RBtS1a - The Thief Economy

Welcome to the first RB succession game run with the new expansion . If you are interested in checking out RB, now is a good time to join the ever popular potluck event, also on BTS.

There will be two teams running this game based on tech stealing.



Roster
Darrell
Qwack
Ozbenno
blid
uberfish

Rules
* All techs with the exception of Ancient Era techs unlocking Worker actions, Writing, and Alphabet (necessary to build spies) must be stolen.
* Cannot detonate a Great Spy bomb.

I'll take 30 turns to start, then 20 for everyone else in round 1. After that its 15 turns during peace or 10 turns during war. Other than that, standard RB rules apply. Save and starting screenshot to appear shortly .

Darrell

Okay...not what I was hoping for . Expansive and a UB that gives two happy; it would have been nice to use that extra population to work Financial boosted river cottages. Still, should be nice production, I see enough food to work all the hills. Lots of forrests to chop, we'll need to prioritize Bronze Working to get the capital moving and to enable our UU. My thoughts on the opening are this:

1. Fishing/Warrior to start, juggling tiles so that the Warrior completes when Fishing comes in.

2. Workboat next, working the forest/plains/hill. Grow to size two before swapping to a Worker (since we are Expansive, we'll end up getting the Worker out faster this way).

3. After Fishing, Animal Husbandry via Hunting (necessary for our UU).

The tough question is do we want to research Agriculture prior to AH for the discount? My instinct is yes, since we will need Farms eventually. On the flip side, we won't be able to build Farms until we have Bronze Working. I guess the decision should be based on whether waiting for Agriculture means our Worker will have to wait to improve the Cows. Depending, we can either squeeze out another Warrior before the Worker (or at least sink some hammers in it, timing things so that the Worker hits the Cows the turn AH comes in), or we just skip Agriculture for now and waste some beakers to get the Cows going faster. Thoughts?

Darrell

Count me as an official Lurker, i want to see the Espionage system.

Lurker question: What is the Great Spy bomb? Never heard this before.

negyvenketto said:

Lurker question: What is the Great Spy bomb? Never heard this before.

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I think the "official" term is infiltrate. What you do is move your Great Spy into one of your opponent's cities and select "infiltrate". You immediately receive a one time payout in EP, IIRC 4000 at Normal (it is supposed to scale with game speed but apparently that is broken). We are banning this because early in the game it can be unbalanced.

Darrell

Checking in, Im leaving for now, but ill post my thoughts when im back.

Probably-not-going-to-lurk-because-we'll-be-on-the-same-map-person's-comment:

Best of luck to you guys. This will no doubt be a pretty tough game, but if any team is set up to handle it....it will be my team in RBts1b

But the second most capable team - all you!

Fishing -> Hunting -> AH -> BW gets my vote as the best way to ramp up productivity - also we want to spot the resources before our first settler is out if possible. I don't think losing a few beakers from skipping agriculture is really important here.

Are we allowed to research ancient techs like sailing and polytheism, or only worker techs?

Lurkers comment

First of all, good luck to you all ( and to team b as well ). This will be a nice way to put a test control to the Espionage feature of BTS, and with only 2/3 weeks of game of experience, that is a daunting task...

Second, in spite of not being allowed to Spy bomb ( I agree that is overpowered ), maybe would be advisable to get GW early. For that you would need Masonry ( can be researched, isn't it? It's a worker tech ( quarries )... ) and BW ( for the chopping ). For that, maybe Fishing -> BW ->(slavery anarchy)-> Masonry ->Hunting -> AH would be a possible tech path....

Third: I haven't followed the RB forums ( shame on me... ), but rule 1 (All techs with the exception of Ancient Era techs unlocking Worker actions, Writing, and Alphabet (necessary to build spies) must be stolen.) implies that you can't oracle or bulb techs? That would make things a little harder....

Sorry for the long lurker post ( hope that not long enough to break the lurker's etiquette ), and again I wish you the best of lucks!

Checkin in.
I won't bother with the agriculture too, unless there is some hidden food resource, but I doubt it.
To make up for the missing cottages, I think we should aim for the GW like r_rolo1 said. An early settled great spy would help, and maybe even a second later on to build scotland yard. That is if we can research masonry of course.
Double great generals points should be nice too with these aggressive settings.

Apart from their culture, libs won't be of any use to us. We can just decide there's no science multiplier buildings at all, eliminating the need to micromanage unwanted scientists. We can rule out representation too, another way to ensure there's no beakers invested anytime. The happiness can be easily compensated by monarchy.

I think we should put a high espionage weight on the techwhore AIs. We may be faced with nothing interesting to steal early on. Hoping here, someone would get to currency and COL early.

I'm out of town starting this saturday for a whole week. So put me at the end of roster or skip if need be.

Somebody better write their turns in the voice of Garrett!

uberfish said:

Are we allowed to research ancient techs like sailing and polytheism, or only worker techs?

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Only Worker techs. Mysticism is good news/bad news. It is the one starting tech we aren't allowed to steal, but we can't pursue a religion to take advantage of it.

r_rolo said:

Third: I haven't followed the RB forums ( shame on me... ), but rule 1 (All techs with the exception of Ancient Era techs unlocking Worker actions, Writing, and Alphabet (necessary to build spies) must be stolen.) implies that you can't oracle or bulb techs? That would make things a little harder....

Click to expand...

Thanks for the post, it wasn't too long . RB rules don't cover the particular variant rules, they are more along the lines of time for a "got it" post, duration of turnsets, banned exploits, etc. We cannot build The Oracle, nor lightbulb techs, nor trade for techs (noteworthy since the AI will be allowed to).

Good advice uberfish/blid. I know Qwack wanted to get his inputs in but I'm probably going to have a window in an hour or so to play, and I plan on taking advantage of it. Hopefully he or Ozzy have a chance to chime in by then.

Darrell

We dont need agriculture here. We have 5 surplus from the cows + clam, and we can grow to size 5 working the grassland forests, then switch over to the mines. Hunting is cheaper, and also gives beakers off of AH, and leads to archery incase we dont have copper/horses nearby.

I agree with Uberfish's tech plan. Also, in terms of workboat build, I suggest going warrior first and fishing, then when fishing is availble, instead of going to the plains hill, its better to grow to size 2 first than work 1 plains hill and 1 grassland forest. This will optimize food and hammers.

Cannot detonate a Great Spy bomb.

Click to expand...

So this means we can build the GW? If it does I would consider going after it, more so if we have stone nearby. Spy for Scotland Yard and protection against barbarians for 150 hammers (Especially with our good production capital) will be worth it.

Okay, so consensus is Agriculture can wait.

Qwack said:

Hunting is cheaper, and also gives beakers off of AH, and leads to archery incase we dont have copper/horses nearby.

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Archery is not allowed . However, we are lucky in that the Mayan's UU is resourceless, and both required techs are allowed.

Qwack said:

Also, in terms of workboat build, I suggest going warrior first and fishing, then when fishing is availble, instead of going to the plains hill, its better to grow to size 2 first than work 1 plains hill and 1 grassland forest. This will optimize food and hammers.

Click to expand...

Hmm...I am going to assume you mean AFTER the Workboat is built, which was my plan. I think it will be several turns after Fishing comes in before we hit size 2, even working a grassland forest. Better to get the Workboat out ASAP and work the Clams. However, I'll pay attention...if we are close to size 2 when Fishing comes in I'll do the math and take the optimal route. That said, I don't want to delay getting that second Warrior out, so I'll need to work a plains forest at least some of the time while waiting on Fishing.

Qwack said:

So this means we can build the GW?

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The Great Wall is allowed, Masonry is allowed, I agree we go for it and settle the first GS, then use the second to be build Scotland Yard. For our variant, the super espionage city will be one capable of running lots of cottages, which probably WON'T be the one we build the GW in.

Okay, playing now.

Darrell

Uh...yeah. So I played the turns. Qwack was right BTW, it was better to stick with the GF until size 2 (it was a trade-off of 15 commerce vs. 14 food, and I'd rather have the food). On the plus side, we have Stone in the BFC and popped Agriculture from a hut. On the negative side we have an isolated start which makes this variant slighly more challenging than I anticipated . So, I'm going to roll a new start for the next post.

Darrell

Okay, take 2. I would say settle in place, tech path should be Hunting -> Animal Husbandry, and Worker first (Warrior has already been moved). BTW, the southern water is coast, not that it will change the opening.

Darrell

hunting->AH it shall be. And just find a location with access to both horses and stone. Should be easy right? right?

darrelljs said:

On the negative side we have an isolated start which makes this variant slighly more challenging than I anticipated .

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ROFL

Our UU spear requires hunting+BW and is resourceless, I thought that was why we picked Mayans since it makes up for archery not being allowed

We might as well try for the Great Wall since we don't have any other GP sources otherwise, think we can squeeze a couple of settlers out first?

Checking in.

Had comments ready on the first start but will put them away now

Second start. Hmmm. Will we have AH researched by the time a worker appears? If no, I'd go warrior, worker. Hunting is a better path to AH (although I don't know we have enough food to work the hills, so may need a couple of plains farms eventually).

Are we allowed BW before Writing/Alphabet? Seems somewhat against the variant. If so, chopping the GW does seem a good idea.

Okay, the game has given us some interesting options. First off, I was able to squeeze out a Warrior before the Worker like Ozzy recommended (cost a little food but we weren't hitting size 2 before the Worker anyway), which turned out to be a good thing as we hit four huts:



We are not isolated this time . Our opponents include some pretty tasty builders:



Hinduism was FIADL in 3600 B.C., and our good buddy Wang Kong founded Buddhism in 3300 B.C. After Animal Husbandry came in (Worker due next turn, must have screwed the math up on the number of turns to research the tech), we get something tasty:



Here's an overview of our lands (emphasis on our):



I stopped one turn early, it is a really interesting start especially considering our variant rules. Darius and Hatshepsut are very close...in a normal game they would both be toast Aggressive AI or not. However, with our variant rules we run the risk of leaving Wang Kon to pull the entire tech load for our continent (assuming of course no more leaders show up). He's Financial and a good builder, but there are still three civs out there that might trade their way to a prohibitive tech lead, and remember we can't get a single EP on them until we meet them.

I think we need to take one out, and I am open to taking both out, so let's examine our options. First off, both Hatshepsut and Darius have a Chariot based UU, while our UU is based on Spears, and resourceless to boot. That's tasty. On the other hand, we have horsies in our BFC, and could go that direction as well. I think speed wise they are about the same. We should get the Pigs up and running first to ramp up our growth (and in any case we'll need The Wheel and roads before we can make Chariots), whereas Bronze Working is another 24 turns away. Bronze Working has the advantage of allowing forest chops, so that's my recommendation. We can also scout Hatty better and see if she has horses nearby.

Qwack, you are up for 21 turns.

Darrell