[no players] We like to lurk lurkers lurking.

[NobleHelium]

Anyway, I've probably said too much, but I figured it would be okay since you've already got several people in here giving you roughly the same good advice. Check out some of Nic's games if you have time- he probably has the second best BTS win record after Mack, not because he's an absolute master of the game but because he's an expert opportunist, which I get the impression is your preferred style of play as well.

While Nic is obviously a much better player than Jowy, citing him as an example of good opportunistic attacking is not really correct given that he attacked vastly inferior players than him which is not the case for Jowy.

[Bobchillingworth]

Aren't "vastly inferior players" exactly who an opportunist should be attacking? :P


I think Nic played one BTS game which was against vets (for a certain definition of "vets", anyway), which he won. Can't be bothered to look it up tho. I do think what Jowy really needs are some lessons in tactics- like, "don't advance your incredibly vulnerable army blindly into assured danger" and "Civ IV is not Advance Wars, you don't win pushing forward a carpet of crap".

[NobleHelium]

Nic has played two games against vets. He ditched both games, then seized the second one back after thestick took over and started winning.

Your point about opportunism and inferior players is valid. And I definitely agree that Jowy should have offered peace after taking the workers, even if he assumed yuris would decline just to look around. One, yuris may have accepted and kept his city, and two it sends the message that he was only after the workers and thus personal gain far more than anything else.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I recall the same problems in the last game I followed Catwalk in. His solution to not having enough tiles to work is to keep size down via the whip. An alternate solution would be to build more workers. Whipping is obviously good, but that capital needs cottages.

[spacetyrantxenu]

If I make another map in the future I'll be much more careful about putting gold remotely close to the players' starting areas. I don't think it's a coincidence that the top two players in score both went wandering and got lucky to find gold. It's like I'm rewarding bad behavior. In Zanth's (Gavagai's?) case it wasn't so bad, he moved to a visible plains hill that would grab 1.5 food resources (although he certainly gave up a higher yield fish to do it):




But he ended up with this:




It would have been OK without the gold. So that's on me. And BaII went wandering, going from:




To:




I guess in retrospect that was a more sensible move than I at first thought, since where he moved was still within reach of two visible high yield food tiles (higher yield than what Zanth did, even). So basically I just didn't see the move and react by relocating the gold further away. Oh well. If they ever report it I'm sure other people will have other complaints about the map before it's all done. Also, in retrospect, it's now painfully obvious there are way too many forests on this map. That's how the map script churned it out and I didn't reduce it, which was a bad choice. Every kind of production should be ridiculously accelerated in this game, like Azza's 'Mids build was. Mapmaker

[Krill]

*shrug* We all make mistakes (well fucking duh in my case), just so long as we learn from them...

These aren't even that bad compared to what has happened before.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Yeah, on the sliding scale of probable disaster these are on the lesser end. Everyone can win from any of the positions on this map, it's up to the players. If they'd report better I'd like to see someone stitch up a land shape picture at some point, but....well we may be waiting a while.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

FWIW, I played a game a reasonable distance past AD with your map and played zanth's start without paying attention to which civ or whether there were known unknown goodies available at a non-SIP start. I made the same decision to take the PH and cows over the coastal fish. I think the deciding factor at the time was wanting more river cottages at the capital.

Overall, the map is very good, if a bit green in a lot of areas. A trimming of forest and jungle by anywhere from 25-40% would probably have been perfect. But this map is as good as many we have played recently and better than several others. Don't beat yourself up over it, it's just fine.

[SevenSpirits]

Yeah, both of those moves didn't need the gold. Looking at those screenshots I'd even say that both of those moves were reasonable even if they weren't moving to a 2 hammer tile, which means I think they were the best move available by a large margin. Throw in gold on top of that and yeah...

Mapmaking is hard. An entire map just looks so different from the little segment of defogged land that a player gets to work with, so it's hard to predict what kind of realities a map will produce.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I sent a PM to 2metraninja, I think it was he who overlooked the ban list and built the Great Lighthouse.

Hey 2MN,

PB17 needs to be reloaded, someone build the Great Lighthouse which was banned for that game. I'm not certain but Civstats indicates it is possible that you built the wonder. If it was you, when the reload is processed it will go back to Yuri's turn. The game should remain paused until you've had time to log in and change the build in whichever city was about to complete the wonder. Unfortunately there's nothing to be done about the wasted hammers, sorry about that.

If I have the wrong guy let me know and I'll try to chase down the right player, if it isn't already known from the tech thread by then.

Thanks,

Xenu

For those scoring at home, score changes this turn from Civstats:

2/27/14 7:39 pm flugauto Score increased to 172 from 170 (+1 pop)
2/27/14 7:39 pm Catwalk Score increased to 189 from 187 (+1 pop)
2/27/14 7:39 pm Gavagai/zanth Score increased to 284 from 267 (tech + pop? some other wonder?)
2/27/14 7:39 pm slowcheetah Score increased to 171 from 167 (+2 pop)
2/27/14 7:39 pm Azza Score increased to 199 from 197 (+1 pop)
2/27/14 7:39 pm BaII Score increased to 198 from 196 (+1 pop)
2/27/14 7:39 pm Nakor Score increased to 199 from 196 (+1 pop)
2/27/14 7:39 pm 2metraninja Score increased to 194 from 176 (+1 pop + GLH?)

The only other score change besides 2MN's that could be a Lighthouse build is Gavagai/zanth, but I don't see it in the screenshot from this turn that they posted in their thread, and Gavagai indicated someone else built it. So it seems reasonable to be 2metraninja.