So, what's up in Norway?
If only you and me and dead people know hex, then only deaf people know hex.
I write RPG adventures, and blog about it, check it out.
I write RPG adventures, and blog about it, check it out.
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[PB73 SPOILERS] scooter's Oracle
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(October 4th, 2023, 08:27)Commodore Wrote: So, what's up in Norway? Well for one, life got busy at a bad time for reporting, but the real answer is I'm trying to figure out how to win this dang game. So, here's what I know. T108: Just played T111: Get Astronomy EoT T117: Enforced peace expires T120: Fish-for-Fish expires, a date that Oxy specifically picked Some other facts: * If left alone I'll win the game. Oxy's economic power takes a big step back at Astronomy, and mine does not, plus I have significantly more land and better late-game traits. So Oxy is going to invade me, very very obviously. * Oxy is in a GA right now, and he's pumping specialists for Great People because his food nose-dived in a big way. * Oxy will be able to outproduce me in a war thanks to Kremlin + Police State plus a population that hasn't been whipped to win a war already. * I will have a large movement advantage at sea * I will have first strike advantage due to turn order * Oxy will almost certainly have Frigates before me So, the last point is the big one. Oxy picked T120 after I offered T110. He didn't pick that for Astronomy, so that tells me he's angling for the next level up at Chemistry. I cannot match that, though I'm doing my best to bring it down. The first strike advantage is the other big thing. So, I need to either deal a decisive blow in the first turn of the war with 6-move Galleons - even if they all get sunk by Frigates after - or I need to batten down the hatches and try to survive his invasion for however many turns it takes me to get Frigates of my own online - understanding of course that he's still going to be able to out-produce me. Let's use pictures to run through the 3 scenarios I see to try to win this.  Kill this city... SOMEHOW. If I raze this city the concession will be instant. It has All The Wonders in it. He'd lose Kremlin whips and Police State and a monster city. The problem is this is not easy. There exists ways to do it that I can think of, but they're sort of moonshots. Havana's culture makes it significantly harder, and he's got Caravels everywhere so his vision is excellent. This feels not possible, but that doesn't stop me from daydreaming about it daily.  There's also an approach that looks something like this. Something like a half dozen 6-move Galleons loaded with amphibious units would fork 5 cities here. If I could turn that into, say, 3 razes, would that set him back enough? Maybe? The problem of course is there's a real chance that results in me losing my entire army and navy afterwards, so it would have to really count. Plus he would see it coming from a mile away, so he could maybe save the most valuable cities. So there's a real good case that this would not really be a good hammer trade for me at all.  Approach 3 is turtle turtle turtle. Force him to invade the mainland. It's easier said than done. In this world the east island would probably be extremely difficult to hold. I'm setting up forts internally as you can see here so that I can have some movement advantages. The point here is that building up a full invasion force is legitimately quite difficult. He'd need to build enough Frigates to force me to huddle rather than counter-attack to begin with, and then he needs enough Galleons, and then he needs actual attackers to fill those, all the while building enough units to stuff in front cities to keep me from taking potshots. Kremlin and his pop would get that for him, but his tech would grind to a halt. I'd get Frigates by the time he was threatening anything important, but crucially I'd still be teching. Stuff like MilSci and Steel would come to me first I'd imagine if I could last that long, and then the tides may start to turn. To tide myself over I'd hurry Walls/Castles in every coastal city to make it a grind. Basically the name of the game here is just try to survive and scale. So that's the crossroads I'm at now. I'll have Astro soon, and then I'm headed straight to Chemistry. I don't know exactly when he'll get Chemistry, but I would bet it's right around T120 with some heavy bulbing. Really we're sort of in an inverse position of the PB70 game where I bulbed my way into a short lead, but had to make gains to make it work. However, Oxy's "lead" is a bit more real here only because he'll have a legitimately noticeable production edge. Overall I'm not SUPER optimistic, but it's doable. My general feeling is if we both play mistake-free he wins, but I think he has the harder gameplan to execute?
Oh yeah.
 All hail. It's providing over 1/4 of my empire's tech right now. I decided the Wealth for at least a few turns is necessary to keep me teching. I thought about Zeus actually, and then Oxy built that last turn. I also thought about Chichen Itza to add defenses to island cities as it's a pretty short (3T) build for me, but that's normally such a bad wonder that I don't know if I've ever built it. Sort of feels like this could be the right moment for it though? Either way the wealth makes it so I can burst Astro-Engineering so I can get my Galleon count up and then unlock Castles.  The food lead is half me popping out to 19 cities and half Oxy spamming Great People. As for me on the Great People front, I'm about to squeeze a Scientist out of Roman (starved this turn) on the exact turn Connor was due a GP. Then shortly after Connor will pop one, and then Logan will do one. 2 of those will pop into a second MoM GA, and the third will be saved for a Chemistry partial-bulb. Avoiding Meditation has been clutch there for blocking Philosophy on the bulb list, however it's still gonna be a few to actually get there, which is the source of my whole dilemma. 
I like approach 1) if it can be made to work, e.g. by going around the ice island to the north, but you're right that if he has the approaches covered that could be real tricky to pull off. You might be able to bait-and-switch but it sounds difficult.
I don't think I'm a fan of committing a lot to approach 2). If we were going to try to keep him busy defending, I think we need to operate guerilla style with smaller forces that keep him moving and committing whips to build defenses, rather than picking one obvious tile to commit a major force at. I suppose that means mostly (3) with a side of harassment is the order of the day. Our berserkers are better at counter-attacking than they are at defending.
48 hours between turns in a 4 person game sure is something. It's ok though honestly as I don't think there's exactly tons of turns left. Could be wrong.
(October 4th, 2023, 22:15)Zed-F Wrote: I like approach 1) if it can be made to work, e.g. by going around the ice island to the north, but you're right that if he has the approaches covered that could be real tricky to pull off. You might be able to bait-and-switch but it sounds difficult. Sadly there's no ice island path to hit the capital from the fog, even with 7 movers, so there's not much I can do with that. I definitely checked. I think I'm just going to have to play mostly defensive and try to sneak in counter-punches with my mobility edge.
Yeah unfortunately I've had to pull way back on effort into this game. It's a shame, but it happens. Time will return in the future, but probably not before this game ends. The TL;DR is I'm doing all I can to get to Chemistry and generated a few GP during a MoM GA, but I think Oxy has this thoroughly covered. The time I spent conquering Yuris just put me too far behind him - he's got Knights and longbows everywhere, and I still don't even have Monarchy, and by the time I unlock those techs he'll have Kremlin-whipped Frigates everywhere. I did get Astro, but it won't be enough to do anything offensively. If I am right that he's just going to roll over me, that's OK, as this game was always very silly, and I enjoyed the unique start. The moral of the story here is the isolated start is really OP when the non-isolated players have WMDs, but credit to Oxy for playing it well. The key play for him was he foresaw the possibility that I'd go straight onto him after conquering Yuris, and he spammed Triremes everywhere to make that nearly impossible for me, which allowed him to push the war window back.
If there was a relevant 3rd player in this game I might be able make something of this still, but I mean, just look at this scoreboard: https://civ.zulan.net/pbspy/game/146/ Truly a unique game.
I was VERY surprised when it turned out this was a 2-1-2 situation instead of a 2-3 split - the 1 either won because they took an econ tech or lost because their military tech was absolutely worthless. "Pick a start" and "one of them is secretly isolated" was not a good combination.
A future version of this with 6p and a known 3v3 or 2v2v2 continent split could have some potential. I do suspect that Gunpowder/France was the only military plan that actually works on this map - you can absolutely YOLO a Musketeer and get a fast kill on one of these 2-player sections on some of these starts (yes I'm saying "Musketeer before Worker"). Like our Start 3 could've had a T18 Musketeer - could Yuris have ever done anything if that showed up on his doorstep T26ish while he was on ONE city? But Guilds was way too slow to get turned on and Artillery/SAM Infantry are slow enough that your non-military opponent can just whip a pile of axes if they really had to a lot of the time. (October 17th, 2023, 19:24)Cyneheard Wrote: I was VERY surprised when it turned out this was a 2-1-2 situation instead of a 2-3 split - the 1 either won because they took an econ tech or lost because their military tech was absolutely worthless. "Pick a start" and "one of them is secretly isolated" was not a good combination. Yeah I agree. I even recognized the implications of Big & Small, but I was even slow to consider the possibility that one player would be outright isolated. I was pretty anything-goes with map instructions, so I'm not upset about that part at all, but I agree that your refinement here probably makes this game style work better. (October 17th, 2023, 19:24)Cyneheard Wrote: I do suspect that Gunpowder/France was the only military plan that actually works on this map - you can absolutely YOLO a Musketeer and get a fast kill on one of these 2-player sections on some of these starts (yes I'm saying "Musketeer before Worker"). Like our Start 3 could've had a T18 Musketeer - could Yuris have ever done anything if that showed up on his doorstep T26ish while he was on ONE city? Yeah agree with this. I'm eager to find out what happened post-game, because France should not have lost that duel at all. |
