[PB81] Lurkers from the Deep

[Qgqqqqq]

Yep, happy to bet 10 NZD against Mjmd winning. Not sure how we'll handle redeeming tho.

[Cornflakes]

Just make the payout to Zulan for server maintenance. Then everyone wins!

[scooter]

So we have a bet then fellas?

DONE. Will be fun to have some rooting interest.

[greenline]

A whole bunch of players NOT settling for Copper first and NOT teching Archery on a game with Barbarians ON, and then complaining about the map is really something. Everyone is just way too used to the farmer's gambit being the standard play.

Let's put a few things into perspective here.

Nothing during the setup process indicated this was going to be a very tight map. So I didn't pick mining as a free tech or on the Civ pick, thinking I could maximize my start benefits by having hunting, agri, fishing, AH all available. This meant that I only finished BW after settling my second city:




Without knowing where my copper was, I settled the only city site available where I could share a capital food resource while pulling in a new one first ring. Now, let's look at xist's copper situation:




Copper is first ring to a city that could grab wet corn and share the cows. In this case xist did not do this, but if he had rushed first for copper and vultures there would have been nothing I could have done at all. The only good food near my copper was a pig, but getting the pig means leaving the copper second ring or vice versa. Oops, didn't pick creative this game!

Even considering that I was slower to settling my third city for copper, I still had an axe ready to reach my copper city and several warriors. But xist had AGG and won his first mid odds battle, so I still lost. I was not able to try and settle a horse city either because there were something like 5 barb units from the tiny patch of tundra in the east, meaning I would have to give up my capital without using the remaining axe to defend.

I agree my play was not optimal for the situation. I could have teched Archery over mysticism, settled straight on the copper, made sure to delay my first settler for BW when I knew the map was cramped. I didn't do these things because I didn't want to hamstring my growth on the potential of a rush. FIN/PRO is a slow opener and I thought if it was any slower I would be guaranteed food for a player who played a normal opening and got away with it because their neighbor didn't rush. Swap Xist with Dreylin or Gira and suddenly I have two axes to cover barbs and I'm okay.

Cramped maps are generally pretty poorly designed and frequently cause early deaths from rushing that do not leave most players satisfied. I know that especially because I made a map with very similar problems to this one for PB34. If you are going to make a cramped map work you should put a lot more effort into balancing the early copper than went into this one - at a minimum players should have at least 2 coppers to settle in productive spots, rather than having to choose between splitting food or grabbing copper. I think as a courtesy you should also let the players know during signup that the map will be cramped - I would never have joined this game if I knew it meant putting hours into playing the turns just so that I was betting my civ's fate on a 40-60 axeman battle early on.

[scooter]

Nothing during the setup process indicated this was going to be a very tight map.

I don't agree with your premise that this is a "very tight map." The original post said this would be two Pangaea's spliced together, which is exactly what this is. Roll some 4p Pangaeas and you'll find a lot that look exactly like this. Which is to say, plenty of space, but starts are not necessarily spread equidistantly to maximize space like a lot of our hand-crafted maps are. I agree your position relative to Xist is a little tight, but rolling some 4p Pangaeas probably would have shown you landing close to someone frequently, and Aggressive Sumeria was a 1-in-3 chance. It's a bit unlucky, but it was always in the range of likely outcomes IMO.


However, let's set the map concerns aside for a second and talk about the actual hand dealt and how it was played. I hope this is constructive. I don't intend this to be harsh.

So I didn't pick mining as a free tech or on the Civ pick, thinking I could maximize my start benefits by having hunting, agri, fishing, AH all available. This meant that I only finished BW after settling my second city:




Without knowing where my copper was, I settled the only city site available where I could share a capital food resource while pulling in a new one first ring.

You knew where Xist was on Turn 3:

There is a sheep by the gems. And silver to the south.

Bad news: Xist's scout popped up on turn 3. This is another crowded shitbox map. At least I have a earlygame UU this time.

You also knew he picked Aggressive Sumeria, which is one of the most brutal early game civs there is. It's unfortunate that you were the one to spawn next to Aggressive Sumeria, but you did correctly assume you would be on the same continent, and there would be only 3 other players on it, so this was not exactly a hugely unlikely thing. But my criticism here is you didn't adapt once you found out on T3 the situation you were in - which is relatively close to the guy who picked a rush civ. He did not actually attack you until T50, so you had 47 turns to prepare. A committed Sumeria rush could probably have gotten there ~15T sooner, FWIW. In fact, reading his thread, I'm not totally sure if he intended to do it at all until he saw your situation. He completed BW later than you.


He also scouted you, which leads me to the first issue - you didn't bother to scout him.

41 turns after finding out you are next to Aggressive Sumeria, you still don't know where his copper is, if he's settled first for it, when he's hooked it, etc. If you would have scouted, the minute you completed BW you would know where his Copper is. From there you can predict exactly when the rush can arrive by watching when it gets hooked and which cities get whipped or which forests get chopped. Scouting is incredibly important. If you look at the vet continent, Mjmd's rush was successful because he scouted SD well, and SD was caught out because he hadn't scouted Mjmd as well. It seems in this case part of Xist's motivation was he knew he could kill your Copper city quickly because he knew where it was.


Second, settling the city before finishing BW is a choice. It's difficult to tell from the screenshots, but it looks like you finished it around T30. This is plenty early enough. What I would do in this situation is simply delay the settler and time it to complete when BW completes. This might mean growing the capital a size larger, for example. This slows your second city by a couple turns, but it speeds your third city, so it's not the end of the world. Doing this probably saves your life here. In fact, it opens up the chance for you to pre-emptively choke him if you think a rush is inevitable, because Xist didn't hook Copper until his third city.


Third, look at your copper city placement. You suspected a rush might come, but you still settled your front city with Aggressive Sumer on flat land. If you move it 1SE, you are on a hill and protected on two sides by the river, meaning he has to move two additional tiles just to hit the city. It's also just a better city placement snowball-wise as you pick up the 2h plant and can now share Wheat and Ivory as needed, and you save 4 worker turns spent roading the plains hill. You can say he won a "coin flip," but the attack was only a coin flip because you placed the city there.


I don't mean this to dunk on you. Apologies if it feels like it. It was unlucky you did spawn close to Aggressive Sumeria and further unlucky the barbs dogpiled you. There's not much you can do about all of that. But I do think it's helpful to think about better options that were always on the table with the knowledge you had at the time.

[greenline]

I'm not offended at all. You have good advice there. I missed that there was a place to get first ring copper and settle a city on a hill, so there was definitely room for improvement on my part.

I do think some of your suggestions are made difficult with the map settings. I struggled to get my scout close to Sumeria early due to barb presence in that jungle. Barbs on means there is a very good chance your scouts will just randomly die. But that is my fault for not creating a game and insisting that it would be no barbs instead of joining up and leaving it to a vote.

What I don't agree with is that the map isn't tight just because it was stitched together from pangaea rolls. Xist's scout found me on turn 3. That's a tight map. If those pangaea rolls can't be edited so you don't have tight first ring cities of players bordering each other, then it's a tight map. Whether this is accidental or deliberate doesn't matter, the result is the same. The onus is on the mapmaker to edit natural rolls to give players the best experience, and I think it will be clear this is not what a lot of players wanted, once they have to deal with a super Xist and super Mmjd snowball just because they went for an early rush. This mirrors a lot of games where players felt like they had no chance for not rushing early on where players started close by - PB16, PB34, others that I have not remembered.

[scooter]

What I don't agree with is that the map isn't tight just because it was stitched together from pangaea rolls. Xist's scout found me on turn 3. That's a tight map. If those pangaea rolls can't be edited so you don't have tight first ring cities of players bordering each other, then it's a tight map. Whether this is accidental or deliberate doesn't matter, the result is the same. The onus is on the mapmaker to edit natural rolls to give players the best experience, and I think it will be clear this is not what a lot of players wanted, once they have to deal with a super Xist and super Mmjd snowball just because they went for an early rush. This mirrors a lot of games where players felt like they had no chance for not rushing early on where players started close by - PB16, PB34, others that I have not remembered.

What I mean here is your capitals are 11 tiles apart. That is close, no doubt, but I would not call it cramped, especially as the others are further, so 11 represents the low end of things rather than the average distance. This is probably splitting hairs, but just in general I don't think 11 tiles is outrageous on a map where capitals are not necessarily equally distributed. If you roll some Pangaea, you'll find this distance somewhat often, which is what I meant. I do think that given your proximity, strategic resources probably should have been looked at in a way that didn't encourage you both to settle directly towards each other, compounding the problem. I think this made it feel more cramped than it was because you were forced to settle in each other's direction early despite you both having west-east options.


My original comment that I think did bother you a bit - or perhaps it felt oversimplified - is one I do feel strongly about though, and it's coloring my perception here. Which is that the RB meta drifted towards a few things:


1) Hand-crafted maps where player distribution is equal-ish and space skews towards roomy.

2) Barbs off, scout starts (CtH), worker-first default, and plains hill starts all mean your risk in the first 30T is usually 0.

3) CtH sanded down some of the rush civs a bit

4) Rushes are rare because they so rarely succeed AND the above 3 issues, so players try them less frequently


Sandbox mode for the first 60T+ is extremely common in our games. In fact, we used to do simultaneous -> sequential conversions around T50/60 because we were playing maps where that was the earliest aggression we could imagine. All of this I think can cause players to be a bit slow to adapt when we have a game where the situation is different as it is here. In this case, it seems Mjmd and Xist's decisions here were driven by scouting showing opportunity more than anything.

[greenline]

My original comment that I think did bother you a bit - or perhaps it felt oversimplified - is one I do feel strongly about though, and it's coloring my perception here. Which is that the RB meta drifted towards a few things:


1) Hand-crafted maps where player distribution is equal-ish and space skews towards roomy.

2) Barbs off, scout starts (CtH), worker-first default, and plains hill starts all mean your risk in the first 30T is usually 0.

3) CtH sanded down some of the rush civs a bit

4) Rushes are rare because they so rarely succeed AND the above 3 issues, so players try them less frequently


Sandbox mode for the first 60T+ is extremely common in our games. In fact, we used to do simultaneous -> sequential conversions around T50/60 because we were playing maps where that was the earliest aggression we could imagine. All of this I think can cause players to be a bit slow to adapt when we have a game where the situation is different as it is here. In this case, it seems Mjmd and Xist's decisions here were driven by scouting showing opportunity more than anything.

I do think there is a fair amount of complacency that players (like me) display when playing a RB map that isn't advertised as being random. I also think that for a T0 ancient start, lowering early risk is the most fun way to play Civ 4. Investments in early military in Civ 4 are a lot more expensive comparatively than Civ 6, where you have production policies for early military, don't need to hook up a metal right away for decent units, and can get a lot more value from early military via barb stomping and capturing city states. Early Civ 4 rushes are very binary, resulting in massive wins or losses for the attacker, and that all depends on very dicey early combat between handfuls of units. Civ 4 rushes are also very heavily influenced by Civ selection and strategic resource placement, which can easily favor a rush by one player over another. When maps are designed to discourage early rushes, you usually see the early frontrunners and eliminations determined by expansion, micro, well planned wonders being built, and invasions that take more planning than "whip three axes and hope for the best". Most players find this to be a lot more fun and engaging because Civ 4 is a strategy game and not an RtS, which could allow for early game rushes and combat that are more diversified than just being a straight win or lose based on luck and copper placement.

Which is to say : for Civ 4, everyone generally benefits from handcrafted maps always erring on the side of discouraging rushes. If a map is going to be cramped it should at least be advertised.

I would go further than most and say that Zulu has always been unbalanced in most games due to how a 2 move early metal unit enables even faster rushes... but there isn't much you can do to the impi without redesigning it entirely)

[superdeath]

Unless im missing it, looks like Nauf also doesnt have instant-hookup horse and copper. Lovely.

[scooter]

Actually fascinated to see how the vet continent plays out. Mjmd mass expand and be slightly broke vs TBS with less land but much better tech. It puts pressure on them both to convert their edge into something.