[SPOILERS] naufragar is not a number; he is a free man

[naufragar]

Have I miscalculated? I mean, I already miscalculated once. I thought Amica was only going to be able to take one city off Pind. Pind dying right now would be not so good, so I've offered him open borders so I can check out what's going on and offer whatever neighborly assistance I can.

[Lewwyn]

What's your plan? Go full econ or back to military aggression?

[naufragar]

What's your plan? Go full econ or back to military aggression?

Full econ, hell for leather.


Our cities are tiny, due to repeated use of the whip, but in 3 turns we'll have Currency. (Hopefully in three turns. It'll be very tight.) And we'll settle a bunch of cities and start actually teching. The goal is to start encroaching on Pind's section of our continent.

Pind, for his part, is building settlers while fighting for his life.



Listen man, it's ok if you don't put up a fight against me, but maybe put up a fight against Amica?


I have no idea what's happening here. Pind had a bigger army on the scene before Amica. You either take back your captured city, or you realize you can't and sue for peace. What's going on? Does Amica have a tech Pind wasn't prepared for? (Elephants, Horse archers, cats God forbid.) How are you getting this badly mauled in the Classical era after I encouraged you to arm up?

I'm watching Pind carefully.


But the game continued to play pranks on me. I mean this has to be a prank, right?


It's turn 92 in a 25 person game. The Hanging Gardens fell this turn. You're telling me not a single person otherwise blissfully at peace could land this? It had to go to Mackoti?



Just great. My neighbor who I wanted to hamstring has decided to kamikaze himself against the guy who built the Great Lighthouse while my other neighbor (Genghis Khan of the Mackoti) builds the Pyramids. Either of these neighbors can break open the Cairo pinata whenever they want (if they can't get me). Man, I stand by my plan, but are we once again going to have work so very hard just to keep pace with game leaders who happen to be next door despite the almost two dozen other potential candidates??

I'll give a bigger geopolitical overview on turn 100.

[naufragar]

I'll give a bigger geopolitical overview on turn 100.

Which is looking more and more complex. Amica and Pind made peace and have opened borders. Amica in that turn declared war on me? And then the next turn offered a cease-fire? Huh? I'm so confused. Worse, I don't really know what Amicalola thinks of me.  I consider him my bitterest rival for encroaching on my Pindicator carcass, but since that's a thought born from paranoia and malice, it's probably not apparent to other players. On the other hand, I'm trying to get my economy back in gear, and a few well-placed galleys would set me back considerably, enabling him to be the one to get the most out of Pind. On the other other hand, presumably one doesn't announce their naval invasions ahead of time. I'm just thoroughly perplexed.

Speaking of economy, my Currency ETA was too optimistic. I was off by a turn, which means I have to decide whether I settle 3 cities on the turn I would have gotten Currency and risk delaying further, or if I just keep them all in limbo. Too much thinking in this game. 

[naufragar]

Currency came in. Here is our Financial Advisor at the start of the turn:



And then we founded three cities:


Shoot me in the face. The first city increased total costs by 7 gold per turn, which means we are now looking at 10+ gpt for every city we settle from here on out. Even with 2 intercontinental trade routes, the city square, and a seafood they don't break even. Yikes, that's painful. Sure would be nice to have the Great Lighthouse.

I believe my peace treaty with Pind expires next turn.


He's building back valiantly. I wonder if he wacks my chariot for some catharsis. He also has a chariot which would be positioned to hassle a city. Let's see what he does. I don't think he's that petty. (But I did treat him meanly.)

[naufragar]

Mack and I played this turn (97) at the same time, which gave me some interesting information. Here's the demos screen from when Mack logs in:



And here's the after:


Ok. Confirmation that Mackoti is the top GNP. Makes sense. Lots of cities, an Academy, and The Pyramids. Still doesn't make me happy. (Ignore my apparently high GNP. I'm researching Archery (ha) which has 7x the known tech bonus. Super inflated.)

I also got to see Mack found this in real time:


I should be able to keep the clams, but I'll have to work for it. 

Frozen/Dullland got my graphs but have kept putting EP into me. This makes me think they are going to try to aggressively push the islands between us. (They are Fin/Imp.) They seem to have made a really extensive land grab on their own continent. Ugh. Y'all might not know this about me, but I'm very conflict averse. Sad to see that I'm getting squeezed on all sides.

[naufragar]

Well, screw you too, game.



It's always work. Here you see me chopping out a monument to try to keep control of my clams and get control over the whale.



As Mack continues to settle more islands.



For some reason, Amica didn't want to give me open borders.  Well, at least we understand each other. Unfortunately, I'm in a hurry to circumnavigate.


I've seen triremes around, so he can likely kill my workboat, but if it can't advance, it might as well be dead.

I promoted a chariot with flanking instead of combat 1, since I didn't foresee Amica's own chariot being on my borders already. My chariot is still wounded. (Combat 1 would've given coinflip odds. With flanking, I die on defense 75% of the time.)


I've got other chariots poised to kill his in response. Annoying, but whatcha gonna do?

Why are all my games so hard? 

[Lewwyn]

Do you have more islands to settle too?

[klops]

" I'm so confused"

hehe, I also don't really know whats going on, but I enjoy reading your posts :D

[naufragar]

Do you have more islands to settle too?

Not really. I settled my last this turn:


You can see that Frozen grabbed the other jungled island near me. You know this, but I'll explain for everyone: there were a scattering of jungled islands between the big continents that were prizes for whoever researched Iron Working first. I'm not too sad about losing these. After all, I have more cities than Mack and Frozen, but still, I'm greedy.

hehe, I also don't really know whats going on, but I enjoy reading your posts :D

I'm glad! I'll warn you that I was trying to make a good first impression at Civforum. At RB, I complain a lot more.    With that in mind, I present...

THE CUSTOMARY TURN 100 WHINING AND DINING!

It's my custom to go through every city in the empire in order to show the lurkers how much I suffer. But with 17 cities in the empire, you'll just have to trust that I have cities with horrible build queues working terrible tiles. Promise.

Have an overview instead:


These builds don't really matter. We get Metal Casting next turn, and pretty much everybody is going to start building forges.You can see that I've just about filled out "my" section of the map. Eagle-eyed lurkers might notice that I'm building another settler. This is going here:



I'm going to settle the hill by the rice. This does a few things. 1) It hopefully gets Pind used to the idea of me settling his land. I want him to think of me nibbling bits of his land and just shrug in resignation. We'll see if this happens. 2) That hill can pour culture into the whales tile if I need to compete even further with Mack's island city. You can see that Amica didn't attack my chariot. Maybe he smelled a trap? He offered a cease-fire. I moved my workboat forward and re-offered the cease-fire. Hopefully this means the boat teleports further out of his borders and it can continue on its way.

Have some demo screens as a treat:


I think Mackoti's GNP spike is pretty self-explanatory, but I can put the rest of us in context: my GNP is very, very good, which makes it even worse that Mack is just crushing me. I'm probably #2 or #3 when at full burn and I don't even come up to Mack's midpoint. Note that Amicalola, owner of the Great Lighthouse
is right where I am. Perhaps he doesn't have Currency yet? Regardless, Mack is also crushing the Lighthouse owner's commerce. After Pind's setbacks, he's making a remarkable climb. Hopefully Cairo's climb is only the start of a rocket, otherwise he's doomed. (He's Fin/Org, I'll remind you.)

The Mfg is less interesting.


Amica is far in the lead thanks to an early Metal Casting (which is why I wonder if he just hasn't researched Currency yet and could maybe catch up to Mack). My Mfg is very poor (like worst in the game), but I'm working cottages, so I'm not particularly concernced. It should improve over the next couple turns as forges go up.

Can you tell on the Crop Yield screen on what turn I attacked Pindicator?


Yeah...  Frozen is the top Crop Yield in the top Crop Yield in the entire game. This puts my neighborhood in some perspective: I've got top Crop over the sea to my East, and the ever dangerous Mackoti right at my heels directly to my north. Amica and Cairo aren't doing poorly either.

The Power graph has some impressive climbs.


You can see that Amicalola really armed up for his portion of the dance with Pindicator. You can also see that Mackoti has been able to get away with zero military because I chose to hit Pindicator and his other neighbor is Mr. Cairo. For what it's worth, Frozen is at war with Ichabod (whose graphs I don't have). I don't know how serious this is, although Ichabod did steal an island.

And here's the demos all put together:


Just don't ask me to build anything. As you can see, there's a huge gap between #1 and #2 food. At least top Food and top GNP are different players. The land area stat is nice, but the trick to these games is always "more land." I wonder who the rival worst Crop is. That seems to be a player soon to be eliminated.

THE CUSTOMARY TURN 100 SMACK TALK

Mackoti

Ah my dear neighbor Mackoti. We have some history: he was really pissed off at me in PB38 for what he saw as attempted kingmaking. I would say that I think he respects me as an opponent, but that respect doesn't ever save anyone from the hordes of knights or armada of galleons. I'll be honest: I'm absolutely terrified of my North. The last thing I want is to get into a game-long blood feud with Mack in which we're both trying to snipe each other's coastal cities.

Would you believe that a few turns ago I was counting Mack out? Imp/Agg is really nothing special on this map, and I thought Mack would settled down to a boring game in which there was no way he could win. Oops. Seriously, fellow players, how did you let Mack nab the Pyramids on turn 92? I, of course, refuse to take any blame for this.  I was busy fighting wars. 

I don't know what Mack's plan to win is, but it's going to involve hitting either me or Cairo with knights or galleons.

Mr. Cairo

I like Cairo. I think he's a good guy, and he's won multiple pitbosses, so I'm not really qualified to talk smack. That said, this is what's required on turn 100.

Cairo's a dead man, even if he doesn't know it yet. Look at his GNP graph. Look at his city count and his Crop Yield. I learned a valuable lesson in an earlier PB: You cannot win by out-developing your opponents. You can give yourself some false hope if the map is ridiculously unbalanced and you got the good spot, but as a rule, you cannot win just by playing better civ than other people, because someone will have grabbed the Pyramids, the Great Lighthouse. Someone will have conquered a neighbor. Cairo has no way forward. He's next to the Pyramids and Lighthouse builders, who will eventually eat him. It might not be today. It might not be tomorrow, but it will happen. For my part, I think I've got a decent read of Cairo at this point. He's not making plans to kill a neighbor. He'll be content to hope that Darius (Fin/Org) can get him some kind of demographics advantage, and maybe he can vulture a neighbor. Cairo might outlive me if Mack chooses me as his victim, but I can call it right now on turn 100, Cairo's dead.

Amicalola

Ah. Vendetta to the death, huh? I didn't realize Amica is as good as he is. In the time since the Pind war, I've read his games. He's quite good, and he spends a ton of time on his turns. I believe he understands our position: we both need to eat Pindicator in order to have a shot at winning. I think I've given away that I'm not very interested in sharing. So, despite not being neighbors, we are at each others throats already. This is a real pity. If I can take what I want of Pindicoria, we can be friends. I've got nothing against his Ethiopians. But so long as Pindicator is alive, we'll be fighting over the same meal.

I've been thoroughly impressed by his play so far. The Great Lighthouse on this map is beyond busted. I suspect he'll be able to contend with Mack for commerce. This makes my timing on my eventual Pindicator attack tricky. Amica has also kept up with the leaders in cities, despite having built not just the Lighthouse but Stonehenge, too. Compare his stats to Cairo's, and my Cairo prediction should become clearer.

As an aside, I hate playing against people that are on the ball. I can't slip anything by Mackoti or Amica. They're both paying too much attention to the game state.

Pindicator

Poor Pind. The hammer had to fall somewhere; shame it had to be here. Pind is Lincoln (Cha/Phi) of the Dutch, and I've talked about how that combo is beyond broken on this map. If he survived intact to turn 100, I would've given him decent odds at a podium finish even on the hell continent we seem to find ourselves. And he's got the skills to manage a big empire, so I'm confident he could've pulled something off. That said, he got caught with his pants down.

Here's the Power graph from turn 82. He declared on me in the first half, and I crossed into his borders in the second half.


Graphs are one turn delayed, so he could be at a higher power than shown in this screen. (You can cross reference my turn 100 power graph above.) The truth is he had roughly two turns to prepare for my invasion. If he missed the first turn, he could at least have put hammers into units and whipped as I poured over the border. Look, I've gotten blindsided. In fact, in my most recent game I got chariot rushed! (Yes, it was very embarrassing.) But I suspect Pind did notice the power spike. My suspicion is that when we see a power spike like that, we're averse to whipping everything into the ground immediately. After all, we hope that the attack hits someone else. We don't want to damage our development. Luckily for me, by then it was too late. When I first drew up my battle plans, Pind had more libraries than metal units. Even so, three whipped axes stuffed into his hill city (in addition to the chariot+warrior+archer already there) would have stopped my attack cold outside his gates. I'm not saying all this to bash Pind. I'm saying it to point out two phenomena I see in these games: 1) People really don't like committing to the painful path. Whipping ancient era defenders sucks. 2) People feel the need to race as fast as they can in these big games to get an advantage. Pind was keeping pace in city count with me and Mackoti (who's also Imp). That was perhaps a touch reckless.

And now, at last,

~*~*~THOUGHTS ON THE MAP~*~*~

I didn't take a big zoomed out picture, so I'll have to use my words. This map is a series of spoked wheels, holding five players per wheel. Each wheel is accessible via coastal tiles, and there are liberal sprinklings of islands all around. Each player has a clearly demarcated zone in which they are intended to develop. Land passage between players is restricted by narrow jungle passes, on on each end, connecting each player to two of the players on his wheel.

And holy smokes is this a terrible map for Imp. I know I said this:

This is a Joao map.

But I was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.  This map is terrible, not just for Joao, but for any Imperialistic leader. The allotted area for each civ is gigantic. (Easily 16 cities without conflict.) Sure, an Imp player could fill this up before her neighbors, but then you just crash your economy. You're stuck sitting on your hands with nothing to put your saved hammers into, until you reach Currency (or Alphabet, I guess). There is zero reason to have conflict with your neighbors before your section is filled up besides longer-term considerations. I've been keeping an eye on the foreign advisor diplo points. Practically nobody has been fighting, and why would they? It's more comfortable to expand in your own box. All a slow leader (Ind/Org; Fin/Org; Cha/Phi, to pick three at random) has to do is set a city down at each jungle pass, stuff it with a handful of archers, and then backfill at his leisure. It's the Classical era; no one's stupid enough to attack across a jungle pass in the Classical era. And, since everyone has a balanced starting area, you can trust that no matter how slow you go, you will be able to catch up to the Imp leader, who, after all, is constrained by tech rate more than land, and you (Fin/Cha/Phi/Org/whatever) should be able to pass the Imp leader in tech as you're catching up in city count. This was a disaster of a map for Joao. (You can point to Frozen/Dullland doing ok as Victoria, but they're Financial, so they can fill up their continent faster. From what I've seen they've also been a touch greedy, hence the Ichabod war.) Imp is only good if the leader can grab contested land or turn the saved hammers into something useful. Neither was possible here. Notice that Mackoti is in the position he's in because he grabbed the 'Mids on turn 92. If I knew the 'Mids would last that long, I sure as heck wouldn't have sweated to kneecap Pindicator. I could've built them by turn 75 with stone+fast workers. (I really thought somebody would've bent their civ for them. Huge miscalculation on my part.)

This map is also balanced to the point of equilibrium or stasis. When I attacked Pind, I necessarily had to open up an opportunity for Pind's other neighbor. Yes, there will be tons of conflict come the age of sail, in which case, expect players to get hella stressed as their cities burn from the fog, in terrifying alpha strikes. I imagine the neighbor dynamic doesn't change, though. If you want to push and prod on this map, you will be punished.

Now, none of this is a dig against Lewwyn, who, like all map makers, is practically perfect in every possible way. This is a dig against players whose appetites seem to be inspiring these maps. I'm seeing more and more people want luxurious, spacious, yet balanced maps. These maps don't just diminish the possibilities for conflict; they actively penalize it, ensuring vultures eat well. On the other hand (the carrot instead of the stick), they give enough space and resources so that you still feel you're playing civ. Not to psychoanalyze folks but I can't help but think this comes from a fear of failure.  You will not out-micro Rusten or TBS. (Or, at least, I won't. Maybe you will.) But it's as comfortable a loss as a loss can be: "Well, we all developed our civilizations in our respective corners until turn 150 but by then [TBS/Rusten/Seven/Novice] were so far ahead that they crashed through with [tech-appropriate advantage]." And I get it. I really do. As I've said before, I'm conflict-averse myself. (Ignore the feather headdress.) I don't take any pleasure in knowing I've got to fight my way out of a position. But in the chaos, in the friction of border wars and settling disputes, that's where this game becomes more than a race to knights/tanks/Alpha Centauri. (And consequently, why I like Imp. I like the game you play with Imp.)

All that said, in this house, we play the map. Before I thought I could have an opening with Pindicator, I was teching Metal Casting. (You can see it in my, like, turn 78 screenshots.) I was going MC before Writing, because my plan was to bulb Machinery for Crossbows off of galleys.  Anything to break the stasis. Luckily, that wasn't necessary. So, where do we go from here? We've crippled Pind, although as I mentioned, he's building back with heart. We need to eat him before Amica can. We need to figure out if we hit him with Catapults+[something] or we wait until Knights. Once we digest Pindicator, we're in a decent position to flex our muscles on this continent. Of course, against the background of all this, is Mackoti within a galley's ride of some 7+ of my cities. Hey, maybe he takes my Crossbows idea.