[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[Epoxy]

THE DAILY ROLL

TURN 212–215: THE MOST DANGEROUS ENEMY

The Khmer have just swept themselves into a golden age of growth and plenty upon finishing the marvel of the Taj Mahal. Ever it shines and ever the current Khmer population tremors in fear of the coming whips. All over the world great people come to fruition, some welcome and some not so, as their energies are vested into researches and golden ages. Overseas the Ottomans are certain to land liberalism and its free tech, but it's uncertain to what extent this drive has cost them in potential cities and improvements. Now the Aztecs eye sites for the post-T218 settlers: a western isthmus appears promising territory, although the same applies to the neighbour of England on the other side. Now that parity with other nations has been surpassed, the Aztecs' espionage apparatus will be channelled into their most likely long-term opponents, first of which will be the Khmer, with their currently supercharged growth curve.

[Sullla]

scooter, I think that spot between the two rices is the place for the upcoming settler out of the capital. That means that we put future cities on the forested grassland hill tile to the north, and the plains tile 2S of the cows to pick up the dyes and spices. (We don't need to take that spot anytime soon since we'll already have dyes and spices from our northern cities.) If plako is really slow to settle this area, we could put another city east of the clams, but I expect he'll claim that region.

That dotmaps the area like this:



We'll see how much of this we actually get.

I would also prefer not settling up on mackoti in the early game. Let's just try to get a roughly even division with him and not deal with his cataphracts until a later era when they're obsolete.

I didn't have time to try and micro this out, unfortunately. I'll just suggest that we should probably be shuffling the longbow in Pocketbeetle off to the east again, since there's a settler and two workers heading off into the fog with no defenders in sight. Good luck.

[Nekira Sudacne]

I think the city next to the Rice and Fish with access (eventually) to the oversea Grassland Silver Hill mine is the best. it's close enough to your core to swap tiles and be easy to get worker labor too, yet with enough productive tiles on hand to be worth settling long term (Wet Rice+fish+plains cows is enough food surpluss to work BOTH silver mines and the plaisn cow, plus potential for additional mines/workshops later on). Plus once it grows to about max, you could plant another city on the planes to the bottom left of the Dye and give it the Wet Rice. This redeems a few useful tiles, occupies the pinessula culturally and works the spices/dyes/ that's a filler city for much later, but still worth founding eventually, and the placement at that dot preserves it. that squeezes 2 very Good cities and 1 above average filler city (due to working two high commerse luxury resources) out of that cluster of resources.

[scooter]

Completely crazy weekend meant I'm behind a couple turns on reporting. It'll probably be tomorrow before I'm totally caught up in that area, but in the meantime, here's some fun info:

City Counts:
scooter: 8
Mackoti: 6
Nicolae: 5
Plako: 5
RMoG: 5
Alhazard: 4

NEEDMOREWORKERS.

[scooter]

Here is the background for one of our three new cities.

PBEM17: Merchant Gank

PBEM17 is the only game at RB where if you ask several people who won, you might get up to three different answers. It was among the last batch of games played with full diplo, and I think the way this game went is one of the many reasons full diplo went out of style. It was a 5 player game where all 5 players were highly-regarded vets. On an islands map, the novice/spaceman duo took Sury of India (unrestricted snake) and proceeded to utterly lap a very talented field early on. They quickly locked down the Great Lighthouse, the Pyramids, and circumnavigation. They got themselves an array of NAPs, then generated a Great Merchant to run a trade mission to fuel a tech burst. Things looked like this:



That GNP is before the merchant got to its destination at which point theoretically they would have run away with every single first-to bonus in the game before a concession came. The merchant never reached its destination.



This remains the only time every player in the game has declared war on someone at once. Yes, that is the merchant in the event log that died. Spaceman sums up the agreements, both formal and informal, that were violated:

To recap, the diplomatic situation before the war declarations was as follows:

Shoot - no specific agreements but friendly, and had recently agreed to let our Great Merchant complete a trade mission. So killing our Great Merchant is not cool.

Darrell - open discussion plus specific agreement for Open Borders. To wit:

"Egypt and Straight Talkers will sign open borders. To prevent Egypt from joining in an embargo, open borders should be for an extended period of time, say 50 turns."

Kyan - Open Borders in exchange for not settling two nearby islands. In the process of discussing an NAP. Ah yes, another classic.

Rego - Open Borders for cash agreement - I don't think we put a minimum time on it.

Lurker thread opinions:

Oh wow, I get the all war declarations but the GM killing will hurt. Cant wait to see their reaction.

How many agreements just got broken? Wtf?

I gotta say... unbelievably juvenile play on the part of the other players. If you want to cut OB, fine, cut OB, but there were no end to breaking agreements there and its just a big temper tantrum writ large.

This dogpile its worst thing i ever view here on realms , lot of words breaked.This is the true Nospace played way beter then the rest of them and they didn't found other way then a dogpile.Close borders but killing a great merchant after you agree on a trading mision?

One of the meanest dogpiles. Not even forewarning. Especially killing that Merchant was extremely ugly. Not sure, if this game can continue after this, but I sure hope NoSpace finds a motivation to do it. There is still room for diplomacy later.

I agree this is pretty disgraceful really, I think as far as I am concerned nospace just officially won this game

Agreed w/ SevenSpirits that the way the chat was carried out broke the game's rules, but I think at this point that might be the least of the dogpiler's offenses. Terrible move on all of the aggressor's parts, like losing a chess game and responding by giving the opponent a concussion.

Miraculously, the game kept going! It managed to end in a manner somehow even more dramatic involving an AP Victory, a turn being replayed, rules being outright broken, etc. In the end, I think the official result of this game is "draw." I imagine the wounds have mostly healed for those involved, which is great because despite the shenanigans, this was one of the most memorable games we've had here.

[Sullla]

I like those numbers! Looking forward to the reporting when you have a chance to post.

[scooter]

I like those numbers! Looking forward to the reporting when you have a chance to post.

Minor glitch: we have 8, not 9 . Post fixed.

[scooter]

I had some more time tonight after all.

Turn 216-218

3 turns, 3 cities.



The aforementioned Merchant Gank. Popped the borders with culture, and then got started with an Altar while growing. Longer term, this is a good commerce location.



Settled this on the following turn. Workers teamed up to complete the corn first, then the wheat on the following turn. I'm currently thinking those 3 forests combined with a whip ought to be turned into a settler. I just don't want to take the foot off the gas here on expansion just yet. IIRC there's stone in the fog to the north (based on mirroring), and that's a medium-term settling target for Moai.

I went ahead and started with an Altar here because Merchant was going to pop onto the cows, and the city didn't immediately need anything in its second ring. I was hoping we'd get lucky with a free religion spread or something. That said, I'm thinking about pausing and building culture anyway though because it would be nice to see across the water and get a glance at what's on that island.



Finally, the third of the trio of settlers. Feel free to take a guess at what games the names are referring to.

Work boat first here for the fish. I'll likely try to get this to size 4 and get a 2-worker double whip in. Somewhere in there I'd like to squeeze out a second work boat. That would be used to scout out this western island, and then it can return to that second fish around the time we plant that location.




Jumping back in time to T217, Alhazard landed Liberalism. I knew he'd be early, but that's very early. Misgivings aside, I'm eager to see if he can really pull this off.



He nabbed Astro with it. Also note that Plako picked up Nationalism ~5-6T or so before we'll get it. Unsurprisingly, we do appear to have roughly the slowest early tech pace. There's only two other players without any techs complete, and I'm pretty much certain neither of them are teching Nationalism. Representation, save us.



Plako confirmed the existence of a north pole land bridge. I offered him a map swap.



Nicolae has settled along here, so this represents our closest borders. I guess I should start saying REM and not Nicolae, because REM has ended 11 turns in a row for this team and is clearly the primary turn player at this point.



This is up-to-date after settling 3 cities. We have by far the lowest population after yet another round of whipping. I've got one city with 5 population, one with 4, and the rest are all at 2. Wide over tall for the moment.



We're only at 10 workers for 8 cities, but we're about to get 4 out of Zulu and Pocketbeetle over the next two turns. That's... still not especially great. But we're making it work alright.

I'm tentatively planning to try to get a settler in a half-dozen or so turns out of Lurker Killer by triple whipping at sz6 combined with chopping that stray forest. I'm not completely sold on that yet, though. I'm working out if it makes sense. I may have to do the responsible thing and get some workers out of it instead. I would swap to a worker this turn, but due to overflow I wouldn't be able to double-whip it, so it makes sense to make the decision next turn whether to pursue a settler or worker next out of it.

Praetorian Tour just whipped an Altar since it was sitting on an unimproved tile. There's a wealth of food between that city and Masterclass, and I'm going to try to turn that into workers.

The T218 project is officially complete. Lots of things coming in the upcoming turns. And yes, I did remember to swap to a Merchant specialist in the capital to keep the GPP pool pure there.

[picklepikkl]

Rage Quit could be referring to any number of events; hell, I've been involved in exactly two multiplayer games here at RB, and in both games, someone has vanished without a trace upon facing losses in a war. It seems like it's an (unfortunately) relatively common thing). If there's one that trumps them all, I want to know what it is.

[BRickAstley]

I love aesthetics of the bending line of cities following the two long rivers,that are joined at one of the cities. Looks like something Commodore would write a fluff story post for.