[SPOILERS] naufragar and Rusten get nickel-and-dimed

[Krill]

Actually you did mention Japan first, and I'll go out on a limb that Japan has never been picked in any game approaching normal conditions (it has been picked in ToW mod game once, and the rest have been random or late era starts).

You're not off the hook yet...

[naufragar]

I'm glad naufragar mentioned Alex first, or I'd feel guilty about dragging him down this rabbit hole.

I’m with you, Krill. Where is this guy taking me? This is RB, home of the variant play, so here we are. Time to smash. It was a snake pick, so the overall power level was pretty high. All the same, I don't think our pick was too out of line with the power of everybody else.

We now know who our opponents are. I’m very proud no one took Zulu or Inca. Either would have been very good. For reference:


1. MSCC- Kublai Khan/Babylon
2. naufragar and Rusten- Japan/Alexander
3. boak and GeneralKillCavalry - Vikings/Bismarck
4. superdeath - Sury/Korea
5. Borsche - Mehmed/Carthage
6. Mr. Cairo - Willem/China

1. MSCC- Kublai Khan/Babylon: I love everything about this combo. It has a very, very strong early game with Cre and cheap granaries (plus bowmen, which are good units). Charismatic will keep it relevant once the expansion phase is done. Cre and Cha both have library bonuses, so there’s some nice econ help there too. This combo is rock solid and uses a redesigned civ. Full marks. I didn’t lurk Magic Science much in PB40. That was a mistake. His thread was excellent, and his gameplay was tenacious. I’ve already mentioned to Rusten that I had high hopes for him this game, and the pick solidifies them. I think he’ll be a contender to win. Charriu has been improving every game since his debut in PB39 and is very micro focused. Chumchu I know less about but I get the sense he is prone to be demoralized. Not a bad player by any stretch.

Scaliness: /5
Slitheriness: /5

2. naufragar & Rusten: We got what we wanted. Yippee. Sure, it’s not the most orthodox, but I’d like to see other players talk about “fast starts” and “strong economies” and “late game powerhouses” after they take a katana to the knee. The players? We’ve got Rusten, whose uncle invented Civilization but lost the rights in a poker game with Sid Meier. We’ve got me, who am bad, but hopefully this is counteracted by my oceans of enthusiasm. (When I’m doing ok, but see PB41 for morale checks.)

Scaliness: /5
Slitheriness: /5 [sic]

3. boak & GeneralKillCavalry- Vikings/Bismarck: This is an excellent combo, not primarily because of its strength in a vacuum, but because of the rest of the field. There are no Mysticism civs and none that scream early religion. If I were them, I’d grab a religion, snatch Oracle with Bismark, and take Metal Casting for forges (again, with Bismark). From there, Colossus and then the world. The Vikings will also be good on this presumably watery map. I like the combo; I like that there is a specific plan it can target. All in all, good pick. Boak is new, I think, so I can’t divine his soul. GeneralKillCavalry came to RB from PB44, but the fact that he was receptive to joining a civ4 pitboss on an unfamiliar site in 2019 hints that he is not a fresh faced innocent. No spoilers for PB44 (and how can I? His team reports rarely.); suffice it to say I think he’s competent.
Scaliness: /5
Slitheriness: /5

4. Superdeath- Sury/Korea Superdeath went Sury (Exp/Cre) first. I’m not convinced that Sury’s good enough for that kind of treatment. I’ve played him in PB41 and while I was happy at the help getting markets and harbors up, I’m not so sure he’s really got the raw power necessary. Still, fast leader that doesn’t drop dead in the midgame is fine. Korea I assume was picked for their Hwacha catapults. They are a bit of a counter to our samurai. (I’ll talk about counters to samurai below.) I think they’re a pretty good unique unit, not because they’re broken but because they improve a unit that you’re going to build anyway. The melee bonus matters more for us than for others. If your opponent attacks you with cats when you don’t have horse archers or cats of your own, you’re in trouble. The bonus vs. melee just emphasizes that. I’ve played in a couple games with Superdeath, and he reports thoroughly so lurkers probably already have a sense of him. He is aggressive, which is necessary for winning. He’s a little impulsive, which can make winning tough. As he’ll tell you, he gets bored by micro; on the other hand, I’ve seen him make a plan, stick to it, and accomplish it. A player to respect.

Scaliness: /5
Slitheriness: /5

5. Borsche- Mehmed/Carthage: Carthage is a good civ. Cothons are very strong. We’re on a Monarch/Small map, so Org will pull its weight. Numidian cavalry are a better counter to samurai than hwachas (but see below). Idk, this combo doesn’t thrill me. I can’t tell if that’s because it’s weak per se or it just isn’t flashy at all. It’s certainly not bad, just dull. I can’t remember any games I’ve lurked with Borsche playing, and I didn’t have time to reread. (Too busy reading Magic Science. Seriously, his PB40 is very good; go read it.) I get the sense that he knows what he’s doing. He’s played a lot of civ, both here and abroad, and, if his thread title is to be believed, he’s going to give this game his best shot.

Scaliness: /5. Maybe /5
Slitheriness: /5

6. Mr. Cairo- Willem/China: This is a BtS powerhouse that has been considerably weakened by RtR. Every part of it got hit: Fin and Cre got directly nerfed. China got nerfed by the balancing out of the tier one techs. China still has the Cho-ko-nu, which is a top five unique unit and especially good on watery maps (only collateral directly off boats). I have no qualms with China. I don’t like Willem here. I think Rusten likes Fin more than me, and we are on a Big and Small, but still. It is a sloooow trait, and Creative, while lovely, is not enough pepper, I think. Mr. Cairo can play good civ. I believe he’s won a pitboss here. In the two games I’ve played with him, I haven’t seen him doing much saber rattling, so only time will tell if he’ll be able to expand in peace or be forced out of his groove.

Scaliness: /5
Slitheriness: /5

Thoughts on samurai counters: In this game, we have two anti-maceman units, the hwacha and the Numidian cavalry. I was a bit grumpy when I saw these picked, but I don’t think it’s that big a deal. We get (not great) odds attacking against hwacha. These are improved significantly attacking into cities. Anybody attacked on flatland by cats isn’t super happy, so no surprise there. If we’re attacked in defensive terrain, we should be able to shrug it off: samurai take reduced collateral damage. Best case scenario, obviously, is we get to samurai before Superdeath gets to cats. It might be a bit of a slog, but it’s not actually that bad.

The Numidians are more annoying. They have a +35% bonus against melee and, like all horse archers, they’re immune to first strikes. This means they beat vanilla samurai. Here, Agg really helps us. With luck, if we know we’ll be facing Numidians, we produce most of our samurai with barracks promotions. Since samurai start with Drill 2, these can take formation right out of the box to hammer back at horse archers. (For the record, promos are especially good for us because of the samurai’s high base strength.) Neither Borsche nor Superdeath are especially good targets, but they aren’t free and clear just yet.

Speaking more generally, half the players are Exp. I, myself, am not a fan of Exp, but it’s got obvious strengths. I’m surprised by the complete shafting of Pro and Imp, however. Customs Houses and Castles are water buildings, guys. There’s also a lot of Creative, which seems inoffensive to me. It’s a smaller, natural map; border-popping is important. Very well. This has the side effect of giving Borsche and boak/GeneralKillCavalry free shots at religion. I expect Hinduism from Borsche and Buddhism from GeneralBoak.

P.S. Never did I expect to wish the forums supported emojis. Couldn't just use the unicode snake symbol. Noooo. Had to resize my own damn snake.

[Rusten]

Actually you did mention Japan first, and I'll go out on a limb that Japan has never been picked in any game approaching normal conditions (it has been picked in ToW mod game once, and the rest have been random or late era starts).

You're not off the hook yet...

I merely offered naufragar the red pill, it was his own choice to stay in wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. All I'm offering is the truth, nothing more. 

Great picks overview!    And I agree, it's a little annoying how we are countered and most of it seem by accident. But jokes on them when our samurai survive with a slither of health remaining. And as you say, we're golden attacking into cities. I will mention the bowmen as a 3rd counter, but they're still not strong enough to withstand samurai. Just not as easy to take out as regular archers.

I agree with most if not all of your evaluations. MSCC got the required tenacity (MS and charriu at least) and MS might not get superdeathed this time around. Like you I don't know boak very well, but GKC looks like a competent player from what I've seen. It would not surprise me if they do well.

[Rusten]

Bigger picture things that I like to see:

-Nobody's picked an ancient era rushing unit. The earliest UU is the bowman, but that's mainly defensive (*crosses fingers*).
-Nobody's picked Phi which I read as a reluctance to tech towards Astronomy. The bottleneck doesn't need to be GPP, you can easily get the 2 scientists without it, but nobody's taken Spi either for the quick scientist push. Our play is centered around the seas, and most of the field has picked for general play. The one outlier here is obviously the Vkings.
-Nobody's picked Agg, which means that we're the only ones threatening with amphibious promotions. Again the one outlier is the Vikings who have it on the berserkers.

I think the best case scenario is to start next to Boak/GKC and capture the Colossus and Oracle before they get their civ going. If they're taken out of the running we're the only seafarers to matter. Honourable mention to MSCC who at least has Cha.

We didn't talk about scout moves, but maybe it's time as the game could be up at any moment. As you already mentioned there's coast to the NE. I don't expect any room to the north. We're getting our 1st settler before the 1st warrior so I recommend checking the site 3N of our capital first and then head SE along the coast after. It's useful information to know if this spot will be a later filler city or something to prioritize. It would be awesome if it has coastal fish for instance, as we could chop the wb immediately with our 2 workers.

[naufragar]

All I'm offering is the truth, nothing more. 

I tuned out of PB42, so I'm not sure exactly what all the naval changes do. I'm really interested in how Privateers are balanced. I'm too lazy to think about the cost of Paper vs bulbed Astro.

I agree with the scout moves. I'll move the scout to the forested hill to the north. Barbs start spawning on turn 25, and I want to be total safe founding our second city, whether that's done by founding the turn we step out of our borders or by circling the scout back. We might have a bit more land to our north. I'm no terrain expert, but it looks to me like we have a mix of northern and southern trees? Maybe placed by the mapmaker, but I wonder if we're sort of equatorial. Or this is all so much tea leaf reading.

[Rusten]

I zoned out of most of PB42 too. The TLDR is that you need astronomy to properly invade across continents. You can defend without it now though, so it's no longer an "I lose" button.
Empirical evidence of why you need Astronomy can be found in Cairo's thread. He tried to invade Superdeath with only caravels and it didn't look convincing.

Agree not to take any chances settling 2nd city. Are you going to flying camera cheese on T0 for extra info?

Random notes:
Borsche comes from the same site as GermanJoey IIRC and he was spotted in the RtR thread recently. Decent chance he will be lurking him.
In the field we can take the +25% against siege weapons against the hwachas, which should give us good odds again. If that's his best defenders we have nothing to worry about as they'll never get defensive bonuses.

I think there was something else I wanted to say too but it escapes my mind right now.

[naufragar]

I've got no qualms about using the flying camera. I've never used it except when goofing around, so I doubt I'll be able to count tiles or anything, but maybe I can check for land. Especially if there are forests and mountains.  

Random notes:
Borsche comes from the same site as GermanJoey IIRC and he was spotted in the RtR thread recently. Decent chance he will be lurking him.
In the field we can take the +25% against siege weapons against the hwachas, which should give us good odds again. If that's his best defenders we have nothing to worry about as they'll never get defensive bonuses.

I think there was something else I wanted to say too but it escapes my mind right now.

GermanJoey's scary. Hmm. Was the something else name scheme ideas? If the game starts soon, we'll need one. I'll sleep on it.

[Rusten]

Happy to leave the naming scheme flavour to you. If you're drawing a blank I can think of something, but I'm really just here for bad advice and inflating the post count, much like Morpheus.

Checking the fish with flying camera might be particularly useful, but I never use this feature myself so IDK. I've avoided it as it was banned in CFC SGOTM. People are very conservative over there.

[naufragar]

Happy to leave the naming scheme flavour to you. If you're drawing a blank I can think of something, but I'm really just here for bad advice and inflating the post count, much like Morpheus.

Checking the fish with flying camera might be particularly useful, but I never use this feature myself so IDK. I've avoided it as it was banned in CFC SGOTM. People are very conservative over there.

I've got a naming scheme. As for the flying camera, I wouldn't shed a tear to see its use banned, but since it's not and it's available to everyone I'm happy to try my hand at it.

Speaking of inflating post count with irrelevance:

I was thinking very vaguely about naval warfare and harkening back to PB41. For those reading this who didn’t follow PB41: Rusten and Hitru (who I think hasn’t lost a PB in like 3 games?!? Good job, Hitru.) got to galleons before me and were able to threaten my entire coast when war broke out between us. I declared war just as they got to galleons; land military tech was roughly equal. We were on separate island continents, and that war was utterly devastating for my empire despite me barely suffering any losses. I lost one city, and I could’ve avoided that if I hadn’t briefly forgotten what exactly a pitboss turn order means. This war was devastating because I had to garrison all of my coastal cities against raids, and that drastic defensive build-up ruined my economy. Along the way, Rusten and Hitru opened up a second front against BGN.

So much for the history. This two-front war was widely criticized by the lurker thread, who believed that Rusten/Hitru were setting the entire world up against them. Rusten and Hitru won PB41. Rustru’s play was correct, in my opinion, because the very act of declaring war meant that I would never again be a threat to them. I needed to wreck my economy through whips and emergency upgrades in order to not lose cities.

Why do I bring this up? With luck, in this game Rusten and I will hit galleons and samurai with the same sort of one-generation tech advantage that Rusten had in PB41. In a vacuum, I think it is correct play to be an absolute villain to the neighbors if bullying them means they stay one generation behind for the rest of the game. Krill has done yeoman’s work in balancing naval combat. Even with this, however, I do believe that the first player to Astro will likely have the means to keep their neighbors permanently on the back foot given a predominantly watery map.

We occasionally hear people make threats like, “Well, I guess I’ll whip my empire to the bone and throw everything at [Player Who Acted Dastardly].” Outside of spite whips, which really are gross, I don’t think this is so scary a threat, unless in the “throwing everything at enemy” the player practically cedes his/her empire to a different neighbor. The executive summary: We will hopefully gain a sudden one-tier advantage over our neighbor(s), and we should probably use this to make sure they are never a threat, even if it seems to wreck the geopolitical diplomatic balance. Pirates are we.
(This is also dependent on how archipelagic the map is. Everyone had their own continent in PB41.) (Except the Commodore-Superdeath loveseat.)

[Rusten]

It won't be as risk free as in PB41 due to naval changes, but as a concept I agree.

In PB41 your caravels could not threaten a counterinvasion nor attack my galleons successfully. In this version having galleons against caravels we still risk minor scale invasions and the caravels have 4 strength as opposed to the 3 in PB41. In PB41 we were almost completely immune to counters from both you and BGN for the entire game. This game we need to respect the caravels more, but if we play our cards right we should have galleons before they have caravels, and start the production sooner. Astro should only be a 1-turn tech from Optics.

What a different game it could've been for you if you had settled RedDot yourself and dogpiled BGN together with me instead. With the GL you were on course for early Astronomy if you didn't need to whip everything to the ground. Much faster than BGN at least.