[SPOILERS - PBEM16] scooter's thread

[scooter]

Well let's try out this RB mod, shall we?





Yep, things look a little different with this mod. Let's give it a whirl. Real post coming up next.

[scooter]

Okay, this post is going to be about my choices for a civ. I changed my mind approximately 2,749 times in planning, which is okay because I'm happy with what I ended up with. I think. The issue with using the mod here is there's lots of leaders I'd like to take for a spin, and the sad part is I can only take one. I'll take a brief look at a few others I considered before getting to the "why" of who I chose. Actually, on second thought, I'm going to do a brief trait evaluation to steer you in the direction of why I chose who I chose. I basically evaluated all the traits in my head, and then formed a list of which traits I'd like to try for this game, so that's what I'll do here.

Financial - Was generally considered to be the top trait. It was nerfed pretty fairly I think. Basically, you need to get to 3 commerce on a tile to trigger the Financial bonus rather than 2, however the bonus is the same on water tiles. In other words, Financial is still a late-game power-house trait just as before, but it takes a little longer for it to kick in. I feel that Financial is still a top-tier trait after changes, it's just not quite so dominant. I decided that Fin was a trait I would consider for this game.

Expansive - Was generally considered to be the 1b to Financial's 1a, and with good reason. Expansive got the ban hammer a little heavy - losing it's Granary bonus. The Granary bonus was probably the biggest selling point, so it got double speed grocers and a boost to worker production (25% -> 35%) to compensate. I decided to pass on Expansive for this game.

Creative - This did not change. At first I thought it got changed to Vanilla Civ4, which caused me to look elsewhere. After I found out it did not change at all, I labeled it as the strongest trait in the game now, and chose to put it on my watch list for this game.

Spiritual, Organized, Industrious - None of these changed, and none of them interested me. Not much else to say.

Imperialistic - Got a very, very minor boost with fast Custom Houses (I think I've built about 19 of those in my whole life). In reality, it's biggest boost was the fact that Expansive got nerfed, making Imperialistic pretty viable. I added this to my watch list.

Protective - What was the least interesting trait might be the most interesting now. Protective simply added double speed granaries. Suddenly it's a pretty solid trait actually - borderline top tier. Imagine pairing it with Imperialistic - you can get out settlers quickly, get granaries quickly, AND have uber defenders to cover your cities! Put simply - Protective is now one of the best traits in the game. I added this to my watch list.

Charasmatic - This trait didn't change much - but you get the +2 happy by default rather than +1 and +1 with a monument. This mild boost, coupled with the nerfs that other traits got makes it suddenly viable. I added this to my list.

Aggressive - I normally totally skip over this one honestly... There was no changes made to Aggressive, however, there is a change made to the barracks, which Agg gets double speed. Barracks was changed from 50h -> 60h, and it provides +1 culture/turn. This means that Agg civs get a barracks +1 culture for the cost of a monument. Very, very enticing. So this was added to my list as well.

So in the end, I wanted to play with: Fin, Cre, Chm, Agg, Pro, and Imp. This is way more than I normally am considering, so this was a problem, but a good kind of problem. How often do we have 6 traits that appear to be truly viable? So I started jotting down combos that appealed to me especially:


Pro/Imp - expand + uber defenders plan
Cre/Chm - This sounded very fun, until I realized this does not exist! Never run into THAT problem before in an RB PBEM.
Fin/Cre - Be the test dummy to see if this is still a top-tier combo
Pro/Cre - Can it out-do Exp/Cre, Imp/Pro, Imp/Cre for expansion?
Fin/Agg - Financial for longterm, Aggressive for short-term
Agg/Chm - The ultimate war combo AND now a mildly improved economic combo!


So that was my list of ideas that sounded fun - and I had a few others I think. The picks started and several picks were taken. Since we did a repick and all sorts of craziness got unleashed, I'll just keep it simple and say that when the pick got to me the second time, here was the three options I was considering. Remember, I was last pick, so I got to pick my combination outright. Here we go:

Willem of India

I know, I know, all that to just take Willem of India? I do think it was probably the strongest option on the board when I was up, but it sounded boring. The other problem was that everybody and their brother was taking early UU's, so I was mildly nervous that it could turn into "kill the pushover peacemonger" so I considered that. Mostly though, I wanted something more fun to try, so I painfully decided to pass over this.

Boudica of Rome

Like I said - Agg and Chm are much more viable now in my opinion, so I thought long and hard about this. Agg already gets the standard bonuses, but their fast barracks get +1 culture/turn. This means no worry about 2nd ring iron and things like that. Chm also is stronger 1st: because many top traits were weakened but 2nd: because no need for monuments to get +2 happy. So with Agg/Chm, we can get uber Praets AND easy borders pops AND able to have 2 more happy citizens (means either more whipping or more cottages worked).... So this combo was REALLY hard to skip. Part of me skipping it was the fact that I hadn't thought this one through until the repick, at which point I would've felt somewhat unfair taking Rome since the repick was due to learning about Creative, so swapping from Zulu to Rome seemed disingenuous. In the end, I decided to go with my final choice:

Ragnar of Zulu

Why?

1. Ikhandas. I just think this will be fun. I get a half price barracks that pops my borders AND gives me a (very light) maintenance reduction. This was actually the biggest thing that set Zulu apart to me - as I wanted to try this out.

2. Impis - I heard they're pretty good.

3. Aggressive for the early game, Financial for the late game



Should be an interesting game. I'll say more about opponents and their choices in a future post.

[scooter]

Most of the leader analysis and thoughts on my start my have to wait until tonight (might catch some time in an hour or so), but I figured I'd leave you with this really short little chat:

1:05 PM scooter: do you like your start?
1:06 PM curious since i havent seen mine
don't know what to expect
dazedroyalty: expect to have to make tough choices. :D

Hmmmm... Haven't seen my start yet, but I get the feeling it'll be interesting then. Looking forward to it.

[plako]

Your start position:

[scooter]

Hmmmm. I'm going to need the scout to tell me more... It's definitely an attractive start. It's really tempting to move 1SE onto the plains hill, allowing a 2 hammer plant AND the ability to work a 1/2/0 tile and get out a work boat quickly. It'll be interesting to see what the scout comes up with.

[fire&ice]

Dead-Lurker checking in and asking if you can sell me that house =D.

Also the one S-E looks food rich. not seeing many forests so asking if you are planning on any wonders.

[scooter]

Okay, I was out for most of the night so I'm just now getting around to writing the report for turn 0! Then I'll probably move on to some more opening analysis, at least until I feel like going to bed. In an attempt to make up for the fact that it took me awhile to get this turn reported, I compensated by taking way too many screenshots for what is otherwise a moderately uneventful turn. But hey, it's the first turn, so who cares . Alright, let's roll:



My fearless leader, in case you forgot already. Somehow I tricked myself into thinking I started with Fishing - which is why I punched the Print Screen button when I saw this... My whole plan of going WB first is kind of a no-go at this point . So you already saw my starting spot, so I started by moving the scout 1SE to see what was in that direction:



Hm. Nothing terribly interesting. In the bottom right corner of the screen you see a tiny, tiny bit of blue right there... So it would appear that just out of sight in the blackness is the coastline. I will likely double-check this with my scout, but that's just the way it looks at first glance. So what now? I thought about moving south onto the grass hill, but I felt that I need to see what's west of the plains hill next, so I moved onto the plains hill:



And spotted some much nicer land. I like the land west of the hill better . That said, it's decision time. Where do I want to settle? I thought long and hard about going 1S. I had the following thoughts go through my head:

1. I like to avoid founding on river grassland if possible, as I don't like wasting a great cottage tile, especially as a Financial civ. So 1S doesn't seem nice in that perspective.

2. 1S is appealing because of pulling in the cows (clams + clams + corn + cows!), however in the longterm, I'd probably split that cow off to another city anyways and in the short-term, that cow won't matter. So in reality, this isn't really a great reason to found 1S. I decided to scratch that off my list, considering that I would rather settle in place than settle 1S. So what next?

3. Settling in place is solid, however it's kind of weak for a few turns. I don't have fishing, so I can't go straight for a WB. The corn is second ring, so I can't work that immediately either. Setting in place is fine, however there's a better alternative:

4. Settle 1SE on the plains hill. This gives me tons of options. I get the 2 hammer start, which will be a big boost for me in the opening turns. I'll explain my opening plans in a moment for my first builds, but this gives me wet corn, 2 clams (all 3 foods first ring), river start, and some great spots for a fast second city just to my south.

5. As fire&ice said, it's somewhat hammer poor, but in reality it's not TOO bad. I don't have any plans for early wonders, so that will help, and I'm not Exp/Imp so I'm not reliant on hammers for a bonus or anything. There are two plains hills for production, and I might experiment with the new and improved workshops on the plains tiles. So without further ado:



I moved.


Next I'll take a quick look at the settings and how I plan to open with this capital. Game for the lurkers: One of these screenshots has something... peculiar about it. See if you can figure out what it is. I'll give out a cookie or something for whoever figures it out.

[scooter]

Oh right, quick glance at the settings:



About what I expected. Monarch difficulty, so maintenance costs will be a tad sharper than my other PBEM, but nothing to bad at all, provided we aren't Toroidal or something. Standard world size, and how many land tiles?



Hmm, a bit big again - 1260 land tiles. This number is significantly bigger than a Standard size Pangaea. For those who are not playing in PBEM14, here's a link to a post in my thread there where I did some analysis on land tiles for a Standard size, low sea level map like this:

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showpost....stcount=55 [PBEM14 SPOILERS!!!!!]

For those who can't click that link (or those too lazy to go read it)... There's some really interesting information there. I generated 5 maps of a bunch of script types with the settings Standard + Low Sea level, which is what PBEM14 is. This map is the same. The interesting bit is that the script Big and Small came out to 1257 tiles average, with a range of 1209-1298. This game? 1260 tiles. Hmmmmmmmmm. It's by no means conclusive, since Plako very well could've done some hand drawing, however it's something to file away for future reference. Out of the other maps I did, the only thing remotely close was Terra, which was quite a bit higher than 1257 (several of them were over 1400). All the other typical scripts are WAY off this number - to the tune of hundreds of tiles that would all have to be hand-drawn, therefore they are generally unlikely. Anyways, I just thought it was interesting because I did those map calculations literally 10 days ago, so the data is very fresh on my mind, and it was nice to see the settings are identical here, so I could use that data without having to generate new stuff. Here's the demos:



Can't really learn much here since Krill and I chose not to settle, but I figured I'd post it anyways. If someone loves C&D and is looking for a thread to lurk... Absolutely make yourself at home . I'm no C&D whiz, and I don't even really enjoy it that much (so I won't be doing it), but if someone out there loves it and has too much time on their hands, then I will happily provide the demos!

[scooter]

Dead-Lurker checking in

Welcome aboard!

One rule though. No dead lurkers. I prefer lurkers that are alive. Ded-lurkers are very much permissible though.

I don't often like lurkers, but when I do, I prefer them alive and dedicated. Stay lurking, my friends.

and asking if you can sell me that house =D.

I have a Nigerian uncle who will gladly sell you this house, so long as you can get him a down payment to help him get out of the country. I'll tell him to email you.

[scooter]

So with a scout start, your starting techs (Agri/Hunting), and a plains hill, how do you plan to start?

Great question! Glad you asked. I simmed it out, but rather than providing extremely boring line-by-line sims of the calculations (seriously, if you think we are reading your turn-by-turn sims, you're fooling yourself), I'm going to try to make it only moderately boring, rather than extremely.

Here's the plan I have in mind. Research Fishing first while working a warrior:

Fishing ETA: 4 turns
Warrior ETA: 5 turns
Growth ETA: 5 turns

I finish fishing, and I'll be 1T from both warrior and growth. I will probably immediately swap to a WB and max-hammer it out, leaving a 6/10 hammer warrior in the queue. Obviously I'd micro it the first turn so I grew to size 2, then I'd work as many hammers as possible, quickly getting out a work boat. From there, it'd probably be worker next (finishing my warrior in 1T obviously) and then it's probably settler time - since I already have potential spots for city 2 and it's T0. I'm hoping to get a very quick second city down honestly. So this is the very rough plan, and we'll see how it goes. Feel absolutely free to poke holes in it, as I'm always willing to change my mind.