FFH II PBEM VIII Lurker's Lurking Thread (For Lurkers) [SPOILERS]

[Selrahc]

On another topic, does Mist's game plan actually make much sense? He seems to invest a lot of time into very clever strategies which aren't actually particularly good. An inconclusive, ultimately pointless worker -> Asena rush in II, where it would have probably been easier to just build melee units regularly, and then going for the neat Elven Runes economy too early in IX, which saw him building super-expensive SoK to fight off an army that had a high percentage of generic cheap spam units. And so here we have him doing some sort of incredibly slow growth culture push game, with a civ & leader which isn't in my mind particularly well suited for it.

Mist's game plan makes sense if people leave him alone. Culture victories with boosted artists are very quick, certainly happening within the same sort of timeframe as the tower.

At the moment, people do look set to leave him be. But I have severe doubts that this will continue all the way to the end game. And the tech path for culture gets far less military goodies than the tech path for the Tower.

[Commodore]

Um. So why are there formation promotions in Mackoti's defensive stacks?

[Ilios]

Um. So why are there formation promotions in Mackoti's defensive stacks?

Because he's scared of 5-move 5-Str Hippus Horsemen rampaging his lands.

[Commodore]

And it's a reasonable fear, I just wonder who leaked it to him that the attack was coming, and why.

[Bobchillingworth]

Mack seems to have realized that he's the global pariah from warnings from Sareln, fear from Amelia, and somewhat overt hostility from Ravus. It looks like he put everything together and has concluded that the Hippus are coming for him- he was posting back even a couple weeks ago in his thread that he was looking for anti-hippus counters (and his screenshots show that he didn't even have contact w/ Yellow then). Sareln also might have spilled something about a horseman army- I know from private conversations with him that he's been hoping to play both sides off of each other (although he sadly isn't quite ruthless enough to actually backstab Yellow while his army is across the world).

[uberfish]

I think Mackoti got suspicious of Sareln's diplomacy.

[Thoth]

Um. So why are there formation promotions in Mackoti's defensive stacks?

Because he's scared of 5-move 5-Str Hippus Horsemen rampaging his lands.

And it's a reasonable fear, I just wonder who leaked it to him that the attack was coming, and why.

Because Makoti is an MP veteran and isn't a fool. He's playing a civ that becomes damn near unstoppable if left alone. Diplo stuff aside, it's obvious that if you're playing the Vamps you need to be able to defend yourself early, otherwise you won't get to your game winning toys.

[DaveV]

I predict that if the other players don't organize a dogpile on mackoti soon (like immediately), he'll turn into a runaway. Looks like he has a big enough army to scare off everybody, and a good enough economy to bring vampires onto the map soon. Once he starts conquering, I don't see anyone stopping him.

[Thoth]

Probably too late.

Previous RB history shows that dogpiles take time and good coordination to be effective. Time is one thing you don't want to give to the Vampires.

[Gaspar]

We're swapping to Aristocracy/Consumption when the GP finishes, yes?

And I advise sending the worker that finished the marble quarry back west to build another farm for DoF and more cottages in the west or whatever.

Please stop sending the majority of the empire's workforce running around the empire in large groups, you are wasting a lot of worker turns this way. You should have workers slowly move around in a localized area and gradually shift over as needed. New cities should have 1-2 workers nearby (shifted over from older cities) when they're founded, rather than being founded with no workers and then being flooded by several workers many turns later, completely vacating the old cities which will then need workers sent back or new ones built.

Basically the crux of the matter is that we have all workers improving a couple cities at once, rather than small sets of workers improving all the cities at once. The capital has four completed cottages that we've never worked, for example, and they were all built back to back with 3 workers, while we could have sent 2 of those workers to the more outlying areas where they would have been immediately available to set up the two new cities immediately as they were founded. Instead, the cottages were built consecutively when we could not work them, and the new cities did not have any improvements to work because no workers were nearby.

I know you really don't like this part of the game, but these game fundamentals severely impact how well you do. You are very strong in the macro-level strategic thinking, but often your plans can't be implemented because the civilization falls behind due to poor micro-level management. I don't mean to offend, but I feel the worker and tile management in the last fifty turns or so has been quite poor.

Tell us how you really feel, NH.