The Death Note (EitB PBEM L Lurker's Thread)

[Bobchillingworth]

Players keep out, yadda yadda.








Performed minimal editing on the map, which I had to generate about 40 times before finding one that looked roughly satisfactory. In the end, I added one or two food resources, one wine each to two player's starts to make up for having minimal river commerce, and moved some mana around. I also replaced horses with gems on a curious 1-tile island at Beeri's start.


Interesting mix of leaders, I think Dave may be underestimating the advantages that Spiritual gives the Elohim; 2-move, 6/8, auto-healing Paramanders are nothing to sneer at, especially when an early Reliquary guarantees the Elohim can bulb the Runes. Thessalonica would have been my first pick, had I joined the game.


A shame nobody went with the Bannor, I suspect that in 50 games you could count their total number of appearances on one hand. I suppose these games are too fast-paced for them to get their advantages into play.

[Bobchillingworth]

Hah, Auro really lucked out moving his capital... it's significantly better now than everyone else's.


I'm a little alarmed they didn't ban Cultists, yet went with the same map script as before...

[Mardoc]

Interesting mix of leaders, I think Dave may be underestimating the advantages that Spiritual gives the Elohim; 2-move, 6/8, auto-healing Paramanders are nothing to sneer at, especially when an early Reliquary guarantees the Elohim can bulb the Runes.  Thessalonica would have been my first pick, had I joined the game.  

Elohim are pretty solid, yes. It's easy to overlook Paramanders because they're not directly supplied by the civ; it's an indirect path that gets you there. I think the Elohim are easy to overlook in general because most of their stuff is best used in a non-direct way. Like using Sanctuary + fast movers in an offensive war, instead of using Sanctuary to delay your loss.

A shame nobody went with the Bannor, I suspect that in 50 games you could count their total number of appearances on one hand.  I suppose these games are too fast-paced for them to get their advantages into play.

I think that's part of it, but the other part is that their advantages are mostly not only late, but melee units. By lategame, magic dominates enough that it's hard to imagine a melee army being numerous enough that your mages/priests can't just shred it, even if it was built with Bannor bonuses.

Hah, Auro really lucked out moving his capital... it's significantly better now than everyone else's.

Yep.  I think one of the best things about EitB is the way you can't claim things are balanced really, so there's a lot less pressure on mapmakers.

I'm a little alarmed they didn't ban Cultists, yet went with the same map script as before...

I guess they're thinking Cultists won't matter as much without the Lanun synergy. It does help to not have a civ who absolutely wants to research Fishing ASAP and needs culture and has the commerce to get to Priesthood well before anyone else can. Also, it's less painful to cede coastal territory when it can't be anyone's high-value land anyway.

Or else they weren't thinking deeply at all, aiming to get the next game rolling quickly rather than have it be a balanced game.

[Bobchillingworth]

I think that's part of it, but the other part is that their advantages are mostly not only late, but melee units. By lategame, magic dominates enough that it's hard to imagine a melee army being numerous enough that your mages/priests can't just shred it, even if it was built with Bannor bonuses.

That's true. IIRC Sabrathiel (sp?) can produce Adepts with enough starting exp to immediately promote to Mages, though the use of Command Posts + Conquest + Apprenticeship + landing the Form of the Titan, and then benefiting from Charismatic- but of course, marshaling all of that requires a tremendous investment of resources and has little tech overlap with what they need to get their melee steamroller moving.

[Brian Shanahan]

Totally missed this game starting, what with being pummelled with work and playing the Raging Barbs Highlands SG.

[Bobchillingworth]

I think these guys chose some unfortunate settings. I could have done more to buff out the starts for certain, but the entire map is barren; I didn't remove a single resource or alter any rivers. There's water absolutely everywhere, making Cultists yet again the obvious go-to unit for conquests, and the script clearly loves to toss out AH resources and seafood while skimping on luxuries (I think some of them may not have even spawned at all). They'd have been better off just asking me to generate a reasonably balanced pangaea.

[Bobchillingworth]

As tiresome as his doom & gloom whining can get, Dave is surely correct that the game is functionally over; Auro's position looks to be rapidly approach unassailable, at least Superjim has already fallen into irrelevancy, and the others increasingly slipping back as well.


A thought for a new game, once this concludes; some years back RB held a vanilla BtS PBEM where the AI was allowed to play every civ for around 100 turns before the map was saved as a scenario and the players took over- it could be fun to try something like that for EitB.

[Mardoc]

Yeah, this is how the Balseraphs win, when played well. It's not about any one thing, it's the total package leading to economic dominance. Then you just pick how you want to turn the economy into victory.