RB PBEM #10 [SPOILERS] - Meatbalz

[meatbalz]

*** Spoilers follow ***

I'll start jotting down some thoughts in a second. In the meantime, enjoy:

[meatbalz]

Relations modifiers

Sumeria:
-1 You're dirty foreigners
-1 You went several turns without contacting me
+0.5 You had the balls to raze of my cities
+0.5 We have OB
-800,000 You razed one of my cities
-800,000 I don't trust you


Carthage:
-1 You're dirty foreigners
+0.5 You contacted me straight away
+0.5 Negotiations have been straightforward
+0.5 We have OB
-10 You're plotting behind my back


Greece:
-1 You're dirty foreigners
-1 You went several turns without contacting me
+0.5 We have OB
+0.5 You've seemed genuine in your communicaton


Netherlands:
-1 You're dirty foreigners
-1 You went several turns without contacting me
-1 You refused OB
-2 Diplomacy with you is, frankly, awful


Russia:
-1 You're dirty foreigners
+0.5 We have OB
+5 You gave up a short-term gain to help me
+2 You passed on valuable information
+2 You're plotting with me against our enemies

[meatbalz]

So, PBEM 10 will be a 6-player game with no tech trading and with a great twist suggested by cyneheard where the 6 of us take it in turns to choose the 12 least desirable civs+leaders, and then select our civ and leader from among the 10 in that group we didn't pick ourselves.

The way i see it, there are only a few civs and leaders i definitely want to avoid so getting a viable civ+leader pairing should be possible.

The civs i want to avoid: (*water civs that are maybe too risky in games like this one where i don't know anything about the map):

America
Celts
Germany
Japan
Native American
Russia
Vikings

I might be tempted to take one of these 3 if the other available choices aren't inspiring:

* Carthage pros: land-based UU, ok starting techs, cons: UU sucks, UB water-based
* Dutch pros: strong UB, ok starting techs, cons: UB comes late, UU water-based
* Portugal pros: ok starting techs, cons: both UU & UB are water-baed

Dutch probably come out just ahead given the above so they'd be my choice.

the leaders i want to avoid are mostly the Protective + non FIN/EXP/CRE ones,
Saladin
Qin Shi Hang
Churchill
Charlemagne
Tokugawa
Sitting Bull
Stalin

There are already a couple of picks available outside of those 2 "do not want" lists so i'll hopefully be able to come up with a combination i'm happy with.




Finally: I'll definitely be playing a variant. Once my leader/civ pick is made I'll decide which of the Master of Orion personality types best fits my pairing and play accordingly (there's a MOO sub-forum here at RB for lurkers who don't know the game)



-------------------------

it looks like all the picks are in. ultimately i decided to avoid khmer rather than native america as those dog soldiers are fierce chokers - great is used against someone else, but knowing my luck i'd find native america right on my doorstep

i have a "draft board" ready. hopefully i'll pick 3rd or 4th. i'll discuss the picks once the draft is over.

[meatbalz]

Thoughts:

Leaders I can live with, in some sort of rough order:

Qin Shi Huang IND/PRO
Cyrus IMP/CHA
Napoleon ORG/CHA
Boudica AGG/CHA
Gilgamesh CRE/PRO

I’d also like to grab one of these 3 civs:

Greece
Arabia
Sumeria (meh)

I had Qin in the "do not want" camp but as the only IND leader his value increases a great deal. He and Cyrus (farmer's gambit) are the picks of the bunch.

I don't mind Charismatic. You get +1 happy face early on (+1 w/ monument or stonehenge); a monument is 20H on quick - that pays back for itself pretty quickly if it lets you work, say, an extra grassland hill or even an extra 2/0/1 cottage. and you get bigger cities when it matters most, in the early game; while the happy cap is still low your cities are 10 or 20% bigger than non-CHA leaders' = more hammers + commerce; in a game with no FIN or EXP, that's not a bad advantage to have.

I'd want to pair CHA with a civ that either;
a) starts with mysticism
b) has a UB that adds to happy cap
c) has a strong UU i can leverage the -25% XP/promotion trait

Based on that, if my first two choices of Qin and Cyrus are taken, I'm considering taking Greece first up and pair it with a CHA leader on the way back - with 4 of them in the mix, at least 1 should be available. Too bad Greece's starting techs are dogshit.

Another one that's tickling me is Arabia; beeline to writing, spam madrassas, run a couple of priests, monopolize the religions, turtle to culture win in my massive fortified cities. SP thinking but I wonder how well it would work in PBEM. Arabia's the only viable civ starting with Mysticism (Celts are untouchable) so I could conceivably run the table on religions + beeline to Liberalism for Free Religion. I was thinking Gilgamesh would pair well, and he would, but CRE isn’t strictly required since all I would need is 1 GP farm, so it would save me ½ the cost of a madrassa.

The more I think about it the more I think I want to secure either Greece or Arabia. I think it’ll be impossible to pair them with Qin and Cyrus unfortunately so I might pick a civ rather than a leader first - there are only a couple of ok civs, but 4-5 leaders I suppose I could live with. Arabia would also work well with a CHA leader.

Sorry (if anyone’s reading this) my thoughts are so disjointed. We’ll see shortly since I got my wish and am up 3rd.

[meatbalz]

not to spam or anything but i went back and looked at who chose the picks i deem "tolerable"...

Tatan 3 (Arabia Sumeria Gilgamesh)
TT 3 (Boudica Napoleon Greece)
Ad Hoc 1 (Cyrus)
Cyneheard 1 (Qin)
Serdoa 0

I might be reading too much into this but then again the whole point of this kind of setup is to get an insight into how your opponents think, so here goes.

i think Ad Hoc's 1st pick of Cyrus was not a strong one - he's going to be one of the top leaders taken yet Ad Hoc put him on the board with the 3rd pick.

Tatan… Gilgamesh is borderline, there weren't many worse leaders left so i can see where he was coming from. Sumeria was a bit strange; the vulture isn’t great but it isn’t terrible either, especially if you pair it with an Aggressive leader. Ziggurat is ok, if you’re ORG it costs 30 hammers @ quick vs 80 for a non-ORG courthouse. It comes too early for my taste but it’s not a bad UB, especially in this company. arabia... on the surface nothing wrong with it, madrassa is not a strong UB, camel archer is very poor, but with only 2 civs available with mysticism, the other being Celts, Arabia sticks out like a sore thumb.

i would say this (i picked them) but khmer would have been a better choice. the baray gives one extra food at the cost of 100 hammers (65 @ quick) - that is a long payback time. ballista elephants are good on defense (i'm guessing even moreso in MP where players prefer mounted units) but that bonus is much less relevant if you're attacking. plus who knows whether we even have ivory on the map... it's not quite picking a water civ, but it's not a world away either.

twinkletoes's choices aren't that bad, but boudica is a very strong warmonger leader in my book - there were definitely better choices out there. napoleon... decent enough, but ORG is stronger than AGG for example and Hammurabi went next. But it’s marginal. The more puzzling one is Greece, especially with celts, dutch khmer and carthage still there. Phalanx is a good UU, one of if not the best one out of the 12

the only comment on cyneheard is that I would have waited until the 2nd leg to decide whether to take Qin (to see whether any IND leaders came out). As it is, he’s given somebody a pretty clear advantage.

Serdoa made great picks in my opinion.

As for my picks – you can debate whether Charlemagne is the weakest leader or 2nd or 3rd but regardless, PRO+IMP is… not good. America has a modern age UU and UB and that’s good (bad) enough for me. I’ve explained the Khmer pick, bearing in mind 11 civs were taken off the board before that. Sitting Bull – yes, he’s the only PHI leader. If someone manages to pair with Arabia that would be a strong combination. But with 11 leaders already off the table & with FIN/EXP/CRE not an option for me, I decided to go with 1 good + 1 awful trait rather than 2 middling ones. I also believe a specialist economy can be tricky to manage (speaking from personal experience) and with the player lineup solid but not top-tier, I can live with somebody taking PHI.

[meatbalz]

well my top 2 picks went to the top 2 pickers so in the end i went with arabia. it will come down to napoleon (which is my preference but who i believe tatan will take as holland is a builder civ) and boudica.

boudica's a bad fit with arabia but honestly i'm not going with saladin, and with a couple of aggressive setups (genghis of sumeria is almost over the top it's so aggressive) having an AGG/CHA leader might serve to dissuade others from casting their beady eyes on my multi-holy cities. course my UU has no bonus whatsoever from AGG.

so in the unlikely event napoleon slips, i'll take him even though it paints a giant target on my back for the warmongers. otherwise, i think i'll take the crazy bitch.:

[meatbalz]

Come get some!!!

[meatbalz]

Meatbalz: Boudica, Arabia. CHA/AGG, starts with Mysticism, Wheel

I’m going to be channeling my inner Master of Orion player here. With Boudica as my leader, I’m going to be role-playing a Xenophobic Militarist. What this means in practice:

Xenophobic; simply put: I’m going to be a bit of a bastard when it comes to diplomacy. I will NEVER initiate contact, no matter how urgent or pressing the matter. This is sure to piss my rivals off and drive them to seek alliances elsewhere but hey, what do I care, they’re all filthy foreigners anyway.

It also means I will probably at certain times be put in the position of having to interpret ambiguous “enemy” moves without the benefit of being able to ask for clarification. Expect a great deal of psychotic paranoia :dancing5:.

Assuming the other civs aren’t completely put off by the initial cold shoulder, they’ll also have to deal with the other consequence of Xenophobia, it will take a lot for me to warm up to other civs. I’ll be running a “relations modifier” for each civ I meet, and halving the effects of any +ve (for example +1 “you accepted our state religion” becomes +0.5). This will colour my diplomatic interactions.


Militarist; the easiest way to do this is simply to always be number 1 in the Soldiers demographic. Fortunately this does NOT mean I’m forced to go warrior first since my Soldiers count will be joint 1st with Sumeria at the start. This will be a game-long burden on an already-shitty economy :wink2: (that's my massive army of useless warriors and axemen waving my economy goodbye).


How to get around these restrictions. Frankly, I don’t think I can. I think given my skill level the combination of lack of economic traits, bad diplomacy, and an oversized military is too much for me to overcome. Still, I do plan to try and have a game plan, focusing on a few priorities:

1) Give serious consideration to Stonehenge. +1 happy in every city and I have a (albeit small) head start on everyone for it. I still think it will go to Russia in the end though.
2) Writing; I need a Madrassa in play asap.
3) Religious hegemony. I haven’t seen the start yet but it will be interesting to watch the demographics and see if anyone tries for an early religion (I certainly will be). Depending on how successful I am at hoarding religions I might try to avoid having trade routes with other civs for as long as possible to prevent spread. I doubt I will have the economy to keep this up for long though.
4) Exploit Prophets. I’ll post the GProphet lightbulb list later but I plan to use it heavily. Theo, CoL, CS, Monarchy are all there.
5) Cheap barracks + stable + early theocracy = 7XP camel archers, 1 skirmish away from 3x promotion. Cheap barracks + stable + theocracy + vassalage = .
edit to add 6) Nebulous general plan that I already know will change 2 million times. Monk economy. Rush to HR to grow my large cities even larger, no worries about slider because I have shrines up the wazoo, right? Use my large cities to pump out enough little virtual soldiers to conquer a small real-world country.

Things I need to bear in mind:
- Quick speed means I REALLY need to work on one of the weak points of my play, I don’t build enough workers. Not good @ normal speed, disastrous @ quick
- I’ll need to conquer at least 1 neighbor to have a competitive research rate
- I MUST make the most of the population advantage granted by CHA since it’s the only quasi-economic trait I have

Wish me luck!

[meatbalz]

And a quick thought before I give my expectations for my opponents.

Civ/leaders taken by chooser:

Meatbalz 0 (i.e. nobody chose a leader/civ I selected)
Tatan 3
Ad Hoc 3
Cyneheard 2
Serdoa 1
TT/Ilios 3

I'm not sure how much I'd read into this other than reinforcing my impression that my line of thinking on civs/leaders is more in tune with Serdoa + Cyneheard than with Tatan, Ad Hoc, and TT.

[Kyan]

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