Hi Woden! Looking forward to playing together - your PBEM18 game has been really impressive, and I think I'll have a lot to learn from working with you
Feel free to go ahead and suggest any alternate thread titles, should they strike your fancy.
Any thoughts about civ picks and/or broader overarching strategic considerations? You may have seen from my PBEM19 thread that I have a deep and abiding love for Japan, which is not at all discouraged by the prospect of a water map, but maybe I should try branching out a little, who knows.
(November 17th, 2020, 06:32)ljubljana Wrote: Hi Woden! Looking forward to playing together - your PBEM18 game has been really impressive, and I think I'll have a lot to learn from working with you
Thanks!
PBEM18 Spoilers
That game really shows that having better units is not always guaranteed victory. Never thought attacking into a +12 combat strength disadvantage would work but it did.
Quote:Feel free to go ahead and suggest any alternate thread titles, should they strike your fancy.
Current title works for me.
Quote:Any thoughts about civ picks and/or broader overarching strategic considerations? You may have seen from my PBEM19 thread that I have a deep and abiding love for Japan, which is not at all discouraged by the prospect of a water map, but maybe I should try branching out a little, who knows.
Japan is a good pick. I hope we get the 4 and 5 pick option instead of 1 and 8. First pick should be one of the powerhouse civs (I prefer Indonesia) and the second could be Japan. I like Indonesia because of the ability to buy boats with faith and they usually get first pick at pantheons (Earth Goddess).
I'll post some more thoughts later when I have a little more time.
Hoping that thrawn doesn't realize that this will work quickly enough to kill me is essentially my entire plan for surviving until the end of that game
I'm broadly on board with you picking first to take one of the powerhouse civs. I don't have a ton of experience with naval maps, and have never played as Indonesia (for instance), so I think the metagame play here is to give the stronger civ to the player better-positioned to leverage their advantages. Hopefully Japan will still be around come the second pick, but I'm fine with taking another okay but second-tier naval civ if not.
I'm also hoping for the 4 and 5 pick option - it seems like there's a top tier of what are generally considered to be "good naval civs" rather than a consensus "best naval civ", and that tier might only be 5-6 civs wide rather than 8... Do you think there'd be an obvious choice if we ended up with the first overall pick?
Thrawn's suggested rule about holding a DoF offer is 1000% in reference to my PBEM19 game, in case you're curious, since they're either at war with or in a DoF with literally everyone else . Do you know if DoF-holding is, in fact, mechanically possible? I'd probably speak up in favor of that rule if so, were it not for how totally obvious that would make it that I know exactly what they're talking about .
If we get 1 and 8 picks, we have to take the Vikings, then launch an early classical age war. Vikings can enter ocean tiles at Shipbuilding, heal in neutral waters, and their longboats can raid for science and culture. Plan would be to beeline shipbuilding, find a target and wipe out any ships, attacking from ocean tiles, where they could not counter attack. Then go and pillage any coastal tile.
As for if we get 4 and 5, I need to think about it. We could go for the best available water civ or find someone who would pair with Japan nicely. Team games are a little different than FFA. We are going to want to work on different things to get the most out of our team. Ideally, we would have one teammate good at culture and one at science. Have one teammate focus on the economy and the other focus on military. We don't want to be good at the same thing and we don't want to be working on the same stuff at the same time.
I have never heard of people holding DoFs and don't think it is a thing. In all likelihood, any perceived holding is just someone forgetting to open the trade dialog. I guess you could hold onto it without opening the dialog but not sure if it is still valid after a few turns. I really don't like DoFs unless it is to hold a flank when declaring war in the other direction or to get an alliance for the boost to diplomatic service (which we get on turn 1 of a team game). I have been burned a few times with them and now rarely offer or accept them.
Would that be a conquest-focused Classical war plan or just a lengthy pillage-and-park operation? If the former, I suppose I should pick a civ with a classical military advantage too so you don't end up on the wrong side of a 2v1, right? Hopefully there's someone we can attack without actually needing to cross ocean tiles, otherwise I'm not sure how much help I'd be able to provide. Or would it make more sense for me to focus on building so we don't fall too far behind in tech?
As far as 4/5 goes, I suppose we'll be able to figure that out once we see what the other picks are, anyways. I do think Japan is one of, if not the, best science civ that's also a decent naval civ, so maybe that's worth considering as far as comparative advantage goes.
PBEM19 spoilers (for exactly Ioan, since I guess everyone else who might get spoiled is locked into their own threads anyways):
Yeah, I played really cautiously with DoFs in PBEM19 due to drawing Nubia, Rome, Zulu, and Persia as the other four civs facing my Russia . That was a pretty game-specific circumstance, though, and I don't expect to push for them the way I did in that game when we're (hopefully) not constantly on the edge of being zerg-rushed into oblivion.
Another thing about Japan: in PBEM19, I am making a half-hearted attempt to emulate the Japan science bomb as the somewhat-weaker Russia. It'd be pretty predictable to anyone who's read my PBEM19 spoiler thread, but if I do end up with Japan, you can bet I'll be looking for a similar opportunity in this game .
If we went with Vikings and I played them, I think we would have me focus on military (or at least an attack force) and have you build out your economy and maybe develop a defensive force. As for having a second civ with a classical age military advantage, I think it is better to have someone with a different age military advantage. Best to not through all eggs in one basket. Then if we go for one civ to go military early, we can always switch focuses to the civ when their military advantage comes on-line.
As for attacking during the classical age, it will be to destroy/capture, not just pillage.
Shouldn't we be a little worried that one civ attacking against two civs defending won't work in a team game, though? I feel like a classical age rush to destroy/capture is a pretty all-in move even if only one of us goes for it, so maybe we'd have better win odds if we both attacked at the same time. I'd hate for your invasion to stall out due to getting bogged down trying to crack two civs' worth of archer spamming.
How do we think the tech shuffle mode will complicate a Classical age attack? In theory it could really hurt us if our attack relies on a UU that gets moved really far back in the tree, or to a place where we can't beeline it. I guess we'd just have to be very careful to get the relevant eurekas ASAP before we commit to anything.
Think of it this way. Vikings get +50% building melee ships and can spit them out really fast, especially with maritime industries. The one limiting factor is gold for maintenance. If one player is good at building ships, why would both player build them? Why not have player 2 get gold, so player 1 can have a larger fleet that he can build really fast. With the snake structure, we also have to consider that each team as a single unit, since any team we attack will move both players before we can move, or vise-versa. So in theory, it is really like a 1 v 1. An additional benefit with having one person be the main attacker is that it is easier to react to counter movements without your partner's units getting in the way. For example, we both have units in an area, they attack and injure your unit but you move after me. I can't move your unit out of the way to counter attack with my unit. One of the main reasons I was arguing for the 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 structure, is that it makes war much more complicated and reduces the likelihood of someone being steamrolled. There are 4 moving parts to each war, not just 2. With snake method, there are really only 2, since both teams can move before their opponents. And if we have one player be the main fighter, it will make war much easier.
I am not saying player 2 can't build an army and get involved in war, it is just that one should focus more on military than the other. Also, since we are playing back to back, we could share client tokens and if I am the main fighter, you could play some turns of fighting, since war is probably the best part of the game, or vise-versa if you are the main fighter.
Edit: In addition, Admirals/Generals only impact the player's units, so it better to have a single larger army/navy that can benefit from any Admirals/Generals versus two armies/navies where only one can benefit from the Adrimal/General.
Oh, okay, that makes sense! Yeah, following that explanation, I think that does seem like the right move, unless I were to pick some civ with a different, complimentary military bonus. Nubia/Vikings with me spamming archers and GGs and you spamming melee ships and GAs might be interesting if we were to go that route .
Looks like we got our preferred choice of picking slot, awesome! Even if Vikings are already taken at 4th (and I think they might not be - I have some sense that the community may underrate them), we should still be in a great position to pick a synergistic pairing without worrying about getting sniped. Religious civs like Japan do have some trouble with cashflow if they don't land Tithe, which might not make them the best partners for a Viking attack, but I feel like on a water map Japan's probably the favorite for the first religion in most circumstances, in which case I think it should work fine?
