Lurker Thread [SPOILERS]

[chumchu]

After a fair amount of technical problems the game is afoot (hopefully). The players seem to have very different opinions on where to settle on this mirrored start:

- Ichabod's Persia is moving north and coastal, forsaking the river for coast and better hammers. Persia is a very good liberty civ and SIP is not very good for liberty as the settler production bonus is only hammers. With a lighthouse a coastal trade the cap should be good in mid game but it has little late game potential as coastal tiles are weak. He might make it into a guild city and work specialists. They give up some chops in the south but they may place there second city there and chop out a wonder or worker/units.

- Nicolae's Ethiopia settle on the stone by the fish lake for the fastest possible start, he will need to find gold to buy some tiles though as the other tiles are plain plains. Tradition border expansion might work as well, but long term you would have wanted a tradition cap on the river for more farms, watermill and hydro plant (like levee in civ 4).

- HAK's Inca settles in place for lack of a better plan. I'm amazed he did not choose England.

- Oledavy's Russia is moving inland where there is a little more food but not much production. Russia bonus production from horses should help in the early game though. He saw right through my placement of them as well.

-Yuris' Songhai settle as the Ethiopians aiming for a fast start. Songhai's bonus gold might be really good for buying tiles here. He is planning a mixed liberty/piety game without any extra happiness (like egypt) and with Ethiopia in the game: smoke:
Let us just say that it is very dependent on getting happiness beliefs. If he can scout and settle the islands near him that might help with getting happiness as well a sufficient number of decent cities. Coastal production trade routes is really good for liberty as you are low on happiness and need infra out of your small cities. But it is possible that he will try for conquest on his continent with the Songhai bonus and delay sailing and optics for too long.

- AdrienIer's Rome we have no info on other than that he is having technical difficulties.

[Quagma Blast]

Judging just from his starter pic, it's not out of line for HAK to pick Inca over England. If the map were a big landmass and he were somewhere in the middle of it, it'd have a good chance to be superior. Still, I bet he's going to be kicking himself once he figures out how watery the map is. England would have been completely absurd here - longbows alone put it over the top of a lot of civs, and SotL are so dominant that England is clearly banworthy on anything with more naval play than a pangaea.

I wonder what would have happened if HAK had been given Ichabod's or oledavy's start so he could actually see that he was near the coast.

[MJW (ya that one)]

If I were playing I would pick England over Inca because they are about equal on Pangea--but England is better everywhere else. The possible massive salt oledavy over SotLs would break my last resistance.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Yuri's plan won't work. You have to get to "reformation" to justify picking liberty and there's not enough time until rationalism, which you have to pick, to do it. FilthyRobot even suggests waiting forever to build the national college to build the oracle because it's that important to get to reformation. As so often in Civ5 you just have to overpower things.

[chumchu]

He has started with the tradition opener as well... Liberty + tradition can work if you get extra culture. Liberty + splash tradition + splash piety looks really greedy. That said I do not think we will see optimal builds and tech pushes here.

I would not count liberty out for three reasons:
1) there is a lot of islands with unique luxuries and strategics
2) there is not good enough land for great tradition cities (roughly 2 decent ones per player)
3) the variable skill level means that liberty's midgame production advantage is more significant. It can be used to say conquer say HAK in classical/medieval.

[MJW (ya that one)]

If Dave actually goes through with piety that's probably worse than Yuri's plan...If Ichabod or Yuri is on the same continent as him there's a good chance they go with the great prophet as the finisher to screw over 50% of their neighbors which would make it worse.

[T-hawk]

I'm wondering what's going on with the horses. Pindicator complained and says that there seems to be no quantity set, and yuris said the same thing when I asked. I'm guessing chumchu placed them without setting a quantity, which defaulted to 1.

Any lurker opinions on whether we should inform all the players what happened here, and that they're all seeing the same thing?

[Dreylin]

I thought oledavy(?) had mentioned something about his Horses having 2, but I just trawled his thread and couldn't find anything. I wonder if the Iron & other resources will have the same problem? Really need chumchu to weigh in here, I think.

[chumchu]

I will test it tomorrow.

[chumchu]

I have checked and all the strategic resources are indeed 1 copy each.

I assumed without testing properly that they would be the same random amounts as they are on all map modes by default and that the edit plot function merely allowed you to specify the amounts. You actually have to specify and can not get the random amounts as far as I know now. To quote Rick Perry, "oops". This is my first time designing a Civ 5 map, I am used to making them in HoMM 3 where they are random by default.

The question is so we re-start or play on? There are multiple copies of the strategics so there will be 2-3 per player which is not a lot. They are not that important for the early game. Their first real impact comes in renaissance/industrial with frigates and factories, that is also when the players can colonise all the islands for extra strategics. In modern warfare the lack of oil will be dramatic in severely limiting the dominant battleships and planes. Balance wise, Russia will get a big advantage from their extra resources and so will the players going for autocracy. Lack of resources favors peaceful strategies as the best offensive units late game costs strategic resources.