Strategy Discussion - Metagame

[Swiss Pauli]

For our long term plans, and debate on our rivals' (un)likely strategies.

Templars - Inca - FIN/IND - Quechua

Imperio - Maya - FIN/EXP - Holkan

Banana - China - PRO/IND - Chokonu

Rabbits - HRE - PRO/IMP - Landesknecht

PAL - Egypt - SPI/IND - War Chariot

Team RB - Ethiopia - CRE/ORG - Oromo


Relevant settings: 2 Old World landmasses, Choose Religion, No Tech Brokering.

[Swiss Pauli]

quote:
Originally posted by Kylearan
...
The main problem here is the meta-game: Any team that plays long-term by putting emphasis on growth and which gets attacked will lose. Any team that plans short-term by focusing on hammers and will not attack will lose as well - against the third kind of team, which plays long-term and which gets lucky by not getting attacked. And in case this makes focusing on hammers and attacking a neighbour look like the best option: The diplomatic penalty by attacking another civ might make that team lose the game as well... Ugh.
...

The optimal strategy in this case is to make a deal with your neighbors to focus on economy and later compete for the New World and the other continent, whose inhabitants will be backwards due to early military buildup. (I would even favor a disarmament agreement for our starting landmass, with location and size of forces monitored by inspectors using Open Borders.)

I think the diplomatic penalty for early agression would be too high. And I personally would rather not play "us against the world" kind of game.

However, this also depends on who our neighbors are. PAL will probably do an early rush. Rabbits (and the rest of Apolyton forum teams) seem to enjoy the game too much to give any team an early exit. I have no idea about Imperio.

EDIT:
quote:
Originally posted by darrelljs
...
I guess I'd rather make mean on our home landmass and make nice on the other one. Is that even possible?
Darrell

Not really. I wouldn't trust a team that attacked its neighbor early farther than I could throw them.

[Swiss Pauli]

Re: Strategy Discussion - Metagame

Some of my thoughts to kick things off:

Originally posted by Swiss Pauli
Templars - Inca - FIN/IND - Quechua

Rush chance: low. Strategy: tech lead via FIN and selected Wonders => Win (Space/Dom/Culture)

Imperio - Maya - FIN/EXP - Holkan

Rush chance: high, but easily negated by Copper/Iron if claimed in time. Strategy: rush one civ then turtle for tech and then attack again.

Banana - China - PRO/IND - Chokonu

Rush chance: low. Strategy: Wonder hog for culture win?

Rabbits - HRE - PRO/IMP - Landesknecht

Rush chance: low. Strategy: New World gambit, using Rathäuser to control maintenance.

PAL - Egypt - SPI/IND - War Chariot

Rush chance: high. Strategy: rush one civ then turtle for tech and then attack again.

[Sullla]

Since this is a rather uninteresting time in the game, good idea to hold discussions like this now. Some quick thoughts:

Templars/Inca: This is a good civ to rush with, but I agree with Swiss Pauli's characterization. The list of Templar players doesn't seem to fit the mold of early aggression at all (Locutus is on there, and he was one of the most peaceful players in testing. Spent most of his time modding, of course.) I'm pretty sure that this team picked the Inca for their traits and not their unique unit.

Imperio/Maya: I don't recognize any of these players... If there's a team that would try an early rush, this is a likely candidate. If not, the likely strategy is a settler/worker spam using the civ traits.

Banana/China: I have absolutely no idea what this team is thinking. The Qin pick doesn't seem to make much sense. Cultural win is the most likely thought... but honestly, a financial or spiritual civ works better for a cultural victory than an industrious one. (Doesn't everyone know that by now?) I suspect this team will do a lot of roleplaying nonsense and not be particuarly competitive. (I hope I don't have to eat those words later! ) The "Will" that's listed as team leader isn't Willburn of MP fame, right? He was/is an excellent player.

Rabbits/HRE: Swiss Pauli has tagged their strategy perfectly. It's not a particularly good strategy either, as Adventure 19 showed. They wanted the Terra map for the express purpose of trying to settle the overseas continent. Hopefully we can use this to our advantage in some way. (I really, really think this team is 90% talk and 10% action. For example - are they skilled enough to know how to exploit settler whips for the Imperialistic shield bonus? I tend to doubt it.)

PAL/Egypt: Since Whiplash is the team leader, this is a dangerous group. An early rush is a very real possibility (although I think they may have gone with Hatty if they were thinking specifically in terms of early game). Our best hope is that the small team size causes interest to drop and lax play to creep in.

Overall, I would classify the teams into three distinct tiers: Imperio/PAL (most dangerous), Templar (middle), Rabbits/Banana (more interested in role-playing than winning). Obviously much of this is speculation, so we'll have to see what happens. We don't even know who our neighbors are yet, after all...

[regoarrarr]

So given from the cloak and dagger thread that we know (think?) that Rabbits popped BW from a hut, the following 2 thoughts came to mind.

Do we want to send some sort of message to them congratulating them for getting BW, just to kind of mess with their heads?

Or, given what we wrote earlier about a team pulling off a successful rush having a good shot at winning and a team that fails in a rush being hamstrung, do we want to warn the other teams at some point about possibly being rushed (not to mention if we turn out to be neighbors, of course)?

I'm not sure what #1 would serve other than just messing with them, and if we were to do #2, I'd think it might be better served a bit later after we see if they have a massive power buildup (from whipping / chopping several axes), but I thought I'd throw it out there for discussion.

[mostly-harmless]

I am strongly against any of those suggestions.
For one thing we might end up in a discussion about cheating, where we would have to explain how we gathered that information. And I don't like to reveal that, as we have to give up our complete knowledge lead on other teams as well. The ministry of thruth has worked hard to give us that knowledge and I doubt all the other teams have spent the same effort.
With the forewarning we have received from analysing the demoscreen we got ourselves prepared when we met other teams.

Second, I don't like to talk to teams we have not met in-game. With us finding the Templars we might agree to share some information with them. For example if theyborder Imperio on the other side,we have an interest to forewarn them.

This only my opinion, of course.
If the majority of the team decides to use the info we gathered to mess with their heads, then that is what we will do.

mh

[Sullla]

Echoing mostly_harmless' point here. The Ministry of Truth is our biggest advantage at the moment. We should not give that up lightly - and it would only attract suspicion anyway, as stated already.

[Zeviz]

I'll third the point about keeping our secrets secret. Information is power. And when we have information nobody thinks we have, we'll be in a much stronger position. If Mostly_harmless can maintain complete knowledge of other teams, we'll be able to call people's bluffs, or to see an attack coming.

[sooooo]

Can I bump this thread for more discussion about contacting teams. There was talk about proposing an alliance with PAL - any more thoughts about that? What kind of things should we say? Also amirite in thinking we have 2 diplomatic envoys now - Ruff_Hi and regoarrarr?

[ruff_hi]

seen nothing back in our gmail account - should we reach out again?

[mostly-harmless]

I repeat what I suggested in the Turn Players Thread a few days back:

Another suggestion to the Diplomacy corps:
Can we launch another round of contact attempts to all known rivals asap?
I am a bit stumped by the lack of inter team communication. Especially after our promising start with the Templars.
An increased level of communication is always helpful to avoid misunderstandings, especially as we are going to aggressively settle in the next turns.

Good luck Ruff_Hi.

mh

[regoarrarr]

I'm not a team envoy as far as I know - I think I'm just "lurker".

[Sullla]

Yes - we definitely want to hear from Templars again, and hopefully hear from Imperio for the first time.

Regarding PAL, both mostly_harmless and I thought they would be a good match for a friend on the other continent. I'm heading off to get some work done, but I'll try to type up a more formal proposal with PAL later tonight. At the very least, a map exchange (via screenshots) seems like the kind of thing that would benefit us both, since we have little grounds for conflict at the moment.

[Sullla]

Long-time bump for this thread here. But I think it's the best place to discuss the "grand strategy" issues that we're faced with.

As we've already brought up in other threads, it's time to think seriously about who to ally with and how we want to try and win the game, at least in general terms. On the alliance issue, here are several possibilities:

1) Negotiate an armistice on our continent, and have the three team (RB, Templars, Imperio) coordinate economic action against PAL. Very sound in theory, may be difficult to make work in practice. Templars have been pushing this notion throughout the game.

2) Ally with Templars against Imperio. Biggest positive: we potentially eliminate the strongest rival on our continent. Negative: we are dependent on the incompetent Templar team for economic and military help. It also seems difficult at this point that we could get them to turn on Imperio.

3) Ally with Imperio against Templars. Positives: Templars would fall easily before our might. Easy religious spoils falling to the victors. Negatives: What are the odds that Imperio would actually agree to this? Also runs the problem of making Imperio that much stronger.

4) Go over to the "dark side" and ally with PAL against Templars and Imperio. We make a full economic and military agreement, wherein we each attempt to dominate our respective continents and be left as the only two civs standing. (Thus the "dark side" part.) Would require heavy coordinating of research. Positives: if it works, we more or less win the game. At the very least, make it into a final showdown. Negatives: PAL can't offer much military help to us, nor us to them. PAL (which has contact with all six teams) can easily maneuver into a superior trading position, since we only have contact with four teams.

Those are the four alternatives I can see. Feel free to suggest more!

Now... how do we want to win the game? I only see two realisitic possibilities:

A) Domination/Conquest. Domination will be harder to reach than normal, thanks to the Terra map script adding another 30% of the world's land out there in the fog. Conquest might come about sooner. Winning under this plan means destroying our rivals on the starting continent, then either invading or marginalizing the opponents on the eastern one. A backdoor diplomatic win (assuming we could get someone else to vote for us in the UN - bah, terrible change in the expansion!) also falls under this category.

B) Culture. Given that we're playing against humans, Spaceship win is just not going to happen. Someone will reach cultural victory long before we reach the end of the tech tree. This is actually a more viable option than you might think. With 3-4 religions (already present on our continent) and Sid's Sushi, it would be entirely possible to bang out a cultural victory in a mere 50 or so turns. By the time the other teams caught on, it would probably be too late. This would be REALLY effective if we controlled our whole continent, and someone had to conduct a Normandy-style landing to hold off a cultural win.

Keep in mind in the latter stages of the game, speed and unpredictability make defense almost impossible. I'm GLAD our capital is inland, because a large naval stack can do a Sirian Doctrine-style invasion just about anywhere on the map. You can't defend everywhere at once, so the initative enormously favors the attacker. Once we reach the Astronomy era, we're going to need to invest in a gigantic navy to stay safe. (Will other teams even realize that? Possibly/Probably not!)

Where do we go from here? Most recent sentiment seems to favor the fourth option above. Let's get everyone on the same page before we send out our next round of diplomatic proposals to the other teams.

[sunrise089]

At this early stage I think conquest victory is best. I am skeptical of staying alive to shoot to culture.

As for the short term, I fear a PAL alliance because I think their contacts with the other continent help them a LOT. If we can make contact with Banana and Rabbits sooner rather than later then I'll be much less concerned.