Why, hello! I'm here as a dedicated lurker! Um. Not like in RPB3 though. The plan as I understand it for this game is exemplified by the way we made our picks: Kyan sent some ideas my way, I responded with random thoughts and suggestions that may have been 89% comic relief, and then he made the picks on his best judgment. I'll update the thread when I get a chance, but this is Kyan's team. It must also be noted that Kyan is a genius, and his incredible civ/leader picks prove once again - as Sirian said in the incredible RB1 Succession game - that it's better to be lucky AND good!
Twinkletoes89 Wrote:Don't worry, I can see why you picked what you picked as its a supremely powerful pairing. My only disappointment is that its a pretty generic line up in and I sometimes like to see a spanner thrown in the works.
Aye, one of these days I'd like to play Lincoln of the Khmer in spite of No Ballistaphants Allowed, but with the people ahead of us setting the tone with Pacal, Willem, Sury, and Liz, it just wasn't going to be that kind of game. And it's not every game (though I haven't looked at all the PBeM threads) that allows for the kinds of pure power play you can get with unrestricted picks in a field of six. (That said, RBP3 still managed to turn out Peter of Korea, Gandhi of Egypt, and - if I may say so - Pericles of Babylon and Ragnar of Maya, in spite of a field of 17....)
Okay, strategizing!
First and Most Unimportantly: Yup, synergizes is a "real" word (in spite of failing to appear in my world-famous Dictionary That's Older than I Am; it's now presumably heavily used in corporate boardrooms). Believe it or not, real words that ARE included in my DTOIA include synergetic, synergistic, and synergic, all of which mean pretty much the same thing. (But not the same thing as synergizes. Confused yet? Good!)
Planning: I agree about (i.e. against) pursuing early religions, though we'll see how our battle plan survives contact with the game. Chopping a monument is a perfectly good way to pop borders in our second city even if nothing better suggests itself. Stonehenge is intriguing, but the map (and other players) might not cooperate, and if we get it, we'll need to build a strategy around acquiring Great Prophets. The presence of stone, marble, or both could also have an impact on things.
Also of note: Kyan, if you're a peaceful builder by nature, we may be in for a crazy game. In RBP3, such defenses as Maya had were acquired mainly because Maniac sometimes snuck in military builds when I wasn't looking. That said, the most ridiculous part of that game was the war between India and Sumeria. In spite of tensions between the two civs that had been escalating basically ever since first contact (if not before) ... when a Mayan chariot (our ONLY chariot at the time!) started poking around that region, it immediately became the most powerful military force in the combat theater. About five turns later, India chopped out a bunch of its own chariots, and Sumeria went down in flames. (One thing: For exactly this reason, if we pre-chop enough forests without actually cutting them down, we can kind of get away with a Farmer's Gambit in this game, just because of being India.)
Build Order and Tech are deeply intertwined, and depend on our start a great deal. Our food resource(s) and the number of forests around will probably play a large role in our decision: I can imagine anything from Bronze + Fast Worker First (the more forests, the more likely) to Fishing - Wheel - Pottery. Depending on when key techs will be due, if we can't generate 4 base hammers per turn at the start, it might even be worth growing, putting token hammers into a warrior, and starting the Fast Worker at size 2.
Theme: I'm likewise happy with anything other than the default. I'll try to come up with something appropriate to Peter of India - otherwise, the best I've got off the top of my head is Scenes from Shakespeare: Our capital could be Elsinore, or even (for confusion) just The Globe, although if there's snow on the trees nearby, I'd go with Bohemia instead, which has the advantage of a double meaning. Our starting Warrior could be Osric (in case of Elsinore) or Richard Burbage (in case of The Globe) or Antigonus (in case of Bohemia - "Exit, pursued by a bear"). If we want, we can later extend our theme to scenes and characters from other literary luminaries; if not Arden, our National Park city might be called Mansfield.
(And moments later....)
Well, if we want our thread to be a history lesson (for me too) we can go with names of places and persons connected to the
Grand Embassy - during which "Peter Mikhailov" (actually the czar himself, incognito) made countless visits across Europe, including one to a shipyard belonging to the Dutch East India Company. (We can also later extend this to East India Company names of all varieties if we so desire.) If so, I suggest:
Capital Name: Grand Embassy. Starting Warrior Name: Mikhailov.
