[PB56] Amicalola and Tarkeel are Feeling Spicy

[Amicalola]

Hmm, that's a shame. It's just frustrating; I want to play!

The only incentive to get the end of the turn during a lengthy peace to me, is to play a double turn and log in more efficiently, thus *speeding up* the turn pace.

[Charriu]

I don’t know if anyone else has mentioned it, but if Ruff could stop playing last Every. Single. Turn. That would be great. He isn’t even at war. He’s probably held the game up by something like 15 turns at this point, and it’s incredibly frustrating. Probably the first time I’ve been annoyed enough to not play a game with someone in the future.

Could a lurker talk to him about this?? I would PM him, but I don’t know if that crosses the line for ‘no diplomacy.’

Just wanted to say that I looked at his login times and he isn't always playing last. Do you want to declare war in the second half or why did you bring this up?

[Tarkeel]

I don’t know if anyone else has mentioned it, but if Ruff could stop playing last Every. Single. Turn. That would be great. He isn’t even at war. He’s probably held the game up by something like 15 turns at this point, and it’s incredibly frustrating. Probably the first time I’ve been annoyed enough to not play a game with someone in the future.

Could a lurker talk to him about this?? I would PM him, but I don’t know if that crosses the line for ‘no diplomacy.’

Just wanted to say that I looked at his login times and he isn't always playing last. Do you want to declare war in the second half or why did you bring this up?

We don't intend to declare any time soon, but if we wanted to it would be hard. I don't think he is camping the turn-timer, but he's often been the last player to play his turn. It's getting into PYFT territory, but I guess it's driven by timezones and his need to play after Vanrober.

[Amicalola]

I don’t know if anyone else has mentioned it, but if Ruff could stop playing last Every. Single. Turn. That would be great. He isn’t even at war. He’s probably held the game up by something like 15 turns at this point, and it’s incredibly frustrating. Probably the first time I’ve been annoyed enough to not play a game with someone in the future.

Could a lurker talk to him about this?? I would PM him, but I don’t know if that crosses the line for ‘no diplomacy.’

Just wanted to say that I looked at his login times and he isn't always playing last. Do you want to declare war in the second half or why did you bring this up?

Oh, thanks for checking. If he's not always playing last, it's probably just my own confirmation bias. I made that post this morning when I got up to play, and was just waiting on Ruff. And waiting. And waiting. 

I've had that same experience a couple of times before, this week. It certainly feels as though he's playing last all the time. But as Tarkeel says, he's probably actually just playing when he can, after Vanrober. Feels very PYFT imo, but I was probably exaggerating before by accident. Sorry. Seriously, thanks for checking. 

We might want to declare war if Vanrober does to snipe a city or two, but that's probably a while away.

[Amicalola]

Team Noble just took a city off Lazteuq, and thrice-whipped.

[Amicalola]

I heard y'all like signs.




On a more serious note, my goals for this game are no longer to win. But I am really enjoying the recovery and in particular playing around with OR, and balancing our priorities of religion, buildings, and military. Not to mention just eking out max hammers is lots of fun here. So somehow I have ended up spending a lot of time thinking about this one. It's a nice change of pace from the extreme tilt that I was feeling for those 10-20 turns.  

Most recently, I have been deciding where we will try to chop out MoM. Fennel is the most likely candidate. If we can whip 3 or 4 population, chop 4 forests, and use our OR and marble bonuses, we should only need either ~50 hammers (3-whip) or ~20 hammers (4-whip) or actual building, which could be done in 2-3 turns. So that would be cool. 

Just to make sure, the bonuses from Marble and OR apply to chops and whips with wonders?

[Amicalola]

Observant lurkers will also note plans being made for if Ruff gets attacked. Vanrober and we have been exchanging 'War With Ruff' diplo for about 5 turns. Ideally, we take Ruff's new city, and Madrid. If Vanrober takes Madrid, my hope is that he would raze it, since Cumin's culture will swallow it; he may not though. Finally, I think us taking the capital is extremely unlikely, but if Vanrober does I might settle that in-between city too.

This would be 10-20 turns away I think, and a total war of opportunity for us; we don't exactly have a standing army. But if we can get 2 cities out of it (I think getting all 3 signs is too optimistic), that would be very cool.

[Amicalola]

Vanrober just 2-whipped 5 different cities. And that's after a HUGE powerspike the previous turn.

Ruff is Dead. DEAD.

We are going to try and snipe that one fur city in the north, and be content with that. I think Vanrober will just bulldoze us alongside Ruff if we try anything more than that.  On a related note, I am really impressed with Vanrober's game. Admittedly he had a Bonkers 2nd city while we were happy to steal a lone wet corn, but he's also been in far more conflict than us this game and is still significantly further ahead. Which should actually snowball even further if he takes out Ruff fully like I am expecting.

[Amicalola]

Sorry I haven't been posting anything of substance. To be honest, the knowledge that Noble is a near 100% to win this already has been splitting me between relaxedly managing my OR cities almost like a sandbox, and hatching harebrained schemes to keep this game interesting. It's a weird combo, and I imagine neither makes for very good lurking.



First, my last map feedback post, and in a way that I hope is helpful Superdeath. Tarkeel and I consider ourselves very lucky to have grabbed the 10 cities that we did (ordinarily, we would have gotten 7). El Grillo was similarly screwed to us on space, as were Ruff and maybe Lazteuq, but the other 7 players seem to have had much better situations.

We have averaged precisely 1 food resource per city, including our 3-resource capital. Meanwhile, Noble seems to have averaged nearly 2 resources per city (it might even be higher!), and Vanrober/Mjmd aren't that far behind. These are the only 3 player's who's land I have seen enough of to judge, but it's not very inspiring. It certainly didn't help that over half of players have a random fur thrown in for good measure, and they were frequently the ones that already had more space+food. This food deficit is the reason I believe we have 0 chance of winning, despite our place on the scoreboard and decent number of cities. It just would have been even worse without that extra land. The only plausible way I can see us winning this from T0 would be a hugely successful rush like Noble's. If you go back a few pages, you can note the exact time that Tarkeel and I realised this in our private chats; it was when Tarkeel stopped doing any more score analyses, on about T30-35.

My feedback for Superdeath: alongside luxuries/strategics and capital balance, food and spacial balance are probably the two most important things to balance on a map, as best as possible. At least in my opinion. I don't mean that in a bitchy way; I would love to see you make more maps. Just try to keep that in mind, I guess. I hope it was remotely helpful.



But I digress. The Harebrained Scheme: One thing I have been considering strongly recently is massing watermills/windmills everywhere possible, and converting to Serfdom in our GA (set for about T125), just as a fun way of testing the civic for myself. I would also build the AP and all religious buildings around this time, to try and play around with a religious economy. Essentially, this game has become a testing ground for me, and I am actually quite excited to try these two things for the first time. Maybe they'll turn out stronger than we tend to expect! ....Maybe not.

[Tarkeel]

We're not conceding the game (it's way too early for that!), but I agree with everything Amicalola just said. The worst part (for me) is that we had a path to being relevant (rushing AT), which we found and pursued, but the river/hill delayed us the necessary few turns for Noble to get there before us.

I think our best strategy going forward is going back to the initial plan. IMP has more or less played out; we've grown as wide as we can for the foreseeable future, so use Hereditary Rule to grow tall and leverage FIN to continue our fast tech pace into the English strengths: Redcoats.