The War Room

I just think it’s so comical every time I think about it. Of all the Persian leaders, they picked the one for sure 99% of players would have abandoned. Darius I is so powerful that it’s been said he’s the strongest in the game. Financial/Org. In fact, this is part of the reason why Firaxis delayed making him available for so long. The killer UU is just extra icing on the cake.

But no… they don’t take the (overpowered) leader… they take the war-monger Persian leader instead. The one who has absolutely no economic traits. Haha.

It is either a very smart move, or very dumb, we shall see. At least I can see where IMP speeds up settler expansion, and charismatic adds an extra happy or two. So if they find out they have no horses, there is a little bit of compensation.

It is certainly not as bad a mistake as taking Tuku, but in both instances, they are announcing their cards before the hand is over.
 
I think with Cyrus they're more likely to try and align themselves with one of the strong tech civs against a common enemy. They would of said that with Darius they would be too big a target, now with Cyrus they might be able to try and take people out early (either by force with their UU or with a good REx.) but you never know the real reasoning behind it.
 
Maybe I'm overthinking this.... but I've been thinking about what babybluepants said -- the Immortals get a bonus vs Archers... who builds archers in MP (honestly, I don't know -- but I would guess it would be nobody unless absolutely necessary).

Maybe this obvious "showing of cards" is an attempt to get a neighbor to build spears instead of axes? Then they march a stack of axes?

Or maybe, they are just hoping for a resourceless neighbor.
 
Egypt always seemed better to me for a chariot rush against humans...


A contingency plan for bad early neighbours sounds essential with our wonder building. Just too big a target...

Figure the key kicker is what our early scouting reveals...
 
Well, if they can get to a human in time to prevent a copper mine (which is certainly conceivable), Immortals could be just hell to deal with.

I just can't, for the life of me, understand the choice of Cyrus. He is so clearly inferior to Darius in every way. Either they are really gambling on an effective choke and settler spam to get themselves huge early, or they are just being silly. Probably a bit of both, IMHO. In the former case, I would probably much prefer Hattie myself. There is no economic upside, so they are gonna need to secure a really great alliance to get anywhere.

As for our plans, they'll just have to take an adjustment if and when we meet our neighbors and learn something about the map setup. Hard to speculate like this...
 
Mono is pouring beakers down a dead-end tech tree. If we go after a religion other than the early cheap two, then maybe CoL with our fast tech speed? We need CoL anyway for various things.

But I do think it is such a waste to start with myst, and throw away the whole advantage of getting a religion from a tech that we need to research early in the game anyway. Most people hate Myst because it doesn't allow your workers to do anything. I think we should use it very early to maximize its advantage, or else it's almost giving us a disadvantage here by taking up a precious worker-tech slot.
 
Ok so firstly I think that The Mike had a very good point about the immortal bluff and a stack of axes showing up, one which we should keep in mind, (obviously this all depends on the map).

But secondly, while I agree that copper will probably be close enough and Immortals probably won't wipe us out in the BC's, we should STILL be worried about a Dow, mostly because no matter how ineffective the war is, it will still slow us down considerably relative to the other teams. As people have pointed out, the ONLY reason that you would go for Cyrus over Darius is to expand quicker (although this is highly debatable when you're going up against Fin/Org) and WAR. This means that if they have a plan for winning it probably involves a lot of war to keep up with the Fin civs.

However, this means that they will also be relying heavily on diplomacy to secure their backsides if they're at war, this means that in the event that we aren't their current target, we could potentially profit because they would be desperate for allies and desperate to keep up with the other civs.

One thing is clear, the Cyrus team isn't looking to keep up and win through peaceful teching...
 
I don’t know about this axeman trick. If they really wanted to go axes, they should have at least chosen aggressive. They would have had a free promotion for each of them AND a super-cheap BARRACKS which practically counts as giving them 2 promotions free.

The way they are doing this, is such a costly endevour on many fronts, I’m not sure what to say.

I think when summed up logically, they just don’t know what they are doing?

I even debate sometimes if they accidentally chose the wrong Persian leader by accident and no one noticed.

Assuming we are not on one of those silly donut maps, because we have our backs against the sea it is most likely that the first person we come across will be sandwiched between us and someone else. Thus they will have quite a bit to worry about.
 
I don't think they would all band together just because they are financial and their cottages are being pillaged. What's stopping them from taking advatage of that and doing to same to each other?
 
I was racking my brains about Cyrus over the weekend... could it be some kind of strategy involving fast expansion to big(ish) cities leveraging their fast settlers and boosted happy cap. Probably planning to use the henge for free monuments?

Frankly for warmongering there just seem a number of flat out better choices?
 
Guys, Niklas just calculated from the Demographics, that the Amazons are now officially going after AH to get their immortals online.

This is not just an ESTIMATE, or GUESTIMATION. It is a 100% fact. A totally certifiable calculation. The Amazons are researching AH now to find some sucker who falls for their IMPS-TRICK.

We may be out of their range at the moment, but we could also be their closest neighbour. I guess it's time to shift into Yellow Alert, for now, with a strong possibility of going into Red depending what happens in the near future.

I will be very worried if we have trouble finding copper.

Hopefully we don't have to change our Oracle engineering, or this could really mess up our plans.
 
I agree there - Cyrus with AH first would not make a pleasant neighbour. Spears are the only sensible answer... finding copper, settling/mining/roading it, hunting - it's a long sidetrack. :( Lets hope they're a 'SEP' (someone elses problem!)

Hopefully copper will be around, as it's an MP hand built map, I'd really hope it is... but that's no guarantee!
 
Suddently setting on top of the copper if it's on the hill 3W seems much more palatable than before.

Yellow alert it is, but for now this is just a state of general caution. If we happen to MEET the Amazons soonish, that's a big cause for alarm. But for now, for all we know we might be on an archipelago map, which would severely diffuse the level of their threat.
 
Well, I don't see how knowing this changes anything for us. :) Like Snaaty pointed out, we're going Agri-BW regardless. For all we know, Amazon have a pig in their BFC. I wouldn't be concerned unless we meet them in the first 10t.
 
We will be very vulnerable until around T-60. So I'd rather worry a bit about it now, instead of later when we have an "Oh Sh*t!!" moment at the last second. I have certainly no desire to be taken out by a bunch of rookies :p

Anyhow, I believe we are playing on a continent's map, so indeed they may not even be on our continent. If this is indeed archipelago, and they are stuck on a tiny island, I'm sure we will hear no end to how they got their starting strategy nerfed and how unfair that was to their leader.
 
Hiya, I'm pretty late to the party it seems, and currently drowning in a sea of posts I need to study before I can be of any use :) Anyway, this is a good enough place to start as any I guess.

Suddently setting on top of the copper if it's on the hill 3W seems much more palatable than before.

I would think a settled-on plains hill Copper is by far the most optimal place to have it. Losing a single :hammers: / t (because it still gives an effective +1 on a plains tile) feels nothing compared to the pillage-proofing, plus the hill on top makes it very hard to take down.

About the Amazon team and their leader pick & player personalities... Well, I guess it's no secret that TMIT is known for his unorthodox strategies based on "virtual power" and denying enemy opportunities rather than go for pure power for himself through science. The only other player I know there is mariogreymist, who's a Marathon player with the Immortal as his avatar... I think that tells enough :)

My reasoning for them picking Cyrus is this: they want to give the impression of being the most dangerous of the bunch - after all 4 of the others are FIN, who probably want at least some cottages even early on, so they will theoretically have less hammers to put in military. Now, this leads everyone to fear them most by far (as evident by the discussion in this thread as well), which in turn makes people hesitate settling towards them and favor settling towards others instead. This would create somewhat of a no-mans land or a settling vacuum, which they aim to fill with IMP Settlers. Land is power, so they could gain an economic lead through land alone.

I wouldn't count out Immortals as a MP UU here just because Spears stomp all over them. Settling towards that team can indeed be really annoying, with 2-move harassers that cannot be countered by cheap city defense. Workers would need more escorting, which in turn can make the cities more vulnerable to a bum rush from a dozen Immortals. A huge harass-helper thing about Immortals that didn't get mentioned yet I think is that they receive defensive bonuses. This makes them infinitely better as harassers compared to regular Chariots. A single dude sitting on a forest hill in the middle of someone's empire can tie up tons of resources and be relatively resilient to Spear attack (since it can dodge them as well if threatened).
 
This is exactly what was said on the map:

Dave McW in the thread in the main forum said:
Map Vote

Mavericks
1. Archipelago/Snaky Continents
1. Global Highlands
3. Wheel

AMAZON
1. Mapmaker's Choice
2. Snaky Continents
3. Global Highlands

Sirius
- Standard or larger map, sea level adjusted accordingly for six teams
- Contact between all teams should be possible via land or coast, but NOT ocean
- Our preference is in the direction of a continents/islands setup rather than pangaea
- We think it would be a good idea to have at least some initially uninhabited islands (something the last map lacked)
- Overall though we vote for the mapmaker's choice as to the layout

CDZ
1. Donut
2. Wheel
3. Mapmaker's Choice

Merlot
1. All civs will have land contact with each other.
2. All civs will have roughly equal land quality
3. All civs will have roughly equal land quantity
4. All civs will have roughly equal distance from each other
5. All civs will have either coastal or non coastal starts (all or none)

Quatronia
1. Mapmaker's choice
2. Archipelago/Snaky Continents
3. Donut

Based on these results, I will be designing a custom mystery map for the Demogame. I already have several ideas about what to do, thanks to great suggestions from several of the teams.

So there's 4 civs here that have stated a preference for a watery map of some description. I have a very strong feeling that Dave will have taken this into consideration. Some other things to note:

- 3 out of 6 have specifically asked for archipelago/snaky continents as their first specific preference
- only 2 civs have expressed preference for a Pangaea, with Sirius on the fence.
- Donut (which is a common Pangaea MP map choice) was only mentioned twice.

Based on this, I think the chances of us having a Pangaea map are negligible. My feeling is, as I said in the other thread, that he'll have gone for a more archipelago-like map, with some civs separated by water (but not ocean). My guess is a 2-2-2 continent split.
 
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