[SPOILERS] scooter Expands the Empire Across the Sea

[scooter]

Bing: Pericles of America (CRE/PHI) of America (fishing/agriculture/library/marine)
America has been picked in ever single game since got the latest version of it's UB, and Bing is the latest to take it for a spin with the expected optimal leader: CREative to discount the building and PHIlosophical to make the most out of the free great people points. Is this the game to showcase it's a broken pick? I doubt it.

So we're going to do another round of the America UB discourse. I think the UB is very good, but I think the high America pick rate has more to do with the UB being interesting. It's a novelty! I don't think it's as great here as it can be. Well, at least not with this leader and opponent list.


To be specific, I think the pick is actually great in a vacuum. The UB is extremely versatile, and he picked the two traits that amplify it the best. There's the Astro play, but that is not the only option here. For example, he low-key has a great angle on Pyramids. Beeline Writing, build the UB in the capital, and while you're building it rush Metal Casting. Upon completion of the UB, you have 19T to get a Forge up and run an Engineer for 1T, then boom, Great Engineer to rush Pyramids. I think that could very well beat Forge + Engineer on account of being able to get the UB up faster than the Engineer, plus you don't have to use up a pop point on an Engineer for a long time. Then Pyramids + UB will spawn you another Great Engineer in 20 more turns, which you can use for any non-banned wonder you want. This is probably what I would be looking at in his shoes, and I think it has enormous potential. I think running a Pyramids specialist economy is likely to be dominant here, and the cheap Libraries everywhere + PHI go perfectly with that.


All of that said, I have metagame concerns over this selection. Specifically, I think a lot of players will view Bing as the best target for aggression. Every other player in the game selected PRO and/or CHM while Bing picked the "if you leave me alone I'm going to Sci-Bulb my way to Physics" combo. I don't think people will leave him alone.


Bing as a player is really tough for me to gauge. I think he's simply a good player that doesn't tryhard ever. A couple time he's had a teammate help him, and that's helped him enormously, but solo he plays quite casually. This gets into my other concern which is that Pericles of American Library is a bit of a tryhard combo. I've made a bunch of casual comments about bulbing Astro will be several players' goals, but are we sure he will remember to skip Meditation instead of playing a turn one day and going "huh, Buddhism is still available"? Ironically, his more casual style would fit our selections really great, and like Yuris, I think I'd be more bullish on his chances if he picked something easier to execute. That said, Pericles of America does sound fun and from that perspective, I think the pick is great. I really hope he goes for the Pyramids play above in part because I don't really want another yet-to-be-previewed player taking it, which is what I expect will happen.


In conclusion, this is my top preference for a neighbor, and I think that's why I don't love this pick for him.

[Zed-F]

Yeah, agreed so far. Bing especially sounds like food.

[Tarkeel]

Yeah, agreed so far. Bing especially sounds like food.

Make no mistake, Bing is not food. He seems to play every turn with a fresh slate, which is a good mindset for tactical defending; not so great for doing strategic planning. I don't think he can win this PB, but he can definitely stop someone else from winning.

[scooter]

Superdeath: Churchill (CHA/PRO) of Native America (fishing/hunting/axe/monument)
For once SD picks a combo I'd be happy to play. While most of the value comes from the leader, the totem-pole has very good synergy with CHA; both discounted culture and two-promo gunpowder units without any civics, and three promotions if you run both vassalage and theocracy. On paper the pick has both economy and early boost to do good.

Superdeath has a certain reputation around here. The good news here is this entire game is the antithesis of the settings that cause him to do the thing. Early rushes are either impossible or very unlikely, depending on the exact map nature, and the former seems most likely. Superdeath seems to agree with me and instead has elected to opt for prickly rather than The Hammer. In fact, his combo straight-up looks lifted from my theory-crafting with Tarkeel, as this rated very highly on our lists.


I think he's got nearly all the tools here. I think he's got both the best early economic combo and the best defensive combo. The nice thing about that is he isn't forced to get aggressive at a predictable point of the game. The one piece he's missing is something that accelerates early growth curve, though Chm may help a little bit. Stonehenge will also be an interesting puzzle for him. It's quite useful for him for obvious reasons, but it is for De Gaulle too, and De Gaulle can beat him to it if he wants to. Losing out on a Stonehenge race would be costly given he needs foodhammers more than commerce, and that's the opposite of the trade he'd be making in the event of some fail gold. I'd probably skip it in his shoes, but if Yuris lets it sit for a minute, that could change the calculus. Mostly he just needs to avoid falling behind on city count I think.


Superdeath has shown he can do fine when he's not actively self-destructive. He's put in a few good games when either the map or a teammate is there to keep him focused. I think the map and pick here will be really helpful in that regard. I like his chances to do well enough and be relevant deep into this game here. My wishes about "easier to execute" with Yuris and Bing are nailed here - this is a much easier leader/civ to play. I think the bigger question is whether he can do more than just be relevant. I don't think I'm going out on some huge limb to suggest there are two players that are more favored here than him. That said, neither of the two favorites have anywhere near flawless track records either, so it's not like he's playing against any untouchable juggernauts. For my money he's on the inside track for a podium finish with the potential for more if things break his way.

[Zed-F]

Yeah, agreed so far. Bing especially sounds like food.

Make no mistake, Bing is not food. He seems to play every turn with a fresh slate, which is a good mindset for tactical defending; not so great for doing strategic planning. I don't think he can win this PB, but he can definitely stop someone else from winning.

To be clear, Bing isn’t necessarily a food-tier player generally, but in this game his combo seems likely to be eaten.

[scooter]

Ginger: Lincoln (CHA/PHI) of Spain (fishing/mysticism/cuirassier/castle)
Spain is probably one of the best naval civs that remain unbanned in this game, but their start is very slow and awkward if you don't start with fish or freshwater seafood. I'm not entirely sold on the traits he's paired it with; while PHI is good for the expected astro-bulb and CHA is good to make the most out of the bonus naval XP, I still miss PRO to make the most out of the traderoutes. Main issue I see with this combo is you want several different tech paths all at once.

So that leaves us with Ginger. The Spain pick is the only thing that gives me pause on my general assumption that starts are probably mirrored-ish. Spain's starting techs are really tough for the reasons Tarkeel mentions above. To me, this pick might be a bet from him that he can micro so much better than this field in the early game that he won't actually fall behind, and then he makes it up with the enormous mid-game power of this pick. That's certainly possible! Alternatively, it might be a bet that on a water map, the snowball effect is dulled considerably by the water bottlenecks you constantly run into, which I also think sounds like a plausible explanation. I wonder all this because man, this is going to be a slow start from him if he's looking at the same foods I am. I tested WB first just out of morbid curiosity, and it felt really bad to me. So sure, he can go worker + Agri first, but his worker is going to have downtime before long because he doesn't have Mining like we do to get to BW quickly. I'm sure there's a solution here that makes it passable, but it's a tough puzzle to opt into. That said, he did opt in after seeing his screenshot, so I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt.


I'm generally with Tarkeel in thinking this Civ wants PRO. The good news is Spain does allow you to skip the Walls in CtH, and he should be able to find Stone by the time Engineering comes online, so that cuts the actual cost down to 50h, which can be reduced further by OR/Forges. So it's not all bad. But PRO just seems better for this because I don't think he's going to get nearly enough international routes. I suspect he felt CHM and PHI were both can't-miss, so he's happy to eat the trade-off. Also due to his skipping of PRO, it results in one very weird side effect. Namely, he's incentivized to war with myself and Superdeath over Bing and Yuris, because the latter two are the only players he can get foreign trade routes with unless SD elects to sign OB for some reason. If he decides to invade Bing, for example, it's going to cost him tremendously from a commerce standpoint. Just something worth keeping an eye on.


The most interesting question to me is what exactly he does with PHI. There's a great divide here I think. On one hand, he could simply use his GPs to spawn a Golden Age or two, bulb Astro, and then go to war, keeping his tech path very tight. Spain though implies he plans to get Machinery -> Engineering on the earlier side of things. This hints at the other option which is to prioritize Engineers. In this world he goes Metal Casting -> Forge -> Great Engineer -> Pyramids -> More Engineers (maybe HG) -> bulb Machinery and/or Engineering. Using up a bunch of GP slots on this would slow him to Astro, but it would ultimately make him much more scary once he got there. (It's possible he skips the Pyramids portion of this but still goes for Engineers.) Of course, he risks someone screwing with him while he does all this, but it's interesting nonetheless. It takes 15T of running an Engineer to pop one for Pyramids, and that is likely beatable by Bing if he were to really try. Which of the two are actually going to try for it? That's my big question. It's the best wonder on the board.


Ginger himself is obviously the top competition for me in this game I think. I have yet to actually play against him, and I've never lurked one of his games super closely, so Tarkeel might actually be able to say more than me about his abilities and style. I did chat with him a bit due to taking over PB70 when he ghosted that game, but honestly he mostly just logged in once a month and randomly changed builds without warning me in a way that was so annoying I nearly asked Ramk to change the civ password, so there wasn't really any serious collaboration there . My impression of him though is that he's a good player with strong fundamentals who is better in the micro than macro, but is still plenty good at both. If RB player tier lists ever came back into style, I suspect we'd be on the same tier or within a tier of each other. I think I need to be pretty aware of what he's doing at all times while being careful not to put the blinders on.

[Qgqqqqq]

Who said RB player tier lists fell out of style?

[scooter]

Who said RB player tier lists fell out of style?

It's been awhile since I've seen one attempted! The playerbase is pretty different these days.

[Amicalola]

That would be an interesting thing to read and to write, tbh. But I'd be way too scared of offending people to actually do it (which I assume is why they fell out of style?).

[scooter]

Ok, so we're off, though not the way planned. Hopefully not another false start. In-game all the settings looked right. Tarkeel and I had discussed the opening screenshot:





And the feeling was to check 1W. Most starts these days pretty tightly guide you into SIP, and the only real other candidates here were 1W onto the plains hill, or maybe 1N onto the Sheep for a 3F plant, though I have some serious hangups over the latter.





Sadly no resources turned up on these tiles, and more important fog-gazing showed coast. Tarkeel pointed out to me that any move was risky in that it could screw us out of valid city plants if our starting land-mass was very small, and it looks like that's a real risk on the west side.





And it looks like a real risk up here too, as I can see water north of two of these tiles. I did test out the Sheep plant at one point, and while it's a tiny bit faster, it didn't seem worth it at all, especially with the added risk of invalidating city plants. So I SIP.





Some notes.


* Sailing ASAP. We can already see what appears to be 3 separate islands, though it could be 2. Earlier we plant one of them, the earlier we take advantage of our trait.


* Fish southwest is good because it means our next city could share Corn OR settle for Fish.


* Still no pre-Monarchy happy visible, and I'm extremely nervous about that.


* We're in the south I assume as I do see Tundra in the fog


* Think Scout needs to check the Fish area to the southwest before circling clockwise?


Finally, I think this crowd will spot the naming theme quickly, but the first person to point it out without googling can name a future city.