[SPOILERS] Bobchillingworth Steals Your Heart

[Bobchillingworth]

NobGas have declared on SD; I'll have to keep an eye on the city counts to see if they start eating him. If they do, then I'm cancelling our trades.

[Bobchillingworth]

Can someone confirm if the religious building hammers have been stripped from the Apost Palace in CtH? I don't see them listed in the Civilopedia and couldn't get them to appear in WB testing. I don't see anything indicating removal of the hammers from the CtH changelog, though.

[Charriu]

They are still there. They are not mentioned in the civilopedia because BtS also doesn't mention them, I think

[Bobchillingworth]

Ah, okay. I couldn't get them to appear in a test game either, but I added everything (holy city, Theology tech, wonder, religious buildings) in via the various Worldbuilder "add X" buttons, rather than teching or building anything naturally, so maybe that caused the issue.

[Charriu]

When I test those things I usually try to create the wonder the natural way. I just start building the wonder in that city and use a Great Engineer from WB to finish it. That way you have less shenanigans from Worldbuilder

[Bobchillingworth]

Yeah, tried another test game and this time built it the slow way, was able to get it to work.


Tempted to try building it in this game, given that I'm otherwise going to be struggling for hammers in several of my cities, but there's a fairly significant opportunity cost in the initial production outlay and beakers to acquire Theology. Hmm.

[Bobchillingworth]

Alright, after mentally waffling a bit I'm going to tech Machinery instead, with the goal of getting Engineering afterwards, and will build a Forge and Temple in my capital, so as to run a Priest + Engineer; if I get a Prophet then I'll build the Temple of Solomon, otherwise I'll rush the AP if still available. Can't justify spending 6 turns teching the otherwise mostly useless Theology plus spending a lot of hammers on the wonder.


I'm pretty sure Lew, who is in vassalage and has a high power level, and Rusten, who is settling obnoxiously aggressive cities on our border, aren't going to leave me alone for much longer, so beakers need to be invested in trying to get to Pikes before I drown in a sea of Knights, and I really have no excuse for spending hundreds of hammers on any given wonder.

[Bobchillingworth]

Unrelated, I'm a little disappointed that I doubt I'll be able to demonstrate any interesting or at least creative strategies this game.


I'm not particularly good at Civ, of course; I'm not terrible by any means, but I join and play these games to have fun, and I derive little-to-no enjoyment from developing sims or microplans, and I generally churn through my turns relatively quickly because Civ IV MP is almost never the only game I'm playing at any given time and like hell am I going to spend more than half an hour playing a single turn (and generally nothing close to that).


What I am good at is pioneering innovative and often borderline exploitive techniques. To the best of my knowledge, I developed the Settler Scouting / Scrying tactic, which enables players to identify where enemy units and culture are in revealed but fogged tiles, highly useful in the early game. I revealed how one could exploit Basium in FFH to upgrade troops to national units which would be otherwise impossible to obtain, and developed the "Wall of Bone" strategy (though I think Dave V first proposed the concept), which led to Keelyn being nerfed. My victory in the first Planetfall PBEM inspired the mod developer to issue a patch to make the amphibious xeno attacks I employed nonviable. I discovered that one could chain Wagon movement in Wargroove teamer games to vastly expand the range of infantry units, leading to it being banned by player fiat (on a side note, having the strategy SD and I used to win the game being banned immediately afterwards didn't sit well with me, and I soured on the MP experience shortly afterwards).


Anyway, my point here isn't to boast, but rather gripe, albeit not about anything particularly significant; as noted, I don't see an opportunity to do anything noteworthy in this PBEM. I was hoping that running a combo with an incredibly high happy cap would at least inspire other players with more skill to use it in other games, but the reality is that it's probably going to be largely unnecessary here. I don't have enough food to grow most of my cities to huge sizes (my kingdom for a horse... tile to become a wet grain! Seriously, I didn't need four horse resources, lol), and Pin was rather generous with the luxuries, so I'm not sure I'm going to need too many of those half-price ball courts. They'd probably be useful as pseudo-sacrificial altars if I was whipping constantly, but most of my cities don't have enough food to do that without killing my economy.

[Bobchillingworth]

Also, that was too many words about nothing, here's some pictures, also about nothing:

[Bobchillingworth]

Well, the era of peaceful building is finished; Gaspar and Noble are eating SD via Cataphracts, and Serdoa has pilled on with a fairly large force as well.



Rusten's power is high, and he war-peaced Serdoa a couple turns ago; I suspect he's retaining a large garrison to ward off Lewwyn, and then pounce on me when Lewwyn declares.



Lewwyn hasn't declared as of the turn I played today, but he has Guilds and his power has been skyrocketing, probably ugrading HA.


I'm no longer last in power, but though I have (finally) switched to military builds in most cities, it's probably more a function of SD dying. My decent economy has been the main advantage I've had going for me, but I've been too reluctant to switch off infra and whip in military units. I'm completing Engineering next turn, but like SD (who's the only other player with it) I'd have probably been better off just building WE.


I will (belatedly) research HBR next, and stockpile cash for Holkan -> Pike upgrades.