[SPOILERS] Lurkerloos and map discussion

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I'd like to imagine if you and Plako had swapped positions, you'd had won.

(You need more updates though, so people can actually see how and why you made all your various decisioins).

[spacetyrantxenu]

Does anyone have feedback for what I could have done better in this game? Obviously my emotional/irrational style of game play doesn't really suit winning one of these games, but I'm sure I could have avoided being completely irrelevant if I had done some things better. So, leaving off things like attacking Brick instead of playing nice (because I crippled my growth throwing everything into an unsuccessful/aborted attack), what could I have done better? If Serdoa thought he was short of land tiles, I was downright poor. He did a much better job of going and finding more than I did (yeah..THANKS. Don't talk to me about not having food, you had New Fish which was a damn good city. You're welcome! )

I'll guess the answer should have been to go capture Old India/New Zulu before they powered up on the Lighthouse and surpassed me, but I kind of think trying that would have been fatal, given Serdoa's and Brick's aggression. So, the question, what was the correct way to play things out from my position? Broad strokes are fine and criticism is OK, unless someone just wants to write a case study of how not to play one of these games and doesn't mind going into detail. I can take the punishment.

[pindicator]

Xenu, i'll try to comment after i read your thread. But i am pretty slow at reading

[scooter]

Does anyone have feedback for what I could have done better in this game? Obviously my emotional/irrational style of game play doesn't really suit winning one of these games, but I'm sure I could have avoided being completely irrelevant if I had done some things better. So, leaving off things like attacking Brick instead of playing nice (because I crippled my growth throwing everything into an unsuccessful/aborted attack), what could I have done better? If Serdoa thought he was short of land tiles, I was downright poor. He did a much better job of going and finding more than I did (yeah..THANKS. Don't talk to me about not having food, you had New Fish which was a damn good city. You're welcome! )

I'll guess the answer should have been to go capture Old India/New Zulu before they powered up on the Lighthouse and surpassed me, but I kind of think trying that would have been fatal, given Serdoa's and Brick's aggression. So, the question, what was the correct way to play things out from my position? Broad strokes are fine and criticism is OK, unless someone just wants to write a case study of how not to play one of these games and doesn't mind going into detail. I can take the punishment.

I only briefly looked through parts of your thread, I haven't read in any great details, but I felt like you expanded pretty slowly. You didn't have a ton of land to get to, but the land you had was some really, really nice land. I don't think Brick should have been able to beat you to that spot, IMP or no IMP. Also, I think you could have owned those islands off your east coast had you pushed for those. I realize that your war with Brick basically put an end to that sort of thing, but it was something like over 150 turns into the game before you had a port on the eastern side of your land. I think the end result of those two things is you ended up with not nearly enough land to be competitive. So that's my only real suggestion: I would've pushed hard for expansion up to that critical choke point, stacked it with units, and dared Brick to challenge you. That's basically what he did to you, and it seemed to have worked okay for him (you know, until he got Serdoa'd) despite having wayyyy worse land than you.

This is the best shot I could find in my dropbox folder:



I think with a more crazed expansion opening, you could have had the choke that Brick took AND been the favorite to take both of those islands. I think that would have put you in a much more competitive position. It's not that pushing hard like that is always the right call, but when there's choke points like that which are crucial to expansion, you really gotta go all-in to get to them. That's my only comment for now, maybe I'll have more later. I do realize it's easier said than done in some ways, but I remember later in the game seeing your land and going "wait, how did he fall behind on the growth curve prior to the Brick war?"

[scooter]

Here's a more specific example of the early growth curve problem. Why did you want a second worker here?



I think I would have gone something like worker-warrior(pause at sz2 or 3 if it was safe)-settler. That one corn is super easy to share with another city, so why not do that? Settler at sz2, settle a city that can share the northwestern corn, then whip a second worker out of the capital since you now have an extra pop that isn't working the corn. You end up with something that looks like this:



That doesn't look to me like it needs more tile improvements before building a settler. You started the settler on at sz5 after building 2 workers and a granary:



That's T35. I think I honestly would have started it at sz2 (T21) or sz3 (T25). I think that would have gotten you going much, much quicker. Things sort of snowballed from there. Since you had such a super sheltered start with the narrow land bridge, IMO this was the perfect storm for a super fast second city. Maybe someone more micro-oriented would explain differently, but that's probably how I would have played it.

edit: hopefully this comes across as constructive and not negative . That's just what jumped out at me from your game was the opening 50-70 turns or so

[Bigger]

Xenu, i'll try to comment after i read your thread. But i am pretty slow at reading

same. but my gut, and feeling at the time, was that you and Brick both dropped the ball letting Serdoa get a foothold on the long patch of land to your west. again, I haven't read your thread or Brick's thread - and I'm sure having to compete w/ each other slowed you down, but I felt like that land should have "belonged" to one of you too and not Serdoa. Serdoa is crafty, though, and I did appreciate him settling towards the two of you instead of towards me <G>.

[pindicator]

Scooter, what's sad is that he built 2 workers and a granary and only planted his 2nd city a turn after we did

[spacetyrantxenu]

Thanks for the review guys. Yeah, in retrospect the opening was way too slow. I definitely got caught in the trap (if you can even call it that) of how good the tiles were at my capital. I remember wanting to grow to size 5 quickly so I could work 5 great improved tiles, and then try to catch up in growth from there. The plan wasn't very good but it almost worked, I was just a few turns late in the blind settling race for Terrapin/Black Fish. Not having that city made it really hard to push my land west, and you see what happened later at New Fish, Serdoa relieved me of management responsibilities with a swarm of units.

Bigger, I don't think it was realistic to keep a lot of the western area from Serdoa. While he had a difficult start for sure, expanding north was the right call for him and once he had boats to do it I don't assume it was terribly difficult to settle that direction. For me to get over there I could have done a naval settling plan too, but my path by water was bit longer I think, I had to sail around my little bay and then north to get up there. He had a shorter supply line on that one, I think, and even if we had settled the land in a more even split he would have wrestled it away probably without too much trouble given the distance to my core (to say nothing of my generalship). I think Scooter is right that I should have filled out my peninsula more quickly and then beat Brick and Merohoc to the island chain to my northeast. I'd have remained perilously boatable the entire game (so I would have probably had to invest heavily in a navy) but surely I'd have been better off than I ended up. Maybe with that amount of land I would have had enough production to build a respectable navy and not have to choose to build only army. And on a map like this having a navy gives you real options for further expansion and aggression, so I probably shouldn't have treated it like a luxury. But I didn't think I had enough hammers to go around between fielding an army and a navy, so I chose army and played a what was probably pretty boring game for the most part (sorry lurkers). I enjoyed it, not sure anyone else did.

Anyway, thanks for the insight. Next time I'll be sure not to grow to size 5 before running out my first settler. Of course...if this wasn't RB mod I'm sure that by the second corn had been farmed I'd have been in a good place to whip settlers and workers like crazy...I don't think I really adjusted my play style to the mod very well. I think for the most part all I did was learn the rhythm of the mod's whip cycle and whine about the tech cost bug. I think the mod makes a lot of good changes to the game play and for all my whining in thread about it, all in all it's a good thing. But I definitely need to learn it better before I step into a competitive game running it the next time, and adapt my game play to fit the new game rules. To that end...I should go read some of the player threads now and see it in action, but that's going to take a while.

[Bigger]

well maybe it was just Brick that dropped the ball and let Serdoa in, then .

[scooter]

Scooter, what's sad is that he built 2 workers and a granary and only planted his 2nd city a turn after we did

Well, his capital was way way better than ours for a quick start, and we settled at basically the same time. I was just making the point that he should have blown by us in expansion, but we were somehow ahead of him until the Commodore war started.


Xenu: I do agree that if we're talking vanilla here, a grow, granary, then massive whip cycle probably would have been more effective. I'm not sure how much more, you'd have to test it, I still don't have the greatest natural feel for it. Maybe something similar to that novice opening awhile back in a PBEM where he got an early granary and whipped the high-food capital silly. Given the multi-pop nerf though, it's a lot harder for that to come out ahead here opening like that.

Once the Brick war happened, you didn't really have any great options the rest of the way, so I don't think there's much you could have done differently. You could have messed with us I guess, but I'm skeptical you could have done anything more than raze a city or two and I guess collect some gold/satisfaction. We were pretty obsessed with hanging onto that island.