(NO PLAYERS) Lurker Thread

[TheArchduke]

It surprised me how long this game is still undecided.

[marcopolothefraud]

Otherwise, I give Woden slightly higher chances than Suboptimal...maybe like 29% chance of victory to 21%. Not a very high margin. Suboptimal's invasion still appears doomed to fail, but if he decides to invade Canada he might take the lead and finally win. Woden on paper looks like he has nice production, but his position is not as strong as Kaiser because Ichabod is pretty good at fighting a harassment campaign.

Ah, I see why suboptimal won't invade Canada now - he's going to go bankrupt if he does. His invasion of Egypt was doomed to fail, which could be why he abandoned it before it took place. Now he has nowhere to conquer - he can't go after Canada or Phoenicia, because there's not much to gain and a lot to lose in both scenarios.

Now that Ichabod is updating his spoiler thread, I like how much a fight he's putting up. The Brazil/Phoenicia meatgrinder has always been interesting to look at.

shrugs I think Kaiser's chance of winning has gone up, probably to 60%, and I'm as frustrated as CMF that there's no military alliance against Egypt. Land warfare is *truly* tedious in Civ 6, and without one-trick ponies like Macedon/Nubia/Rome/Hungary, it almost seems like stalemates are inevitable.

[Bruindane]

When Woden controlled Alara Kitan, could the fur tile not be transferred to The Black Gate?  With the revolt and planned razing there appeared multiple opportunities to do this.

[marcopolothefraud]

Good point. That 2/2/1 tile would've been useful to have, but it's probably not too consequential.

Do you think Kaiser's still the frontrunner, or does Suboptimal have the highest chance of winning now? I think it might depend on whether England invades Canada or not.

[Bruindane]

The biggest outcome of the Egypt-England conflict in suboptimal's favor is that Egypt is no longer threatening to conquer Canada, which would give Kaiser the victory.    Instead, England is going to gobble Canada, as King George III sang in Hamilton,  I'll kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.

Then there is geography, Egypt is more worried about Phoenicia as there is more space for conflict.  Kaiser will not offer peace to Woden as it would hurt Brazil, which is not in Egypt's interest.

Phoenicia's path to victory is through conquest of Brazil, slowing down Kaiser if possible.  The alliance with England helps them keep towards that goal.  As long as Kaiser is the technological leader that will be true.  Woden has more immediate concerns than a suboptimal culture play.

Brazil is fighting tooth and nail, and if it helps them, they would sign an alliance with England, changing the political winds once again.

I nominate the lurker winner to be Canada, everybody else is playing for second in our hearts and minds.

[shallow_thought]

I nominate the lurker winner to be Canada, everybody else is playing for second in our hearts and minds.

There is an interesting alternative history where the civ in that location was anything but Canada. It was probably somewhat shorter and much more decisive.

The story we have does have its charms though.

Oh, I and I love the real Canada. I've enjoyed my few, brief visits there, and have never had anything but fun with Canadians I've met on holiday or working over here in the UK. And anyone who thinks that they can't field a good army (hello Civ VI devs!) needs to study the war of 1812 and the World Wars (Vimy ridge! The Falaise Gap!) a bit more more closely ...

[ljubljana]

It helps that I'm only focused on this game and I'm playing with nothing to lose. Woden has to be the player with the best PYFT in the entire forum. His avarage time to send a save is 38 minutes in this game! This is simply amazing. Meanwhile, I open the save, take a look and I spend my day thinking about the game. It helps that I have the appropriate time window for that.

As Woden's partner in PBEM20, I can confirm that their average time to send a save in that game is...37 minutes . As the player right after them in the turn order, I'm very appreciative of this, in addition to very amazed .

[marcopolothefraud]

To be fair, ljubljana, you play pretty quickly too. Both in PBEM19 and PBEM20.

What do you guys think of Woden's argument here? He seems excessively angry at Williams482 for no good reason. To me, it seems like a good idea to trade with both Canada and England...though maybe I'm biased because I read through all the threads.

My reading of this trade is: "Poor me (Canada) has only iron units and a research rate of 128 versus suboptimal, who has oil units (tanks; saw gossip about it) and a research rate of 176, I need your oil so I can research better units without revealing my own oil." The gold is about where research of those 2 are now.  I think suboptimal will switch gears and turn on Canada as soon as he can. He is the easier target and with Canada making peace with Kaiser, suboptimal lost his +5 CS bonus right after signing a new alliance. But dude, you made our bed and switch to the dark side. You have alliances with both Kaiser and Ichabod, who you were just at war with and are currently helping out against us, your former allies. I am not going to send you oil because I have no doubt it would end up in Ichabod's hands if I start taking his cities away from him and he came asking. I hope suboptimal comes after you. It keeps him away from me while I fight Ichabod. I also need suboptimal because I am sending him 6 trade routes for roughly 100 and 18 and am getting 3 luxury resources from him. I am currently at 31 war wariness right now dependent on him. I hope he depends on me as much as I depend on him. I would be hurting big time if I wasn't trading with suboptimal.

[Sullla]

This is the first time I've seen a screenshot of this area and I cannot understand why suboptimal didn't settle this land:




There's room for three more cities here and it's not like this is some tundra wasteland. That's high quality land! How can this still be vacant in a game that's last 200+ turns?! Suboptimal is also running projects in half a dozen cities (one of the weakest possible things to do with your cities in Civ6 unless there's a dire need for a particular Great Person) and making no attempt to leverage his technology into military conquest. I just do not understand this at all. Does he actually want to win this game?

[Azoth]

Well, it's clear suboptimal has his eyes set on a culture victory. The projects are targeting Mary Leakey, who triples tourism from artifacts, a unique bonus not available any other way. The order of Great Scientists is random, so suboptimal has to run projects constantly to get her in reasonable time and avoid her being sniped. 

Meanwhile, the peninsula seems to have been earmarked for seaside resorts, so there was no rush to settle it before the modern era, and even now suboptimal is probably waiting for the final round of friendships to be agreed. The evidence of the past few PBEMs suggests that there is a real trade-off between peaceful expansion past 10 cities or so, immediate medieval/renaissance military and higher culture/science from higher amenities. (That's how Woden ended up with higher yields after he lost a city to Ichabod.) Pillaging seems to be most lucrative of all, but isn't compatible with culture victory because it loses the bonuses for trade routes and open borders.

In any case, suboptimal has a powerful standing army, can redirect the forests on that peninsula into more military, and his science rate suggests he'll be the first to nuclear weapons. Without seeing the raw numbers in the game, I have no idea if the culture victory can land before a global dogpile or nuclear war. But I'd hesitate to count suboptimal out, if only because Alhambram won an unlikely but clever religious victory against oledavy running a more conventional domination game in PBEM2, when few thought it possible.