[spoilers] - pindicator is excited for the next Realms Beyond league mechanics

[pindicator]

Good ol' Krill, keeping the meta fresh with his meta tweaks and rebalancing and stuff.

[pindicator]

Only slightly related at all because I'm going to draw on Path of Exile for my city naming theme again...

What build should I play when Blight starts up on Friday? I'm currently debating between some kind of poison Assassin or summoner Necro. Now that the patch notes are out I'm probably hoping to have someone do the work for me and post a decent build in either of those classes online.

[The Black Sword]

[pindicator]

Interesting start. It's not often you see such a water-heavy BFC. I think it's safe to say we're on the 'small' section of the B&S, but it could be something similar to PB5 whree Rego and I were on a peninsula of the mainland instead. I have to remind myself not to look past the BFC, but typically you get something similar to what you can see, so I'd expect land in the directions we see land and water in the directions we see water.

FIN and PHI get consideration immediately, though for different reasons and probably not together. The capital is definitely going to be our Moai location, so if you want to go for a fast Moai then I suppose IND could even get some consideration as well, but IND would more be to go for Colossus and try to really boost those water tiles further. Portugal's Feitoria is the other building that gets boosts and in addition is a naval civ - which is somewhat the purpose of this civ. That's one way to play this capital: boost the water tiles as much as possible with ideas like Moai, FIN, Colossus, Portugal - aim for Bureaucracy and an academy and grow the capital as large as possible. On one hand, you don't have to improve tiles with workers; on the other you have to improve them with buildings and wonders.

The other hand is to minimize the coast: capital grows to size 5 working the food and the hills and there it stays until it's time to start pushing out great people. We do get 3 PHI is the idea here and maybe coupling it with a civ that gives extra great people generation like Egypt, Ethiopia, Arabia, etc.

Neither of these plans emphasize a fast start: they both take until the midgame to start to come into their own. So perhaps I'm better suited to pick a civ that gives an early game bonus while my traits do well later on?

I'll have to see what gets picked ahead of me to decide, but I suppose I'm leaning towards strategies that buff the coastal tiles and give me a solid Bureau cap with this start.

[pindicator]

Since there have only been civilizations selected so far let's talk about what we want to get out our civ.

The best way to play the start here is worker > warrior > settler at size 2. The clam is best ignored until after the first settler as you have to spend 30h to get a 4f tile. The best starting techs are Hunting/Mining, which would allow BW and early chopping of the forested hills in the BFC - although Mining is not nearly as important as you could go Mining > BW at the start and finish BW right as the worker finishes the 2nd pasture. A chop then would speed up the first settler by 2 turns (t25 instead of t27).

*Note: EXP would mean 1 turn of nothing to do with the worker in this scenario. Annoying but probably not worth impacting the decision whether or not to go with EXP as a trait.

You could skip both Hunting and Mining but then unless you start with Wheel you would run into the dilemma of either delaying BW until later or having your first worker have nothing to do until there 2nd city goes down. And if you delay BW then you have a more awkward Slavery transition, although that's probably a less important factor.

Does this mean we can go for an early religion? Hunting/Mysticism would be the ideal starting technologies. We could go Poly > Wheel and finish wheel by the time the worker finishes the 2nd pasture. Similarly we can go Mysticism > Religion Tech with any Hunting start but that is far riskier in a large game.

Do we even want to go religion? Shrines are an obvious benefit in larger games, and get stronger the more potential cities there are to spread them into. Plus there are obvious advantages to having an early religion as that gives first dibs on free spreads. I think there's an advantage to exploring or sea based civs as well as the free spreads are done by trade route connections but I don't know if that is actually the case. I think an early religion isn't mandatory but a religion is a good strategy and you absolutely need a plan to land one in a game of this size.

*Note: conquer neighbor who spent his efforts on early religion and not military could be that plan!

Finally, there are two traits that are for all purposes useless for this start: Agriculture and Fishing. Fishing is a bit of a red herring (heh), but the clam should not be hooked before the first settler is out and we grow to size 3 and beyond. Agriculture is only needed once we claim a grain resource, whenever that may be. One exception: Babylon due to their new UB.

[pindicator]

On to specifics!

Hunting/Mining civs

Ethiopia was just taken, but I was really intrigued with going for the early Currency bulb here. Be interesting to see how 2MN uses it, but this is a choice that wants to be paired with PRO for the UU.

Khmer is a civ I can't quite wrap my head around. Or rather, I think I can and it seems very war like. Build lots of Ballistaphants and use them for some border pops in the Classical era before Code of Laws comes in. It comes late enough that it doesn't really replace CRE, and there could be a minor boost to Hanging Gardens but the free build by Ballistaphant doesn't come into play there. The free artist slot also lends more towards aggressive border pops. However, you could use an early Great Artist to essentially become a free Music tech by virtue of Music being 3rd on the Artist bulb list. A Monarchy bulb is the only other feasible target there; all the other targets are too far down there list.

Germany is one I like initially due to its forge improvement. Really it's just another version of the HRE Rauthas but with the bonus spread onto a forge instead of kept together in one building. This does make IND a desirable trait. Although it still may make more sense to go FIN paired with a faster trait like PRO or IMP in the larger scheme of things.

Russia is also very interesting, especially coupled with PHI. The plan there would be to tech ahead quickly using an early academy combined with bulbs to get to Education and very fast universities/Oxford.

Hunting/Mysticism civs

Aztecs are off the board already and deservedly so. While they may have needed a slight buff, Krill went and packed everything he could think of into the Sacrificial Altar. IMO just one of +1 happy or 2 priest slots or having the building come earlier in the tech tree would have been sufficient; instead all 3 feels unbalanced. (Unless I'm reading the notes wrong and it requires Monotheism in addition to Code of Laws - in which case it's probably okay.) Anyway, no surprise it went early as it was already a desirable choice before the changes.

Celts. The poor man's Aztecs. While the altar got buffed the dun got nerfed. Although Rusten and Hitru did show in 41 how effective G3 promotions could be in pb41.

HRE really should be seen as similar to Germany, but the UU here encourages REX strategies and using longbow units as a cover-all-bases defender, where Germany is more about building an economic base with a hammer advantage early and then adding another expansion window late with a grenadier UU. HRE adds value in giving them an early religion push.

Yet I'm leaning away from the early religion strat, not because I don't think it's strong but because with this start I see my focus being set towards wonders, and combing wonders with early religion is a dangerous line to toe (see Commodore in PB44). Also, that game had higher maintenance costs and so without the need for early settlers it was a good plan to focus early hammers elsewhere. Here the expenses will be low and our start already looks to have some mid-term hammer difficulties.

[pindicator]

Civs to avoid - Ag/Fishing/Mysticism combinations.

That eliminates America, Dutch, Arabia, Inca, and Spain. I suppose this shouldn't be seen as a hard no, but rather there needs to be a good reason for picking them if the starting techs are going to be so bad for this start.

Inca has been grabbed. Arabia with FIN is a little tempting for this start. Spain perhaps (it seems like the latest balancing crutch is to slap -% city maintenance on a UB), but it is also very slow. Maybe a monastery or cathedral with + science is a way to go with Spain, but it would be tough to make a UB tied to getting a religion.

Anyway, there's not enough there to get my attention so we'll just cross those off the list for simplicity.

[pindicator]

Let's look at this from another angle.

The first 7 picks have all been civs. So I can either pick the 1st or 2nd leader (depending on what Elkad does) and the 16th civ, or I can roughly pick the 8th civ and 8th leader.  Is there a civ that I feel I have to have at this point? Not really - there's a number of them that I feel I could make work. But I do think there are some clear winners in the trait department: FIN seems like a must have here. It's like IND to get the Colossus but you actually start with it from turn 1. So what to pair it with? IND makes less sense when paired outside Germany. Although we do need help with hammers so that is a purpose. And more likely we get that hammer savings with IMP or EXP.

Vicky? Probably Vicky. She's really solid. Possibly Huayna Capac. Augustus as an outlier

[pindicator]

Went with Pacal over Vicky because:

• We're right in the middle of the pick list.  With 8 people after there isn't a guarantee we get to rely on having any kinds of synergy between our traits and civ. EDIT: So it's better to go for general all around goodness rather than combinations.
  
• On water maps EXP gives a bit more than IMP. Although I think there +50% to settlers is slightly better than +35% to workers, the rest of EXP more than beats out +100% to Custom Houses and GG pts. (Dang, I'm already missing those GG points. 
  
• Let's see if the broken BtS leader is broken again. 
  

[pindicator]

Well, the next 2 choices were civs I was looking at - but I actually prefer Babylon to India. Maybe it still was better to go with a civ first and trust there would be FIN/ something still available for a decent pairing.

Well, isn't that what I'm doing here except pairing the civ to the trait combination? There's 5 civs to go before I pick again, so I need to have a list of 6. They are:

Babylon - Cheap granary, can avoid Pottery a bit. I actually simmed this one out a bit and I can get settler and granary by t30. Expand like nuts.
Arabia - Cheap library which I then turn into GP roulette by setting if the game wants me to have religion or science. Kill someone with uber knights.
Russia - use the early game focused traits to get to the late era goodies
Portugal - lots of water commerce
Carthage - more water themed goodies, this one fits with the EXP bonus
Khmer - the starting techs are good and I have to admit to being intrigued by the artist even if I can't think of a practical fit to my style of play
Spain - did you count?