[SPOILERS] scooter tries again: back to school! (Willem of Vikings)

[scooter]

It's the PBEM32 sequel time! I'm excited. Anyways, I seem to have a tradition of posting webcomics in the first post, so here's the one for this thread. Perfect too as it fills up a lot of vertical space. Then it'll be "get serious" time after that or something. OR SOMETHING.



Long-winded thoughts coming up sometime soon.

[scooter]

Alright, before I get too into it - ded-lurkers are welcome! Treskies - hopefully you are still on board, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the setup. Anyone else who would like to ded-lurk can also participate in the discussion - again this setup lends itself to longer-than-normal pregame thoughts, so I'm going to try to do that here. Even if you just want to ded-lurk long enough to give your opinions on the setup here and then go spoil yourself, that's fine too. Anyways, I'm going to copy the setup into this post so I have a reference here and don't have to keep flipping back to the other thread.

The start:



Hmm, he named it "DullRube.JPG" - not sure what that means. I may think about that. Version with tile yields on but tile markings off:

Tech Maluses:

Fishing: City has 0 culture
Mining: Tile A becomes flatland
Agriculture: Tile B loses whale boats
Hunting: Tile C loses forest
The Wheel: Tile D, town becomes hamlet
Mysticism: Tile E becomes plains

Trait Bonuses:

Aggressive: Observatory
Charismatic: Laboratory
Creative: Barracks
Expansive: Harbor
Financial: Customs House
Imperialistic: Lighthouse
Industrious: Stables
Organized: Supermarket
Philosophical: Colosseum
Protective: Levee
Spiritual: Islamic Temple

Other Restrictions:

If you are India, you start without a worker.
If you are Inca, you start without a scout.
If you are Aggressive France, you start without rice.
If you are Charismatic Russia, you start without rice or pigs.

Some interesting stuff here. One quick mechanics question - the netted Whale does not provide happiness before Optics correct? In other words, it's just a nice tile before then. So Agriculture loses you a nice tile til Optics but does not lose any happiness.. Correct? (probably still not picking Agri, but wanted to verify that)

[scooter]

So tech stuff first. The list:

Fishing: City has 0 culture
Mining: Tile A becomes flatland
Agriculture: Tile B loses whale boats
Hunting: Tile C loses forest
The Wheel: Tile D, town becomes hamlet
Mysticism: Tile E becomes plains

Mining - not too good - that loses the opportunity for a RR grass hill. The RR plains hill was useful in PBEM32, and a grass hill is even stronger. You don't pass up 1/4/0 tiles without a good reason. So I'm unlikely to pick Mining.

Agriculture - This loses the improved whale tile. That tile is quite nice - 3/1/4. That becomes 3/1/5 with Financial and 4/1/5 if you pick Fin/Imp. That's a pretty incredible tile to have at T0. One caveat - to have it at T0 you need Fishing, and Fishing starts with 0 culture so you couldn't work it the first two turns. Still though, that's a nice tile to have. The contrast though is you'd be giving up the ability to improve wet rice on T0, so I don't think taking Agriculture is COMPLETELY stupid.

Hunting - This basically means you can hook up the elephant anytime, but at the cost of 1hpt permanently. This is a bigger deal than PBEM32 because in this case, the Hunting resource is not food. So Hunting is less attractive because it doesn't give you food. I'll probably pass on Hunting.

The Wheel - You town gets level'd down. Since I'm not going to work a non-river plains hamlet anytime soon, this is basically equivalent to deleting it. I don't think this is such a bad penalty - especially because it's plains and non-river. It's situationally useful if you're wanting to race to a religion or something, but overall I like this tech here.

Mysticism - Hmm - grass wet rice becomes plains. You trade a food for a hammer. Not a killer nerf, but it's still a nerf for a lousy starting tech. I don't know, is it really better to have this than, say, Agriculture?

Fishing - Probably the best starting tech if you don't pair it with Agriculture. You can't work T0 whales,but you can still work them sooner than anyone. This also underscores how pointless the town is (being able to work that much better Whale) - so pairing this with Wheel seems quite nice. The culture penalty has one significant downside - you are working riverside plains for 3 turns no matter what. Still, that's one of the milder nerfs.

One issue here is that because there are no hunting foods, you really need Agriculture, Wheel, or Mining if you want your working to be doing something (and even Wheel is not an awesome thing to be doing at first). This means this start is a bit more difficult than 32 which at least had Hunting food available. I mean, Fishing/Wheel seems nice in my head, but is it really so great when your worker just builds roads until Agriculture comes in? And because you start with a worker, vertical growth will probably be the name of the game early (no worker first) so that's slowed down considerably if you have no food you can improve out of the gate. Starting with a settler first for a few turns is remotely tempting. Anyways, I need to think on all of this more. I'll come back to this after talking about traits which is a bit more fun. Also, these are all just gut reactions and highly subject to change .

[Commodore]

Some interesting stuff here. One quick mechanics question - the netted Whale does not provide happiness before Optics correct? In other words, it's just a nice tile before then. So Agriculture loses you a nice tile til Optics but does not lose any happiness.. Correct? (probably still not picking Agri, but wanted to verify that)

Right. Your people can eat and use delicious whales from the start, but they won't be happy about it until Optics.

[oledavy]

Fun fact, I know the "Every Major's Terrible" song by heart

Good luck Scooter! I'm looking forward to following this thread.

[Commodore]

Fun fact, I know the "Every Major's Terrible" song by heart

When that comic came out, I laughed, particularly at the Physics major bit, and then sadly went back to work as an engineer.

[scooter]

Next, traits. Here's the list:

Aggressive: Observatory
Charismatic: Laboratory
Creative: Barracks
Expansive: Harbor
Financial: Customs House
Imperialistic: Lighthouse
Industrious: Stables
Organized: Supermarket
Philosophical: Colosseum
Protective: Levee
Spiritual: Islamic Temple

Comes with these disclaimers:

If you are India, you start without a worker.
If you are Inca, you start without a scout.
If you are Aggressive France, you start without rice.
If you are Charismatic Russia, you start without rice or pigs.

My first thought is that these are just a tad weaker than the PBEM32. Not by a ton, but still there. PRO levee sounds fun for instance, but that'll effect exactly 5 tiles, none of which will be worked in the early game. Wang Kon is still sort of tempting I admit, and if we had more river tiles I'd go for it. Anyways, this list is a bit overwhelming at first, so I want to go through each trait and eliminate/keep each one and try to have a smaller list of traits to work with. To me, building bonuses fall into three tiers - "negligent" "useful" and "strong." So to me, if something is "negligent" it better be a really good trait. Customs House is very negligent, but FIN is a great trait here, so that's acceptable. Anyways:

Industrious - Eliminate. The Stable is a pretty negligent bonus, and if there were no bonuses I'd still have several things I'd want over this.

Aggressive - Eliminate. The science bonus is nice, but to me, this is weaker than, say, a Grocer because we're on Toroidal/Prince so maintenance will quickly dip the slider low enough that this will be worth a small-ish amount. I'm also not a huge fan of traits that don't help economically. Pairing it with France isn't worth the penalty at all - this is a roomy map so the great artist isn't as awesome here because you're so far away from people.

Charismatic - Eliminate. Same story as Aggressive. The happy bonus from Chm is nice and all, but there's better ways to get happy here IMO, which I'll touch on soon. Pairing this with Russia would be hilarious,but you lose both food bonuses for it, so I just don't think that's worth it. If it was only -1 food bonus, I would do this.

Financial - Keep. FIN is fairly useful here assuming the level of water is fairly similar to last time. The Custom House is useless for an AW game, but that's ok, FIN is still good.

Expansive - Eliminate? Harbor is another fairly negligent bonus, but I'm leaning towards skipping EXP just because I've played it a lot lately. So this is probably an eliminate. Probably. Though this map is spacey so EXP is particularly strong so I just don't know.

Creative - Keep. Kinda want to play with Creative because I haven't in forever. The barracks bonus is pretty mild, but that's ok.

Protective - Eliminate. I sort of explained this - but yeah, Levee is not amazing with this capital. Now what you COULD do is pair it with Dutch and FIN/IMP and get a very broken 4/2/4 tile or 3/2/5 tile available from the start. Yikes! That's sort of tempting, and I kinda hope someone does it. So maybe I take back my derogatory Protective comments here. Hmmm. Probably not going to take it, but it's fun to think about.

Philosophical - Keep. Unfortunately, there aren't many bonuses with specialists slots to abuse. However, pairing this with, say, the Mayans is tasty. +3 happiness from the start? Yes please! That would be fairly awesome IMO. Pair it with Organized would be kinda silly - as that would give +1F for faster growth and added health, so the capital could be monstrous fairly easily. Speaking of...

Organized - Keep. I really like Organized here. Courthouses were important last game on Toroidal, and difficult is up a notch here. Plus it also gets cheap Lighthouses. Mackoti has also been trying to convince me lately of the power of Organized, and if there's ever a situation where it could be useful (with +1F on top of it), it'd be here. Otherwise, you could pair this with America and get +20% gold on top if it, which would be pretty nice actually.

Spiritual - Eliminate. This is actually a fine trait here and the temple is somewhat useful, but I just don't want to play SPI here as there are other more exciting things.

Imperialistic - Argh. I want that Lighthouse, but I don't want IMP again. Plus we notched up difficulty here. Probably eliminate unless I go with some goofy Imp/Pro Dutch or something which I probably won't.

Hmm, so that's all that. That leaves us with:

1) FIN
2) CRE
3) PHI
4) ORG

And that's with PRO and IMP way back in the back of my mind as possible goofy synergy pairings. But those are the 4 I like best so far in a vacuum - not necessarily in that order. Some fun options here . I still haven't considered synergy with civs that have appealing starting techs, so that'll be my next big job.

[scooter]

Working on a synergy post. However, I just realized Japan is the ONLY Fishing/Wheel civ. That's kinda bleh.

[NobleHelium]

Levee also improves your city tile, and the tile SE of the city is also riverside I believe (not 100% sure on the latter since I haven't opened the save).

[scooter]

Levee also improves your city tile, and the tile SE of the city is also riverside I believe.

Good catches, thanks. That makes it much more tempting.