Not that I'm in much of a disagreement here but it's an interesting post. I also slightly changed the order in OP.
Aggressive settling to me only makes sense if you can either 1) defend the city, or 2) secure DOFs quickly, or 3) just bribe the neighbor(s).
In the end we seem to have gone for a 4-city Liberty CB push which is a fine strategy, but completely unexpected after a discussion about how we wanted to plant like 10 expos. Perhaps it was better to call off any further expansion and just focus on killing things and getting a sub-100 NC, but to me it seemed like the overall mood in the thread was to plant more cities even if the in-game actions suggested otherwise.
Yeah, something like that
Aggressive being a relative term here and the city locations do matter the Uluru city being a prime example - it doesn't need a Worker or unit(s) for dozens of turns to perform its main function. Sure it'll be a crappy one for ages but it still (sort of) works. The frontline cities on the other hand need to be defended or at least be able to defend if needed.
I don't mind the change of plan from ~10 city wide start to 4C CB rush but I'm more used to doing that with some units as without them it seems unnecessarily hard though interesting to a degree. The Pacal's DoW was a wonderful surprise but I really would've liked to have some units to defend with and not having to go into full panic mode every citiy building units in the end.
(As a side note, I think that even if bribing isn't an exploit per se, it makes the game much easier, more so than any other game mechanic mentioned in the ruleset, save for maybe the white peace bug. I don't like such get out of jail free cards, but I concede they might be necessary for SGs go to smoothly, or just in general for Deity to be less tedious to play. What I liked about the original no bees and no gold from AIs rules is that there was a very real chance to lose or at least be heavily punished for mistakes, like in the Rome game)
I've never seen it as an exploit in general but as half-heartedly implemented mechanic. It isn't always easy to bribe anyone to attack anything & it might get pricy which is fine but giving Attila or Shaka a free meal & a t-shirt to DoW the rest of the world is moronic.
The no ban is interesting oneand it generally makes the game easier no doubt but that it's highly dependable on one's actions & starting location. While it makes Dom probably (much) harder it may not have any effect on Sci.
The Purist's way is surely harder in any respect but that also affects warmongering way more than peaceful play. This might heavily change depending on one's view about pillage & repair.
Hence my calls to build military and caravans - military for defence and barb control, caravans for positive diplo, plus extra gold for bribes if needed, plus science to reach Construction or whatever quicker. Stockholm -> Nimrud was a TR that we could've sent much earlier. The two nearby camps had archers in them so the Pike could've just walked over them. We could've quickly gotten a few Archers, Stoneworks and Caravan (preferrably with overflow from a Settler) in Stockholm - it had decent hammers and 3 chops, so this wouldn't have delayed expansion too much. And with 3 quarries and +50% to settler production SW pays for itself in like 12 turns anyway. Sending a TR to Pacal was safe as well.
Instead we went for a build order that to me seemed to contradict everything we had talked about before that. So my line of thinking was to try and compensate for the hammers we lost in Stockholm with production in our expos, which is why I suggested chopping Caravan/Military/Worker in Helsinki and Archer-Settler in Sigtuna, and started a Settler in Birka. Basically just trying to catch up to what I thought the original plan was.
I don't see any TR properly safe when the cities have camps nearby & tiles are pillaged but I agree that the diplo bonus could've been achieved even if the Caravan wasn't necessarily turning into the Silk Road. Ashur's front was screaming a Caravan on turn of settling. Just a couple Archers and the order of the rest would've been of marginal importance.
- Why Gandhi, because I figured Ashur wouldn't actually commit any troops to attacking Pacal so that's kind of pointless. I didn't think about the positive diplo for being at war with the same civ. (This illustrates the off-script conversation perfectly. And why I understand that Gren and vadalaz get frustrated - I simply don't think of the things that you all think of. They never enter my mind so it seems like we're going off-script when really I never rehearsed the script in the first place.)
Nah, it's not that bad at all. In my case it really wasn't a choice between continuing, asylum or death. It was a practical solution but once again I could've been more careful with wording. As I said I thought the plan got lost in translation and switching to units whatever was in progress was changed or at least postponed so it didn't make much sense of doing that again in 40 turns before surely leaving for at least a week. My actions were ad hoc solutions to a potential problem, not a logical follow-up to much of anything happening previously and if someone actually predicted & planned the chaos in Sigtuna then you may have my congratulations - it apparently was a perfect balance between timing & hammers put into it. Slightly too exciting for my taste, though.
