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Imperio turned us down again? I'm really surprised by that. I know that this isn't the AI, but we were cutting them an amazing deal in beakers, almost 2 to 1. Do we want to send them another email asking them what's going on? If they have some kind of exclusive trading agreement with another civ, we'd like to know that.
In a larger sense, we are so f-ing screwed by this map, it's not even funny. PAL holds all the cards; I'm finding it difficult to see how they could possibly lose this game now. They have the most cities, they control all contact between civs and can trade with anyone they feel like, no one else can even reach Banana without going through them, they just eviscerated an incompetent rival militarily, and their economy is roaring along thanks to the fact that every trade route of theirs is "intercontinental". Love that feature in the expansion - and thank you again, Mr. Mapmaker!
What can we do in terms of trading? Imperio won't trade with us, for God only knows what reason, Templars and Rabbits are incompetent role-players, we can't even reach Banana, and trading with PAL only makes things worse. We have no happiness resources, barely have any strategic resources, and no one wants to work with us for whatever reason while they happily let PAL run away with the game. What a goddamn mess.
It's hard not to be fatalistic sometimes, when we essentially had zero chance to win the game from turn 1, after we opened up the save and saw our lousy starting position. (At least Templars are even worse off than us, heh.) While I don't intend to give up, I don't think we can do much more than play a spoiler role in PAL's inevitable march towards victory.
Lets wait for our galley to scout out the coast line, there might yet be a way to reach Banana (island hopping?!).
Anyway meeting Banana is not crucial for our chance in the game but would be nice. In the end we might have to wait for Banana to come out of their shell or wait for Optics.
Alternatively we can just decide to pull the plug on the no-scout rule with PAL and see whether they dare to close borders and loose out on trade routes.
Apart from that, I think we can look proudly on what we have achieved so far. We had a ****ty starting position and lack vital resources. So what? Realms Beyond is among other things about digging out of a hole.
We have a no-scouting clause with both Templars and PAL. We don't want to stir up any fuss with Templars at the moment. Besides, I believe the galley stands a better chance to reach Banana first.
We can tell Templars that we're on a crusade to find the Lost Banana and they're welcome to join us
I'd be tempted to ignore PAL if they try to block us.
And again I think we're too used to playing against AIs, expecting a win rate of close to 100%. A team should win 1/6 of its 6-player games, and I think we definitely have more than a 1/6 chance by now. Even finishing second to PAL is plenty respectable.
I wonder if Imperio thinks of us as we think of PAL. As in, Imperio perceives RB as the runaways and doesn't want to feed us techs. Since we share a continent, we're a more direct and shorter-term rival to Imperio than PAL is. Note that the techs they've refused us both lie on strong military lines (Math to Construction, Monarchy to Feudalism), while we're offering them airy-fairy arty stuff. I feel Imperio is just being prudent, not stupid. They've got the longbow slingshot, why should they help us catch that?
@T_Hawk - Interesting stuff as always, but I don't think you need to be an AI to take a nearly 2:1 beaker advantage and give up a non-monopoly tech. Surely just giving us Maths doesn't threaten their longbows too much.
As for Imperio considering us their PAL, that could be true to a point, but language barrier or no language barrier, Imperio can see we can't monopolize intercontinental trade and communication, and anyone can see our score is lower than theirs.
I think that's what we need to do. At least some sort of trade embargo. Whether we'll be able to do with that with the language barrier and/or incompetents on some teams remains to be seen.
But I think something along the lines of a continent-wide alliance is where we need to be heading
At this point, attempting to make a continent-wide alliance will do more harm than good. There is no chance of Templars agreeing (just review the history of our relations), and Imperio is more worried about short term threat from us than about long term threat from PAL. So the most likely outcome of our attempt is that somebody will leak the info to PAL, and they will stop trading with us.
Our best course of action is to forget about the other continent (except potential trade deals with PAL) and focus on doing the best we can on our continent. Considering our starting position, just ending up as #2 would be a victory. And there is always a chance to pull off a sneak culture win near the end.
I apologize for getting a bit negative yesterday. I was feeling really frustrated over Imperio's refusal to make any kind of trade with us, and disgusted by that ridiculous eastern continent that gives PAL all kinds of advantages. But still, there's no reason to go crazy and vent like that. When I get frustrated with games, I always walk away for a little while, sleep on the situation a night, then return the next day with fresh ideas. I did the same this time, so here are some new thoughts for us to play around with.
Our long term goal should be simply to stretch the game out for as long as humanly possible. As sunrise mentioned in one of these threads, most Multiplayer games don't go on for that long; PAL's moves so far would have given them the victory already in a standard MP game. How familiar are they with the Industrial era, for example? There are a lot of Renassiance MP games, not so many in the later eras. The longer the game goes on, the more of an advantage we have, IMO. One thing that I should mention is having a lot of coastal cities is a major disadvantage in the lategame; a Sirian Doctrine fleet can strike at any target at will, because you simply cannot defend every coastal city at once. Use caravels/subs to find the weak points, swarm in with a large fleet, and the enemy can't even touch you because the army never leaves the ships! Since few MP games tend to be played on water maps, this is another advantage we may be able to use at some point. Epsilon pulled off a successful variation of this in the CivFanatics Demogame, for example.
Similarly, how many MP games are played on Terra maps? I can give you that answer - zero! That stupid additional continent out there might end up helping us quite a bit. The extra land raises the Domination threshhold considerably; the Terra continent holds about 30% of the land in this map script, and it can't even be reached until post-Astronomy. This will make it substantially tougher to win a normal victory in this game. Finally, as Zeviz said above, we can always try to sneak out a cultural victory in the end. There's a decent chance of that happening, as PAL would have to pull off an invasion of our continent AND march across our entire landmass to reach our core. I don't think PAL is the sort of team to go for culture themselves, so we might be able to steal a march on them eventually that way. With the new BTS United Nations, they can't simply vote themselves the winner by population either, another edge for the less dominant teams. Plus, if we can found a key corporation, we can do a lot of catching up that way. MP games don't exactly emphasize corporations usually!
Yes, we have major handicaps to play with - but so what? This is Realms Beyond, after all. We don't know what to do unless we're playing with both hands behind our backs.
Anyway, our immediate priority should be getting to Monarchy tech ASAP. I believe we can do this in a mere 5 turns, based on the number crunching I did this morning. First, we run two turns of zero science, on the off chance that another team comes up with the tech and is willing to trade it with us. Then we finish off the tech with three turns of 100% research. Here's how the turns would break down:
Obviously we will have to do a little tweaking based on the founding of yellow and possible capture of Saxon, but we can do this! Now, why do we want to discover the tech on T106? Because that's the same turn we build Great Library, naturally! That way, we can revolt on the turn to Hereditary Rule, and have our three workers connect the wines during the interturn of Anarchy, getting an instant +2 happy in every city to start T107. We can also shortly connect a second wine and trade it to PAL or Imperio for their excess luxury goods.
From there, we let our cities start growing and finally get out of the hole we're in. China Beach produces a Great Scientist for an Academy on T114, we should trade for Civil Service with PAL around that date as well, and we have Airstrip One at size 7 working 6 cottages with Great Library + Academy + Bureaucracy cranking the science. THAT'S what we need to do in the next 15 turns!
One caveat: to make this work, we need to have Cape Town build Research this turn and the next (T102), and Pink Dot build one turn of Research too (T102 also). I think it is worthwhile to do so to speed our Monarchy aquisition by a turn. What does everyone think?
Also in the news... since we're not getting Math from Imperio, our workers went ahead and cashed in three forest chops at Airstrip One:
We are right on schedule to finish on T106, just as Ruff predicted. Barring something insane happening, we will have the Great Library on that date.
So we're not in first place, but indeed, we're doing OK. Let's keep working on the things we can control, and try not to sweat the things we can't. Alright, Sullla?
This is Realms Beyond, after all. We don't know what to do unless we're playing with both hands behind our backs.
Can I at least have a pencil in my mouth so that I can tap on the keyboard
Quote: "All Happiness is the release of internal pressure" Visit myCiv IV web site for information on mods that I am involved with or use and other Civ IV tools woo hoo!My wife publishes her first book. Buy it now in paperback format at lulu and help me retire so I can write more BUG mod code.
Why are we killing ourselves to get Monarchy in 5 turns? What is wrong with 6 turns? I don't think that the 2 turn delay in Heroic Epic is worth it. I would revolt to HR (+1 other?) as soon as possible, but I cannot see any reason to want to line that up with finishing the GLib. I totally agree with having the workers connect the wine during anarchy but they would do that at T+6 just the same as T+5 wouldn't they? If you want them to do something else, have them mine one of the grassland hills.
Remember this from May 2008?
Our capital is at -7 food so a farm or two would help it grow. Maybe farm one of those new grassland tiles?
Or am I missing something?
Quote: "All Happiness is the release of internal pressure" Visit myCiv IV web site for information on mods that I am involved with or use and other Civ IV tools woo hoo!My wife publishes her first book. Buy it now in paperback format at lulu and help me retire so I can write more BUG mod code.
I'm really surprised by that. I know that this isn't the AI, but we were cutting them an amazing deal in beakers, almost 2 to 1. Do we want to send them another email asking them what's going on? If they have some kind of exclusive trading agreement with another civ, we'd like to know that. 
That way, we can revolt on the turn to Hereditary Rule, and have our three workers connect the wines during the interturn of Anarchy, getting an instant +2 happy in every city to start T107. We can also shortly connect a second wine and trade it to PAL or Imperio for their excess luxury goods. 
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