[SPOILERS] Seven Russias Into the Periclous Fray

[SevenSpirits]

Well I settled the iron city and he still only has one spear visibly in the area. The hill south of the iron is unfortunately roaded, so I want to gain control of it ASAP. I will be chopping a library in the city for the culture. In this respect CRE is working like I wanted it to - removing the need for manual culture for the first border pop, but still requiring you to put in effort to get enough culture to compete with another player - and providing cheap culture buildings to help with this.

[SevenSpirits]

Things are plodding along boringly. I'll post some screenshots again soon. Iron is secure - HAK's military has not spiked since I settled the city. The interesting stuff is the diplo.

* HAK offered one of his TWO COPPERS (and btw, I found yet another copper, which is in HAK's sphere of influence... Krill!!) to me for one of my two horses. This is after I hooked up iron. Look, that's very thoughtful of you, but the only case where I lose my iron is the case where you declare war on me and all my deals are cancelled. I did not accept the offer because I'd just as soon not have to build spears for a while longer.

* I settled a city to get a trade connection to Haram, and offered him OB a couple times, as well as a spare horse for spare furs trade. He has not accepted any offers nor proposed any himself. Perhaps he's met someone else and managed to connect over to them and already has full routes? Or maybe he hates diplo screens, who knows. We could certainly both use whatever help we can get in not falling too far behind the leaders, so I'm really surprised he declined the deal.

[SevenSpirits]

OK, here's the following turn, t71.

Overall empire.



As you can see I still don't have anything beyond base happiness. As such I haven't bothered with granaries yet, except that the newest cities are starting with them. Older cities are already at full pop and have therefore been building more important things like workers, settlers and, er, guerrilla 1 archers.

City screens.

Getting out our academy. Also starting on a galley here. I am currently thinking that the next settler goes on the sugar island, as Haram does not seem to want OB (or anything else having to do with use of the trade screen). So I've moved to chop a forest for the capital and can finish it off with natural production.

Remember, the capital had to 2-whip out a barracks (and spend a couple forests) for some archers to protect our iron. But thankfully it has now grown back.



Next two cities are pretty obvious. Nothing to say here.





Diddlysquat just got two forest chops. From this and the iron production, I'm getting an axe this turn and a granary in two turns. After the granary finishes, the rice will be ready to go and we can commence growth.



Eskimo wins the prize for not quite being the worst city ever. But only because it stole the cow from Collywobbles.



Foible is newly planted, and to my surprise it seems to claim 3 food resources and not just 2. I wasn't expecting to be able to keep that plains cow, but immediately after I settled my city, Haram plopped down his own which invalidates any cities between them. So we got the maximum possible buffer between our border cities - nice!

Power / food / demos. I estimate there are 6-7 people doing better than us and 3-4 doing worse. Disparity between the top and bottom is pretty high.

[SevenSpirits]

Next up for the opponent analysis, we have Gavagai -



I know Gavagai from PB16, where he was annoyed and confused that Gaspar and team considered him a threat after he attacked them in the ancient era. He thought that his attack made perfect sense for the situation.

It turns out that people who think attacks make sense are more dangerous than people who don't think those attacks make sense, regardless of how right the various parties are.

I see Gavagai as a fairly good player with a major gap in his understanding of people. But the sacred animals probably don't care about people, do they?


5/10

6/10

8/10

7/10

8/10


In this game, Gavagai chose Willem (CRE/FIN) of Ethiopia (HUNT/MINE). This is very similar to my pick, but replacing my PHI with FIN. I think mine is better. FIN doesn't really synergize with any of the rest of it, while PHI + CRE is a nice combo. In fact, in general I see FIN as having higher inclination than average to use commerce for gold (since it's good at commerce), while CRE has slightly lower inclination to do so (since it has an easier time building beaker multipliers in its commerce cities). There's also some amusing antisynergy with having both CRE and a Monument UB, though perhaps that just means you build the Monument UB in high-culture situations where it's at its best. Overall, it's a perfectly OK combo, but I don't like it that much.

What sayeth the sixth sacred animal of this pairing?

Baaaaaa

[SevenSpirits]

In diplo news, Haram offered me OB. I accepted and noted that he was still getting no benefit from it, presumably due to not having sailing. I offered him horse both as a token of hopeful cooperation and because I wanted him to immediately know that the commerce I was getting was noticed and appreciated.

GermanJojo offered me OB soon after. I declined initially to check out the situation, since I don't expect to have a trade connection to him anytime soon. His scout was stuck at my border. After playing through most of my turn, I determined that OB with him would be OK, and offered it b-

Nope. I can't make any diplo offers because he's logged in and won't answer the phone. He stayed logged in until after I finished my turn and still would not allow me to open a diplo window. I gave up.

This game mechanic is really frustating!!

Well anyway, I offered them to him the following turn and presumably he will accept.

[SevenSpirits]

Actual turn report, t76.

I've now birthed two scientists before anyone else got their first. Academy + turn on tech. Calendar is in sight. Getting calendar is worth an insane 4-5 happiness, so I will basically be set to grow through granaries onto lots of cottages. Yay. Not sure what the next tech after that will be.

You can see I postponed the galley-settling-island plan in favor of more cheaply settling by a newly discovered crab. (That city was going to be a filler later since it has 4 lighthouse lakes.) The reason for this change in plan is the OB with Haram, which meant the island city would not be worth nearly as much. However, I will probably still settle it soon - at the very least it provides sugar.

[The Black Sword]

How valuable do you think Cha would have been for this start?

[SevenSpirits]

I think that's too hard for me to answer, since I would have played the entire game differently - earlier granaries, much more whipping... plus there's the matter of removing one of my current traits, which would also affect how I play.

I can tell you a vague summary of how I feel. Often when you are starved for something you look enviously at the other players who have that thing, and wish you had that instead of [insert critically important thing that you have and they don't]. I don't feel too envious of CHA civs here. That's because I do have plenty of happy resources, it's just that they are all unlocked at calendar. I'm more envious of having copper at my capital, and the food/production growth curve some other civs have shown (which I guess could be partly based on CHA, but that doesn't seem to matter to me).

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I see an academy. Was the other GS turned into a math bulb? I don't recall.

What are some mid-range goals for you? I see lots of granaries, as you commented. Calendar, grow taller, _______, profit? How do your 7 cities compare to your opponents? How many more expansion phase cities do you think are "yours" ?

Any way-too-early-to-call pronouncements about changes in your mod? Anything that you would do differently in rebalancing given your viewpoint of the early game? This last question is not meant to be leading, I'm not sure what is really happening elsewhere.

Sorry about the barrage if questions. I'm rooting for Cathy/Russia [obv OP ] here so good luck.

[SevenSpirits]

Yeah, the first scientist was planned to be an academy, but I got IW just before and revealed that iron was on the border with HAK. I felt like I had to go for claiming that area ASAP or I would lose, and that required enhanced chops. The math bulb was already a (far-off) candidate instead of an academy because I was having to delay math due to IW, so I don't feel too bad about it.

My midrange plan is to grow in cities and population as quickly as possible (Calendar -> bigger cities, Cottages -> more cities) and keep an eye on how geopolitics develops. HAK had a really strong start this game but I could easily see him being a squishy snack. And GermanJojo is doing pretty bad from his war with Haram, while Haram has been set back some too. I think the most likely opportunity I get will be to attack HAK through that pass where he settled close to my iron. It's all hills on the way to my city, but it's also all hills on the way to his city, so construction is a tempting tech to go for. But we'll have to see what HAK's position and tech level look like at the time when construction and building units seems like a reasonable possibility for me.

The long term plan is that a miracle occurs, and Gawdzak/Mackoti/Parkin/Wetbandit destroy each other simultaneously. At that point I think I have a chance.

My thoughts about the mod so far: CRE is a bit weaker, it seems fine. PHI is a bit stronger, it seems fine.

I can't tell for sure, because I don't have graphs of most players and I also don't know what kind of starting positions they had, but statistically, PRO and AGR both look a little bit strong. I was already half-expecting AGR to be too good (but hoping that it wasn't, because it's practically impossible to tweak), and I did aim for a bit too strong rather than a bit too weak on PRO. But PRO seems maybe better than I expected. One factor I'm guessing is present here is that these capitals could hardly be better for PRO. I'm guessing everyone got a plains hill plant, a nearby PFH, AND a copper. So that's both a ton of hammers, and 2 4h+ tiles, which I think is above average given that you usually lose one such tile from your starting area simply by settling on it. (This map also has a lot of forests which are good with PRO, and I'm starting to wonder if Krill used the older version of Torusland to generate it, which placed an excessive number of forests.) So I'm not too sure about PRO... but I do think both it and AGR are going to come out of this game looking too strong.

Something this game really made me aware of is that normal and quick speed games play very differently due to the fact that forest chopping on quick is way worse than chopping on normal. (On quick, you are spending 4 worker turns for a result that should cost only 2.67 worker turns.) The fact that early chopping is actually strong on normal makes worker and settler production bonuses quite a bit better than what I am used to. (I've played mostly in quick speed PBEMs, but I feel that these days we've figured out how to run a good pitboss game, and now I would claim that normal speed pitbosses are the best and most relevant games.) Chopping also makes a granary production bonus worse, because the granary discount is more valuable if whipping is a relatively better way to complete the granary than chopping. So I've decided that I probably underestimated PRO and IMP, and overestimated EXP, by a little bit.

PRO should be good at either 35% or 25%. IMP maybe should lose the bank (or market) bonus, but I haven't seen anything to indicate this yet. AGR needs to be redone. EXP should get harbors back and should be watched to make sure people are picking it enough. I haven't yet gotten any indication that there are problems with other traits, or anything else. I'm definitely also keeping an eye out for the tech cost scaling being too high. I think the number of players we have warrants a large map but the map size set is huge, so I would consider the techs being a tiny bit overpriced to be just about perfect for future games.