[Lurker Thread] Secret Island of the Māori

[MJW (ya that one)]

15+ turns with no barbs. Sure that they got turned off. Should we inform the players?

[Krill]

Greenline has a barb camp visible.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Archduke has 5 Eagle Warriors and an archer opposite Japper - that feels like it should be enough to just kill the poor tundra-choked start. 

A choke feels like the wrong strategy, especially in the BBG mod. Archduke may keep Arabia and Russia pinned down, but Colombia and Kongo are still out there and free to develop. Spending resources to oppress your neighbors without deriving any corresponding economic benefit isn't the move I'd make in a multi-polar game.

[Cornflakes]

I interpreted TheArchduke's post as "Russia is as good as conquered already and my next move is to choke Arabia"

[williams482]

I'm surprised Japper didn't expect something like this, and apparently posted no relevant sentries on that border. It's Archduke, with a rush civ, and you settled towards him (not that you had any better options).

The good news for Japper is that Moscow is an excellent defensive position, with two of the adjacent tiles blocked by mountains and two more boosted by the river. If the archers can be positioned in and behind the city (hard to tell without screenshots), they might do enough damage to keep the jags contained while reinforcements are built.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Well I called BBGM being made for online speed ruining everything. Didn't have whole picture though... Didn't know about Aztecs being strong because Scythia was much much stronger in base game, so Aztecs went under the radar, and didn't know about Aztec BBGM buffs too.

If another BBGM game happens the speed needs to be changed to quick (like that German community does) or the rush civs need to be banned.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Is it okay to refresh pin's memory of the setup, or is that overstepping lurker boundaries? He can't recall the setup specifically about barbs, which states:

So...

BBG
Random pangaea generated with BBM
Random civs (Maori excluded if it causes map generation weirdness)
2 city states per player, so 10 city states with 5 players
Prince difficlty (or do you guys want higher?)
Standard speed
Standard barbs
No tribal villages
Natural disasters 0? Or should we have some?
Anything else important to discuss?

[MJW (ya that one)]

Refresh. BBGM nerfed barbs to speed up the game, which wasn't talked about during the setup even though it should have, so pindi is being deceived.

[williams482]

Reducing barbs is a positive change in BBG, at least. We've all had games where barbs caused an absolute mess of things on dumb luck alone.

I'm still blown away by the Aztec buff. I understand online speed makes it harder to get your army to your target before walls or next gen units leave your troops obsolete, but it also makes the units much quicker to build and walk time isn't *that* big a deal. Archduke and Japper are close but not unusually so. Archduke built his first new jag on t34 and needed roughly 10t to walk to Japper's doorstep, plus a couple more turns to position and let stragglers catch up. Japper had no idea this was coming until t45, five turns ago. If Japper had 15 more turns of unfocussed development before Archduke showed up, he was still going to get crushed by this attack.

If we assume everyone is alert to the potential of a rush and taking appropriate precautions then maybe those Aztec production buffs are necessary to make an effective jag rush possible, but even with online speed, an unaware opponent is going to get destroyed by it. just as we're seeing here.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I would not be so sure about 15 turns making no difference. 15 turns is forever at such an early stage of the game. Also, ArchDuke reported that Japper could have defended much better with just the unit he had on hand if we played well. If Japper was indeed close 15 turns would have stopped ArchDuke easily.