Gaspar & Noble make their triumphant? return; mostly just get asked about "The List"

[scooter]

Comon lurkers, help pindicator edit the map.

Sorry, there's been an extensive disagreement over how many barbarian subs to put near your start.

[pindicator]

Comon lurkers, feed, train, and walk pindicator's dog so he can edit the map.

FTFY

[pindicator]

Here is your starting position




Anything in the fog is subject to change.

[NobleHelium]

Thanks!

Well, we could pick FIN. We're definitely not picking Scandinavia like pindicator is suggesting though.

I see we've met Serdoa in the file - please do make sure to remove the contact in the final save for the game.

I guess we move the scout NW-W? There's really no way we'll move from this spot though. So we could just settle first before moving the scout.

[NobleHelium]

Work boat open. We'll get a bit more commerce here if we pick FIN, obviously.



Work Grass Forest for 1 turn. Work Plains Forest for 1 turn. Work PFH for 3 turns. Work Deer after border pop. Put 1t into worker while work boat travels. Grow on warrior 3t then swap back to worker.

[NobleHelium]

Sandbox

Worker open feels like it sucks in comparison, but I can't really elucidate the reasoning for this intuition yet.

[NobleHelium]

The beginning of the Work Boat open feels very good to me, but the positioning of the forests (and hills) around the capital is extremely awkward.  Not only is it awkward for improving the tiles it's going to be awkward for the settler to move to the second city location, wherever that may be.  In fact it feels like they were strategically positioned for maximum annoyance. I want to get BW to chop the forests to reduce the annoyance but I also want to get Pottery for granaries if we are EXP.  So I feel like we're going to end up with Victoria as a result of this.

[Gaspar]

or Justinian!

[NobleHelium]

So as you may have surmised, we were pretty locked in on Byzantium and were planning to pick it in most circumstances.  It would've taken a very annoying AH start for us to be deterred from picking it.  So yes I am a little annoyed that scooter posted a bunch of stuff in the CtH thread in the last 24 hours that basically mirrored the contents of our thinking as well as a number of things that we've posted in our thread.  Specifically regarding Byzantium, while I am not convinced it is overpowered, we are picking it because:

1) I think Mysticism may genuinely be a top tier starting tech in its 1.4 state of 60b and 1 bpt. (Top tier doesn't mean it's OP.) I'm not sure, but that's my feeling.  Gaspar is less sure than me, even.  The only thing he's sure is that it's "not terrible."
2) Every single game I have played before this has been with a civ that has two of the trifecta of Agriculture, Wheel, and Mining.  I have never played a civ without two of those techs, and pretty much routinely disregarded 2/3s of the civs because of that (keep in mind India and Inca were generally banned).  With Agriculture being changed to 40b and thus anyone can research it quickly, this felt like a brave new world of being able to consider a bunch of civs that I couldn't before.  So I hope whatever happens in 1.5, this remains true.
3) Byzantium will likely be nerfed so how can we possibly pass up the chance to play it before that happens?  And if we don't pick it, someone else will.

ALSO, I would like to say that work boat openings are EXTREMELY UNDERRATED.  They're underrated because Krill hated them for no apparent reason and everyone just listened to him.  I think work boat openings (when a fish is available) are better than worker openings at least 40% of the time.  And it could be a lot higher than that, maybe as high as 80%. I just don't have a large enough sample size to know because you used to need Fishing for such an opening.  Why are they better than you think?  Because the work boat finishes the improvement IMMEDIATELY.  I get the fish hooked up instantly instead of taking five turns to build a farm.  Since games aren't played on Quick anymore, this is an even bigger difference than before.

[scooter]

So as you may have surmised, we were pretty locked in on Byzantium and were planning to pick it in most circumstances.  It would've taken a very annoying AH start for us to be deterred from picking it.  So yes I am a little annoyed that scooter posted a bunch of stuff in the CtH thread in the last 24 hours that basically mirrored the contents of our thinking as well as a number of things that we've posted in our thread.  

Well if it helps, I definitely did not get any of my opinions from your thread . I had a version of that ready to go well before this thread was created, but I was waiting for the PB54 snake I was in to complete because I didn't want it to look like I was influencing the picks in the game I was in. There's no good time to talk about balance for a mod in progress, but I don't think concluding "hey Byzantium and Mysticism looks too strong" is particularly hard. I think it's a more obvious first pick in this mod than Pacal is in vanilla BtS. I didn't even know what the snake pick order was in this game until a couple hours ago.