Old Lurkers

[civac2]

Hope this is gonna be good. 

[aetryn]

Interesting decision point on continuing to skirmish over the city site over taking the tempo gain and trying to parley that into an economic lead. I've mostly seen Old World multiplayer on larger maps where this kind of early skirmishing isn't reasonable, so not sure what the right call is here.

[civac2]

Development seems to be quite fast, at least as far as settling is concerned.

[aetryn]

Development seems to be quite fast, at least as far as settling is concerned.

I think the map setting is impacting that, as they have seem to have an unusual number of open city sites nearby. Usually you only have one and have to use military units to clear additional sites from the barbarians/tribes. But generally that's just the game pace of Old World - it's totally possible to have settled your second city on the open site and cleared a single camp if you picked a leader that's useful for clearing camps.

[aetryn]

Development seems to be quite fast, at least as far as settling is concerned.

I think the map setting is impacting that, as they have seem to have an unusual number of open city sites nearby. Usually you only have one and have to use military units to clear additional sites from the barbarians/tribes. But generally that's just the game pace of Old World - it's totally possible to have settled your second city on the open site and cleared a single camp if you picked a leader that's useful for clearing camps.

The other thing that is affecting the settling speed is the low difficulty level (which is part of the map settings, but less geographical). On higher difficulty levels you don't start with the food to produce a second settler immediately (you have to pay 100 food just to put it into the build queue), limiting you to two cities out of the gate.

[Amicalola]

For the technologically challenged, is 'play by cloud' the same as PBEM except without having to manually send emails with the saves? As in, the saves uploads automatically to a cloud folder?

[aetryn]

For the technologically challenged, is 'play by cloud' the same as PBEM except without having to manually send emails with the saves? As in, the saves uploads automatically to a cloud folder?

Yes. I'm not sure if it works between Epic and Steam - I think they had some difficulties at the start because one player was on Epic.

[aetryn]

Changes on the test branch likely coming live soon:

• Traders now get 2 culture per Specialist instead of per bullion Resource
  
• Patrons now get 3 culture per Bullion Resource instead of per specialist
  

Seems like a pretty inert change that mostly just serves to stop Traders getting triple benefit out of Pearls, slightly reducing the feast-or-famine feel of using them. Unlikely to matter in this game as nobody has Patrons (Rome has passed up the chance to get them, though amusingly they have quite a bit of Bullion hanging around in Silver), and only Carthage has Traders. Seems unlikely they will found Traders when they've already founded Artisans on the coast - would mean either giving up their Military family or passing on Statesmen, and neither of those seem likely.

I haven't yet tried the 100% bonus Nets traders on an Inland Sea or other water-heavy map yet. Really hard to tell whether they would be better than Artisans (stronger ships, and military control of water movement is often quite important on water-heavy maps), who they are often up against. Possibly not on Inland Sea, more likely on Bay/Seaside/any map type that has lots of water but not a direct water connection between players, where Naval action won't matter as much and the superior econ of traders would be good? For Hatti, Traders is probably up against Patrons or maybe Landowners. I could see running Traders with lots of coastal sites for Hatti.

[aetryn]

I'm seriously questioning the wisdom (and I'm sure Kaiser and CMF are now too!) of pushing so aggressively against Carthage, who has a very strong early military advantage due to barbarian recruitment. It's true that Orators can also recruit barbarians, but they have to do it with legitimacy and both sides had one of those anyway, leaving Carthage's buy-tribesmen-for-cash ability to be a major difference-maker. Settling the center site early in the face of Carthage was already pretty aggressive. Maybe it would have been better to strongly defend it and not overextend? By harassing the other city sites, Kaiser more or less forced the opposite team to concentrate and focus on military, when they might have just accepted the city plant and not sought early conflict. Now the result is a lost center city and scrambling military to defend the core. I suspect the lost turns/econ potential gained by the harassment were not worth the cost in this scenario.

The question is do Bruindane and Ginger keep pushing or accept their gains and go back to building up. They haven't had a chance to upgrade their mercs much, and strength 3 units are just not a real great investment on the attack. If they pause to upgrade, they let Kaiser reinforce but strength 6 units will overpower anything Kaiser can build right now. On the other hand, it sounds like some of the players aren't far from T2 military units, and if Kaiser can research and build a few of those in the meantime the attack would fizzle out. Personally I'd like to see this game go on longer than the equivalent of an Axe rush in Civ 4, but it's not clear if the players are really all that enthused by the game at the moment.

[El Grillo]

Is losing a city this early a death knell for Kaiser/CMF? I also do not know if both teams are not really engaged, or communicating more in Discord or elsewhere.