Chevalier and Incurian's Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny PBEM Reporting Thingy

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Stopping longships. Hm. Main thing is just get as many ships out as possible. Phoenicia can match longship construction with Cothons. Indonesia can sort of keep up with faith - faith converts to production at 2:1 ratio. Galleys cost 65 hammers, so 65 faith per turn equalizes ONE Norwegian city producing longships. Won't hit 65 faith per turn for quite some time - holy sites will bring in about 30, cities will bring in around 15 (with luxury tiles), remaining 20 faith would have to come from shrines and temples?

basically Indonesia will never match Norwegian ship construction on its own, it will just beat a vanilla civ (Sumeria).

Fortunately Phoenicia will handle heavy naval defense duties, and two of us combined can outbuild Norway. And Norway can't solely focus on us - will need to worry about other teams. By the same token, can't let Norway focus on another team exclusively - need to be able to take offensive and suck Norwegian ships into us. Don't expect to successfully conquer him, but need to not do what Ljubljana did in PBEM19 and let the uber UU kill one foe at a time.

Overall solution is to begin getting as many hulls into the water as early as possible. Can expecti nfinite longboat spam aimed at killing someone, with city-states as consolation prize (followed by more longship spam), ending in a Sumerian frigate rush while Norway chokes and provides melee escort. Very tough combination to stop one on one (Norway on a naval map is just too good, really). But can be opposed by all teams combined.

Personal plan to win is to exploit thrawn drawing all the heat and light. Holy Order really might be a viable belief for us. ;D Should be fun either way.

[RefSteel]

I know most of y'all lurkers don't care about this and really want to know how I'm going to stop the unstoppable longship deathball

Honestly? I'm rather enjoying reading about your plans that don't relate to the ULDB! If you never come up with a plan to deal with them and then they show up and gobble your civ and obviate all your planning, that obviously wouldn't be a good outcome for your game or the thread, but as long as there's more-than-one-dimensional planning going on, it's fun to read about all of it, longship-stopping and otherwise!

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I know most of y'all lurkers don't care about this and really want to know how I'm going to stop the unstoppable longship deathball

Honestly?  I'm rather enjoying reading about your plans that don't relate to the ULDB!  If you never come up with a plan to deal with them and then they show up and gobble your civ and obviate all your planning, that obviously wouldn't be a good outcome for your game or the thread, but as long as there's more-than-one-dimensional planning going on, it's fun to read about all of it, longship-stopping and otherwise!

Good! That's good news since I'm not sure there is a good way to stop a determined longship attack. Like, best case you fend him off but then the joker just skulks around and chokes you - raiding coast lines, keeping you from settling or building along the shore, etc. 

Anyway, Wednesday is a half-day at my school, so I have the afternoon to play a turn and give a quick update:

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Didn't grab a screenshot today, but I'll get your weekly report on Monday morning.

Highlights of the week - 

1)We finished our Holy Site one turn after ljubljana. I need to kill 2 turns before sailing unlocks and I can begin ship construction, so I'm running a 3-turn project. Still debating finishing the project or saving it one turn from completion, to be run later and irritate Ljubljana. 

Need to decide on Feed the World vs. Choral Music for religion. Either is good. 

2)Malhari was founded and is working the 2/2/1 incense (dyes?) tile while building a second holy site. I find waiting the 60 turns for your first holy site to return a religion is ages, you want that second one quickly. And we have time, because...

3)thrawn finished his first longship this week. I expect fresh longships every 2-3 turns thereafter. However, he can only support maybe 12 (lol) off his initial gold income and a trade route to Krill, so it shouldn't be an unstoppable deathball yet. Will need a solid navy capable of buying time until Inc joins though (and Inc will likewise need one). Won't settle the outer sites until that's sorted. 

4)Everyone more or less has finished their first settlers and are putting down second cities. 

5)I really need to sit down and plan this game because at this point I'm very stalled, and against this field that's a good recipe for us to be the first ones eaten. 

Won't mind if we are, though. Harder to make the time commitment to these as a family man than when I was a bachelor.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

In general, I have only vague thoughts about the game, because I devote basically just the time the turn is open to it, and a few minutes where I can snatch some time at work. Same goes for my other PBEMs but thankfully those are straightforward and I wrote all my thought down on those ages ago so there's no plans that need making. 

But basically the loose plan here is to use faith to goose our economy as much as possible, while staying nimble and opportunistic. I'm not married ot any particular micro strategy (I haven't bothered to plot micro at all, but I think it's mostly overrated - subject to severely diminishing returns vs. time invested) or overall gameplan. Instead, we'll try and get second religion, pair it up with the strongest beliefs we can, and use monumentality to pump expansion as much as possible while Incurian focuses on gold and the fleet. Then my resource-free jongs and Inc's frigates, plus a strong caravel fleet, will try to wait to seize opportunities as they appear. 

Is this likely to win? Nah, not really. Faith should be stronger than anyone except Japan, which will be a good goose to expansion. But I expect either a Norwegian deathsnowball from eating city-states and choking the neighborhood with swarms of longships (making my galley swarms look like a suboptimal fleet), or a Portugal-Japan trading nexus of doom, or hell just Gallic production and English gold (married to Woden's plodding but largely mistake-free play) to reach critical mass over our unoptimized empire. 

BUT if none of those things happen, then the inherent strengths in our civilizations, as long as we develop suitably evenly with the others, should be okay. Whoever is early leader should be victim to the same thing I was in PBEM20 - an early timing attack to try to cut us down to size. Granted, uh, I defeated that attack pretty handily and probably was on a winning path regardless, but it would have been a walkover without the Jongs intervening. 

At the same time, I should probably seek an edge like Work Ethic in last game. River Goddess is a good start, solving my amenity problems from last game in large part. Then I have two good choices in Feed hte World or Choral Music, and I'll adapt as needed (if both are gone because Woden chops Stonehenge or some nonsense like that, then I'll fall back on Crusade/Defender of the Faith/whatever). In fact, since both of the follower beliefs I think are good are dependent upon heavy holy site construction, I might even plausibly skip them until my first apostle. In general, if there is a path to victory for me in this game, it will be via judicious use of faith and careful leveraging of my religion. I do think such a path exists, and give our team 10% odds here. Thrawn has about 40% in my estimation, Portugal/Japan about 30%, and Woden/Banzai 20%. We'll see if I can hit that small window.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Weekly map update, done in the brief time I have before work:



Biggest worry is food at Srivalli. No 3 food tiles makes a very tough situation since ANY 1 food tile makes the city struggle to support its population.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

One interesting thing in the last turn - Ljub is gaining extra Great Prophet points. Either he's running the revelation card (I think that unlocks at Astrology) or he took Divine Spark of all things for his pantheon.

Actually, no, can't be Revelation, you don't get a wildcard slot until PP. So it's Divine Spark.

Personally, I think it's overrated as a pantheon. It gets you an earlier Great Prophet and maybe, like, two or three extra great scientists over the course of the game. Compared to the boost that early culture pantheons offer, or God of the Sea (too bad Work Ethic got banned), it's pretty minor. But it does signal that Ljubljana is desperate to get the first religion. Now, is that because he's constructed an intricate gameplan to win based on a key religious belief? Or is it because he's ljubljana and he's constructed an intricate micro plan based on best-case assumptions and he's convinced himself that his neighbors are going to do the single worst thing to torpedo him (like he did repeatedly in PBEM19 and PBEM20)?

If it's the second, we may have an opportunity here. If I finish the project I ran for a single turn while waiting for Sailing to come in - a two turn build - I delay my early ships by two turns. Is the risk of losing, say, Chinguetti to Norwegian raiders because my ships were two turns too late worth the possible opportunity to screw with ljubljana's head by finishing that project? Because I guarantee you if I do, he'll panic for a while in his thread. Too bad williams is there to talk him off the ledge, he's the perfect dedlurker for ljubljana (Archduke would just let him throw himself from the ledge). Anyway, the question is, will he alter his gameplan enough to 'win' a religious race (as if I would race Japan, Divine Spark or no, lol) to do material harm to other plans? And what does screwing with him cost me?

I'm tempted to do it just because it'd be funny. And it's not like we're playing to win in this thread, so what the hell.

What say you, peanut gallery? Is the comedy worth the suboptimal (2-turn) project build?

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Didn't have a new map so updated an old one:

Turn 32


Is a project build foolish? In a pure game sense, yeah. Not worth it when there are more pressing things to do. But from a messing with my opponents sense? Absolutely! Ljubljana took two days and a million posts to choose a pantheon. And he went with one that is pretty terrible apart from racing for religion - and I'm the only person with a HS down. So he's so damn afraid of me getting a pick before him that he'll torpedo his own pantheon choice over it. That, in turn, means that if he sees this project - which already had been invested in - he'll panic. He'll assume I intend to run more, because why run one unless I was racing him? And that, in turn, will warp his own decision making. He'll accept compromises in other areas, twist his own gameplan, in order to respond to me. 

So yeah, it's a suboptimal play, and I might have been too cute teasing him in the tech thread, twigging him to the possibility that he's just being messed with, but I bet he won't be willing to gamble on that possibility. Thus, my suboptimal play dictates even more suboptimal play by my opponents. 

Now I just build enough to not be easy meat for thrawn and figure he'll go try and eat Portugal/Japan, who will look much scarier than me.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

-cackles-

I did this and none of you can convince me otherwise:

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Well, I've had my fun. Now on to more practical things:

Malhari is finishing its holy site soon, then will join in galley production. I will get out 6-8 and eat the nearest city-states. I'll be a bit behind in that, but I'm content to drop a bit behind in this game. I'm not playing with the same attention that I did PBEM20, because the reward just isn't worth the effort here (namely, my time is much more limited these days), and because I think a slow start isn't fatal, really. As long as we're in the mix, hanging in there, we basically keep from being a target while waiting for the opportune moment. Like how I won PBEM12, or TBS won PBEM13.

So Inc and I will do the basics without microing everything to hell and back. Probably drop on the scoreboard for a while, but what else is new? Find a single game of mine where I didn't spend most of the first 70 turns or so on the bottom of the scoreboard. As long as we lay in the fundamentals in these early turns we should be okay. Then it's more a matter of exploiting the map, your civ, and the opponents than micro anyway.