Chairmen NobleHelium and Gaspar Demand Your Presence in the Collective

[oledavy]

Glad to see this thread active again after the week-long break

Anyway, here's the current situation. We met Lewwyn this turn (of course I forgot to adjust EP back to no7 like an idiot)

How far apart are your capitals? Can we confirm mirrored starts?

Here's my guess at Commodore's Map Concept:

The usual practice at RB is to pink-dot the border region with your neighbor, and backfill sites once you have a front city or two up. Most mapmakers build around this, and create a rich center area or put unique resources in the regions between teams to reward whoever expands better and create potential for conflict.

From the preliminary look we have at the map, the border region between the four of you is tundra. Based on the screenshots, it looks to me like the map is formatted:

Mackoti - Water -------- N7

- Water - Tundra Center - Water -

Lewwyn - Water - NH/Gaspar

If I'm completely wrong here, or missed the post where someone already figured this out, someone call me out on it

Bottomline: Usually rushing the center is beneficial. Other than the visible silver, there is nothing unique in the center at the moment. So Commodore eschews the typical 'rich center syndrome' and offers each civ a choice:

A. Rush the center and secure an extra happy and more land, but miss out on developing better cities close by.
B. Develop the city sites closer to your start first with better long-term potential, but miss out on a unique resource and end up with less land.

He's also given us two nice island sites with gold and stone within easy visibility of the coast, so it would seem he's offering a 3rd option:

C. Expand onto nice offshore island sites, at the cost of hammers put into galleys and the difficulty of logistics.

So, if my guessing is correct, Commodore created this map with the idea of offering each team several different avenues of expansion, each with it's own cost and benefit - and the intrigue will come from seeing which way each team goes with their cities.

http I need to get back down to strategizing, though. I don't feel like we've really exhausted all the possibilities.

Did you and NH ever make a firm commitment to one of the outstanding ideas? iirc, we had decided we could prioritize one of three things:

1. Expansion
2. Stonehenge
3. The Great Lighthouse

Is there anything I'm forgetting? I think we ruled out the pyramids.

[Gaspar]

Glad to see this thread active again after the week-long break

Thanks for the comments, Dave. Yeah, I hope I haven't given the impression we're any less into the game, that's not the case. NH has been out of town (and still is) so we haven't been having our usual 200 lines of chat about it. Combine that with mackoti being unable to play and me being busier than usual and I just sort of took the opportunity to not worry quite as much about any of my games. With the turns appearing to be back on schedule (unfortunately due to the time zone spread I doubt we'll ever be able to exceed 1t/day here) its time to get back in the saddle.

How far apart are your capitals? Can we confirm mirrored starts?

I didn't count tiles, but there's room for roughly a ring of cities each before reaching the contested tundra region. The starts aren't precisely mirrored but they're certainly close enough to be counted as such.

Here's my guess at Commodore's Map Concept:

The usual practice at RB is to pink-dot the border region with your neighbor, and backfill sites once you have a front city or two up. Most mapmakers build around this, and create a rich center area or put unique resources in the regions between teams to reward whoever expands better and create potential for conflict.

From the preliminary look we have at the map, the border region between the four of you is tundra. Based on the screenshots, it looks to me like the map is formatted:

Mackoti - Water -------- N7

- Water - Tundra Center - Water -

Lewwyn - Water - NH/Gaspar

If I'm completely wrong here, or missed the post where someone already figured this out, someone call me out on it

This roughly coincides with my theory which I'm not entirely certain I ever posted. Basically, the "rich" tundra center is generally consistent with a Wheel script. I'm well familiar with this since it is the map script I used for PBEM19. Given that we're on a toroid and I know that Commodore liked the possibilities inherent with the map I made for that PBEM I believe we're working off a modified Wheel. My best guess is that basically the map is a Wheel with the sides and top lopped off and turned into islands. The only real question is whether or not the floodplains region in the SE is a 3rd edge to our blob or if it connects to the NW blob. NH and I had posited that area being connected along the lines of Our FP / Contested Jungle / Other teams FP. That part requires more exploration but I feel fairly secure that the basic hypothesis, which jives with what you suggested is correct.

Bottomline: Usually rushing the center is beneficial. Other than the visible silver, there is nothing unique in the center at the moment. So Commodore eschews the typical 'rich center syndrome' and offers each civ a choice:

A. Rush the center and secure an extra happy and more land, but miss out on developing better cities close by.
B. Develop the city sites closer to your start first with better long-term potential, but miss out on a unique resource and end up with less land.

He's also given us two nice island sites with gold and stone within easy visibility of the coast, so it would seem he's offering a 3rd option:

C. Expand onto nice offshore island sites, at the cost of hammers put into galleys and the difficulty of logistics.

This is roughly my perception as well, though whether that FP area is another border of a blob or on a contested region will be big.

Did you and NH ever make a firm commitment to one of the outstanding ideas? iirc, we had decided we could prioritize one of three things:

1. Expansion
2. Stonehenge
3. The Great Lighthouse

Is there anything I'm forgetting? I think we ruled out the pyramids.

Basically. I don't think we've necessarily determined that Stonehenge is mutually exclusive with either of the two choices, though certainly heavy expansion and TGL are mutually exclusive. We've decided on a slower early growth plan with vertical expansion first which rules out super-fast expansion. What we do after T27 or so is still very much in the air. The current micro plan goes for Henge, but it could easily be changed to go for TGL, Pyramids or just generic expansion. There's also the possibility of going for Serdoa's suggested mega-chop TGL plan. Like I said, really requires a few sandbox playthroughs.

[Gaspar]

T14 ahoy. Decided to play quickly in faint hopes of turn moving again. Unlikely, but worth trying.

Discovered... not much. Moving back to hub to meet mackoti, hopefully.



Cottage is done at the capital.



Lewwyn adopted Slavery this turn. So discount on BW at least.

We're last in everything, but probably the only team with two workers out?

[NobleHelium]

Okay, finally got a chance to look at the save. Quick notes:

1) N7 probably teched AH but we're not getting a discount from it because we're not making 10 base beakers yet. I guess the free beaker doesn't get multiplied by stuff? BW isn't giving a discount either. Gaspar reminded me to test switch to the cottage and we are in fact getting 21 GNP on AH/BW vs 20 GNP on Writing (1 prereq), so yeah, N7 has Agriculture/Animal Husbandry and Lewwyn has Mining/Bronze Working.
2) We need to fix the damn EP next turn.
3) We're not sure where N7's scout went but it probably went to the southeast since we haven't seen it. It's possible that mackoti found N7 and thus they don't need any more contacts and can use their scout to explore Lewwyn's blob.
4) If you ever play a game with Gaspar, he'll never do what he says he'll do in regards to sandboxing and/or strategizing.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 15. Dun dun dun:



I fixed our EPs because I am not a chump like Gaspar.



So...scout choke? Or has N7 somehow gotten a warrior over to Lewwyn? Did they just want to scout his lands to see where copper is? (It occurred to me last night that we might have been able to divine the location of copper if we had explored more of Lewwyn's land.)

N7 grew to 3, seen via top cities screen.

[oledavy]

Either to scout his lands or...

PBEM23 Spoiler

I doubt this is a spoiler for PBEM23 anymore, but early on in that game Yuris was approaching the N7 capital with a warrior. They declared war and immediately offered peace as a way of divining Yuri's intent. Lewwyn's warrior may be approaching their capital and they're doing the same here.

[Gaspar]

Pretty quiet turn. I think Dave's postulate vis-a-vis the First Perso-Korean War is correct. NH thinks it was a quick scouting move for copper. Either way, they made peace:



You'll note our scout has a chance to see new tiles next turn for this first time in a couple turns. You'll also note that OCDNH needed to debate whether to move to the tile shown or the deer tile one east of it for approximately 4 hours. There may have been a spreadsheet, a consultation with The Amazing Kreskin and several supercomputers involved, but ultimately we ended up there. NH - apply yourself to macro like you do to micro and you'd be SevenSpirits. Well minus the sanctimony.

Back on the homefront, We've... got... cottages!



We could have gotten AH in a turn earlier by eschewing the corn in favor of the FP cottage as soon as it was built, but working both cottages this turn was insufficient to make that happen. So it goes. I don't think it was wrong to stay on the corn but no doubt we'd rather be pasturing next turn than roading or whatever nonsense we're doing to utilize worker turns.

Demographics, always fascinating:

[NobleHelium]

Yeah, we need to road the cows next turn since there's nothing better to do.

[Commodore]

Yeah, we need to road the cows next turn since there's nothing better to do.

Why not cottage the riverside plain?

[Gaspar]

So, uh, yeah... 2nd turn of the day!!!

Not much new discovered in the hub:



OMG critical road on cows:



AH came in, here's the horsies. This has NH and I believe the copper is located in the NE, perhaps on the PH there (highlighted in the image.)



And the demos. Score-wise it appears no7 grew to 4 this turn and mackoti discovered a tech.