PBEM Duels Lurker Thread

[roland of gilead]

there are eurekas that need theater squares.

a good theater square is worth having but that is indeed a hard thing to set up.

[civac2]

The reason being you don't need entertainment complexes with so few cities (<= 10 seems to be typical) and wonders are bad?

[roland of gilead]

The reason being you don't need entertainment complexes with so few cities (<= 10 seems to be typical) and wonders are bad?

not bad just long builds and with a lot of pre requisites

[Kaiser]

Wonders are expensive and rarely justify their cost, especially considering that you could build units with a multiplier card instead. Also wonders have medium strict to very strict placement requirements (Panama canal and Amundson Scott Research station are certainly the worst) which makes fitting everything together while being able to place a good theatre district there.

Entertainment districts compete for a district slot with Commercial Hub/Harbour, Campus, Holy sites, Industrial Zone/Encampment (about in that order for generic citiesm but you want to have a good mix).
You get district slots at 1/4/7/10/13/16 and housing often caps you out in a way that you barely reach size 10 with your capital until the mid-game. Having a city with 2 district slots open for Entertainment + Theatre before the late game is rare and even then it is typically a comparatively new city/bad production city.

At least every district has its unique version with often a snowflake strategy working around it.

That beign said, one of the best reasons for an early entertainment district is to build the Colosseum next to it, which can easily be exploited with 2 4 adjacency theatre districts. Even then you have to invest 2 districts, 1 arena and Colloseum to achieve and adjacency you can get with a reef/geo fissure + mountaint + CC + another district for a campus.

[williams482]

Suffice it to say this game is not shaping up to be the battle of the builders it was theoretically supposed to be.

[suboptimal]

Yeah. They both expressed an interest in building and Thrawn has decided to go full-on ancient conquest. Guess all his pins got him excited.

If they try this again perhaps they need to set a time/age limit for war....no war before the Medieval Age starts.

Edited to add:

Thanks for the update. If the starting locations are more or less what they will be, would you be able to post a screenshot to give us an idea? No harm if you change it later, worst case we lynch you day 1 next werewolf (but we would be doing that anyway )

To summarise everything in one place:

Map
- some separation so we don't get into a war too early, but without it being a naval map
- map size: duel or tiny, as suboptimal decides

Turn 29

With it any doubts I had that we'd be able to conquer efficiently are dissolved. We should be able to finish the game a little after the turn of the age, and most of this time will be to travel.

Don't want to get into a war too early but is planning to wrap up a domination victory sometime in the 60's.

[williams482]

Thrawn saw an opportunity to win the game, which from his perspective is the whole point of the enterprise, and he's taking it. That's a perfectly valid way to play, although not everyone thinks like that, and I won't be surprised if Ichabod will be a mite peeved about it.

Since this probably won't be the last duel match where the players express a desire for a long-ish buildery game, it might be worth some discussion about how to make the map more conducive to that. Simply making the map larger would at least be a step in that direction, making it harder to march all the way over to an enemy before your units go obsolete and/or they see your milpower spike and prepare enough of a defense to stop you. Of course even then, the attacker can send over an offensive force expecting to either win immediately, or get beaten back but score some pillage rewards and stall out the other civ's development, sheltering behind that same extended travel time to protect against a counterattack. So maybe the larger map is enough disincentive, but I'm not sure.

Also an option would be the technically-passable-but-highly-inconvenient barrier Thrawn was expecting to find. That works, but perhaps to an extreme where the entire game revolves around controlling and pushing through whatever choke points are left. If that barrier is mostly mountains then wars are likely to devolve into draws, even between unequal opponents, until mountain tunnels come into play and the barrier is no longer relevant. If it's water, on the other hand, Shipbuilding and Cartography become the relevant techs to allow mass passage.

So maybe that's the solution. A water barrier, tuned to make either Shipbuilding or Cartography the critical tech to attempt any kind of invasion.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Alhambram and Archduke did a duel where each started on his own continent once. It wasn't very well reported and Alhambram took the variant Mali civ to try it out, so it didn't go really anywhere, but I think that's the right idea.

I think even a duel island plates map, where each civ has a starting island capable of holding 2-3 cities and then some little city-state islets and other small islands, might work.

[suboptimal]

@williams482's You're right - he's taking full advantage an exploitable opportunity.

I had considered making a map that was broken up by large mountain ranges with only a few passes to go through. I ultimately decided to avoid that approach this time around because it felt too contrived - I wanted to make a more "typical/natural" feeling map, using the comments about the lake world script as an inspiration (come to think of it I need to back out those script changes). However, if the scouting is advanced enough (as here) do mountain passes on a duel map really slow someone down? Maybe it's just my way of thinking but having the course of the game dictated by running to a given tech (at least on a fixed tech tree) cuts down on strategic variety.

I almost made this a tiny-sized map but was able to build the city-state locations the way I wanted on the duel-sized map. I think a larger map in conjunction with creative use of terrain could result in enforced separation long enough to allow for a more buildery start.

williams482 and CMF, what did you think of the start locations in general terms? Asking for future consideration.

[williams482]

I thought the starts were great. It's immediately clear that each player has a choice between SIP for a 2h city center, spend a turn moving to settle on a non-foodhammer luxury, or spend a turn moving to get a five foodhammer tile in the first ring. Overall, the resulting capital is neither severely gimped nor inordinately lush. It looks like SIP might have been the stronger play with this one, but not by an outrageous degree.