williams: yeeeeah ok i think i'm convinced about ground troops. i guess my hope is that nobody will invest a ton into them pre-frigates, with most of the use cases from PBEM20 coming well into the frigate era. but landlocked cities were such a nightmare in that game and significantly disadvantaged the England/Japan game because they were easiest to conquer. and you'd better believe that "snakiness of continent" will be a MAJOR factor in determining the best target in this one :/
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[SPOILERS] swans will bite u
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If thrawn does take Portugal, we may want to gear our picks towards taking something that can stop Portugal, as with thrawn at the helm and any number of breakable partners available they are way too dangerous to be left alone. I can think of one civ that is uniquely and powerfully suited to doing this - Norway. According to TAD (but not civwiki) Portuguese traders can cross ocean tiles before Cartography. We need to triple-check whether this is true because if it is, it is an enormous weakness in this setup because your own ships can't protect your traders from Norwegian longships. Anyone who picks this civ will need to be very very careful about keeping a ton of ships around for TR protection duty, and if the ocean tiles thing is true the very existence of Portugal in the game could be a major stealth-buff to Norway, as pillaging 8 Portuguese traders is almost as good as being Portugal yourself...
thus in the event of thrawn picking Portugal our best options are probably something like - Indonesia to pair Jongs with some kind of gold-generation civ - Phoenicia/England for generally oppressive sea power and possible unexplored synergy with the Dutch/Egypt (?) - Norway to build two settlers and then nothing but longships for the first 100 turns, pillage a crapton of gold, conquer a bunch of city-states to also spam longships, hopefully fund the same kind of mass-upgrade Portugal would be enabling, and aggressively counter-team thrawn IF the ocean trade route thing is true.
That's an excellent point, and a potential issue for us if Thrawn goes in another direction. Very map dependent, of course. Someone is going to grab Norway (my money is on Chevalier, given how much he wanted them for PBEM20) and if that person is aggressive and opportunistic with them it could be major trouble for a trade-centric economy.
How can that be defended against? It may be possible to set up trade destinations in relatively sheltered locations that won't leave traders going over the ocean very much, but only if the map is conducive to it. Quadremes can attack longships on narrow ocean corridors, but even a three tile wide stretch of deep water can offer complete protection. I doubt any player with plans on raiding us will sign a DoF, and it's not clear we should want to do that anyway given our turn order position. 
Indonesia feels like the right fallback pick, but I'm really loving England too.
RNDs are awesome, obviously (+1 movement on ships, double admiral points, plus a free ship, extra loyalty, and extra gold on foreign continents). Redcoats are a pretty awesome improvement on a pretty good unit, and after PBEM20 I'm really interested in the potential power of Letters of Marque-fueled Sea Dog swarms (those things are invisible frigates who can capture enemy ships, albeit with a worse promotion path). Just gotta avoid the idiotic bug (or possibly intentional nerf gone wild) where capturing a city on a foreign continent doesn't get you any of the usual free stuff and they should do extremely well.
I don't know tbh....
there is one ironclad and hilarious solution in Phoenicia - biremes have an ability that prevents allied trader pillages within a 4-tile radius, and can go toe to toe with longships as well. But there's a 0% chance Phoenicia will drop to 7th or that we would have rejected them anyways if they did. we could also take Norway ourselves if they drop to 7th but that's not happening either  Otherwise, I'm not sure what we can do besides be VERY careful to not let traders cross the ocean and have a partner who is dedicated to providing an anti-raider defense force. China or the Dutch can do this as they can forego culture Pingala completely (replacing him with Sacred Places and the TR culture, respectively) and open with Victor 3 in a galley-spam city, turning their galleys into effective naval UUs in the t50 range. One could add Twilight Valor as well but missing FI basically kills the synergies with Portugal by missing the frigavel timing  And if TAD and I are on separate continents, as was requested of the mapmaker, and there is ocean between us, I don't have any ideas, and maybe that reality is bad enough that we should reconsider second-picking them...man, if thrawn does take Portugal though I really wanna take Norway, ignore Pingala for Victor 3 ASAP, Classical Dark Age for Twilight Valor, Oligarchy, and just run him over with strength 51 longships in the Classical era while my partner builds towards a mass upgrade with my pillage gold. Best partner there would probably be Australia since Norway can opportunistically weaken conquered city-states for them to liberate better than anyone. god that would be so much fun
Ok, the capital Good capital Idea for defending Portugal against Norway is to find a city-state in a Geneva-like location:
 and have Portugal's partner take it, build it up into the TR destination, and cram the channel full of galleys. But there are all these weird restrictions on where Portuguese TRs can go that seems to imply that many would still take a long sea voyage even to such a location. And you'd lose out on any multiplier from intercontinental TRs in addition to needing to rebuild the districts in the CS from scratch... ugh i hate game balance
deliberately leave ocean tiles just off the coast unexplored so the traders will be forced to pick a coastal path to my capital? idk man
We could also simply focus on TRs to city-states, and then if Norway shows up in force and we can't defend them, simply declare war on the CS to save our traders? but who wants to leave a city-state alive ugh Byzantium's banned for sure, right? Dromons are classical era frigates and would help a ton...
There's very little chance that Portugal wouldn't be eventually targeted by Norway in this game, especially if these trade routes prove as lucrative as we expect. Thrawn, Woden, and Chevalier are all plenty sharp enough to figure out that raiding traders is a profitable and effective way of slowing down an opponent, the only thing left to chance is how vulnerable those traders actually are on the map we gen. It's basically the same issue as Venice in Civ V: very powerful, assuming your opponents are idiots and don't attack your fragile and indefensible trade network.
Ugh indeed. Hopefully Thrawn picks soon so we can start focussing on actuals over hypotheticals here.
omg i got it - send our trade routes TO NORWAY or to their partner. then if they attack us to pillage our traders will save themselves and we'll inspire Defensive Tactics, and maybe we can get Australia 7th, and if one actually finishes we'll get a trading post + diplo vis to speed our eventual conquest
 only half-kidding here |
