[SPOILERS] I had first pick and all I got was this stupid combo

[Bobchillingworth]

I guess Sian was sick (and only posted about it in some FFH game's tech thread) and Jowy had a "tough turn". Okay, whatever.



Not much happening with my civ. Building a little fleet to ship stuff to colonize the center; going to make a slightly larger fleet to found a couple Continental colonies after that. The odd war in the south continues:





Mardoc's... uh... "main stack" is 6 Knights, a single Catapult, a supermedic Chariot and a spear. He left a treb for Jowy to snipe with a WC, because? Jowy has theoretically enough on hand to destroy this army (although I'm not sure why his forces are so Mace-heavy), but he apparently lacks siege or combat workers, so the rivers spoil his chances. He might not even have Construction, come to think of it. Eh, I can't criticize either of them too much, I don't have a great grasp on what has and is happening, but this just all looks so odd from my perspective, like two AI going at it or something. I guess it's working for Mardoc at least though, although it doesn't look like he's going to make much more progress unless Jowy stripped defenses from everywhere else to save his capital, or he does something really silly which gets his troops massacred.

[Bobchillingworth]

Game will probably be over soon. Stick landed Lib and will surely take Nationalism so that he can build the Taj to continue his endless MoM-fueled Golden Age. Sian & Jowy are both taking forever to play their turns, and Mardoc's offensive seems to be stalling out due to having like no seige, all of which is likely killing whatever interest remains. Oh well. I'd almost be tempted to join a new non-great-player BTS game if one started, since I've still never played a non-duel BTS MP game to completion, but the blandness of vanilla Civ gameplay combined with the ridiculously entitled & self-absorbed attitudes of certain players has burnt out a lot of my interest. Although I guess most of them have declared a fatwa against playing with me, so I'd have nothing to worry about


I'd def. sign up for another FFH PBEM though. Too bad most potential players are already committed to games or otherwise unavailable.

[Bobchillingworth]

Okay, that's enough whine, time for some cheese:


My newly-built settler could found a city here :







But not here :





Hopefully it's just a barb city there, since stick hasn't settled the coast closer to him, but who knows. My sign is actually a tile or two off, but whatever.



I'm not sure why more people don't fog-scout with settlers. You can see all sorts of stuff that way- large area where you couldn't found a city? There's culture there, and/or it's too close to someone else's settlement. Only one or two tiles unavailable? There's hostiles on them. Playing FFH, found a forest where you can't settle, and you still can't a couple turns later? Probably a Spider, or a Bear lair. I would do this more often, but I'm a lazy asshole who can't even be bothered to look at the demographics screen every other turn. Totally would be worth just building a settler for this purpose alone if someone was in a very competitive game with a lot of visible-but-fogged land they wanted to track for whatever reason.


Some silliness:








No idea why neither of those spots got claimed. Well, I have one: [/Sulla]

[NobleHelium]

Well, nobody's ever done that settler thing you just showed, but something similar was discussed in the ISDG and there were a number of opinions that it should be banned and not used (mostly because you can use it to tell where your neighbors are before you find them). I do agree that that is over the line when used in that manner and I would probably bring that up if I join another game (it's never been outright banned but I think it's only been used twice, once by Krill and once by flugauto). In your current case use of the settler is not really necessary because usually the resources will be hooked and you can tell from that. However if you are checking in the deep black fog (not previously explored) to find cities that way, I think that shouldn't be done.

[Bobchillingworth]

It won't show you anything for the black never-revealed tiles, unless there is some exploit I don't know about (which I agree wouldn't be Kosher to use anyway). I think settler-scouting is a little more useful than checking resources, if you've got a settler handy, since you can scan for more things. Plus stuff like the netted clams in the penultimate pic would lead you astray if you were relying solely on resources.


What was the ISDG trick? I don't remember that discussion at all.

[NobleHelium]

Use queued GOTO on a warrior until you get to a tile where the Fortify command flashes in blue to indicate suggested action, which means that there's a city there (game is suggesting that the warrior fortify to protect the city). It works on black tiles. I'm not so sure that your settler trick does not work on black tiles, either.

How do you know the spots in the last two screenshots aren't claimed, anyway?

[Bobchillingworth]

I know they aren't claimed because the 9 blue tile overlay squares are telling me those are valid locations for my settler. In the pic of Jowy's unclaimed island, you can see I've got a sign off to the right which says "stick c?". That's because the tiles around that point aren't giving me the overlay squares, because they fall under stick's culture (and might be too close to his city in that area). So I know someone grabbed them (and in this case it has to be stick, because he has a lot of cities unaccounted for).


Am I seriously the first person to talk about doing this? I've used this trick for years, but only for FFH games (mostly SP) to see if I can get away with sending settlers into land I think might have barbs, with minimal escorts. It's useful for plenty of other purposes, but I pretty much never invest that kind of C&D work in any game. I only bothered here because I was curious how much of the center remains free, and whether it's worth investing several hundred hammers in a fleet to colonize the big continent. Plus I wanted to post some actual content to make up for moaning about the turnpace, which nobody ever enjoyed reading. If I really wanted to, I could use this trick + tons of signs to map out everyone's borders in the fog.


You know, if the RB BTS community is going to hold obnoxious moral debates constantly, this trick, plus the one you mentioned, plus stuff like the Flying Camera / GoTo thing a certain FFH player uses to discover land elevation and water tiles might be actually worth talking about. I don't think any of it is cheating, if not explicitly ruled out, but it might be good to come to a general understanding about what crosses the line vs. merely being "gamey" before feelings get hurt.

[Bobchillingworth]

Probably not necessary, but here's a more detailed demonstration:


Test Land:




All I did was give myself a lot of vision at the start, and then added some things via WB in the newly-defogged (but not currently visible) tiles.


I could build a city here:





Or here:





But not here, or here:








Reason:





Trying to peer into the completely black tiles shows me nothing:




There should be land there, but because I never had vision over it the game won't give me any spoiler info.


Scouting for spiders in FFH:

















Note that this doesn't work if you place the hostile units via WB and then immediately try to settler-scout them; the barbs need a turn to move first. Not sure why that is, that's not the case for cities.

Edit: I just noticed that the Giant Spiders actually aren't blocking the settler city squares- probably because they're invisible. Hah, news to me. Still useful for finding every other kind of barb :P

[Bobchillingworth]

Who needs Sulla's AI Survivor when you have this? :










For the last several turns Mardoc has been trying to siege Jowy's increasingly well-fortified capital with about 10 Knights, one catapult and one treb, very slowly bombing down the defenses. He hasn't bothered bringing in reinforcements. Jowy has responded by sticking a ton of Maces in his capital, but he refuses to use combat workers to attack Mardoc while avoiding the River penalty, nor does he build any siege. He def. has Construction, since he has Pikes. And now this turn Mardoc has apparently decided to commit suicide, and run his units toward a less-defended Jowy city, deeper in enemy territory. If Jowy has the least bit of tactical sense, he'll slam this stack with his melee units now, siege or none. Wouldn't surprise me though if he does nothing.


It's all very strange. I guess neither of them really cares what happens any more, not that I could blame them. Totally would be a good time for me to jump on Mardoc, except A: stick would probably then attack me, to put this game completely to rest, B: I would much rather continue to play builder and expand peacefully, since there's room for like 30 more cities on the map, and C: building up the sort of force needed to take out Mardoc would require a huge investment of time and freak stick the fuck out, which could easily backfire terribly.

[NobleHelium]

Interesting. I think scouting for barbs in the fog a bit over the line because you can't get that information (or something close to it like resources being hooked up) otherwise. And given that you can determine the exact locations of any barbarians in land you've already scouted, there's no need to escort settlers at all in that case, which is a big difference.