[PB85] naufragar gets back to his Roots

[Ginger*]

^ Ditto exp barays should be fun. I do feel like that presents a different tech sink than SPI does so that might be something to juggle.

[naufragar]

Sorry, folks! Big burst of activity and then I had several days of lockdown. But we made it to the weekend! Let me catch up with rapid fire thoughts as they pop into my head.

^ Ditto exp barays should be fun. I do feel like that presents a different tech sink than SPI does so that might be something to juggle.

Welcome back, Ginger! We've got three(?) Spi leaders among 5 players this game, so it'll be interesting to see who has the guts to go for all the stereotypical Spi stuff. Amica, I became a believer in Barays in another random map game (PB69) when I finally noticed that the baray was giving the Khmer player something like a 25%-33% growth rate bonus.  With the high water count, we might even find a use for harbor-spam this game.

To Ref and Fenn, have you been inside a Barnes & Noble recently? I mention it because they've made the genius pivot from "bookstore" to "store for people who like books." The difference is subtle, but they now sell stuff that people that like books would buy, so, yes, they sell books, but also fancy notepads, vinyl records, puzzles, games, tote bags with funny quotes. I can't articulate Realms Beyond's vibe, but it's always been (almost) all-encompassing. We've had Final Fantasy, Path of Exile, Advance Wars clones. I've never played a full game of Master of Orion, but I've read a ton of reporting from Ref and Sullla and others because it's just been so engaging. I figure that if you've got something that interests you and you can talk about why, you'll find a home for it on Realms Beyond. Heck, that Planetfall game that I participated in had almost no non-player commentators, but it still felt like it was an appropriate addition to the library. So I guess long story short, Fenn, if you want to write something, I'll read it!

Tarkeel sent me a sim, so I know he's already laser-focused and locked-in. So, uh, I should start thinking about the actual game instead of bloviating about the old days, huh? 

Responding to Tarkeel: When I was toying around with openings in my head, I totally had us improving the pigs on turn 1. Oops. Yeah, need to wait for border pops. I love me some Serfdom watermills, but we'll need to scout our land, because if our land is poor, our capital is very, very rich. In fact, given that we already start with Writing, I wonder if we want an early Academy on all these green cottage-able tiles. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around Classical Era Start great scientist bulb paths, but I feel like here I might be more interested in an academy than the usual bulb from our first scientist.


Leader/Civ thoughts: When I find time ( ), I'll do the traditional opponent analysis, but very brief note on our own combo. I agree with what everyone's been saying about Spi/Exp Khmer being great for this set up. We don't have the raw late game economic power that our Org and Agg opponents do, but we should be able to do great things with Spi.

On the other hand, that means that if we want to really strive for optimization, we have to plan out an opening where we're juggling 5 turn swaps between Serfdom for worker improvements and Slavery for settlers & granaries.  No, seriously.  Optimization nightmare. But very powerful if we can manage it.

Thoughts on opening: I haven't really played around with the opening, but I suspect that worker before granary will be better. But I will test this. Other things we need to puzzle out/I'll try to test: first build (worker? granary?) first tech (Monarchy for worker speed and micro hell? Math for chops? Alphabet for religion and immediate swap into Org. Rel.? I think we're modding religions into Alphabet, Compass, Drama.)

Then all the usual stuff. Do we try for a religion? Wonders are barely tech-gated so do we try to out micro everybody? People were saying things like, "Classical Era start speeds up the boring early turns." But really it just slams you face first into the flaming swords juggling act of the later early game.