[NO PLAYERS] PBEM 7 Map Making & Lurkers

[Japper007]

Well, to be fair, in the second Khmer war Woden was seriously concerned about ending up with weakened forces that would have made it easier for Rome to just roll over him after - something that could have been made more likely with a less favorable split of cities to Rome/China. Throughout that team's posts for that period, you can definitely get the sense of the fear of being a victim of the Rome steamroller. Was it overstated? Possibly. The terrain didn't favor an immediate Roman follow-up and the timing window for Legions might have been closing anyway. On the other hand, I can't blame anyone for being afraid of Sullla attacking them from a superior position.

I might have been a bit too harsh, I'm pretty bad about warfare myself after all, but I disagree here: If you are afraid of another teams follow-up the last thing you should do is just concede economy to them and make your problems worse in the near future. After all he would end up Sulla's neigbour in the end regardless of how far to the west the lines where drawn, right? It was pretty apparent our team was screwed and wouldn't be able to hold once the two-way started. Maybe I'm biased because I was in the driverseat at the time.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I don't understand why Sullla doesn't think he's just winning??? I suggest reading the other threads before reacting to my post because they don't paint a pretty picture.

There's no way of stopping him from reaching the next tier of tech and crushing everyone. Maybe he fears a two front war more then other players (ISDG and Pitboss #16). Or maybe he doesn't know how much the other civs are going all out to stop him now and thinks the can keep up.

Or maybe it's because this game is just of shits-and-giggles after what happened with MFA/Japper? He wanted to keep the game afloat earlier because you cannot have a second first-team game but now he wants to sink it--there's nothing to learn due to the overpowerness of chopping and the game will be a total drag to play.

Civ6 no longer keeps 1upt after that medieval era (armies, airplanes and support units) so it could work. The only reason the AI doesn't fall apart at the start is because of it's free stuff.

VA and Nan Madol should probably be banned on anything other than a Pangea that makes little coast. They should have been banned on this map.

[aetryn]

Well, to be fair, in the second Khmer war Woden was seriously concerned about ending up with weakened forces that would have made it easier for Rome to just roll over him after - something that could have been made more likely with a less favorable split of cities to Rome/China. Throughout that team's posts for that period, you can definitely get the sense of the fear of being a victim of the Rome steamroller. Was it overstated? Possibly. The terrain didn't favor an immediate Roman follow-up and the timing window for Legions might have been closing anyway. On the other hand, I can't blame anyone for being afraid of Sullla attacking them from a superior position.

I might have been a bit too harsh, I'm pretty bad about warfare myself after all, but I disagree here: If you are afraid of another teams follow-up the last thing you should do is just concede economy to them and make your problems worse in the near future. After all he would end up Sulla's neigbour in the end regardless of how far to the west the lines where drawn, right? It was pretty apparent our team was screwed and wouldn't be able to hold once the two-way started. Maybe I'm biased because I was in the driverseat at the time.

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with you at all. Ultimately you can't concede too much economy to the other team without some kind of plan to compensate (i.e. better develop your cities, settle somewhere else, whatever). Woden and CMF had invested in early military, and other than using it to prevent Russia from settling their borderlands, they didn't get much out of it. They needed to take Khmer cleanly and quickly - but Cornflakes deserves some credit too for setting up the defense.

[aetryn]

I don't understand why Sullla doesn't think he's just winning??? I suggest reading the other threads before reacting to my post because they don't paint a pretty picture.

There's no way of stopping him from reaching the next tier of tech and crushing everyone. Maybe he fears a two front war more then other players (ISDG and Pitboss #16). Or maybe he doesn't know how much the other civs are going all out to stop him now and thinks the can keep up.

Or maybe it's because this game is just of shits-and-giggles after what happened with MFA/Japper? He wanted to keep the game afloat earlier because you cannot have a second first-team game but now he wants to sink it--there's nothing to learn due to the overpowerness of chopping and the game will be a total drag to play.

Civ6 no longer keeps 1upt after that medieval era  (armies, airplanes and support units) so it could work. The only reason the AI doesn't fall apart at the start is because of it's free stuff.

VA and Nan Madol should probably be banned on anything other than a Pangea that makes little coast. They should have been banned on this map.

I don't think it's possible to ban Nan Madol since there's no way to pick (or unpick) specific city states. There's also several other fairly impactful ones (Kumasi, Geneva, Stockholm) mixed in. I think Nan Madol is fine - creatively running an economy through different city state bonuses ought to be a thing, and it definitely makes fighting over the city states worthwhile.  It's not like it gave him a bunch of culture for free - he built all those coastal districts that were boosted.

VA, on the other hand, is just too darn good. I think Sullla could win anyway because those ships will come online in dribs and drabs, and his entire fleet concentrated could blast the new arrivals apart pretty easily. I think he just doesn't want to play hours-long turns anymore and doesn't see the possibility of a concession in the next week or so.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I complained about Nan Modal about not being banned and came up with a solution: reroll until you get lucky. You still have access to the random seed.

[Cornflakes]

I disagree about banning any city states. City states are one of the more counter-able imbalances. Civs can compete with envoys from across the map, or capture/raze from nearby. It is entirely within the power of other players to interfere and interact. VA does appear to powerful (except perhaps on a Pangaea)

Chopping does overshadow everything else after the early game. I specifically chose the dry location for the 3rd Khmer city I planted because of all the forests available to chop. And full 50+% of my military came from chops. In addition to decreasing the chop value, buffs to tile improvements might be the best way to counterbalance. A civ-4-style workshop for production on flat land would help. And then sprinkle in a few more +1 *yield* to X improvement throughout the science tree to get mines up to +6 or +8 by the end game. Or add policies to the civics tree, for example "+1 to farms"

[MJW (ya that one)]

When CMF comes back if he wants the game to end the game will end. Otherwise the game goes on.

There's a way around the bug: pay the gold to switch and then use MFA's gold hack to get the gold back.

[aetryn]

I disagree about banning any city states. City states are one of the more counter-able imbalances. Civs can compete with envoys from across the map, or capture/raze from nearby. It is entirely within the power of other players to interfere and interact. VA does appear to powerful (except perhaps on a Pangaea)

Chopping does overshadow everything else after the early game. I specifically chose the dry location for the 3rd Khmer city I planted because of all the forests available to chop. And full 50+% of my military came from chops. In addition to decreasing the chop value, buffs to tile improvements might be the best way to counterbalance. A civ-4-style workshop for production on flat land would help. And then sprinkle in a few more +1 *yield* to X improvement throughout the science tree to get mines up to +6 or +8 by the end game. Or add policies to the civics tree, for example "+1 to farms"

I'm wondering if the switch to flat yields from District buildings instead of percentage-based bonuses from buildings has hurt the ability of cities to be strong producers without chops. Both Civ 4 and Civ 5 had buildings giving 25% extra production and other ways to multiply your bonuses. I have a save from Civ 5 with a 30 pop city having 99 base production from tile yields but over 200 production based on bonuses. Civ 6, on the other hand, gets multipliers only to the districts and district buildings (and even those were nerfed in R&F). Is it even possible to have an effective 30-pop city in Civ 6? You could raise the housing cap high enough with enough Neighborhoods, but between those and the districts you are actually going to want, would it actually be useful to have that many people in a city? That's the downside of things taking up space on the map - every District is one less workable tile. And the overall potential of well-built cities seems to be lower.

[pindicator]

I think that if i were to put the time into a mod there would be 3 things that would need to be reworked regarding production:

Revise unit production costs so that they are more in line with district cost scaling. You can't get too crazy here unless you also want to change the upgrade formula.
Increase production potential of late game cities by boosting industrial zones and late game tile yields.
Normalize production overflow to remove the chop-overflow mini game.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Japper is friends with MFA IRL so he can contacted him and make him do the hex edit.