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RBPB3 - Gandhi of the Egyptians

I'll post pics when the game is up, but I suppose I'll start with the standard opening post:

If you are playing in RBPB3, please either stop reading this thread, or continue reading it after you gift me all of your cities, tech, workers and army. Thanks.
BTS games: PB1, PB3, PBEM2, PBEM4, PBEM5B, PBEM50. RB mod games: PBEM16, PBEM20, PB5, PB15, PB26, PB27, PB37, PB42, PB46, PB71. FFH games: PBEMVII, PBEMXII. Games ded lurked: PBEM17, PB16, PB18
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So, pre-game thoughts: Everyone wants to tech, but teching don't matter: funding does. Any idiot can run the slider at 100% with gold from 3-4 other civs, but it takes know-how to run the slider at 100% and make 400gpt by t200. And if you make the gold, you can always decide to up your own slider and tech for yourself if you have to. Which is the crux of the matter: make yourself self sufficient asap, never rely on anyone else for tech.

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17 players means it will be a cramped map. I need to be capable of protecting myself in the early, with ancient era units, and not HA/swords.

I also need to be able to expand and grow without crippling myself with defence. And I need to be able to tech.

Well, the good FIN civs went early, so that was out. It's on Emperor and huge, which means the tech costs are insane (216 adjusted beakers for BW! That's like 18 turns for the civs that start with mining), so I stopped looking at leaders and picked my top 3 civs (and later top 7) on starting techs and UB (I don't care about UUs). It worked out as Egypt>Arabia>China. Reasoning was thus:

  1. Egypt starts with the Obelisk, War Chariot, Agriculture and Wheel. That means that I was one tech away from any food improvement tech, and had a UB that allowed me to make a shrine ASAP. I reckon that shrines are going to be the key to this game, and not Fin, and it is possible for me to bulb Theo, CoL, Monarchy...most of the religious branch without any worries, and without having to tech writing, which is insanely expensive. WC are uber - 30 hammers, and I can use them to wreck HA if push comes to shove - They crush Numids as well, considering hammer cost. Get horses early enough and 2 WC can easily choke someone into the ground.

More coming soon. This thread is going to get spammed into the ground today....
BTS games: PB1, PB3, PBEM2, PBEM4, PBEM5B, PBEM50. RB mod games: PBEM16, PBEM20, PB5, PB15, PB26, PB27, PB37, PB42, PB46, PB71. FFH games: PBEMVII, PBEMXII. Games ded lurked: PBEM17, PB16, PB18
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I can see a problem with the UU. The map like you said is going to be cramped so you may not get horses in which case you'll have to fall back on melee.

However the shrines will be extremely strong if you can manage to spread your religion. Though again the map is going to be cramped so it may be a little difficult to get a huge income from them like you can with less people.

Agriculture and the wheel are both expensive starting techs those so that can buy you maybe 1 or 2 turns teching time but agriculture isn't immediately effective like say mining so it's a bit of a drawback. The bonus is that it's a pre-req for pottery and AH (for the horses) so it isn't completely useless I suppose.

My $0.02
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  1. See above


  2. Arabia - Madrassa, Camel Archer, Wheel + Mysticism. Riskier start, would have had to go straight for a religion to make it work, and get scouts out, because no way I would be hooking up a food res with those techs unless I lucked out on a grain and could get agri asap. But that would mean that myst was a wasted tech, and after RBPB1 plus the insanely slow tech pace in the early game, I didn;t wanted any wasted techs.

    The madrassa is awesome, but it is also really hard to get to (writing is too expensive and forces AH/pottery early), but the ability to get a 5 turn GP/GS could really come in handy. The CA is also really nice, basically best used as a cheap method of damaging those high strength defenders after the cats have wrecked the remainder of the stack.

    I almost took these and play a risky game, but end of the day I figured I don't want to be top dog in this game, so it's probably better to play a relatively safer strategy that will leave me in the middle of the pack.


  3. China - Pavillion, Cho-ko-nu, Agri and Mining. A UU that can collateral catapults as well as ordinary units, a UB that gives +25% culture on a crowded map, and the best 2 starting techs in the entire game? What's not to love? China is a massively underrated civ, it is the only one that starts with those starting techs, and while the UB isn't a strategic lynchpin, it is tactically a large advantage in front cities.

    In hindsight if I wanted to play another extreme game I would have taken China on the way up, after picking a CRE civ on the way down (Hatsheput or maybe Cathy), and slave out the settler after going BW/warrior first.

The other choices I lined up were Ottomans, Rome, England, and Japan (that would have been extreme). I was tempted to take Rome and then pick Shaka on the way up and just create a blackhole of worry, but that would have screwed up game balance and no way would that have been a winning strategy. And IW is 360 beakers, Pottery 144, BW 216, Agri 108, Wheel 108, AH 180. That's nearly 1200 beakers!

Now, next post is for the leader decision, that I picked first, but happened after I whittled down my list of civs.
BTS games: PB1, PB3, PBEM2, PBEM4, PBEM5B, PBEM50. RB mod games: PBEM16, PBEM20, PB5, PB15, PB26, PB27, PB37, PB42, PB46, PB71. FFH games: PBEMVII, PBEMXII. Games ded lurked: PBEM17, PB16, PB18
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StellarOmega Wrote:I can see a problem with the UU. The map like you said is going to be cramped so you may not get horses in which case you'll have to fall back on melee.

However the shrines will be extremely strong if you can manage to spread your religion. Though again the map is going to be cramped so it may be a little difficult to get a huge income from them like you can with less people.

Agriculture and the wheel are both expensive starting techs those so that can buy you maybe 1 or 2 turns teching time but agriculture isn't immediately effective like say mining so it's a bit of a drawback. The bonus is that it's a pre-req for pottery and AH (for the horses) so it isn't completely useless I suppose.

My $0.02

The map will be cramped, but that just means I need to focus even more on getting the required resources and stopping anyone from annoying me. AH is cheaper than BW, so I'll get more time to grab horses than anyone is going to have to grab copper. And with a map this cramped, I can't see Sullla screwing teams over by only giving some horses and others copper, that wouldn't be an acceptable map design. They'll be accessible, it just depends on how much you'll dedicate to their procurement.

Shrines are a very long term investment, and with so many players they are all going to want a religion so combined with free spreads I can just gift missionaries, or trade them...it's not just my cities that I want religion in, it's everyone else's.

Agri is a lynch pin tech. It opens up pottery, AH, allows grains to be immediately hooked. Without it, you rely on hunting for AH, which is a scout start, which is Bad™, just ask Speaker why in RBPB2 if you want, critical if you have animal food), fishing for pottery (easy to research and only critical if you start with fish), and you need to research it anyway if you get grains. It's probably the #1 starting tech IMO on this difficulty level, as I've just said there is only one instance in which you can get both mining and BW and be able to slave out a worker to improve grains.

So any start that gives you grains and you don;t start with agri you are forced to research in a specific order if you start with grains, and if you get animals you have to go through agri anyway to hook them up unless you go via hunting which has it's own drawbacks.

It's best to consider the cost of BW when considering agri: the more expensive BW is, the less useful early slaving is if you have to research another tech to hook up your food. Mining and fishing is a great combo if you start with seafood, but otherwise I'll take agri and wheel everytime.
BTS games: PB1, PB3, PBEM2, PBEM4, PBEM5B, PBEM50. RB mod games: PBEM16, PBEM20, PB5, PB15, PB26, PB27, PB37, PB42, PB46, PB71. FFH games: PBEMVII, PBEMXII. Games ded lurked: PBEM17, PB16, PB18
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Leaders: After deciding that I wanted to aim for a shrine based economy, I knew I needed a Phi civ.

Fin/Phi went first, which was to be expected. I don't rate Fin myself, in an MP game where commerce is effectively shared via trading, I'd rather get commerce by another method and get a tech that works solely for myself. (NB. bulbing is the same, which is a counter argument for bulbing as a PHI leader, which doesn't apply to me as yet).

Then Cre/Phi, which is the ultimate early academy leader. Again, I don't see the point in early academies unless you can keep the slider high, which you can't do until you land currency, but by that time you could have gotten a GS with any civ. And if you want to bulb maths all that much, be my guest. Otherwise it's a nice civ, if a tad slow, but after playing CRE in the MTDG (and FIN for that matter), I wouldn't have picked it.

So, this left me in a quandary. I knew I could take Peter. EXP is like the best trait in the game, cheap workers and cheaper granaries, but they need BW to really be taken advantage of (chopping is the only way to get a granary done before the food box is half full at size 1), and slaving is the best way to take advantage of cheap granaries in the early game. But I'd done it before to the extreme with Joao of the Incans, and with this being a crowded map I couldn't take it to an extreme, so I thought I'd move on.

The remaining choices were:

SPI, AGG, PRO, ORG, IMP, CHM.

None of them are really top tier traits anymore. Agg would have been useful, it allows some cool stuff to be done with melee and gunpowder units, so while it's just as slow as SPI, it's "fun" to play with if you can get a good setup.

PRO...no chance.

ORG, I may have taken if we'd allowed spies, I might have gone for a spy economy. It would have meant I rely on this being a toroidal map to up the costs, but I think that there is a good chance that is true, so it didn't seem a risk. But the spy vote just killed the idea for me.

IMP, would have meant I got only unis as cheap buildings, and IMP kinda sucks without EXP to keep up with the vertical growth. As we saw later, Joao of the Incans is out there, so it will be put to use, but I don;t think it suits my gameplan.

CHM is a risky choice. You really need to get the second and third cities out asap and get them worked, to grab strat resources and valuble land, and forests for crash chopping projects, and CHM drags your attention to vertical growth, delaying workers roading out, delaying settlers being built. I was considering Boudicca at one point, but rejected the idea of playing the mercenary - the map is too big for me to meet everyone, and that is a major requirement of the strategy (public posting is a necessity, so you don;t get ganged up on, or called a liar so your rep gets destroyed).

So in the end I took good old Gandhi, SPI/PHI, and plan on heavily abusing the civics as the needs arrive. It's critical that I get CoL and Fued, and Mono/Theo so that I can start micromanaging the civics. It feels like slipping into an old comfortable pair of slippers, but those slippers won;t help me into the lead in the first 100 meters of the race.
BTS games: PB1, PB3, PBEM2, PBEM4, PBEM5B, PBEM50. RB mod games: PBEM16, PBEM20, PB5, PB15, PB26, PB27, PB37, PB42, PB46, PB71. FFH games: PBEMVII, PBEMXII. Games ded lurked: PBEM17, PB16, PB18
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My bible for this game: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=140952

Great Prophet:

Meditation
Polytheism
Priesthood
Monotheism
Theology
Divine Right
Mysticism
Masonry (Warlords patch & BTS)
Code of Laws
Civil Service
Monarchy
Literature
Music
Writing
Philosophy
Printing Press
Drama
Aesthetics (BTS)
Alphabet
Paper
Education
Liberalism
Calendar
Masonry (Vanilla & unpatched Warlords)
Animal Husbandry
Construction
Future Tech
BTS games: PB1, PB3, PBEM2, PBEM4, PBEM5B, PBEM50. RB mod games: PBEM16, PBEM20, PB5, PB15, PB26, PB27, PB37, PB42, PB46, PB71. FFH games: PBEMVII, PBEMXII. Games ded lurked: PBEM17, PB16, PB18
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So here is a brief list of the strategies I've considered:

  1. Beeline priesthood, Oracle alphabet, backfill remaining techs.


  2. Beeline Mono, rushout second city to get judaism. get Obelisk in capital and get Gprophet for shrine. Get obelisk in 2nd city and get Gpro for theo.


  3. Beeline CoL: same as above, but don't get shrine for Judaism. Instead, bulb Theo and then bulb CoL. Use GP 3-5 for shrines, unless I can bulb Philo via Caste scientists.


  4. WC rush someone (it's an option, right?)


  5. Standard cottage/slave economy, playing defensive and getting as many scouting WC out as possible

Thoughts on what I should do are much appreciated btw.
BTS games: PB1, PB3, PBEM2, PBEM4, PBEM5B, PBEM50. RB mod games: PBEM16, PBEM20, PB5, PB15, PB26, PB27, PB37, PB42, PB46, PB71. FFH games: PBEMVII, PBEMXII. Games ded lurked: PBEM17, PB16, PB18
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Is going for an early religion, via Priesthood for example, as your first tech a good strategy in MP?
I ask, because in the pitboss 2 game - no-one went for a religion at the start. In fact, just about everyone spoke against even considering it. The opening religions went unclaimed for quite some time.

Assuming you do go for it, do you think it's likely that you'd have competition for the religion?


By the way, I really enjoyed following your aggressive diplomacy in your Pitboss 1 thread smile
Looking forward to seeing how you play Gandhi, as getting the best from PHI is something I've always struggled with!
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I would think #2 would be the most straight-forward roleplay. Having an early shrine will let you expand more quickly and provided you have enough food will allow 5 priests in the second city, so generating an "extra" prophet to bulb CoL (relative to #3) shouldn't take too long. It might force city #2 into the highest-food location (as opposed to towards a resource), but I'm not sure you wouldn't want to do that anyway.

I would be disinclined towards #1 (unless you have Marble) because you'd be effectively giving up a city for the wonder and you don't need a measly 2 GPP/turn when you have the Obelisk.

#4 and #5 aren't really strategies to decide on before the game, rather they are responses to the situation/terrain you actually find yourself in. Planning on #4 a priori is a great way to lose the game, and #5 is fairly boring.

But what do I know anyway ...alright
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