[Immortal] Co-op da Whoop #2

[Silu]

Hi again! After the last disastrous trek into the land of deities, we knock it down a notch this time, to Immortal. That means we have to spice it up a little otherwise!

Game Settings:

Immortal difficulty
Marathon speed
Large Fractal map, default map settings
2v2v2v2v2v2 team distribution, that is us vs 5 teams of 2 random AIs. 12 Civs on a map size that uses 9 as default, so things can get a bit crowded.

Our team composition this time is Shaka (AGG/EXP) of the Zulu (me) and Lincoln (PHI/CHA) of America (Fleme).

And the kicker:

To keep things interesting, we put up two small variant rules.

Shaka is not allowed to build buildings that either produce or give modifiers to culture, wealth or research. No Monuments, no Libraries, no Markets. National wonders are an exception to this rule, the Heroic Epic and Moai Statues are allowed. The jury is still out whether or not 7 Theatres are allowed to unlock Globe Theatre.

Lincoln is not allowed to build military units beyond a single unit per city. 'Nuff said, will definitely make Marathon barbs interesting.

---

Most of us know the UBs and UUs by now. An unique aspect to team play are the starting technologies, as they are combined when playing in a team. The Zulu and America get Fishing, Hunting and Agriculture, one of the worst combos there is, giving 140/220 possible starting beakers. Still, about 100 times better than playing Vikings & Greece The combination that gives most beakers is Agri/Wheel/Mining/Mysticism, while usually the one considered best (with huts on, anyway) is Agri/Wheel/Mining/Hunting to give both(!) Civs a Scout instead of a Warrior as a starting unit and a discounted AH. There are tons of Civ combinations that get these four techs. But I digress.

Here is my start:

Oh looky-look, I got an obsolete-start! Fascinating. Moving the Scout 1SW reveals a dry Corn 2W of the hut (and nothing else), making it a no-brainer to settle on the grass hill 1NW of the Settler.

We immediately run into Monte/Justinian, Monte being our nearest neighbor. This is NOT good news on Marathon, especially considering the one he is bordering is my near-helpless teammate. There is also a ton of tundra, likewise, not good news for barb-defense as I need to stretch the defenses across both of our empires. A bit farther away we meet HC/Mao, a much nicer team at least when HC isn't pressing your borders down with 5 classical wonders. Here is the land after 15 turns of exploration. Not that pretty of a sight. At least I'm the brawn instead of the brains in the team as this land suits that a bit more.

My initial build order is: Worker, Warrior, Warrior, Warrior, Warrior, Warrior, Warrior, Warrior, Warrior. Yeah... I really need to bust a safe route to my ally and get more busters and defenders there ASAP. I likewise need to get Impis online fast to be able to run to defend America from the nationless ones. Thankfully I at least have this 2-move unique unit, otherwise I would probably arrive hopelessly late.

Meanwhile we pop Sailing from a hut. This is actually really nice as you can see in this next picture. My Copper is some ways off and Sailing means I can skip roading 3 more tiles (20 turns!), getting my Copper online for my capital that much faster. There starts to be an awful lot of barb movement all around, and I'm not at all comfortable with having just a handful of Warriors to defend. Barb Spears and Axes can be expected shortly.

Oh, and we did have an edgy conversation on which city gets that eastern Corn My Gold-city proposition won! If you're not aware, team border tiles in many BFCs are assigned to the city which is closest to that tile. 2E being closer than 2W1S, it will go to me. For equal distances, culture is the tiebreaker as usual.

And that concludes our start blast of 100 turns. Feel free to tell us what you think of the game, variant and gameplay America's thoughts following shortly, I hope.

 

[Fleme]

I'm Lincoln!

So, for this installment I'm playing a thoroughly peaceful nation and as mentioned in the rules - the effects for me will be that I cannot build structures that give experience to military units (save for Airports) and can have no more than 1 military unit per city.

Furthermore, I'll be carrying our economy through this game while the Zulu police over America.

My start, well suited for economy for sure:

Ended up settling 1S.

To T100:

Washington proper:

Current core:

Northern parts:

As for my future plans, I aim to block Montezuma off so I can secure all that juicy [/sarcasm] tundra all to myself. All in all the position is strong and I'm looking forward to what will become of an economy of 1 in a teamgame.

 

[kossin]

Nice variant. Wish I could play some of those team games as well!

I guess it'll be worth (past-Currency) for the brawns to turn off research and give surplus gpt to the brains.
I'm assuming Shaka can build Culture @Music to get border pops and use Caste to run Artists?

Best of luck, will be lurking.

 

[Grashopa]

Can you guys post a starting save? Is it possible for two people to shadow your game?

 

[bestsss]

kossin, religion works just ok for border pops, esp. w/ OR/Theo

 

[kossin]

Good point bestsss, that slipped my mind.

 

[Silu]

Surplus? What surplus? (honestly speaking, yeah, good point) And yeah, religion border pops was the plan... would be a tad harsh otherwise.

Here's the starting save, I have no idea if/how it works. I guess it should work just fine straight-up. Your names might be locked as Silu/Fleme though.

EDIT: here it is.

 

[Sian]

would have been much easier if you had each others placement so Zulu was placed closest to the enemies and America could hide behind

 

[TCMIV]

Shouldn't America get that gold site since they can use wealth/research modifiers?

 

[Silu]

would have been much easier if you had each others placement so Zulu was placed closest to the enemies and America could hide behind

Yeah, but perhaps a lot more boring My land suits -only much better than science, too.

Shouldn't America get that gold site since they can use wealth/research modifiers?

It's not easily seen from the screenshots, but America has some 10 city sites without it. Me, I have room for 7 including a crappy tundra one if I get that site. Also, that site will never be a great lategame modifier-driven commerce city - it's however good for early game commerce (where modifiers don't matter that much) and some production, while being a semi-decent lategame production site.

In a perfect world it would be 1SE on the coast desert tile, however the damn Yankees thought this disturbs their settling pattern too much

 

[shyuhe]

Unless there's seafood down there, I'd move the Zulu corn site 1E and the American site 1SE too.

 

[Jet]

Why didn't you build the Great Wall?

 

[Silu]

Unless there's seafood down there, I'd move the Zulu corn site 1E and the American site 1SE too.

Putting the Corn in the 2nd ring is somewhat of a risk though when you have no control on when you get border pops. Coastal with a popped Sailing is nice for the same reason And I think Lincoln is quite protective over those flood plains of his... Would probably work as well, there's many ways to skin a mediocre-land dotmap

Why didn't you build the Great Wall?

Fleme should have built that at the cost of expansion (delaying the land block), his forests, and tech in the form of the early Masonry. A calculated risk I guess, and the spy pollution isn't nice either for PHI, our neighbors aren't known for their great teching so stealing isn't that enticing either. I don't like the GW at all without IND or Stone except under extreme circumstances.

 

[Silu]

Onwards!

So, we left our brave civilizations at the brink of peril when facing the nationless ones. We get a sighting of a black Axeman on America's borders, and my first Impi is hurrying towards it, Shock promotion ready to be taken to hopefully save the Americans from peril. However, this proves to be unnecessary! Check this hero out:

After this heroic act, the barbarians were a bit more hesitant in approaching America. We got a sighting of another Axe in the same area, but could not find it even though all new Zulu warriors hurried to defend America. Well, turns out they had other plans as you can see. The barbs really handed my ass to me because I sent almost all of my busters and warriors to the eastern reaches. A Corn field, Gold mine and a regular mine were all pillaged prior to this. And yeah, that anarchy is for Slavery to conjure up an Axe of my own...

For a change, I get a windfall in the form of border pops! Yay!

And shortly after the Total Bustage(tm) is completed. Try to spot all the 8 brave busters (not counting the Mr. Obvious-Scout-is-Obvious near Monte's area) in this picture and check the spoiler if you were correct! Rolo is handing out Internet cookies to all that answered correctly. Anyway, this was the end of barbs as we know them.

Spoiler :

At the time the kill list was 10 Warriors, 5 Archers, 3 Axemen and 2 Spearmen at 1920BC. Could be worse, my personal best is 37 barb kills at 1400BC on Marathon (solo, no raging barbs or cooked map).

Here're some overall pictures when we were wrapping things up. I was actually persuaded to alter my dotmap to put the third city 1 tile north, in order to get the Marble in the first ring. We already got Aesthetics and are working on Poly, so you can try to guess what my Philosophical friend is going for here... We also partially researched Alpha, hopefully we can trade Aesth for it soon.

Here is the teeny-tiny anti-Monte force, growing as fast as possible. He's eyeing HC quite hungrily at the time, but I don't think he will provide much resistance for very long, because his ally seems to be on another continent. Not reachable pre-Astro judging by the absence of Chinese units and boats.

And the proverbial back-scratching moment to wrap things up:

Next up: hopefully stabilization&expansion&americawonderation!

 

[Fleme]

Not a whole lot to report from America. Initially we planned that the round would last to t200 but I somehow managed to forget that so we played on to t205 instead. What a fine turn to report.

Anyhow, since I was militarily restrained I relied heavily on Zulu military police from the get-go and the first troops Silu built actually made their way through barbarian lions and bears just to secure my borders. Impis actually came in really handy.

Being of next to no military, things like this gave me scares:

The dialogue by Silu is saying that Monte could dagger-dow.

Washington was the obvious choice for a GP farm given that it has ample food for early GP farming, all the while boasting sufficient production to handle my settler production needs, notice the happy cap:

Here's what I intended as the final overview shot for the round:

See if you can spot what's different in the shot taken next turn:

Spoiler :

In the first screen from 1480 BC the mine near Boston is not completed. In 1470 BC it's completed and on the very same turn Gems pop. I've never seen this before, but I'll gladly take it.

 

[DMOC]

I would like to have that luck popping gems.

 

[Zexx]

Wouldn't we all...
Fun game to watch, I can't understand the restriction on either player though.

If it's too easy why not jump a level? The previous attempt? Deity is like that, from what I understand, sometimes you get smacked in the face with bad luck and can't claw your way back. That's no reason to quit trying!

 

[Meiz]

IMO variants really spice up the single player as well. You are forced to adjust and invent new strategies, instead of repeating the basic ones over and over.

Great writeup guys

 

[roberteriksson]

Yeah great writeup, following this with interest!

 

[Silu]

Wouldn't we all...
Fun game to watch, I can't understand the restriction on either player though.

If it's too easy why not jump a level? The previous attempt? Deity is like that, from what I understand, sometimes you get smacked in the face with bad luck and can't claw your way back. That's no reason to quit trying!

Why not play more forum-Deity? Well, considering the Immortal<->Deity gap is about the same as Prince/Monarch<->Immortal, it can get a bit taxing at times. You can do everything right, and still get a 20-unit (for each team member) Cat+Sword SoD on your doorstep at 1800BC, or 2 barb Spears and 2 barb Axes at 2500BC. We tried a couple of Deity starts first, 2 were isolation (boring reports), 1 was too hard and boring (boring reports) and 1 was way too easy (boring reports, and nobody would have believed it wasn't WB'd ). The variance is huge.

So we got some cooldown on doing those. If it looks like people are interested we will certainly do more of those in the future, though. For the time being, variants are fun and we haven't really tried out team-member specific variants like these before.