[PB73 SPOILERS] scooter's Oracle

[scooter]

Now that all the tech picks are in, regretting not taking Satellites for the Most Perfect Rush?

This did cross my mind briefly as one of the funniest possible selections alongside taking Computers and Oracling Superconductors. I'm more sad that nobody is going to try The Internet. It's not really viable in this military-heavy setup, but it's the craziest choice for sure. I can't figure out how you can possibly make it work in MP though.

[Cyneheard]

I’m going to laugh when it turns out we’re on a 2-team continent with just Oxy and the pure military leaders have to only fight each other.

[scooter]

I’m going to laugh when it turns out we’re on a 2-team continent with just Oxy and the pure military leaders have to only fight each other.

That would be the dream. I mean, in that case we definitely try to just capture Oxy's insane capital, right?

Will have more detailed thoughts later, but draft is complete.

Luddite: Victoria of India, Start 5 and Artillery
Oxy: Joao of Inca, Start 1 and Communism
Cairo: Willem of France, Start 2 and Gunpowder
Scooter: Mansa Musa of Vikings, Start 3 and Civil Service
Yuris: Pacal of Byzantium, Start 4 and Guilds

Scariest to me is Cairo and also Oxy if he's left alone. Less sure about Yuris as his has a lot of question marks, but if the stars align for him it could be scary. And Luddite is the wild card. His combo is very all over the place for me, but he's at least not really conquerable once he gets like... 3 Artillery. Will try to write up more detailed thoughts prior to game launch.

[Qgqqqqq]

I was going to say Vikings

I think Oxy has the combo I'd most like to play. Agree Caito is scariest, perhaps even just if he's left alone.

I don't see anyone gearing for a super early rush here. If you do that you just take one persons land. I think everyone's plabung to expand out on a decent clip and then try to do something with 5+ cities. The trick will be being strong enough to out fight everyone one we get there. And Vikings give us our own nukes to bring to the table against Oxy.

[Zed-F]

Some thoughts:
- Luddite: Slow start but Vicky + Fast Worker feels a little better than Pacal + bad techs. Still doesn’t feel too scary as a neighbor.
- Oxy: Probably our main competitor if we aren’t next to Cairo. Only downside is maybe a weaker tech speed, but given a good wonder this could be solved.
- Cairo: Scariest opponent to be next to, at least for us. Hope he’s closer to Oxy?
- Yuris: Pacal is good but Byz has bad start techs and Start 4 is pretty slow already— this has a lot of needs and only limited acceleration. I feel like Yuris could get left behind until it’s too late to matter. If a neighbor, I think we can sort this.

Stone Wonders:
- Oxy and Cairo start with Stone so are our main competition.
- Henge: Neither Oxy nor Cairo really need this. Maybe we get it later at our convenience but we have cheap temples so we probably don’t need to rush it.
- TGLH: We don’t want Oxy to get this; ideally we find a way to snag it ourselves. I’d be less worried about him getting Colossus. It does need Sailing as well as Masonry so we should have a leg up.
- Mids: Seems really good with SPI as discussed already.

[Cyneheard]

Some thoughts:
- Luddite: Slow start but Vicky + Fast Worker feels a little better than Pacal + bad techs. Still doesn’t feel too scary as a neighbor.
- Oxy: Probably our main competitor if we aren’t next to Cairo. Only downside is maybe a weaker tech speed, but given a good wonder this could be solved.
- Cairo: Scariest opponent to be next to, at least for us. Hope he’s closer to Oxy?
- Yuris: Pacal is good but Byz has bad start techs and Start 4 is pretty slow already— this has a lot of needs and only limited acceleration. I feel like Yuris could get left behind until it’s too late to matter. If a neighbor, I think we can sort this.

Stone Wonders:
- Oxy and Cairo start with Stone so are our main competition.
- Henge: Neither Oxy nor Cairo really need this. Maybe we get it later at our convenience but we have cheap temples so we probably don’t need to rush it.
- TGLH: We don’t want Oxy to get this; ideally we find a way to snag it ourselves. I’d be less worried about him getting Colossus. It does need Sailing as well as Masonry so we should have a leg up.
- Mids: Seems really good with SPI as discussed already.

The Great Lighthouse doesn't have a doubler, but otherwise agreed there. If someone else can grab the Mids, that's a clear sign that they're not worried about military at all - which is the bigger problem IMO than the actual wonder falling.

[scooter]

It’s time to start doing opponent previews. It’s a lot more interesting than normal because players have lots of selections to analyze, and more importantly we can glean a ton about their opening because we can see their starts. Going in order of the draft, first up we have Luddite.


Luddite: Victoria of India (Mysticism/Mining), Artillery





First off, I don’t really understand what happened with this draft. Overall I think top of the draft was where you wanted to be. The first problem was spending that pick on Artillery. Which isn’t to say that picking Artillery itself is a problem at all, but I view Artillery and Rocketry to be extremely similar in power, and nobody even picked Rocketry! But I think this would have been totally fine if he drafted around it, and then he just kinda didn’t at all? For example, he picked India, but he didn’t pick Expansive to make them quicker. I suppose that’s not a huge deal. Mostly though I’m confused about Financial. His capital isn’t exactly cottage cheese heaven, but also what does he need the tech boost for?

To elaborate, he has access to a unit nobody can out-tech for like 250 turns. So the most important thing for him is growth curve for food-hammers so that he can produce more of them. In that sense, there’s a certain reasonable logic to Imperialistic, but overall Joao or Shaka sound way better here. I think he has to SIP and then suffer through a 12T worker. At least India saves him a turn on each of his first 3 foods if he improves them in the order I’m assuming, so that really does help a lot. It’s not clear to me what Financial does to boost his game plan and suggests he’s going to try to play this start pretty normally. EXP/IMP/AGG/CHM all make a ton of sense to me, so only getting 1 of those is a downer for this I think. Even SPI would be fairly interesting here, but FIN would not even be a consideration for me with this start/tech. Finally, to make matters worse his Mysticism/Mining starting techs do nothing for him here, so he’s going to have to go something like Hunting->AH->BW and go ages without Wheel, or slip Wheel in and slow his improvements/chops further. Not to mention any cities he’d want to plant need Fishing and/or Agriculture! He’s going to have a couple painful bottlenecks early on due to India.

My gut says his immediate neighbor will just try to kill him ASAP before he builds an Artillery. If he’s close to me I’ll definitely have to consider it. Once he DOES build one, any city defended by it is practically untouchable for a couple eras. If he tries to play the start straight-up and there’s enough distance to not need a rush, I think we could get to like 7 cities before he gets to 4, and then Artillery drop from existential threat to major nuisance.

Finally, Luddite as a player played in several of the earliest PB/PBEMs. Without doing any research, I remember him being an extremely competent player that was neither scary nor a pushover. I would have placed him in a similar tier as myself as a player. What I don’t know is 1) if my memory is correct and 2) how much the long break will be a factor. He seems quite engaged here, so I expect a good performance, and it’s quite possible he’s figured something out here that I’m not seeing as a result. My prediction is he ruins someone’s game but does not win.

[scooter]

- TGLH: We don’t want Oxy to get this; ideally we find a way to snag it ourselves. I’d be less worried about him getting Colossus. It does need Sailing as well as Masonry so we should have a leg up.

As Cyneheard stated yes there's no doublers here, but I agree this is a crucial wonder. The straight up un-cut GLH on this map will be incredibly powerful. Given that there are no IND or ORG players in this field, the path to building this is wide open. I agree Oxy is the player we least want to get this, and he's also probably the only competition.

[Zed-F]

To try to peek into Luddite’s head for a sec… I don’t think he’d agree that there is no need for commerce. This is big and small, so boats and naval parity are needed to actually win here; if he can’t compete on that front it doesn’t matter how many artillery he has to crush an immediate neighbor; he just gets walled off with wood, out-teched, and rendered irrelevant. To me the pick looked like ‘oh, cool, let’s get this awesome thing! … oh wait… how am I going to actually make this work for more than just one neighbor? … well I guess we will need some kind of economy…’

[scooter]

And now for something completely different.

Oxy - Joao of Inca (Agriculture/Mysticism), Communism




If you would have showed me these picks and this screenshot a week or two ago I would have lost my mind finding out this combination was possible and would have declared it the winner sight unseen. It wasn’t that long ago that I suggested Communism should be the obvious pick 1. Obviously I backed off that after testing a few techs and seeing how much Bureaucracy mattered. But this is still really powerful. I think Bureau is still faster than all this, but over time that will fade and this will catch up and potentially blow past. It’s aided by this truly ridiculous start that has so many goodies that I don’t really know how to work out in my head how quickly he can get stuff out. For example, I couldn’t tell you what yield a farmed Floodplain Wheat is without looking it up. (You don’t need to tell me. It’s really OK.)

The thing I wonder about these picks are whether they’re too greedy. I think my picks are great obviously, but I was concerned that maybe I was being greedy myself. But these picks take it to another level. If you have a military tech, why not attack him and take that juicy capital for yourself? I think T-Hawk's comment about "you don't have to outrun the bear" is really relevant here as Oxy might be the slower runner (defender I mean) and juicier target. Unfortunately, we know Luddite is not near him because we see tundra to the north here while there’s tundra/ice south of Luddite, which I really should have mentioned in the Luddite preview. I can see that Yuris and Cairo are both north of the jungle belt, so there’s a good chance one of them neighbor him. Given that all 3 of them are north of the equator, it seems very likely I’m south of it (and I think the trees hint as such too) and closer to Luddite.

Anyway, If Oxy is left alone though, this will be extremely powerful. One thing in the previous post about Oxy + GLH that was left out was that Oxy will be pursuing the Kremlin sooner than later which may distract him from GLH. He has two ways to build this thing. He can try to build it straight-up which I think would be a mistake, but at least he has the Stone to reduce the cost from 800h to 400h. The other way is to tech to Metal Casting, run an Engineer, and then use it to rush Kremlin. This is probably what I would do, but even so that’s a long wait. However, if you’re going to do that, Sailing is a pretty real detour because you want to get that GPP clock ticking ASAP. It seems more likely them that the other wonder he might target would be the Colossus since it’s already there at Metal Casting. I suppose he could also go all-in on Pyramids and use the Engineer points that generates to speed it along, but again that would also more or less remove him from GLH contention. The other risk of building Kremlin is that someone would come take it from you obviously. So he’s got a lot of options, but each one has a drawback. (I guess thinking about length of time to pop an Engineer, maybe he does just slow build it.)

Overall I think if left untouched he's going to be a serious contender in this game. I just have a hard time imagining him being untouched. Let's compare him and me as targets, for example. With him you can get this ridiculous capital and Kremlin. With me you get... whatever wonders I happen to build. Of course, all of that depends on continent configuration, so it's not really useful to wonder about all those scenarios. Overall his win-con here is get a city lead untouched and build/rush Kremlin prior to Musketeer/Cataphracts arriving and use the enormous production edge more cities + Kremlin affords you to fend them off. Do that, and he'll be a contender. It'll be a real test to see how he can balance those three things at once though - REX, don't die, and Kremlin. Oh, and he has to figure out how to tech at some point too.

I don't have super great memories of Oxy as a player as I never actually played against him, but like Luddite I recall him being a competent B to B+ type player. Quick glance at the game spreadsheet says he won a game with Commodore and Q, although it was one of those tight AW games that are sort of a different skillset. Q, do you remember much about him as a player? Anything he's particularly good or not good at that you remember? I think his selections could make him a contender if he plays his start right and gets neighbor luck.