[SPOILERS] Zanth and Bacchus conquer the Amber Gugohn

[Bacchus]

This is a Lilac Emergence themed spoiler thread for the dual showing of Bacchus (emergent-616) and Zanth (emergent-...) in Pitboss 21. The Future is merciless!



And Commodore can put a screenshot of our start here.

[Commodore]

Your start:

Normal "it can change" caveats apply.

[Bacchus]

Rivers! Agriculture! Animal Husbandry! Pottery! Let's explore south!

[Bacchus]

More seriously, hardly anything is likely to justify a move away from the plains hill. Especially as it's the norm to put copper into BFC and moving away could have entertaining results. I am also scarred by the 13 experience, where a tight map was made tighter by three players moving their Settlers toward each other.

Thoughts on traits: don't want to play Cre (13, Alae1) or Chm (18), otherwise I'm up for anything. The start seems reasonably non-committal — not too high on food, but with a healthy mixture of river commerce and production. 7 forests to chop, again a fair, if not an astounding amount. Chm would actually be useful here, as we have 5 river grasslands to cottage and a flood plain, and no happy in sight to increase our cap that far. Religion would be another way of boosting it up, albeit without coasts we can probably only try for Judaism. 2-hammer city tile together with the cow make a strong case for Imperialistic. What do you think about Victoria of Sumeria, zanth? Fin and Imp now seem to have lovely synergy, Imp seems to work well with earlier and cheaper courthouses, we get a strong shot at religion and a quicker way to Priesthood (Sumeria now starts with Mysticism).

[Bacchus]

Sandbox (for Vicky of Sumer): https://drive.google.com/uc?export=downl...ENNVFBfWm8

[Bacchus]

So we are pretty settled on Victoria, which brings us to the following observation: whilst building a settler with Imperialistic, a mined grass river hill is actually better a coin better than the wet, but non-river rice. And it's easy to research Agri by the time the Settler completes. So, our tech options are as follows, both opening with AH research:

Agriculture + something (40 + x beakers)
Hunting + Mining (90 beakers total)

The advantage of Agri is that you can take Mysticism with it, as was the original plan with Sumeria, and Mysticism is expensive in ToW, so you get to win 10 beakers, nearly a turn of research. If not Mysti, then the wheel, for an early access to pottery which is nice here -- our food surplus ain't that great, and we need the cottages pronto, especially due to the delay in activation of Financial. Octomen would be quite nice due to extra happy, Frogmen not much worse, Babylon and Egypt unexciting. Agri-Mysti -- Inca are meh, we need pottery early anyway and Sumeria is nice, as noted above. From the Mining/Hunting crowd an obvious attraction is Germany, but Russia and Ethiopia are not so bad neither, although Russia is pretty lacking in synergy to the set-up. Basically, if we get Vicky, we are quite free in the choice of civ, so that's nice.

[zanth]

Hi all, I'm emergent-e^i*Pi/2 and we'll gonna show our opponents that their future is merciless (yep, since starting this tech there was plenty of synchronistichnost'
It seems, WB save doesn't have Tech Cost Scaling, though it's On in our settings. That would make starting techs cheaper https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...ring#gid=1

1) Scout moving: both 1, 3, 7, 9 looks fine for 1-move scout, 33 or 77 for 2-move.
2) Settling: if nothing extreme pleasant would be shown, then SIP looks great.
3) Now most serious part: traits and civs: I just won't rewrite why Victoria would be great here. As for civ: it seems that we must have one of Agri/Hunting, second tech could be anything except fishing -> enormous choice.

[Bacchus]

And what we do know about synchronicity? http://www.moskva.fm/artist/би-2/song_655806

[Bacchus]

Hmm, Gavagai is playing without traits until something like T70. I guess he saves the turn of slavery revolt. Very strong mid-game for him, though, he will be bulbing up the tree like nobody's business, and can run caste/pacifism with impunity due to Spi. Hopefully his neighbours realize the danger, or they will be facing an onslaught of far more advanced units coming out after the bulbing fest.

[Bacchus]

With Hannibal gone, not much even to think about. I'm pretty scared of the Viking pick, especially as we are not on the coast. Either we can actually manage without a fleet, that is there is a nice, large continent all around as, or we are gonna have to compete for the seas and that's just not going to be much fun.