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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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[SPOILERS] scooter's Rule of Three
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December 3rd, 2024, 12:21
(This post was last modified: December 3rd, 2024, 12:21 by pindicator.)
Just don't do like me and say "This is important and I will lose if I don't do it" early in the game, and then not do it.
Suffer Game Sicko
Dodo Tier Player
Yo Commodore.
 Are you really gonna make me call this bluff?  You know that I can see you don't have anything else, right? (December 3rd, 2024, 12:21)pindicator Wrote: Just don't do like me and say "This is important and I will lose if I don't do it" early in the game, and then not do it. I would never. *touches earpiece* I'm being informed I have in fact done this many times.
You know, I really should have checked PBSpy before playing the turn.
 Because the axe whip was very easy to see if I had just looked. Ah well, this is what I get for playing way too casually. I should not have agreed to start this game before 77 ended. I forgot how blazing fast the pace would be. 5 turns today. For most of 77 that many turns would take a week.
Turns are still absolutely flying. 6-7 turns a day right now.
 I figured out a rough plan last night. Losing the warrior to being overly casual kicked me awake at least. Culture Victory is chop/whipping this settler. It will settle the white dot on T38, where it will briefly share a cottage while CV is regrowing, and the Wheat farm will begin immediately. Stooges has the recipe for a quick worker at size 2 as Fish/Copper is great for that. It too will be able to borrow a cottage briefly when CV is regrowing. Also the tile 1E of the city has a turn into a cottage already, so the fresh worker can complete that when needed. Will also hook the Gold.  Because I'm chopping one forest, I may as well chop a second one, so that is the plan. The Fish and Wheat + Granary are enough to keep health under control, but I'll keep the other two forests a bit longer for health reasons. Settler overflow will finish the Granary at sz2 saving ~9F with some micro, and the chop will help me get the UB up and running quickly directly after. A chop into it is worth 67h thanks to CRE + OR. In addition, our science is already quite strong here thanks to the cottages + FIN, and we have gold in the bank to run 100% science for awhile, so there's real value here. Finally, I would like the GPP to start accumulating. So I'm happy with this plan overall. I'm less happy with some of my previous decisions - like having to whip settlers twice pre-Granary - but what's done is done, and I don't want to delay city3 longer just to get the Granary complete.  Things look fine. Average. You can see the cottages + FIN starting to have an impact, though. I will have the tech lead early. In general my game will hinge on whether I can convert that into value or not. 
Password is will. Feel free to login and take a look whenever.
Alright, let's catch up a little first before leading into the turns while I'm gone. These screenshots are a couple turns old, but they're fairly close and will give a decent picture of the state of things. I'll post something forward-looking later today or tonight.  I settled Traffic Lights here with a worker ready to farm the Wheat immediately while also sharing the FP cottage while CV regrows. There's a decent amount of flexibility here to share tiles. I would like to get the Stone quarried too at some point as it's a really great 1/4/1 tile which would be really nice to have for the odd hammer config.   The main thing about the state of the game is Cornflakes has a commanding early lead. I do not believe starts were heavily (at all?) balanced, so this could just be that, or it could be he's made a nice start and I just sort of played the turns as they came, hard to say.   I did get this very nice event. The map is extremely roomy - see minimap - so this won't have huge impacts against other player. However, this will be a nice bonus against barbarians. We haven't seen any yet, but we are at the stage of the game where barb axes could start appearing. I delayed hooking Copper a few turns longer than I should have, probably. The Wheat mainly is what I'm concerned about potentially getting pillaged by a roaming axe. Anyway, this is the state of the game. Around 40T in. 3 cities. Capital has Granary and nearly Library while regrowing, and it should shoot up in size quickly with a strong food surplus. Traffic Lights is about to have its Wheat online, and Stooges is working on its Granary. One of these cities will need to build an axe soon. I have more to say, but I'll save it for later with the forward-looking stuff.
But first, I'm gonna try to bang out some opponent previews today. We've played over 40 turns, so it seems like a good time to think about it, even if a little late.
My first preview is going to be longer, but it's because I'm going to sneak in some 3-city elim thoughts that I hope to not repeat in the other previews. Commodore - Nebu (PHI/IND) of Arabia First up is the wonder pick. In a vacuum, this is all really good. I love Nebu, and it's really fun to play. He's going to have a leg up on a bunch of things. Pyramids obviously feels really good with this combo, and if anyone is going to challenge my GL interest, it's this. In addition, one thing I learned in PB70 is this combo feels really good with the Monk Wonders. The sneakiest thing PHI has is the Monastery discount. Combine this with the monk wonders, and Monasteries quickly become The Everything Building. For just 30h with PHI you can get 2 gold, 2 beakers, 2 hammers, 2 culture, +10% science, and the ability to build more missionaries. The ROI is insane. Of course, you do actually have to build the wonders and get the religion, but the religion is baked in here, and he only has 3 opponents to contest wonders, none of whom have IND. Does he want a shrine? Well, let me tell you what you can do with a Madrassa. In addition, this is a very roomy map. It has a lot of allowance for peaceful builder-ing. And we did note pre-game that these settings are likely to promote safer play rather than aggressive wars. It's not hard to imagine a win-con here. I have since sort of confirmed that both Yuris and Cornflakes are to the east, which leaves an enormous backline that looks easier for Commodore to grab than me. So, he's the favorite, right? Well maybe, but let's slow down, because... Three City Elimination See, this is the looming issue that hangs over the very idea of doing previews and making predictions. I think having a lead in this game is significantly less valuable than in a normal game. How many games has a runaway lost 3+ cities? It's more than you think! I probably would have lost PB73, for example. Or maybe I wouldn't because 3-city elim means I consolidate faster? No idea! PB77 would have seen multiple eliminations by now. It's such a wild setting to play with here that I am having a hard time "solving" how to play it, and figuring out novel settings and building a game-long strategy around them is sort of the thing I (like to think I) do best. And I think this is really why he picked Arabia. Knights are going to absolutely dominate this game, and the best Knight UU is off the board, so he picked another one. The resourceless bit doesn't matter much most likely, but the 15% withdrawal chance is something so why not. I think Commodore looked at his leader and 3-city elim, got some nerves about it, and compromised with Arabia. At least that's my guess here. Commodore as a player can obviously win this. What I've seen of the map so far makes me think he's probably the favorite? I occasionally get a little irked by his style of play, which is more fun to lurk than to play against. The main hallmark that I occasionally criticized is he's quietly a bit of a blue shell guy. If he's in 3rd place and someone is building a lead in 1st place, his instinct is generally to kneecap the player in 1st place rather than eating a weaker player and catching up that way. He doesn't always do this, but he does always consider it. This can be frustrating to play against, at least for someone like me that sees that and thinks "who does this benefit except 2nd place?" That said, I'm not quite sure if any of this applies thanks to the game settings? Or even if it does, those very instincts might serve him well here. I say all of this because ultimately, this game will be won by conquest. That is itself an insane thing to say, but there's no way it's not true. Why concede when there's very little combat necessary to kill someone or to die yourself? There's also weird meta considerations. Imagine I strike up an in-game friendship with one player here. Then I lose a random city because I clumsily settled it exposed and either barbs or another player sniped it. Now my counter is down to 2. Don't you think the sharks may smell blood in the water? If anyone gets down to 1 city left, you're gonna see neighbors begin circling immediately. For this reason I think true cooperation will be thin and distrustful all game long. Slipping in the knife is simply too rewarding.
Yuris - Frederick (Org/Phi) of Germany
One of the more fun restricted leaders picks for sure. In fact, Yuris has decided this game to lump all his advantage into the mid-game, and that seems like a really good choice for a game in which that's where all the action will be. The German UU in CtH is one of the better-designed additions to the game - in this case a Grenadier that starts with Pinch and does not requires Military Science. I've always been a big fan of Grenadiers because they have a lot of quiet advantages. For example, you can upgrade melee units and crossbows/archers to Grenadiers. As a result, it's not terribly hard to mass them quickly upon unlocking them. They are effective both as attackers and defenders due to their high base strength and promo flexibility. And finally, they have a super long shelf life because they counter the other big one-mover of the era in Rifles. The closest thing they have to a 1-moving weakness is Muskets in that they're 20h cheaper and can be reasonably cost effective. However, free Pinch! There is still one weakness for the Riesengarde which is that they are not 2-movers. This will matter here a lot I think as a land-dominated map. But it's still a really good UU. I don't think the UU moves the needle by itself quite enough, but the UB + ORG puts this over the top. The one concern of course is how many 4-player games last long enough for ORG factories to be relevant? And do the rest of us even allow him to get that far if he's becoming a problem? Hard to say. But if Yuris can hang around here, he's in business. I think this is the soft spot in this combo. Germany + these traits will spike so hard late that I wonder if he just gets ganked right before then? But that's true of other players too such as myself, and a key difference is nobody else has the Riesengarde to help them survive. As for Yuris himself, that's another place where the game settings make things interesting. Normally he does not get predicted to win games, and instead he gets predicted to hang around and finish in the midfield. This game though has just 3 opponents and just 9 razes required for a win - only one of which you need to do yourself - and so there's a lot of room for an upset. The one thing you will need the most in this game to win is a certain stick-to-it-ness which Yuris has in spades. I think many will predict him to finish 4th, and I do not think he will finish 4th.
Alright, here's where things actually are as of right this second. First, I want to underscore something. Please do not worry about executing anything precisely as planned. You have full authority to do whatever you deem is best. I trust your judgment here. That said, here's where my head has been, with the obvious disclaimer that this game has received approximately 5% of my Civ attention.
 Here is the empire. Wheat is hooked at Traffic Lights. I think we probably want to consider chopping both Axe and Granary there. An axe could show up at any moment and make things really annoying. I don't have the forests earmarked for anything specific, so I think mostly using them on growth curve is best, especially since I have Mathematics in. Tech is set to IW. If you see need to change it, feel free. In general I expect we'll want to settle a city with jungle sooner than later, so it seems worthwhile, not to mention finding Iron is useful. One important thing to be aware of - hover individual tiles around the capital, especially the floodplains. Quite a few of them have 1-3T already invested into cottages. This was just a side effect of workers moving and not wasting movement turns. In fact, I do have a decision I'll leave for you along those lines.  Here's one such Floodplains. The Copper is 1T away from being hooked. No barbs have showed up, so it may be worthwhile to actually delay the Copper another couple of turns and complete this Warrior for MP. The Worker could just cottage while waiting, and it would emergency hook if a unit appears. Feel free to use your judgment on this versus just hooking it. It has otherwise been building a Granary that is ~ half complete and is getting the OR bonus thanks to a lucky Buddhism spread. Notably, CV needs a MP soon. Speaking of.  I was pretty much just going to grow this until I couldn't and then build/whip another settler. Generally I think it makes a lot of sense to set this city up to do 6 -> 3 settler whips with the odd worker while regrowing and waiting out whip unhappy. With MP + Religion it can already do that, and that's before hooking the gold. I'm unsure if you'll settle a city or not while I'm gone, but I did think about it some.  These are the spots I'm tentatively looking at, though I don't love any of them. The main problem is they all sort of want Iron Working, which is why I'm teching it. Yellow's placement I'm not super confident about, but I figured it wants to be able to share tiles. Indigo is good in that it has an unjungled food, but it's bad in just about every other way. Very far, jungle-choked, no tile sharing, etc. Actually, I wonder if it should go 1N of the Pigs? Or 1NE on the hill, though that invalidates Orange. Speaking of, Orange sort of feels the best in that it can borrow the Wheat (Traffic Lights can fall baack on Floodplains) for a handful of turns. We want to settle east, and this gets us there. The downside of course is that even with CRE we gotta wait 5T for border pop, and then it's 9T of worker labor to get the Rice improved. I dunno, my options just feel middling all-around. Worth noting I am trying to place as many cities on hills as possible for the obvious reason. I would rather a city be slow up and running than hard to defend. But of course, I'm fine with you just making a call and going with it if necessary. Of course, feel free to ping me on discord. 50/50 if you get ahold of me. If you do settle a city, pick the name as you see fit! Plenty of good choices.
Right, let's see what we can do here. I've been paying even less attention to this game than scooter, so I need a few to get myself sorted.
 We have three cities working six tiles, and three workers. Currently we have seven improved tiles, but two of the cities will grow next turn so we're short on tiles. The western worker goes to continue the floodplain cottages, while the other two road the wheat; I think it's worth it here. Will probably chop the forest N of Traffic Lights next turn, any thoughts on also chopping the E forest? I actually think I like the next city to go between the gold and ivory (eastwards ofcourse) to help take advantage of the floodplains. Another contender is east of the northern deers to whip out workers. |
