SGOTM3 Rome - Team Smackster

SGOTM3 Rome - Game Thread.

Hi everyone, and welcome to your game thread.

Here is the start position.


Here are a couple of links you might find useful.

The Original GOTM16 Announcement.
The Draft Constitution

This Months' sponsored variant is Xenophobic NOW
The rules are as follows.
1. Non-Oscillating War variant. You keep a list of opponents and the order in which you meet them.
2. You must declare war on the first Civ you meet before leaving the diplomacy screen for the first time.
3. You must stay at war with that Civ until one of you have been eliminated.
4. You must declare war on the second Civ you met on the same turn that the first Civ was eliminated or 20 turns has elapsed (whichever happens sooner). This is to prevent sandbagging.
5. After each opponent is eliminated or 20 turns elapse you must declare war on the next civ in the list.
6. If you run out of opponents because you haven't met them yet and 20 turns have elapsed, you must declare war on the next opponent you meet before leaving the diplomacy screen for the first time with them

The Xenophobic part of the variant runs as follows.
7. You may never own a foreign worker. You must never buy or sell one, and if you capture them they must be disbanded on the tile on which they were captured.
8. All deals must be at face value. No haggling.
9. You will not establish embassies.
10. You will never retain a town that contains foreign citizens. Such towns must be razed and any workers spawned disbanded.

Also there is a puzzle involving some non-standard Barbarian Units. The puzzle is framed in the same way as it was for the original GOTM16, but the solution is different.

The save will be available from >>HERE<< when the timelock is released. All of your teams save files will eventually be available from this link.

When you finish your turn, you may upload your save to >>THIS<< link

Have fun, and good luck everyone!

Hi Everyone,

Thought I'd get the first post up, to welcome you as you get here.

Atlhough team leader and we are playing a Xenophobic variant, I don't want to play the leader like a Xenophobe, so lets put it all together like a team, play the best game we can and try to enjoy while we are at it.

To aid this, I'll run the roster, and try to keep the game moving. At the least I'll try to load up each save as everyone plays and give suggestions, and hopefully we can get everyone else to do that too, and that should lead to some good discussions.

I think it is up to us the order of the roster, and although I'm happy to play the first set of 20, I think somebody else should do it, so hands up if you want to play first.

smackster

A quick look at the map, its looks like a good start position, and we might be able to settle on the spot. I would move the worker to south hill, and then unless there is something like cattle, or wheat visible, settle on the spot. Then move the worker to the game, and cut that forest, then irrigate. Build one warrior, and then granary pre-build.

So I'm getting ahead of myself, not a good way to play this. We are Rome, Militaristic and Commercial, and we start with Alphabet and Warrior Code. We really need that granary, and as we can't really count on good trading early, we should research Pottery ourselves at max. Then we have a choice, normally I'd probably go for Writing as that is the only 2nd level tech we can get, but in this Xenophobic game, I think getting Iron Working ASAP will really help us.

Clearly at the early stage, we should not send the warrior out, and should avoid contact. Just accept that we wont do much tech trading early. But if we are contacted by the AI for a tech trade, then take it. Which leads me to the next point, if anyone has any questions on what we have to do trading and war wise, then shout.

smackster

Reporting in

On line!

Re. Smacksters initial plan: I agree, keeping a low profile is a key factor in the opening phase of this game. However, a moderate/minimum scouting would be possible (hopefully) wo bumping into our not-so-nice neighbours.

Roster: Why not go with the order we are listed in MB's list? With Smackster starting us off.

We need to tidy up this world of ours and establish a lasting Pax Romanum.

And... It would be nice to have a gold laurel to have a green/gold matching set!

Checkin in... i am going to take my dog outside and wait until my kid is in bed. I will write some of my thoughts no later than 10PM EST today

I can start it, but if I blow the start, one of you will have to take over leadership after I resign in shame.

But seriously I'll only scout a little as you suggest, enough to know where our cities are to go. I very tight RCP build is certainly called for here.

Smackster

Just saw the results for SGOTM2 Wotan, congrats on a great game.

Also noticed that we have 2 in Europe and 2 in the US so far (not sure where Deceased Horse is located).

I'll start (partly as this is my 6th SGOTM, and I've not started one yet), but I'll arrange the order so we end up, Europe, US, Europe, US, that way there is a chance, that the scandinavian guys can play, and the US guys can pick it up same day and we can start talking about, and once in flow, play the next move same day. To begin I think its good to take a bit of time to talk about what to do on each set of moves.

Also for anyone that has not played one of these before, or SG's or Civ or whatever, if you are playing your turns, need help, need to stop, just post, take your time (I'm always on-line, well most of the time). If you only have a short span to play, then play the turns, don't worry about the write up. Better to play for two hours, than play one hour, write up for one hour.

Checkin' in. I'm on the west coast of the U.S., so pacific standard time for me.

Hi DeceasedHorse,

Good to see you Checking In.

So we have two Europe, two EST, and one PST. That's actually a pretty good mix.

For the record, I'm from the UK, live in the US (Boston), have lived in California, and was in both Norway and Sweden last year. I travel a lot so if you don't play your turns, I might turn up at your house Just to give you a little push.

But seriously (or not) we should play Europe, EST, PST, Europe, EST

Therefore I declare the roster as follows

smackster (playing)
Tarkeel (next up)
dmanahko
Wotan
DeceasedHorse

I'm playing as soon as its available, which it is not now, I think.

The key here is that this will turn into an AW game pretty soon. As such we need to get a survey of the initial land, to know where we will be attacked from, and form a defensive line that way. All of our cities should have 1 turn reinforcements from atlesat one or two other cities, and atleast the frontline cities have to make good use of hills and rivers for defense.

The xenophobic part is what hurts us most I think, and hopefully we'll find a few high food spots for all the settlers and workers we'll need to build.

The game is available now. MB have us down for "no" variant though, must be a typo sine the original team allocation listed us correctly as a variant team.

Anyone in the team played the original Gotm? If so, how far out can we safely scout wo too much risk of bumping into neighbours? I would really like for us to avoid contact until "they meet us" rather than "we meet them".

Didn't play the original gotm, but the spoiler threads are still available in the forum. I wouldn't count on them though, as I suspect mad-bax has been rearranging our immediate neigbourhood.

Peeking at the original thread would take away a lot of the fun in the game. I was just curious if someone on the team had played it and if so that info is already available for us. The problem with trying to unlearn things

Yeah, I agree Which is why I didn't link it Besides, I'm pretty sure that most of the info you can get from the spoilers would do us more bad then good..

One other thing that just hit me: For those of us (me included) that have been playing mainly conquests, remember that the forbidden palace isn't quite the same here.. If it's allowed in gotm now (couldn't see anything on it), we should probably go for a RCP style build.

RCP is OK and actually a must in PTW. In line with previous comments on this in our thread, I would suggest RCP3 or maybe 4. But that is in the end down to what the area around our startup really looks like.

Hi team, hope i didn't miss much.

I was hoping to post something yesterday, but thunderstorm knocked out my cable connection so i lost both TV and internet.
It's 7-30 AM EST and i am about to head to work, but i have few minutes to post my thoughts on the beggining of the game...

Well, I never played original GOTM so i have no idea what kind of map is that, i'd like to assume it's continental but correct me if i am wrong, or is it a mystery? I also don't know who our AI opponents are, i never had a chance to download save file with internet beeing down yesterday. I won't do it until tonight.
All my thoughts below based on pure speculation since i have no details on current game.
So there we go.

1. When we make a collective decision and there is some disagreement over decision made it should be prohibited for those team members whose ideas were rejected to do “I told you so” if things go wrong… I think we should be a team and have fun even if things go wrong. I know I didn’t have to mention this.
2. I do agree on having very close RCP city build.
3. We don’t have pottery and that kind of sucks. I agree it would be nice to get it ASAP; we can research pottery at Max rate in 15 to 19 turns. Although we can gamble with researching writing while hoping to buy Pottery from AI for nominal price.
4. Most of the game we will have to research ourselves, since we cannot make peace and demand techs from AI for it and it will become AW in not time. The only way to keep with AIs for us and not fall behind would be building of Great Library.
5. If we don’t build GB and this map is a continental map we won’t fall behind in tech with AIs that reside on the same continent with us. The reason is as soon as we will have war with all of them; their economies won’t be able to produce much science. Downside of this will be clear when we met Civilization on the other side of ocean. We will realize we are ages behind. Great Library would help here tremendously.
6. One single technology we need to win any war – Iron working. If we manage to get it soon and start pumping our Legionnaires, nobody is going to handle their attacks.
7. Conclusion… Out of all AA technologies most important would be: Pottery, Literature, and Iron Working. Importance is not necessary as in the order above
8. We probably should try to get Philosophy->Literature and be the 1st to build GB. I always try to follow this path in my Emperor games, but the big difference of course I never had to do always war xenophobic scenario, so I am not really sure if this will work… But then again we so badly need start building legionnaires and probably Iron working would take a priority.
9. At the beginning of the game we probably want to build at least 4 instead of 2 warriors, what do you guys think? I think best bet order would be: warrior-warrior-barracks-warrior-warrior-settler-archer-warrior-(may be granary here).... All following builds will depend on situation. I tried few test games on random maps yesterday and at least once I lost right at the very beginning of the game.
10. We probably should not start scouting area until after we build barracks, barracks are cheap for us since we are militaristic and will take just few turns. We will badly need it to produce veteran units at the beginning of the game.

Any suggestions?????

in reply to your thoughts Dmanakho, these are my comments:
1. Goes without saying.
2. Yes, probably at RCP3, maybe at 4 depending on the surrounding area.
3. Pottery at 100%.
4-5. GL is something to consider in this game. I normally never build it, unless I have a Great Leader too many... But with AW this game does not follow standard guidelines, so maybe. Unless a neighbour civ builds it so we can grab it, (my normal approach).
6-8. Legionaries will be a boost for us so going Pottery->Iron Working might be an option to consider too. As I see it we need to decide on whether to go Pottery->Literature or Pottery-> IW first.
9. I would say we go with Smacksters initial plan Warrior-Granary, but that depends on what is revealed in the first move(s). If we settle on the spot, yes, if not maybe another build order. If settling on the spot get the Worker over to Game and clear the forest/irrigate. Maybe build 2 warriors before granary though.

We won't be able to build Granary for another 15-19 turns, so at the beginning we have to make sure we have some units to defend our single city...
I would still try to build a 1st settler before granary.... I am not insisting on this though...