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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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[SPOILERS] - Available to new home, slightly used civ, 1 previous owner
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It's true, you know.
City list
Thoughts on PB24 and PB1: I've said over the past year that I was not going to be able to play a new game until early 2015. Luckily (or not, it depends on your view) I've had the pleasure of playing in PB18 with novice because our periods of unavailability overlapped and we were able to share the load. But now that PB18 has slowed down to a turn pace of a turn every two days, I feel that I have enough free time to hold another game, and by the time PB24 reaches T100 I full expect PB18 to either be over, or for us to be dead. Or at least in some sort of mindless holding pattern where I queue up units and shove them in front cities.
I've always wanted to replay PB1. I loved that game...apart from all the shit diplomacy, anyway. I had to give it up around T110 because I went back to university, and they implemented a new firewall that I cut out access to the pitboss servers. I felt that at that point, had I played on and not given the game to a series of players I would have been able to win it against those opponents. As it was, the great Incan Empire imploded under the pressure of 5 players dog-piling it. The map was, at times, both amazing, and utterly dreadful. As the first PB game held on RB, Sullla designed the map based off the tenets and commonly held opinions of hte time. The starts were described as strong...with a single 5 food tile for all starts except Imhotep who got a grass cow and sunrise whom got a wet corn. A few starts had 2 hammer tiles, most didn't (and I fucked up and didn't move to the plains hill). That game was slow, with a complete dearth of food resources. Most cities had 4 food tiles for me. But the layout is something that we are only just coming back to now. It was a lake map, with multiple coast lines to defend and hide behind, choke points and broad swathes of land providing solid strategic options. Just diplomacy completely destroyed that aspect of the game. Apart from the fact it was cylindrical, it was quite similar to the Torusworld maps that we use today. The best example I can give of the map is this screenshot below. Fugly, isn't it?  I'm looking forward to replaying the map though, especially with it being given more food resources. It's a very large map, as it was a huge map for 11, now 12, players. The number of tiles per player goes up from the 150-180 we use now to closer to 250 per player. It gives us more time to relax and just build rather than cramming a bunch of units down each others throats. So whilst the start positions are going to change, I hope that we can have another fun building game unlike any we've played over the past couple of years.
Get in, best snakepick position.
I've been thinking about what I want to pick, and I've narrowed it down to wanting to play an EXP leader, but there aren't that many civs available that synergise with EXP. Rome, America, Persia, Carthage, Ottomans, Khmer for UB...all of which I don't have much interest in playing. Except maybe Carthage, the UU is not likely to be that important on such a large map, as major conflict might be put off until knights...but then, I'm sure I can find a way to make use of it. But the main reason would be the UB, it's +1 trade route. OK, it might only be available in coastal cities but it's cheap at 40 hammers with EXP. What I'm more likely to want to do is to pick the second trait to fit the UB, after I decide what starting techs I need. And to be honest, it's fairly easy. If I have seafood, I need to start with Fishing. If most players do not start with Myst, I may have picked Myst to go for one of the first religions. This would then partly synergise with the trait: a seafood start with no one picking Myst would suggest FIN to me, so I'd want to take Pacal. Trying to pick for this kind of synergy, where you know you want one trait but the Civ/trait synergy comes from the second trait is always easier the further down the snake pick you are, and the bottom pick gets perfect synergy. Yes, I will not get any of the top tier civs, I'm not getting Zulu, Inca or Egypt or India, but I know I want EXP and that means I'll have enough choice at hte bottom to play one of hte EXP leaders and whatever civ is left so I'm happy with that.
I'd do a trait analysis, but really I think Commodore did a solid one in his PB22 thread. There are certain points I'd clarify though.
Quote:-Expansive: This one is probably one of the most changed traits; its core early benefit is intensified greatly, however. +35% to workers and work boats is just tremendous for start speed...a fishing start looks a lot better with expansive, and you have to work hard to not get a faster worker out of the bonus here. As long as you're building workers and work boats, the hammer savings of this trait are going to be very impactful. Later on, the trait gets quite the hodge-podge of boosted buildings; on aqueducts this translates to benefits in the factory era, while harbors are great in the trading-heavy Pitboss environment and markets plus grocers are solid if unsexy boosts. Good trait! Fishing starts actually aren't that much better in RtR with EXP, but that is more to do with the general crappiness of seafood starts. So whilst, yes, EXP makes such starts better, you still don't really want one. If you have a split seafood/land start, because you always want to improve hte seafood first and then make the worker afterwards with the food, (unless you get one of those Fishing/Mining starts on a smaller map and lower difficulty so that you can whip it), EXP doesn't really help that much at the start with seafood. It's good for worker first starts, obviously, you should always gain 2 turns minimum on a given start (3 turns on a 4 yield start, 2 turns on a 5 yield start). It's not much but it is something. So it has some early game potential, but that isn't where the real power of the trait lies IMO. Where EXP shines are in those cheap buildings. The Market and Grocer are buildings that you generally don't want to build, they are too expensive and come at points where you still have larger priorities of securing your borders nad killing someone with knights respectively. But at 75 hammers, that changes slightly, but mainly for the Market. And it's because of the happiness, the EXP market can give you a return of 19 hammers per happy. It's insane. That's just...well, you only need AH to get three of those happy and the fourth is Calendar, you can reach Currency by T85 easily and often before T80, and you can just skip the whole issue of the happy cap delaying growth. You aren't certain to get all four happy, but you can often get 2 of them. It's a bit of a gamble, but what EXP does give you the opportunity to snowball out of that fair early game advantage into a rather large midgame advantage from those cheap buildings, which is what all of the other early game traits don't let you do. And that's why I want to play it here, as this is a map that should give a fairly uncontested early game due to the large numbder of land tiles, and I'm going to need to snowball in that midgame to get a lead. Quote:-Imperialistic: My head and my heart fight about this trait. The simple benefits of +60% on settlers are obvious and far-reaching during the (often long) expansion portion of the game. The great general emergence bonus is always nice latter on, and although cheap custom houses aren't the be-all, end-all, in RBmod's Free Market trading game they are definitely worth building. But...kind of dry, overall. Useful trait! As an example of that lack of mid game power in early game Traits, IMP is perhaps the best example. That 60% bonus to settlers is, IMO a stronger early game advantage than what EXP brings to the table, but then once you have to stop building settlers cos you are going broke it does nothing. I think that is why Commodore called it "dry", it's almost a fire and forget trait, because the GG bonus is....well, not that much added flavour, and the Trading Houses are more game dependent and quite expensive here. As an aside, I think that the ToW version of IMP is a better version of IMP, with cheap markets and banks, but then you see that IMP essentially has the same strategic gameplay there that EXP does in RtR. I feel that in ADG/SMEG with the changes to the harbour buildings it becomes a bit better. Quote:-Protective: Cheap granaries are a game-changer. Anyone who's played BtS expansive knows how huge they are. Cheap walls, better defenders...are fringe benefits at best by comparison. Useful when you use them, but you don't actually want to be defending behind walls much. Still, granaries also make Protective a strong contender for “main” element of your leader pick. Workhorse trait! PRO explains the strength of the granary in BTS: cheap granaries are enough to power any trait. You don't need anything else to make the trait strong enough to stand by itself. But what you do need is flavour, you need to make the trait fun to play. Frankly there are quite a few ways to do that, and I don't think any of them involve cheap buildings. It involves making the game different for the PRO player compared to picking something else. I think that the original idea of PRO back in Warlords of being able to defend cities easier still holds value as a concept today, what with the increase in aggression and willingness to throw cities out to hold land aka "Pink Dot", because it increase the viability of units that are otherwise more lacklustre. Quote:-Creative: How do you feel about eliminating a major potion of your gameplay? Being able to plant without having to plan for the culture problem is just huge. There is nothing like it. Creative also gets a tremendous early game boost for being able to ignore Mysticism and the religion tech lines; if you want those wonders or Monarchy that can be annoying, but otherwise, son, you should be making a beeline for Currency anyway! The cheap buildings are definitely minor; theaters are cheap anyway, coliseums (unless UB) are fine but meh, and observatories are super-late typically. But it's still a hell of a power trait! I learnt this recently: to really use CRE without cheap libs well, you have to focus on the changing your dotmap and play style to grab as many resources with each city as possible. You have to be greedy, none of this overlapping BFC crap to share food resources. You be greedy and grab every food resource possible...just don't ignore cottages and defence to do so. I think CRE is perhaps the easiest of the early game traits to use OK, but the hardest to use perfectly, because you have to understand the long term implications of your dot map with minimal information. It's a trait that relies much more on macro skill than micro. Quote:-Aggressive: Boy this one got a work-over. The cheap barracks with culture is nice, allowing a mysticism delay...but you still don't want to spam barracks early, so it's not like fire-and-forget creative. -25% maintenance is a powerful benefit early on, although in the end of all things you're still wanting courthouses and their ilk. The cheap drydock is good late, for what its worth. Late-game, there is no trait more massively influential than Aggressive for military conflict; easy access to commando, amphibious, and the gamut of counter-promotions makes your gunpowder units unholy terrors of the battlefield. I like Aggressive quite a lot. Fun trait! EXP/IMP/CRE/PRO...AGG is the last of the "early" game traits, but it's not really an early game trait IMO. I like one definition that early game traits as traits that decrease the length of time it takes to settle the second third, fourth cities etc, ie let you expand faster. Arguably CRE doesn't fit that model though, and AGG certainly doesn't. What they do allow you to do though is to keep on expanding because you need to expend fewer resources on maintaining and improving said cities. Workers cost less (EXP), settlers cost less (IMP), borders pop for free (CRE), granaries cost less thus can get at size 1 for much quicker growth (PRO), and cities cost less gold to support thus can settle more before having to slow down (AGG). It's not really improving hte settling rate is it? The culture on the barracks doesn't help either, that's just a bonus to not get Myst thus redirect resources to other economic techs and potentially the make early and mid game warfare from T60-T120 slightly less costly due to improved combat odds compared to other players that don't want to invest into barracks yet. It's really a late game trait as Commodore described, the whole point of the trait defined best, perhaps ironically, in PB1 where it let Munro raze rego's capital because he had units that started with a free promotion. Everything in the trait is aimed specifically at being able to reach a point where this can happen and the civ is still relevant to the game. Quote:-Charismatic: The first benefit of Charismatic is incredibly powerful; a straight up +2 happy for free everywhere skews the whole game at times. More efficient 1-pop whipping, bigger early cities...a modicum of discipline is required but good use of Charismatic can be every bit as snowball-boosting as creative culture or protective granaries. But it takes effort. The military impact of the trait reverberates all the way down the line as well, particularly in XP-hungry naval combat. Other prettier traits get picked a bit more, but not because of any weakness here. Excellent trait! Not quite sure I agree that it makes 1 pop whips more efficient, just less costly because you can still grow onto a couple of decent tiles. It's actually a different take on the Commando meta-game of AGG needing 20XP rather than 17 for Commando on gunpowder units...but you can get it on anything if you can reach 20XP. I believe that CHM has issues not with flavour, but with player perception and in all honesty a cheap building or two that was rarely built would likely get more people to pick it just for synergy reasons with those less often built buildings. Quote:-Industrious: I don't know how I feel about this trait, to be honest. I don't much like it, but I get an impression that its good for me. Forges are an essential infrastructural building that cost an arm an a leg to build...when I'm not industrious, I tend to be criminally slow about building them. And make no mistake; Industrious is about forges...it helps with wonders, but not nearly as much as planning, preparation, and tech path do. Industrious does create a sort of mental block at times, as other players go “Ind guys' got it, not going to bother”...but wonders are much more minor than forges. Interesting trait! IND needs rebuilding, partly because it's a win more trait: you pick it and although the cheap forges is the bulk of the power for most players, it's not enough. You have to get those wonders to make this trait actually work, and not every IND player can get them. There is a real possibility that a rebuild happens in AGD. Quote:-Financial: Financial is a good, good trait guys. It was; it still is. For all that, how the trait is good has definitely shifted. The lack of riverside bonus means Financial is quite strange in how it improves its tiles, for one; the Financial player focuses on farms and watermills along most rivers while cottages sprout on dry tiles. This works out to a very growth-focused early game setup, at the price of cottages coming online a bit later than normal. There are two other times when the Financial tile boost is handy; in the early game, Financial coast is wonderful for tech rate. Then, late game, Financial likes to grow into the “cracks” with fishing villages much much more efficient than with all other players' coast-working settlements. The cheap banks are a very strong boost, making Banking a lynchpin tech for Financial players, biasing Financial toward rifling lines and upgrading in general. Again, Financial is still a very powerful trait, but it is much slower to yield its full benefit. Phenomenal trait! Lesson #1: If you have to cottage rivers you cottage the god damned rivers. Having played this version of FIN, I have to say that I think it's at a reasonable power level, but given a choice of picking it or not, it is perhaps the most start dependent trait here. If I have a nice river at my cap, I wouldn't pick it, because the capital is normally where you spam cottages and get a good chunk of value from the trait in the important early turns but this version of the trait nukes that approach. There is that reliance on the coastal tiles approach and using the trait to beef up subpar land rather than enhancing good land: if you have goodland, you can more afford to rely on early game traits to use such land and rely on the snowball to have a good late game. Quote:-Organized: Old Faithful keeps on chugging. Death and taxes are still universal constants. Murphy's Law still rules the battlefield. Organized is still the premier economic trait. I like that; good to have some consistency in your life. Lighthouses, courthouses, and factories are fantastic buildings to get half-off, and the “always on” savings of Organized help from the first settlement onward. There is nothing sexy at all about Organized, but I never regret having it; nobody ever does all game long on any non-childish difficulty setting. It's dull at times...but still the best trait. I don't think it's the best trait. I think it's good, I think that it just constantly improves as the game goes on so the longer you can stay relevant the better your position will get with it, unlike FIN which you still have to work on growing those cottages and you will cap out at some point if you can't keep on growing. That's because Inflation increases as each turn passes, increasing costs...which ORG then nerfs back again. I think it's a good trait to pick with any of the early game traits, and not bad with any of the others, really. But best? That's SPI. Quote:-Spiritual: Here's another trait that hasn't changed in RBmod. Except somehow, it is much better. Spiritual is still nice for switches and swaps, but the civics you can pick! Serfdom, Vassalage, Environmentalism, the column swaps are all much better now. I'm still at a loss for how best to evaluate this most flexible and interesting of traits, but I do know it is stronger late than early, and late it is just amazing. Transformative trait! In RtR there are few civics that you will want to stay in for a long time and not swap out of except to deal with an unexpected event such as a surprise war (Looking at you, Nationhood). Other than that...well, you can play out the late game in Representation/Nationhood/Caste System/Free Market or State Property/Theocracy. But the advantages of being able to swap into and out of FR for teching, OR to build some infrastructure...screw it. As a player, if you can micro, and if you can control other players actions by keeping initiative, you can gain a significant edge from the efficiencies from using the various civics at hte ideal opportunities. for example, saving gold and then only teching FR, mass drafting for 5 turns then spending 15 turns in other civics. Into and out of Serfdom to limit the number of workers you need to build thus saving hammers. Only building units in Police State. Saving gold for 10 turns then spending it all in 5 turns of Universal Suffrage...or maybe you don't because you see an opportunity to spend it on research. Forcing other people to react to your unpredictability. SPI is the best trait. If you know what you and your opponents are doing, anyway. Quote:-Philosophical: Okay, so here's good ole' Philosophical, just a bit more. Still the snowball-boosting wunderkind, helping shrine and bulb and probably allowing a hard-to-manage fourth natural golden age...there is a lot tricky you can do with Philosophical. If I get it, though, I'm going to be just using it for pure Writing-Academy-Education line path. I'm very curious to see how “screw trickiness, just push Great Scientist” goes in one of these games. When I'm playing with my novel airship and axeman army, I'll let you know. Speed trait. Fuck it, it's a win more trait and if you don't get Lib you're probably doing it wrong and should have picked something else. The fourth GA is overrated anyway compared to getting Taj or MoM giving you the extra GA turns. I don't even value the Artist bombs it could generate any more.
The time before you see a starting screenshot is always full of wonder and hope. Then you see you that you have a plains cow for food and all that bitterness bursts forth.
Plains cow? You wish! It's a whale and one flood plain tile for food. And maybe a plains wine, too, if you're lucky.
Played: Pitboss 18 - Kublai Khan of Germany Somalia | Pitboss 11 - De Gaulle of Byzantium | Pitboss 8 - Churchill of Portugal | PB7 - Mao of Native America | PBEM29 Greens - Mao of Babylon |
