RBTS6 - Finally Ready for Noble!

And even without tile improvements we reached the rank of Augustus Caesar. :)


Congratulations with the victory. This has been a very fun game. :)
 
And even without tile improvements we reached the rank of Augustus Caesar. :)

Very enjoyable game to follow. :goodjob: :cool:

Although as a player who is trying to get the hang of Noble, without any self imposed restrictions, it is somewhat dispiriting to realise how easily this team strolled through the game. :crazyeye: :cry:
 
Hi all! Very nice game indeed. I am happy that someone tried that before I would ever think of it :D

Nice way to show some core mechanisms about city upkeep and commerce counting. Thank you for (not just) that!
 
Well played, Zeviz! :goodjob: We managed to wrap things up before 1850, very nice.

I have to run for now, but I'm going to sit down this evening and read through the B team's thread and then make some comments here. They have a lot of posts as well, so I wonder how things are going (?)
 
lurker's comment: Congratulations! :clap:

It was quite entertaining to follow both threads and to see two different strategies at work
 
Great game guys. As usual, interesting variant, nice play, good discussion and beautiful reports!

I'm already awaiting the next RBtS SG. What will it be..? :lol:
 
I hate to make comparisons right now, since the B team is still playing and can't take part in them. At the same time, I feel the need to get these thoughts down on paper now, because in another two or three weeks they won't be fresh in my mind. So with apologies in advance to our peers in the other game, here are some of my thoughts. :)

First off, I have to say that I didn't even know whether or not the B team would be playing the same civ or map as we did. That was all still under discussion when I passed along the starting save file to sunrise. It was a pleasant surprise to see that we were in fact using the same scenario, which would make direct comparisons possible. Or, so I thought before reading the other thread, anyway... The games diverged VERY quickly, to say the least! :lol:

- The first notable difference occurred on the very first turn of the game, when mostly_harmless moved to settle on the plains hill tile instead of the wines, as we did in the A game. This was a huge change right from the very start, with the B team pulling an extra shield each turn, but growing much more slowly to compensate. Their capital city would never be able to grow past size 6! Needless to say, this was a drastic difference from the situation that my team found itself in. Yet, given the strategy that the B team chose to employ, going with a shield-heavy start was actually the right move, because:

- The B team went aggressive right from the start. :eek: Whether or not this was the intent, mostly_harmless directed the B team towards an early rush by researching Mining and then Bronze Working out of the gate, opening up the possibility for very quick dog soldiers. In our game, I deliberately and knowingly went for a religion first, opening with Mysticism/Polytheism and founding Hinduism in the capital. We opted to start out by building several warriors to serve as scouts, followed by a settler once Cahokia hit size 3. In the B game, the team went warrior, barracks, dog soldier - with game-changing effects.

- That single dog soldier went on to kill off both Joao and Wang, wiping the continent clear of opponents (in 2700BC and 2175BC, respectively). Obviously no such thing happened in the A game, where we were focusing on exploration and an early settler at the same time. Now the strategy employed by the B team was perfectly legitimate, and I'm actually glad that they took a different path than we did for comparative purposes. At the same time, you will never, ever see a decapitation strike like that in any of my games, or in any succession game that I captain. I can't ever forget the discussion we had back in pre-release testing, where Soren Johnson explained that he could program the AI to defend against early rushes, but he would have to break the game for normal play in order to do so. We agreed at the time that it was better to leave things alone, and trust players not to exploit the AI's shortcomings in this regard. (The AI has been deliberately programmed not to "see" an early rush coming; it will always give you peace in the first ~80 turns of the game, and assumes you will do the same.)

Like I said, I don't blame others for taking that route, but it's not for me. :cool:

- One thing I do wonder is whether or not the B team should have held on to one of those capitals, rather than razing them both down. The maintenance costs would have been rough, but it might have been worth it anyway, given how slowly it took to build settlers. I think we were ALL surprised by that, everyone on both teams being used to having resources to help with settler production!

- Another difference that might sound minor, but wasn't: the B team never adopted Slavery civic in their game. We used it constantly, incessantly throughout the whole run in our game. In fact, double-whipping settlers in the capital was a major component of the gameplan. I think that this may have something to do with the higher food threshhold we had at our capital; whipping really didn't make much sense at the capital in the B game. But it certainly looks like it would have helped elsewhere in some other cities (?) Even locations with no food bonuses can get major benefits from Slavery if used properly.

- I was also amused by the comments about how many "views" and "posts" each thread was attracting. I honestly don't pay any attention to those things while these games are going on - but it looks like some people do. ;)

- What was interesting is that both teams picked the stone location for their second city. We were both thinking in terms of the Pyramids on that one, no doubt about it! After that, my team had to settle for a coastal city in the east (on the iron), while the B team was able to place a city in the north (cow city) in what was Portugese territory in the A game. That had the advantage of linking together the two river systems... but was otherwise a rather weak location, with little commerce and few two-food tiles. I believe that our iron city was actually a better spot, given the nature of the variant. But of course, we were able to send trade routes around the northern ice via Open Borders with Joao and Wang, which wasn't a possibility in the B game. Interesting how even the minor details can be affected by the removal of the other civs...

- It was neat to read how the early wonders played out, simply because there were a lot of similarities mixed with crucial differences. In the A game, we built the Great Lighthouse first in stone city, then chopped out the Pyramids in gem city at a later date. In the B game, they built the Pyramids first at the capital, then completed the Great Lighthouse at the same stone city. (This was absolutely the right call for their game, since their capital had a lot more production than ours did.) No big difference, right? Well, the result was that the A team's first Great Person was a Merchant, while the B team's first Great Person was an Engineer. We used our Merchant as a super-specialist, further boosting the food output of Cahokia (to 4 food/turn with corn) and setting it up for future synergy with a Hindu shrine. The B team instead used their first Engineer to rush the Great Library in the capital. This gave them access to the Library at an earlier date... but at the same time, it also deprived them of a (Representation) super-specialist in the capital. It's difficult to say which was the better move, I'm merely pointing out the differences.

- I do think that the B team lost focus somewhat in the middle of the game, with very little happening on their continent besides slow growing of cities and movement of units. The fact that they had some player turnover (with Atlas sidelined due to computer problems) surely didn't help things here. Aside from sunrise's uber-sized pictures around 1500AD, there wasn't much talk of dotmapping or planning city sites, which may be a reason why there seemed to be fewer cities founded overall in the B game. Again, I don't mean that as a criticism, just an observation. We were fighting for our lives much of the time in the early AD years, which kept everyone on the edge of their seats.

- One broad-based comment that is a criticism of sorts: I don't think the B team got enough out of using the coastal tiles. You could see from our early dotmaps that literally all of the thinking in the A game revolved around use of the sea, leveraging our control of Great Lighthouse + Colossus and trade routes to compensate for the lack of tile improvements. In contrast, the B team obviously had no one to trade with (since Joao and Wang were dead), and they were unfortunately unable to land the Colossus before it was taken by one of the AIs. That was a huge boon for our team, as you could tell from the long discussion over whether we should hold off on researching Astronomy to prevent obsoleting it. It's not even that the B team didn't get use out of the coastal tiles in their area, just that we got so much MORE use out of them in the A game. Part of that was due to being restricted to the southern half of the continent; the land down there was so bad, we really had no choice.

- Another thing I noted: the B team spent a lot of turns in anarchy swapping back and forth between religions and civics. We made few civic swaps in the A game, and usually during Golden Ages to avoid the anarchy. This was ultimately a minor detail, yet I think it demonstrated that we had a more coherent vision and plan for the game - in my biased viewpoint, of course. :p

- The biggest surprise overall was how the removal of the AI civs from the B game didn't put them drastically ahead of the A team in the long run. If anything, the A team may even have come out ahead, due to superior economics from trade route income and having access to tech trading. (Certainly the tech pace was faster in the A game.) The B team also had to deal with a lot more barbarian harassment than the A team, with all that empty wilderness. These changes I think were one of the coolest things to see, since in Civ3 the early aggression would have given the B team a vast, overwhelming lead from which they never would have looked back. Civ4's economic model, with the use of all those maintenance costs, really does strike a nice balance between guns and butter. If the A team ends up having a faster finish (for whatever that's worth), it will be because we had a stronger economic base. I find that to be a really interesting aspect of this game, and still holding my attention after three full years of play. :D

I'm leaving off any comments about the endgame until the other game wraps up. Tomorrow I'd like to post some further thoughts specifically about our game: more on the setup (why I specifically picked the Ice Age map), more about the team dynamics (which went fabulously well, and how other SGs can try to achieve the same), and some final analysis about keys to success when running this wacky variant. Hope this proved interesting to read.
 
The starts of these games were astonishing. I remember being genuinely shocked at team B's decision to kill Wang and Joao with a single Dog Soldier. To me, this seemed a terrible decision considering that I was thinking the commerce would come from trade routes. They seemed to do OK though, so I was wrong about it being terrible. But I think leaving the AIs alone is a better strategy. AIs can be wiped out at any time the player likes because of the existence of the utterly broken nationhood civic. That civic just makes any game that reaches nationhood won for a human willing to exploit it. So leaving Wang and Joao around to trade with until then should be the best strategy methinks. I think that if I was playing I'd have done similar things to team A, but I would have gone to astronomy before education and liberalism. I didn't think of going for pyramids and settling all the GPs, which was a great idea.
 
Lurker's comment:

Amazing game. I find it great how you guys overcame production, food AND commerce handicaps.
 
Wow Zeviz...I knew I wouldn't get another turnset but I didn't think you had a chance in heck of finishing this thing off :eek:. Nicely closed out!

Major thanks to Sulla for the comparison analysis (and, of course, for the game itself!). Like I said, I knew my turn in this SG was over, so I went ahead and read team B's thread as well. I probably would have been a bit more critical of their chosen path, but I guess the historian in you forces a balanced view on things ;). I just can't see the early rush being the right path; no tech trading, no foreign commerce routes (!), the need to guard against barbarians from every direction, no wonders to steal :mischief:. Building the Pyramids first and using the GE on the GL worked out very well, however. I was also amazed that they were able to connect east and west, I never realized a river connection could be made in that manner.

I'm looking forward to reading your comments on the team :).

Darrell
 
Great sg for us lurkers! Must admit Sulla, that when I first read your civ intro (before release) with Saladin's use of religious mechanics to such great result, my eyes were opened. So too with this pair of SG's in respect to trade. Since everything else was parred down to a minimum, this sg really revealed the inner workings of trade in a new light for me.

Fascinating reads.:goodjob:

Cheers!
-Liquidated
 
As promised, here's another (lengthy) post on some more elements that went into this game. Normally I wouldn't go into this much detail... but this scenario was one that I've been nursing for many years, and it played out even better than I anticipated. I think it's only fair to share some more of the ideas involved with the faithful readers who kept an eye on this game for the past month.

The Civ

I thought long and hard before picking a civ for this game. The Native Americans were appealing for thematic reasons, the protectors of the natural environment and such. (They are also generally an unpopular civ, and nice to see them getting face time.) But I would have rejected the Native Americans if their traits hadn't fit the gameplay that I wanted to create.

What was the overall goal here? To make the variant as difficult as possible, of course. :) That meant ruling out many of the most desirable traits: no Financial, for 3-commerce water tiles. No Organized for cheap courthouses and reduced civic expenses, no Creative for free border expansions and cheap libraries/theatres. Charismatic and Expansive would give free happiness and health, so they were out of bounds too. (Imagine how useful that extra health would have been in this variant!) I was really looking for a civ with either Protective or Imperialistic traits, along with something else on the weaker end. (The Holy Roman Empire I rejected as not a good fit for this scenario, even though they had both of the "bad" traits I wanted.)

So the Native Americans were a good fit not just because they fit the theme, but because they had the nearly-useless Protective trait to boot. Don't get me wrong, Protective is "OK", it's just that virtually anything else would provide a more substantial bonus. It helped us in one or two battles in this game, and that was it. The other trait for the Native Americans was Philosophical, one of my favorites in Civ4. Philosophical requires a lot of skilled play to use to maximum effect, however; it's not something like Organized or Aggressive, which more or less operate in the background. Of course, the other thing that Philosophical usually requires to operate at maximum efficiency is a lot of food (for specialists), which led me to...

The Map

Ah yes, the decision on which map script to select. This was another area which received a great deal of thought. For the no tile improvement variant, this was a critical issue. The variant is actually pretty easy if you play, say, an archipelago map, with little land to work with. At the same time, I didn't want to play on a pangaea, where a super-early rush of every AI would be the clear winning strategy.

After looking at a number of the map scripts in the editor, I settled on the choice of going with an Ice Age map, but one with two large continents. The Ice Age map is one of my favorites - it's mostly plains tiles, and food is scarce, forcing intelligent city placements and use of resources. You can't just throw cities down wherever and expect to do well. For the no tile improvements variant, it would mean PAINFUL shortfalls of food: few grassland tiles, and floodplains almost nonexistant. But that was the whole point of this game! :cool: Why even bother playing a variant if you always start in the land of milk and honey? I wanted this to be a brutally difficult map, one where the city sites had to be planned well in advance to achieve success. Looking back now with the game finished, I'm quite pleased with how the map turned out.

The map had to be two continents because a single continent would open up too much potential for early rushes, as mentioned above. At the same time, if the map turned into 3-4 continents, it would start to resemble an archipelago, and that would start to make the variant too easy. (If you can put every city on the coast, it makes things immensely easier.) Thus the narrow range of possibilities for a good game here. Two continents also meant that we would have an even split of civs between east and west, three civs on one continent and four on the other. The SG team would have to "win" their own continent, AND make progress overseas as well to win a Domination or Conquest victory. I really liked that gameplay, and it seemed to work well here.

The Team

Usually I don't like to specify certain requirements for joining my succession games; I believe that by nature SGs should be INclusive, not EXclusive. This one was a little bit different, however, and so I asked specifically only for experience veteran players in the signups. With all due respect, this was not the sort of game where we could take the time to go over some of the more basic elements of city management. The focus had to be on big picture strategy all along, and I wanted a team that would reflect that.

Fortunately, that's exactly what I got. :D Darrell, Compromise, and Zeviz formed the perfect teammates for this venture, and our strategy discussions were fantastic thoroughout the whole run. That's not to say that there weren't disagreements - there were - but we always seemed to get stronger from the discussions, never splintering apart into quarreling factions (as you sometimes see in SGs). I believe that there are two factors responsible for this, beyond simply the high quality of the players I was involved with:

1) Small team size (4 players)
2) Short turnsets (10 turns)

I've always felt that 4 is the ideal size for a succession game; I will usually go with 5 to get more people involved, but I've learned from long experience that 4 seems to work the best. With 4 players, you aren't swamped with turns (as is often the case in the 2 or 3 player SG), but the game comes around to you frequently enough that you don't feel excluded from major decisions. I often see SGs running with 6 players, and occasionally as many as 7! That seems crazy to me. :crazyeye: Combined with the longer turnsets that many SGs favor (see below), it can take as long as 100 turns before the game gets back around to you again. The larger the team, the harder it is to keep everyone on the same page in terms of overall goals too. One thing I might recommend others trying in their games is using smaller teams and seeing how that goes. I've always felt like the team dynamics are better with a smaller group.

The other thing that really benefits SGs is short turn durations. We try to stress 10 at Realms Beyond, and that really works well, in my experience. This allows for more strategy discussions between turnsets, and helps keep everyone feeling involved in the game. There's a tremendous difference between getting the game back after 30 turns (as here) and getting the game back after 75 turns (as is common in many other games I've seen). The game is barely even recognizable after that much time. Also consider this: a typical game of Civ4 lasts about 400-450 turns. We took 90 turns on the first turnset, and then 10 each after that. That means each person got the game about 10 times total. Compare that to a group with 6 players, each taking 15 on each turnset - each player gets to play about 6 times total. That's a huge difference! Definitely helps to make each person feel like they're more of a part of the game.

Closing Thoughts

Now that we've opened up this variant, it's wide open for someone else (or another team group) to take it and expand upon it. I'm sure there are many ways that the gameplay could be improved upon, and taken to higher difficulty levels. What's the ideal tech path? Is it better to go to Astronomy right away for overseas trade routes? When is the ideal time to try and conquer your local AI rivals? There's a lot of gameplay out there to be explored if it happens to suit your interest. I always enjoy being the first one to try something, and it's a cool feeling to inspire others who take the initial ideas and better them.

Some quick keys to success from our game:

- Coastal cities are your bread and butter for this variant. The Great Lighthouse/Colossus combo is highly recommended. It's probably not a good idea to eliminate all sources of AI trade routes too early. A Financial civ would be really, really good for this variant.

- Barring that, your other key to success is to land the Pyramids and Great Library, then run the Representation/Academy/lots of super-specialists in the capital combo. Although this would be less powerful for a non-Philosophical civ, it's still a winning move.

- The key to taking over the world is to use the draft, just as we always knew it would be from before the game even started. But it's not as simple as just research Nationhood, game over; you also need to have a tech lead (so that you can fight rifles against longbows, if at all possible) AND enough cities to overwhelm your opponents with conscripts. The B team is finding out right now that their smaller size makes drafting more difficult. Again, to win this variant you must offset QUALITY with QUANTITY. That applies not just to the economic side of things, but also to the military side as well.

That's it for now. I'd like to thank darrell, Compromise, and Zeviz again for one hell of a game. :goodjob: This is one of the best SG teams I've had in a long while.
 
I haven't had a chance to post since the game ended, so: Zeviz, I think you finished off the game nicely. I especially liked this line:

Zeviz said:
And just to make sure we have attacked everybody in the game, I invade Spain as well.

Indeed! The perfect finishing touch on a Domination victory.

I've also read Sullla's comments and some of Team B's thread. I suspect I probably would have leaned more toward Team B's approach, but I'm very pleased with the way we played the game. It felt kind of like playing a new, but strangely familiar game. The game was very enjoyable and I found Sullla's many comments about the map/civ setup and SG's in general fun and informative.

And I have to agree with Sullla about our team in particular. It is all too easy for teams to lose focus, splinter, or for people to get upset about disagreements. This is especially true with a medium such as threads and posts where it is difficult to post what you're thinking, why you think that and how you feel about everything. All those nuances are lost when you're not discussing things face to face. Even over the phone works better.

But this team was great fun to work with. I felt like we worked together to analyze almost every aspect of the game exactly as needed. We were able to agree and disagree, congratulate and criticize with strong respect for each other.

So, thank you very much for an excellent scenario, Sullla. And for excellent play and discussion from Zeviz, Darrell and Sullla. Our many lurkers were like the perfect spice for a dish: It always feels better to know that your efforts are appreciated more widely.

It has truly been a pleasure!
 
I was a bit leery of 10 turns/turnset on Epic, and only 4 members, but I must admit both worked out quite well. Also, while I have been in SGs with a lot of discussion before, I've rarely been in any with this much debate. Zeviz and I in particular seemed to often disagree (to his credit, I'd say his vision was clearer than mine), but somehow we always found a pretty optimal path. It was quite a fun trip, unfortunately I doubt its something that is easily recaptured ;).

Darrell
 
It's a bit late, but here are my concluding thoughts:

Sulla's setup of short turns and small team has worked out very well. 10 turns on Epic speed are fast enough to play that they can be played almost any evening, and the precedent of fast turnaround meant that I felt more need to play the turns as soon as possible to avoid slowing down the pace. Which meant that we often went through 1-2 turnsets per day, keeping the game moving quickly enough to retain constant interest.

Another thing to note about teamplay is that I enjoyed our discussions, and lurker contributions were also appreciated. An important aspect of discussions was having a clear plan of where we wanted to go. Some things, such as settler production and using whip overflow for Courthouses, couldn't have happened without our high coordination. (There were no cities good for training settlers, so we had to decide that the dotmap has to be filled, so settlers have to be trained, even if it hurts some of our best cities.)

Some things that were particularly helpful were Compromise's Worldbuilder experiments, Sulla's excellent start, and Darrell's ideas in discussions.

During the game we were lucky with the map giving us half a continent to occupy peacefully, with plenty of coastal space. (Although we haven't fully utilized the space we had, so even a slightly smaller subcontinent would have been enough.) If our start was switched with Jao, or we had Monty as a neighbor, we would have had to do an early rush, so the rest of the game would have been more similar to that of team B.

The map script itself made this variant easier, because with a shortage of good food, AI couldn't use its favorite strategy of cottage spam. So instead of having to use our 2/0/3 coastal tiles to compete against AI's 2/0/4-7 cottages, we had to compete against plains farms, improved resources, and some coastal tiles.

This means that we actually had an economic advantage by grabbing Colossus, which is the only way to improve coastal tiles. Our monopoly on other early economic wonders (Pyramids, Great Lighthouse, and Great Library) also helped slow down the AIs.

Despite our technological advantage, I was surprised at the ease with which AI empires fell once we went on offensive. It took a single pass through the roster (less than 40 turns) to capture AIs' half of our continent, and less than 40 turns to reach domination from there. AIs were ahead of us in production and eventually caught up technologically, but they just hadn't put up much of a fight.

The comparisons with team B should wait until they are done, although I am not surprised that their early aggression hasn't given them a significant advantage. We didn't fully utilize even our peacefully acquired lands, so the only benefit of early aggression was not having to fight the AIs later. Balanced against the loss of trade opportunities, that doesn't look like such a big advantage.

Thanks again to Sulla, Darrell, and Compromise for this very enjoyable game. :)
 
Hmm... nationhood won you the game, interesting. I thought food was the main limitation of your civ, but turns out that it was production that you had difficulty with.
 
- The first notable difference occurred on the very first turn of the game, when mostly_harmless moved to settle on the plains hill tile instead of the wines, as we did in the A game. This was a huge change right from the very start, with the B team pulling an extra shield each turn, but growing much more slowly to compensate. Their capital city would never be able to grow past size 6! Needless to say, this was a drastic difference from the situation that my team found itself in. Yet, given the strategy that the B team chose to employ, going with a shield-heavy start was actually the right move, because:
The religion opening was very nice, had you landed a priest as your first GP, your game would have been Markedly stronger. Why not just chop the Oracle and take Metal Casting?

After watching it play out, I think I like your capital spot a bit better than ours

- That single dog soldier went on to kill off both Joao and Wang, wiping the continent clear of opponents (in 2700BC and 2175BC, respectively). Now the strategy employed by the B team was perfectly legitimate, and I'm actually glad that they took a different path than we did for comparative purposes. At the same time, you will never, ever see a decapitation strike like that in any of my games, or in any succession game that I captain...Like I said, I don't blame others for taking that route, but it's not for me. :cool:
Lets be fair, we did not chop out a settler, settle ON copper and then chop/slave 10 axes. One Dog Soldier killed them both, that is not a committed strike, had either had ONE archer, it was over. Our whole early game shot right down the drain. Moreover, initially we just wanted to pillage and hold them back. But when the game hands you an easy win you take it and don't look back. Massive early attacks on the AI are unsporting and unfun. Who knew one dog soldier would be so effective?

- Another difference that might sound minor, but wasn't: the B team never adopted Slavery civic in their game. We used it constantly, incessantly throughout the whole run in our game. In fact, double-whipping settlers in the capital was a major component of the gameplan. I think that this may have something to do with the higher food threshhold we had at our capital; whipping really didn't make much sense at the capital in the B game. But it certainly looks like it would have helped elsewhere in some other cities (?) Even locations with no food bonuses can get major benefits from Slavery if used properly.
Yep, we should have used slavery more. I also got the impression that you guys built more granaries than us too. Frankly I am surprised that the finish dates were so close I would have thought the granaries + slavery would have provided a more substantial difference.


- It was neat to read how the early wonders played out, simply because there were a lot of similarities mixed with crucial differences. In the A game, we built the Great Lighthouse first in stone city, then chopped out the Pyramids in gem city at a later date. In the B game, they built the Pyramids first at the capital, then completed the Great Lighthouse at the same stone city. (This was absolutely the right call for their game, since their capital had a lot more production than ours did.) No big difference, right? Well, the result was that the A team's first Great Person was a Merchant, while the B team's first Great Person was an Engineer. We used our Merchant as a super-specialist, further boosting the food output of Cahokia (to 4 food/turn with corn) and setting it up for future synergy with a Hindu shrine. The B team instead used their first Engineer to rush the Great Library in the capital. This gave them access to the Library at an earlier date... but at the same time, it also deprived them of a (Representation) super-specialist in the capital. It's difficult to say which was the better move, I'm merely pointing out the differences.
The Pyramids -> Great Library was huge, i can't believe you guys took the merchant first. I think for your gameplan in this variant the GP you needed first (in order of importance) were a Priest, Engineer, then Merchant.

- One broad-based comment that is a criticism of sorts: I don't think the B team got enough out of using the coastal tiles. You could see from our early dotmaps that literally all of the thinking in the A game revolved around use of the sea, leveraging our control of Great Lighthouse + Colossus and trade routes to compensate for the lack of tile improvements. In contrast, the B team obviously had no one to trade with (since Joao and Wang were dead), and they were unfortunately unable to land the Colossus before it was taken by one of the AIs. That was a huge boon for our team, as you could tell from the long discussion over whether we should hold off on researching Astronomy to prevent obsoleting it. It's not even that the B team didn't get use out of the coastal tiles in their area, just that we got so much MORE use out of them in the A game. Part of that was due to being restricted to the southern half of the continent; the land down there was so bad, we really had no choice.
No question, we did not take advantage of the Sea tiles very well, your team excelled in this respect. I think the difference was that despite clearing the continent we still could not settle as many cities as you guys b/c we lacked the trade routes from Joao and Wang. In this respect we really suffered due to their death

So the Native Americans were a good fit not just because they fit the theme, but because they had the nearly-useless Protective trait to boot. Don't get me wrong, Protective is "OK", it's just that virtually anything else would provide a more substantial bonus. It helped us in one or two battles in this game, and that was it. The other trait for the Native Americans was Philosophical, one of my favorites in Civ4. Philosophical requires a lot of skilled play to use to maximum effect, however; it's not something like Organized or Aggressive, which more or less operate in the background. Of course, the other thing that Philosophical usually requires to operate at maximum efficiency is a lot of food (for specialists), which led me to...
I have to say Sullla your whole comment about the Native Americans shocked me. I can't remeber if I wrote it in the thread or told Sunrise, but basically the jist was that I thought the Natives were perfect :crazyeye: Just goes to show about taste. From the first this variant SCREAMED Great Library + Bureaucracy + Representation to get as far as Nationhood and then Drafting Muskets then Rifles to wipe out the world. This was easily the best path in terms of the variant and both teams did this. I said that the Great Library is perfect with Philo. and Protective is perfect with drafting + we got a civ with an Ancient resourceless UU that will be great since we have 0 resources in the beginning and can use the unit to hold the neighbors back or down if we want. Plus, the beginning of the game when we are vulnerable to attack, we have like the best civ for defending. I can see the benefits of Financial, but Exp, Chm, don't do anything for me. Imp. would have been helpful in our game we needed LOTS of settlers and those guys are expensive. Agg. would have been nice, but I don't know that I would have traded it for Philo. I guess Philo + Agg of Natives would have been ok. I don't know, I was just so surprised to see your comments. When the game came out I honestly thought you gave us the civ you thought Best for the variant :lol:

Thanks for the idea, it was fun and I throughly enjoyed it
 
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