[No Players] Where the Lurkers Take Their Holidays

[Miguelito]

I think ljub is worried that that plant might get the 2nd ring hill with a cheap Cha monument and then look into their city? I believe it's that? New folks with different values, it definitely makes the game more interesting.

Also I'd give the 7 chariot/ 5 impi or whatever t55 rush a pretty high chance to succeed in total elimination? That copper city is really not well connected, and it would be very hard for Givac to hook up another. And if there's anything that Ginger hates, it's getting his snowball held up by mundane needs like metal units.

[Krill]

Pin (and others that commented on the map whilst in development), I just wanted to say that this style map, as well of the level of green/food resources, looks like it should give a pretty good game that won'tend in standard knight rush. It feels like there may be several more games of this type in the near future.

[pindicator]

Thanks Krill, I keep seeing things I could have done better so it's nice to hear that.

[Commodore]

If you'd told me this was someone who'd massively overbuilt workers, I'd have laughed you out of the room.


City #2 having both food tiles unimproved is bad enough, but that's a huge amount of riverside grassland going without cottages. This is actually a trap easy to fall into with excessive simming...you keep on working out how to max out one goal (cities in this case) but don't have all metrics under consideration (have a decent economy going into the midgame).

[El Grillo]

To be fair, city #2 only expanded borders 2 turns ago, and surely now that the forests are all chopped, all those workers have to start improving tiles.

[Miguelito]

They often cited the story of a worker paying for itself within 12 turns through chops only... which of course means you chop workers to chop more workers. And to secure the 2 victory points for the longest road, apparently.
Still, I'm pretty much impressed by their expansion, being newbies and all... And as Grillo says, all those workers can cottage the rivers pretty fast when they run out of forests, and the sixties is not too late.

[Tarkeel]

This is actually a trap easy to fall into with excessive simming...you keep on working out how to max out one goal (cities in this case) but don't have all metrics under consideration (have a decent economy going into the midgame).

Agreed. Simming is good for on the tactical/micro-level (finding the optimal route to a short-term goal), useful on the operational-level (getting a feel for the game and what you need to build) but pretty useless on the strategic level (where do I need to be).

If we have 10 workers and somehow can't find time to do tile improvements so that we're considering running specialists rather than work bare tiles, something has gone very wrong.

QOTM? Too spoilery, but otherwise a contender.

[Krill]

I recall speaking with Friedrich Psitalon (MP lead during Civ 4 development). He once told a story about another person, a high level civ 3 player that constantly mocked the game design in Civ 4. After a while FP started to get a bit annoyed, and they ended up having a duel.

The way FP described that game, he didn't have to do anything to win except watch as the loudmouth overexpanded and collapsed his entire economy into strike without FP doing anything.

I think we're about to watch the same thing play out once they settle that gold city.

[El Grillo]

I'm curious if their sims are somehow not capturing their expected costs accurately. One thing that still catches me off guard when I play casual SP games is how adding cities #6-10 can turn previously break-even cities into burdens due to number-of-cities maintenance. It feels a lot better to have cottages growing than to be scrounging up every bit of commerce while limping to Currency :D.

[Commodore]

In general I think players are struggling with the somewhat novel problem presented by the map. It's not that it's barren, per se, but that its wider and sparser than the artificial RB norm. Cities are being thrown down at a much further distance than people are used to, it's not a map that supports fewer or more cities than usual, it's just a lot more distance.