(February 22nd, 2016, 20:13)ReallyEvilMuffin Wrote: Btw did you notice you have a 3 food desert non rivered to your caps NE? I assume it would be like the old vanilla ones that you cannot build on which would make it pretty meh if true, but interesting nonetheless.
Yea I won't be able to build an improvement on the dessert flood plain. It's a decent tile, I think of it as a grass farm that I would probably want anyway for a city in that area and I also don't have to invest the worker turns into. Obviously I would prefer it to be on a river but I'm pretty happy with it regardless.
T11
Big news this turn is that I got my first contact. Mr.Cairo playing as Mao (EXP/PRO) of England.
Mr.Cairo is a complete unknown player who's playing in his first game here, assuming he's no smurf. Obviously it's impossible to discern his skill level, however, from personal experience, new players need time to adjust to the RB MP environment. For example, the map sizes, the number of players, and the meta games all takes sometime to get a good "feel" for in order to make the optimal plays.
Mr. Cairo's leader Mao (random coincidence: I'm doing a research project about Mao in school
), is definitely one of the REX leaders. Mao's got cheap workers and cheap granaries which are obviously a big deal in the early game. However, the leader definitely runs out of steam after the early game, therefore he definitely need to leverage Mao's traits into a meaningful advantage somehow.
England starts with Fishing/Mining, which two of the cheaper starting techs. Assuming that the starts are similar, this is probably one of the worst starting techs for him. Because with Fishing he would want to work the 3 food lake however he is also EXP, which means he wants to get his EXP worker bonus by working an extra hammer, which cannot be the lake. I suspect he will run into the problem of getting his EXP worker too early but not having enough for them to do thing due to techs not lining up correctly.
Let's do a quick sim with his techs with my start:
T10 Techs Agriculture
T20 Techs Hunting
T35 Techs BW
and then what? he can't start chopping due to not having BW or he might not be able to hook all his food. He also need the wheel right? Another 8 turns. He also want PRO granaries right? Well, he can't get to Pottery until almost turn 50.
An aside for starting techs:
I always place a high value on starting tech. Not that starting techs can ever win you a game, but that bad starting techs can certainly lose you the game. I think of early game techs as constraints, constraints are something that prevent one from making choices. One of the key goal of the early game is to remove these constraints ASAP, to increase the number of choices you have. The more choices you have, the better chance that you will be able to choose a game-winning line-of-play. With no huts to give free techs and gold in this game, starting techs are even more important.
The English Redcoats and the Stock Exchange both kinda fall into the "cool but kinda low impact since they come too late" area for me. It's definite no Impi or Terrace but better than...say Khmer Ballista Elephants or Ethiopian Steles.
I don't expect the England UB or the UU to be a significant factor.
Let's summarize his game play so far:
T10 discovering a tech that likely Agriculture or Hunting.
Seemed to have sent his scout straight toward an opponent's capital(me), instead of doing a full circle around his own capital. (I guesstimate there's about 15 tiles between capital and we met T10, so he would have to spent at least 5 turns in a straight line)
In the end, I'm definitely feeling ambivalent about having Mr.Cairo as a neighbour. His strong early game could lead to him grabbing contested land between us however maybe I could exploit his inexperience in MP.
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