RBP3 [SPOILERS] Hannibal of Byzantium (Bobchillingworth, ManiaMuse & SleepingMoogle)

[ManiaMuse]

Yeah, that's the plan I think. It's a shame that that will probably reveal only a desert, but we have to stick close to the capital.

Fair enough. One thing that interests me though is that there seems to be another desert hill below the one which we have already revealed, might be the possibility of striking gold around there.

Looks like we are going to be very slow at scouting and contacting everyone else which could be problematic if a mega alliance forms or everyone decides to dogpile on us because we're Byzantium. Are we thinking that is we have horses (which should be within reasonable reach) that we'll use chariots to do a fair bit of the scouting?

[SleepingMoogle]

Using chariots for scouting sounds like an idea, yeah.. it should be safer too. Barbs on Emperor are no joke. Once we have built the settler, we could really do with a defensive and/or scouting unit or two.

I moved the warrior NE and ended our turn. No new tiles were revealed this time, but the next turn we'll have better visibility on the SE desert, and on the land to our east the turn after that.

[Bobchillingworth]

Hey lurkers out there, if you exist please feel free to stop in and say hi!


Judging by small number of postings in the lurkers only thread I think there's probably only a few lurkers left on this site with the time and willingness to read 17 threads, especially with PB2 getting so interesting. I don't mind if what we write here is only for our benefit and the other teams once this game finally concludes, but I'd be great to get some lurker input on the quality of our updates and planning. I also welcome non-spoiler questions about our plans- I think we've laid out our goals both short and long-term pretty well in this thread, but it's difficult for me to remember what material has been posted here as opposed to only in our private team email conversations.

[banshee]

Don't worry, there are still some lurkers in the depths of the forum
Now that you've scouted most of the immediate vicinity - do you think it was the right decision to settle in place?
I might be wrong here but I think you got pretty lucky in that you could see those 3 southern tiles at the start (including the rice)... doesn't look like "natural" LoS to me.

Anyway, great read so far. Good luck to you guys!

[Bobchillingworth]

Thanks for the response!


For settling the capital, I do think we chose the best available spot- it has better commerce potential than the other locations we had discussed, and meshes very well with a potential 2nd city on or near that plains square to the south. My opinion will change dramatically if an archer or something comes out of the fog and parks itself on one of our many hills or forests. Regarding line of sight of the south, I'm not sure exactly how the mechanics for revealing tiles works, but I think it was because our starting warrior probably naturally spawned 1S of our settler and then was moved on top of the settler at the start by Sulla or someone else. I've never played one of the Epics or Adventures on this site, but I seem to remember from reports that Sulla tends to have all units begin on the same tile for most games.

[ManiaMuse]

Don't worry, there are still some lurkers in the depths of the forum
Now that you've scouted most of the immediate vicinity - do you think it was the right decision to settle in place?
I might be wrong here but I think you got pretty lucky in that you could see those 3 southern tiles at the start (including the rice)... doesn't look like "natural" LoS to me.

Anyway, great read so far. Good luck to you guys!

Personally I think it was a toss up between settling in place and on the silver. I bet Sulla put it there (and I presume a similar situation for most starts) just to force a difficult decision out of all the teams. I don't think any of the other alternative places we considered would have been as good as settling in place or on the silver.

Pros for settling on silver
- Early research boost esp with financial (could help us now as research costs seem to be be very high)
- Immediate happiness boost (doubled by charismatic)
- IW can be delayed a little bit

Cons
- The west is really food poor. We would have 3 plains hills which would be great if we had the food to feed them but we don't really since we were planning on cottaging as much as possible
- Picks up a useless desert as well
- Loses 4 commerce potential

The question whether it was the right decision will presumably be answered if we get rushed because we weren't able to research the defensive techs quick enough or we just generally fall way behind. We were never expecting a super capital capable of being cottaged to the max at size 21 but I think in place was more versatile for food and production and later commerce. The happiness boost isn't so important either as we weren't planning to grow to a happy cap of 7 before building our first settler either.

In any case I imagine all the teams have similar starts and about half of them settled on the first turn as well so hopefully things should be fairly balanced relatively. The extra LoS to the south is probably a worldbuilder issue since the warrior got moved from wherever it started.

The next big decision we make will probably be whether to get IW early or not but that will depend on how the next 40 or so turns go.

[SleepingMoogle]

In the end, I'm happy with our choice to settle in place as well for reasons already mentioned. We would have benefited from settling on the silver for the short-term commerce boost, given how slow the current tech rate is, but this is caused just as much by our Civ's lack of starting worker techs. Plus, we will need to pick up IW quickly if we want to work that rice tile to the south so it probably won't be that long before we hook up the silver.

Tech-wise, our current path is pretty much set as Agriculture > Animal Husbandry > Mining > Bronze Working. Hunting, Archery and Pottery are probably up next. After that, Writing and Iron Working would be good. It'll depend a lot on in-game developments though, so it's hard to pin down this early.

[ManiaMuse]

Turn rolled over. Where do we want to go next with the warrior? Borders have expanded and given us visibility on a few more tiles as well.

[SleepingMoogle]

The scouting path was E > NE for now, so I moved the warrior one tile to the east. It revealed a desert tile south of the oasis, and two more desert tiles can be seen in the fog E and SE of it. Overall, it doesn't look too attractive for now. The border expansion revealed a lot of hill tiles to the W and NW of the citadel though. Perhaps it would make for a good production city location, so further scouting would be good at some point. The river keeps on going NW, without an end in sight. I ended the turn as we can't do anything else for now.

For scouting, there's two paths that would come to mind now:



The red path is what I originally had in mind; it keeps both Warrior and capital safe. The blue path would reveal a lot more land, but it also makes the Citadel vulnerable. Still, we could make a gamble since no one will have visibility on our city tile anymore. What do you think?

[Bobchillingworth]

The paths image doesn't show up at work, but I assume that one of the options is NE, which I favor because I want to see if there's a food resource on those fogged grass tiles in the east. Unless both paths reveal them, in which case follow your heart :P