[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[antisocialmunky]

I mean, the city probably more than pays for itself so why not take it? Plako's not going to come for it until later anyway.

[Sullla]

Looking good scooter. Thoughts that came to mind in the order raised by your post:

* The random religious spreads are slightly annoying; I know this is one of the longtime gripes that we’ve had for MP. The religious system was designed for use in SP games, not competitive MP where the percentage chance to fail a religious spread could throw off elaborate micromanagement planning. The good news is that I think the odds for a successful spread with one religion present in the city are about 85%. The bad news is, well, that’s about a 15% chance for us to fail. I don’t see much for us to do beyond cross our fingers and hope for the dice to be kind.

* On a related note, I approve of the use of Masterclass over Merchant Gank for the 450 GPP production. That city has a crazy amount of food, and we might as well make use of it. Just have to hope that the missionary religious spread is kind.

* As far as settling the offshore island goes, I approve of dropping the settler on the same tile as the longbow. I floated the possibility of landing on the western island, but any city located there would be forced to contend with plako’s culture and would be likely to spark some real border tensions. I mean, plako has full visibility of that spot from his culture, there’s no possibility of hiding anything. A city over there is also weaker in terms of tile yield, as there’s not that much food available with the northern clams swallowed up by plako’s culture. I agree that we might try to expand there if plako still hasn’t made a play for the area in ~10 turns, but for now, let’s take the safer play and a get a strong city on the silver island and go from there.

* We definitely want to clear mackoti’s longbow from that jungle hill, and probably settle a city on that very tile. A longbow on that hill with fortify bonus will probably kill 1 knight and die to a second knight, so figure 3 knights to be sure of eliminating it. We can use workers to road from the fog and kill that unit without mackoti getting visibility ahead of time. Another thing to put on the “to-do” list for the next 10 turns or so.

* I love setting up the resource trade with RMOG. They seem like a good choice for a trade partner, either them or Alhazard, but I doubt the latter has much in the way of resources connected. Mackoti has already signaled hostile intent, and REM is currently our biggest competitor for winning the game, which means we need to try and find at least one border that won’t require heavy defenses. RMOG may turn into a good neighbor in that regard. By the way, plako is falling waaaaay behind in score now. Yes, early game score can be highly deceptive and all that (see: Alhazard’s current second place score), but you don’t want to fall this far behind the rest of the pack. We may have an opportunity to make gains there in a few dozen turns.

Another thing that pops out of that screenshot: the resource list. I love looking at the list of connected resources as an informal comparison of a team’s standing in a game. The more resources a team has, and especially the more unique resources that they have, the better the team tends to be doing overall. Amongst the resources I can see in the picture, we have 18 resources connected to RMOG’s 14 resources, as well as several that they’re lacking (bananas, fish, etc.) I might try to do a more formal verison of this sometime tonight. I should have a chance to log into the game and poke around for a little while to see if I notice anything.

* On the research front, I think we’ll be safe to hit Constitution before the end of the Golden Age if we trigger it on T229. We’re pushing 100 beakers/turn right now before multipliers, and we’ll be getting more than that in the Golden Age. (Note to scooter: we might want to save gold now for the next 3-4 turns, so that we can research at 100% throughout the Golden Age. Not sure how many turns we’ll need to save to pull off 8 turns of full research spending.) With our ability to Build Research if it looks like we’ll be coming up short, plus a crapton of Scientist specialists that we’ll be working while we’re in Golden Age mode, I think we’ll definitely reach the beakers we need for Constitution / Representation before the end of the Golden Age. Looking good here.

If we can get the Great Engineer, Great Merchant, and double Great Scientists as we have planned, we’re also looking very good in the race for Statue of Liberty. Representation + Mercantilism specialists will be awesome for our widely spaced empire. Forget about using a Great Scientist for an early Academy; the way to boost your capital is to get Oxford University in there quickly, and we’ll have plenty of high food cities where we can whip out universities to satisfy that requirement, plus double Great Scientists to knock out Education and Printing Press in short order. In fact, after the Golden Age I think setting up Oxford will be our next big priority. Why care about +50% research in your capital when you can get +100% instead? Anyway, if we can get all the Great People lined up for our triple lightbulbs into Constitution/Education/Printing Press, with a Great Engineer sitting around ready to knock out 60% of the Statue’s cost once we finish Democracy research, we’ll be in a very nice position indeed.

* If possible, we’ll want to start shifting some workers back into the core for mass cottaging duty, especially in the capital. We probably should not whip the capital again and just let it grow upwards from now on. The minute we leave Slavery civic in the Golden Age, we’re going to need cottages everywhere along our fertile river core. I don’t know what our turn by turn worker micro looks like right now, just mentioning this to keep in mind.

Demos look good. There’s starting to be some real separation between our team/REM/mackoti and the rest of the field. Can’t wait to see the numbers after we plant two more cities and pick up the island trade route bonus.

[scooter]

Yeah, I've already landed the settler on silver island, so it's a done deal at this stage. FWIW, the tie-breaker for me is that the silver island is simply better with fish access. Decided to err on the side of more food. Having native gold in addition to silver would be nice, but I don't anticipate having any problems trading for gold access. There's more gold out there than players I think.

Two quick comments:

* The random religious spreads are slightly annoying; I know this is one of the longtime gripes that we’ve had for MP. The religious system was designed for use in SP games, not competitive MP where the percentage chance to fail a religious spread could throw off elaborate micromanagement planning. The good news is that I think the odds for a successful spread with one religion present in the city are about 85%. The bad news is, well, that’s about a 15% chance for us to fail. I don’t see much for us to do beyond cross our fingers and hope for the dice to be kind.

FWIW, I did queue up a second missionary just in case this first one fails. If we have to use it, it'll just mean either I delay the golden age 1T or Masterclass misses out on 1T of Pacifism. I'll cross that bridge if/when we get there.

* If possible, we’ll want to start shifting some workers back into the core for mass cottaging duty, especially in the capital. We probably should not whip the capital again and just let it grow upwards from now on. The minute we leave Slavery civic in the Golden Age, we’re going to need cottages everywhere along our fertile river core. I don’t know what our turn by turn worker micro looks like right now, just mentioning this to keep in mind.

Yeah it's hard to tell in this picture, but I've already begun this to some extent. Lurker Killer is currently working two cottages that will be handed to the capital, for example. That said, longterm I'm thinking the capital will be better served running quite a few scientists (alongside a few riverside cottages of course). A scientist will be worth 6b in Rep, scaled up to 15b with Oxford, Libary, and University. You can add another 1.5b to that with an Observatory and 3b if we ever build an Academy for a hypothetical 19.5b. It'll take a mature riverside town to beat that with the added benefit of not taking half the game to grow to that level. Plus we probably won't be running UniSuffrage in this game.

The main limitation is the number of scientists we can run when not in Caste, which is 2 until Oxford where we get bumped up to 5, then 6 after an Observatory. I think the goal should be to run a food surplus big enough to run the maximum number of scientists indefinitely. Any thoughts on that? Basically, I'm not super enthused about non-riverside cottages at the capital because we haven't started any of them which means this game may well be over before any of them are towns.

[scooter]

Should be easy-ish if you've been around for awhile. Guess away.

EDIT: I got a better city name recommended to me, so I changed it. Screenshot above has been updated to reflect the new name.

[Krill]

Oh yes.

PBEM24 right? The one with the barb sub?

[Dp101]

I know it's a PBEM, that's about it. For some reason I am convinced that commodore was involved, but I can't imagine why. Probably wrong on both.

[scooter]

That was pretty quick.

[Krill]

Not like that has happened in any other game. The hardest clues are the ones that apply to multiple games.

Also I've been waiting for you to post that for the past few days

Edit: I must admit, I did go and double check after making the post.

[antisocialmunky]

Another thing that pops out of that screenshot: the resource list. I love looking at the list of connected resources as an informal comparison of a team’s standing in a game. The more resources a team has, and especially the more unique resources that they have, the better the team tends to be doing overall. Amongst the resources I can see in the picture, we have 18 resources connected to RMOG’s 14 resources, as well as several that they’re lacking (bananas, fish, etc.) I might try to do a more formal verison of this sometime tonight. I should have a chance to log into the game and poke around for a little while to see if I notice anything.

Its like Mercantilism with Bananas, "Potassium of Nations" if you will.

Edit: Can someone link me to the Underwater Barb post? I don't follow PBEMs too much.

[Mardoc]

Barbarian Sub was the one with the map made by Bobchillingworth, with Commodore/Gaspar/Mackoti/Twinkletoes. PBEM 24

Not the first time Bob's come up with something crazy-brilliant that an uncaring public rejected, certainly not the last. As usual, multiplayer games have less tolerance for unexpected things than Adventures.

Fake Edit:

I did go and double check after making the post.

Dang it, that's my problem! Should have gone with the description and my first guess of PBEM 38 and edited it afterward.