RPB3 SPOILERS Bismarck of India (regoarrarr, darrelljs, sooooo, sunrise089)

[regoarrarr]

Spoiler thread for Bismarck of India.

You know the drill - if you're one of the players in this game, you don't belong here so click elsewhere.

If you're not playing, then you are welcome to add thoughts advice and comments, though please keep spoiler-free (i.e. don't post information that you saw in someone else's thread, or even comments based on information that you learned elsewhere).

With this being the 5th PB / PBEM game going on, I don't expect to have many issues with this but just in case!

[regoarrarr]

Okay so I will be posting in here all of our initial thoughts on stuff, but first let's talk about our choices.

We are Bismarck of India. As opposed to Bismark of North Dakota.

Bismarck is EXP/IND

Expansive - +2 health per city; build granary and harbor at half cost; +25% worker production
Industrious - +50% wonder production; build forge at half cost

India -
UU - Fast Worker (0/3/60) (Worker) - Movement rate of 3 (versus 2)
UB - Mausoleum (Jail) - +2 happiness

Obviously the Fast Worker is the real reason this civ is powerful, but in PB1 I have also enjoyed the effects of the Mausoleum. It's not that great of a UB, especially because it's so late, but it's not awful (cough, cough, Mall)

Roster:
regoarrarr - General thread post spammer
sunrise089 - Military leader from the Apolyton demogame
darrelljs - Being set up as the "fall guy" from PB2 which is why we didn't listen to any of his choices for leader / civ as you'll see
sooooo - Our savior who will ensure that we don't repeat our early exit from PB2

[regoarrarr]

Tentative Location map - https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXll0...meA&hl=en?

C&D spreadsheet - https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=...hcnc&hl=en

[regoarrarr]

Early post #2 reserved

[Speaker]

You are underrating the Mausoleum in a MP setting. I'll paste for you my comments from the beginning of my PB2 thread:

Happiness in multiplayer is key. In single player, you can get multiple religions, take the time and production to spread them, build lots of temples and cathedrals, and easily trade with the AI for as many happiness resources as you can get. One of my favorite lines of text in the game is the polite way of making a demand: "this sure would come in handy!"

Hereditary rule is really strong early because it allows you to blow past the early happiness cap. If you have properly prepared and have made a few cheap warriors for each city when you finish researching monarchy, you can get into hereditary rule, click the "max growth" button, and watch your tech blow up, as you grow like a weed and work a ton of cottages. Later in the game, however, there are much better government civics. Representation will be awesome for us, being philosophical, for the synergy between the two concepts. Police state is great to build units quickly, though the High Upkeep is not particularly great. And universal suffrage is probably even more valuable than police state once all your cottages have matured into towns, especially when combined with emancipation and free speech. So, suffice to say, with so many juicy options, you want to get out of hereditary rule as soon as you can. But if you aren't blessed with many happiness resources, and remember, in MP, the human players are a lot less likely to hand over valuable happiness resources, which let you grow your cities and produce more commerce, more units, or both.

This is where a few Unique Buildings really shine.
Hammam: Aqueduct replacement with +2 happiness
Mausoleum: Jail replacement with +2 happiness
Ball Court: Colosseum replacement with +2 extra happiness
Hippodrome: Theatre replacement with +1 happiness from horses (instead of dyes) and +2 happiness per 10% culture rate (instead of the theatre's +1)
Odeon: Colosseum with +1 extra happiness

The Hammam is the second best unique building in the game, after the Terrace (as Sullla has already mentioned) because it provides its bonus so early, and the building is so utterly useful. In essence, it allows you to raise both the happiness and health cap in every city! Like the granary, it's the sort of building you should put in nearly every city, and it is available in the classical age! The only downside is that it is pretty expensive at 100 hammers on normal speed. The Ball Court and Odeon are both pretty good because they are available pretty early, but the Colosseum is a pretty weak building overall. Using the culture slider for anything other than a quick happiness fix or border pop is suicide in multiplayer, as you fall behind technologically, which usually translates to military might. The Mausoleum provides the same bonus as the Hammam, but it comes much later, and is not such a crucial building that you would build anyways. However, it is very cheap, at just 120 hammers, considering it is available in the Renaissance/Industrial era, with Constitution.

The one thing I would add to that is that the Mausoleum is available at the same time as the better civics (Representation or Universal Suffrage) which you might want to switch into from Hereditary Rule, so it can help ease the pain of the loss of happiness from your military police.

Good luck guys! I hope this game goes better for you than PB2! And if you happen to be near Jowy/Kathlete........

[regoarrarr]

Okay now to start with some of our thoughts from our leader pick. These will basically be pasting in the emails / chats that we had over the past few weeks, with occasional commentary.

I will balance out the need to have 1 email per post for thread-spamming needs with the fact that I can only post once every 30 seconds.

First one - summary from me

Okay so with the snake pick set, I thought it was time to start formalizing some of our thoughts for leader / civ. If you haven't seen, due to sunrise screwing up the way we interpreted the random numbers <g>, we ended up 9th out of 17, so pretty much smack in the middle.

I don't know if any of you have read Spullla's analysis of starting civs / leaders from his PB2 spoiler thread, but it's excellent. It's located in the first page or three of his thread. They break down the choices into 3 areas: Traits, UB/UU, and starting techs.

In talking with sunrise, it seems to make sense that unless a truly amazing civ drops to us (India / Inca / etc), that we should pick leader first.

So, traits:
Although this is not a no tech trading game, where Financial is super-important, Fin is probably still one of if not the best trait. This is a no brokering game, so it's likely that we will again divide into techers and feeders, but being a techer means that you'll always be in demand (though I think sunrise has shown in pb1 that someone who is truly geared for gold production can also be in demand). Exp and Cre are also good. Phi/Spi also good, and with such a big map, Org may make sense?

Unique unit / building:
India, Inca are the top 2. Sunrise suggested he didn't want to do Byzantium again, which I agree with. I think that we should not pick anything too dominating, because I feel like that puts an even bigger target on our back than we're already going to have. I think we should pick somethign good but not overpowering, counting on our general skill (hopefully!) to give us enough of an advantage.

It may also make sense to take something with a defensive (or maybe even offensive but played defensively) early UU. That would hopefully stop the early rush on us, and again, we'll have plenty of time to let our general awesomeness (<g>) rise us to the top. So that would be something like Egypt, Zulu, Babylon, Mali, Native America.

Starting techs:
This was an area that I have thought about less. But still it's important. The 6 starting techs come with different beakers. So if you start with Fishing (40b), you have to research Ag (60b), whereas if you start with Ag, you only have to research Fishing, saving 20 early beakers. Not a HUGE advantage, but early on that's 2 turns, and early advantages do tend to snowball. The other 4 costs are Wheel-60, Myst-50, Mining-50 and Hunting-40. Also with Huts off and the default scout / warrior choice, we probably want to take a civ that does not start with Hunting. So Ag and the Wheel are the 2 most expensive (and with Mining probably the 3 most useful). Civs that start with 2 of those 3 techs are:
Sumeria, Babylon, Ottoman, Egypt, France (Ag/Wheel)
Mali (Wheel/Mining)
China (Ag/Mining)

One possible strategy would be to take an Expansive civ with Agri and the Wheel and tech Pottery off the gate! Of course with no Mining / early BW, we'll want to make sure to take a civ with a good early UU (or play enough defense). That would indicate Egypt or Babylon.

Other:
Some other thoughts I had is that general early development is going to be less important than finding as many of our neighbors as possible, and coordinating an early tech trading bloc. Again as with my techer example, if we decide and prioritize Alphabet, that ensures that we won't be left out of any trading. Just decide that we will research Alpha, and use that as an early diplomatic tool - "we are on our way to Alphabet and want to include you in our tech trading" etc.

Thoughts?

[regoarrarr]

You are underrating the Mausoleum in a MP setting. I'll paste for you my comments from the beginning of my PB2 thread:



The one thing I would add to that is that the Mausoleum is available at the same time as the better civics (Representation or Universal Suffrage) which you might want to switch into from Hereditary Rule, so it can help ease the pain of the loss of happiness from your military police.

Good luck guys! I hope this game goes better for you than PB2! And if you happen to be near Jowy/Kathlete........

Thanks Speaker! Like I said in my post I have enjoyed the effects of the Mausoleum in PB1. I didn't want to go into too much of a detail since some of it could be interpreted as spoilers as some of my PB1 opponents might be reading this thread.

As for the Jowy / Kathlete team well I think things could get interesting. Personally I'll leave each game to stand on its own and I have kind of "made peace" with the events from PB2. I wouldn't want to necessarily ally or attack a given team based on events.

But still, you know.....

[regoarrarr]

Okay so after that brief interlude, back to the pre-game emails

Sunrise

Two thoughts,

1) Org won't be very good IMHO due to how crowded the map will be.

2) Big tech-trading lesson of RBP1 - let as many people in your bloc
as want in. Otherwise the other bloc WILL be bigger.

Darrell

Hmm...9th really isn't that bad I guess. With tech trading on FIN is less important, I'd actually prefer PHI but since we just did that I'm okay with FIN.

I still say Byzantine is the best UU/UB combo in the game (or Rome), but there's no way we'll get them. I guess the thing to do is rank order our top 9 leaders, then after the dust clears on the first snake leg rank order the remaining top 9 civs?

I pasted in darrell's emails, even though as you will see, we pretty much end up ignoring everything that he said .

[regoarrarr]

Okay - me again

Byz and Rome are good but I think that we should try to lay a lower profile in this game. We may not need to go 9 leaders deep, and we may have to go more than 9 civs deep, since some people could pick civs first. Obviously the 8 teams below us will have both leader and civ before we pick twice, but if anyone picks a civ in the first round, we would have worse than 9th civ pick. Here is a top 9 leader from me, not necessarily in order

Pacal (Exp/Fin)
Willem (Cre/Fin)
Huayna (Ind/Fin)
Sury (Exp/Cre)
Mansa (Spi/Fin)
Hatty (Spi/Cre) - would prefer to avoid a repeat for me
Lizzie (Phi/Fin)
Peter (Exp/Phi) - would prefer to avoid the repeat here too
Bismarck (Exp/Ind) - if we see no Inds ahead of us - remember we nearly picked him for pb2

Anyone else?

Here is the first germination of an idea that we might want to lay a bit low in this game. Last game we had what some might agree was an "all-star" cast (I mean we're no Speaker / Sullla but ya know), one of the best civs and made aggressive settlements early on. Didn't work out so much for us.

The thought might be (and we'll talk some more about this later on) that we just need to play an above-average (but not exceptional) early game and count on our overall Civ skill (cough, cough) to carry us to victory. There are a few schools of thought on that, which we will explore

[regoarrarr]

Sunrise spends an hour or two compiling a list, only to realize that it was pretty much what I had just emailed

I generally rank the traits like this (1-5 scale):

Agg - 3
Cre - 5
Chm - 2
Exp - 5
Fin - 5
Ind - 3
Imp - 2
Org - 2
Phi - 4
Pro - 1
Spi - 4

My rankings of all of the leaders, not adjusting for synergy at all:

*5 Stars:
Pacal
Willem
Sury
Pericles
Hatty
Peter
Issy
Lizzy
Mansa

*4 Stars:
Ghandi
Kublai
Louis
Shaka
Bismark
Ragnar
Capac

*3 Stars
Monty
Ramesses
Alex
Cathy
Zara
Washington
Joao
Mehmed
Darius
Hannibal
Victoria

*2 Stars:
Stalin
Gilgamesh
Wang
Mao
Asoka
Brennus
Justinian
Frederick
Lincoln
Suleimon

*1 Stars
Saladin
Sitting Bull
Boudica
Genghis
Hammurabi
Augustus
De Gaulle
Roosevelt
Cyrus
Napoleon
Julius Caesar
Toku
Qin
Charlemagne
Churchill

_________________________

SO....I spent an hour at work to figure out my top 9 are:
Pacal
Willem
Sury
Pericles
Hatty
Peter
Issy
Lizzy
Mansa

Only Pericles and Isabella are unique to my list; regoarrarr has Capac
and Bismark instead, and I have both of them ranked close at 4 stars.

So...I don't think I really accomplished anything

darrell:

Try putting the leaders we DON'T want at the top of your lists, so people stop taking them.

This was after Pacal, Willem and Lizzie were the first 3 off the board