheme for this game, especially with our green colors. With our traits and unique building, we definitely want to expand outwards like the plague.

Epoxy: I think the proper time to grow the capital upwards will be during the Golden Age. We’ll have enough cities at that point that other, smaller locations can carry the worker/settler load afterwards and the capital can do its Bureaucracy thing and grow onto lots of strong tiles as we shift into the midgame. For the first 30 or so turns though, it’s endless settler whips to drive expansion.

Regarding scooter’s point about score increases from the other teams: I stand by my statement from earlier this week, and I’m definitely impressed that Nicolae was able to get 2 cities out so quickly with a non-Imperialistic leader. They beat us to four cities by 3 turns, T203 to T206. Now with that said, we certainly could have pushed out another settler at an early date. We put three forest chops into early workers, and we’re in the process of double whipping Pocketbeetle right now for 2 workers over 3 turns, which will take us up to a total of 8 workers. And we’re still extremely short on worker labor despite that! Serfdom or not, Nicolae’s team has to be hurting for worker labor right now. They already paused this turn to conduct another whip, which is probably for another worker. Overall though, yeah, seriously impressive play from those guys. I hope that we’ll be able to out-expand them in time, because if not, we’re in some trouble.

A quick word about score on CivStats. The formula for population scoring is the “max population” for each map divided out of 5000. On this particular map, it’s 5000/1333 = 3.75 points per pop. You can see this in the very first screenshot we took after the game was posted, back about a month ago. That means that most of the pop increases are worth 4 points, but one out of every four pop increases is worth 3 points instead. For Nicolae’s team, here’s what happened on the scoreboard:

Grow 1 pop on the turn roll
Whip 1 pop
Settle city (+2 pop)
Settle city (+2 pop)

Each pop point was worth 4 score points except the second city had a pop point that was only worth 3 score points. Little trick of the math there. The real question is how fast they can get their new cities up and running, which is probably pretty fast given the strength of Nicolae/REM as players.

I expect RMOG to plant a city this turn and join us in the 3 city club. The problem is that they’re already getting outexpanded by other non-Imperialistic teams, and their second city is so weak that it’s contributing almost nothing. They should be in a position like us, getting ready to plant their fourth city shortly, not waiting to put down their third city. Plako has ended his turn without whipping or planting a city, so he appears to be way behind as well. Maybe he’s doing something with Great People? Or maybe he’s going to whip out 2 settlers at once like Nicolae? I guess we’ll see. Alhazard just appears to be lagging right now. I hope for his sake he has some kind of Taj Mahal or Liberalism plan lined up.

Definitely looks like our team, mackoti, and Nicolae will be the major contenders based on what we’ve seen thus far.