VQ07 - Snakes on Pangea!!

[bobrath]

VQ07 - Snakes!

Restricted City placement as determined by the ever popular on cell phones and other lite sites:

• Each city must be placed adjacent to the previous city using optimal city spacing (so 3NW1W, or 3NW1N, etc.). Basically the BFCs have to interlock perfectly.
• If at any time the "snake" can only expand into its own body, the snake is dead and no further cities are permitted.
• If at any time the "snake" can only expand into water, then the snake may tunnel through the water and come out at any location adjacent to the same body of water.
• The first (and only the first) city captured from an enemy AI or the barbs spawns a new snake. Snakes may not cross each other.
• If your snake's head gets chopped off (ie captured), your snake is dead.

Roster:
Bobrath
GreyFox
CosmicHail
Armstrong
Eektor
Maquis


Game Settings:
The World - Large, Pangea, Tropical, Medium Water
The Level - Prince
The Leader - Peter of the Snakes

Our starting position:

I'll hold of on playing for a bit until we get our 6th player and some discussion/questions happen.

 

[Chunky]

This looks interesting. Tag.

 

[Maquis]

Hopefully I'm in the last spot... Can't miss out on my own series right??


Settle in place? Fresh water bonus, but can't tell if that's a Plains hill?

 

[eektor]

* The first (and only the first) city captured from an enemy AI or the barbs spawns a new snake. Snakes may not cross each other.

That rule is interesting. Does that mean we only will have two snakes at one time? Or we have one new snake for each city we take from each civ on the board?

Also, When we go one way can we expand the other way or once we commit to one direction we can't add on to the tail?

Edit: what difficulty lvl is this?

 

[bobrath]

This means that you potentially have n+1 snakes possible where N is the number of leaders (inclusive). The + 1 is due to the possibility of a barb snake.

Any other cities you take from other AIs... my original thought was you could keep them, but they in effect became blocks/walls.

Snakes only have one head!!!!

 

[Cosmichail]

My brain already hurts thinking about this configuration. I will have to keep reminding myself whenever I have settler. The spot above looks good and Peter too so we need a nice GP farm at some point. Bobrath you have your sixth player (Maquis - veteran of VQ) so let's go for it. D'OH I see you added him to the Roster.

 

[GreyFox]

GreyFox reporting for duty to the ... Obsidian Order Snakes, I mean.

Huh? Prince? This should be easy ...

I would suggest we rename cities with the letter H in parenthesis after the original cities name once the sanke has grown ... easier to keep track of when we have something like 10 snakes. (Didn't play large map that much, large map has 10+ civs, right?)

 

[Cosmichail]

Whaaaat?? Prince???

Oh no I see Large configuration and my computer might be able to handle it. It might be ok but it's usually best at Standard.

 

[armstrong]

Checking in!

As I just mentioned in the VQ06b thread, I'm going to be out of town this coming Friday, Saturday, and maybe Sunday to help out with a move. So maybe you should throw me to the end of the line?

This should be really interesting. Peter is one of my favorite leaders - I love Philosophical, and you get Cossacks too Early granaries are the best cheap buildings to have, and

I'm tempted to move the settler, but I have no idea where. 6 lake tiles and no river does not make a strong capital. I think send the scout S, NE on to the hill to see if there's anything better that can also grab the pigs?

Assuming we don't have any other good resources, I'd go with Animal Husbandry->BW, and build Worker->Warriors (until size 2, work pigs+a hill)->Settler. We only have eight choices to settle our second city (and I doubt we want to send our first snake into the tundra!) so we might as well build it early

As for naming cities to keep track of our "snakes," how about giving each snake a theme based upon the starting city? For instance, all of the "Moscow" city-snakes could be "-cow" or "Mos-" something.

Since this is Prince, do we want to grab any early wonders?

 

[bobrath]

I ran a test run on the same settings and couple things popped out at me right away:

1) The need for scouting is pretty huge as your second city has to naturally lead to a 3rd city.
2) The landmass is fairly crowded - war is not going to be something we can skip.
3) Prince is forgiving until you let a war drag on too long...

Also, added a new rule - if your snake's head gets chopped off (ie captured), your snake is dead.

You're halfway down the list Armstrong, so its not likely that you'll be up until Sun/Mon anyway.

 

[eektor]

I suggest we have BW before we put our second city so we can see which way we can go to. AH is important too for the pigs and to make sure we have horses for our cossacks later on.

As for early wonders, I say we go for Oracle (CS slingshot) and Great Library, and maybe try to go for Pyramids as well?

 

[Cosmichail]

Oh cossacks those are my favorite UU. They just kick a$$. CS slingshot is quite viable with all those forests and who knows maybe some marble laying around. I am a big fan of getting BW early to see where we settle although we have to be snaky about it. Also knowing where the horses are early is a good thing too.

 

[berserks01]

Got room for one more? I'm a sucker for anything pangea
If not, I'll be happy to lurk.

 

[bobrath]

berserks, we're full up, but if someone has to drop out, you'll be welcome to jump in as an alternate. So feel free to lurk on.

 

[bobrath]

[mortal kombat voice]
It has begun!
[/mortal kombat voice]


Played 20 turns and managed to find out a good bit about our surroundings.

First move was to have our scout hop on top of the hill and he found this:

I chose to settle in spot as giving up one or two turns to get to any of the "better" spots made little sense. Moscow was founded and began researching the use of Bronze in making implements OF DESTRUCTION.

Our scout quickly moved to the huts in the NW and we were lucky enough to be given the secrets of stones:

a second hut gifted us with 32g after we fended off an attack by wolves.

We're currently 5 turns away from Animal Husbandry.

The great city of Moscow produces a scout, then a warrior, and is currently at size 3 with a worker seven turns out.

We have met 3 other leaders (two of whom have founded religions):

We harnessed our friend the bird to fly is very high in the sky and we (from memory of course) were able to draw up this planning map:

Notice that we've found Mao's capital. He has a worker currently building a farm on the corn.


On a side note, I created this game with the autologger prevented... so folks get that pad and paper out, no easy logging for you! (yes it was a weed moment).

Bobrath <-- Done for now
GreyFox <-- Your turn in the sun
CosmicHail <-- Get ready to spring
Armstrong <-- something witty
Eektor <-- something witty
Maquis <-- something witty


Here's the save

 

[Chunky]

You should change the topic name to Snakes on a Pangea.

 

[bobrath]

Too bad I don't have that right! *paging lurking admins*

 

[GreyFox]

Got it ... now for the next Snake Head:

- grow towards 4E3N to grab the copper, but the next head growth will be severly limited ... what we can do is rush Mao or Gandhi to start a new head.

- grow towards 4E3S to grab wheat and wine

- I am more interested in what is in the SW.

- Note that any direction we move except 4E3N will mean that it would be very difficult to get the copper.

--

 

[eektor]

I say expand to get the copper. If we do that we can still expand south where the forest is by the edge of the black area. Only problem we will miss the wheat, but we get copper and still can go further south that way.

 

[Cosmichail]

I'm with eektor. Get that copper and let's go a axe rushing, a axe rushing la la la..........

(Bobrath has weed moments too aye)

Bobrath that's the way I been doing it for a while now. Good ole pen and paper. Although I was thinking of trying that HOF mode.

So how do you do that prevent the autologger?????