[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Fintourist]

Ok, I'm back (with a headache), which means that it's all about micro again..

Just making sure: Which save stack Harry are you looking? In the latest version, the worker that is mining the grassland hill S of Endor would have moved onto the banana tile S of Dunkirk. I believe this is a conscious micro improvement from your side and completely fine though Just to make sure that we know what we are doing: After this change 1 single worker won't have time to road both the tiles (S and SE/E of Dunkirk) before the borders pop and improving the cow starts. Consequently this is what we probably should be doing now with our 4 workers in the area:
T77: Plains hill road 1/2, Grassland mine 2/4 and 3/4, forest chop finishes.
T78: Plains hill road 2/2, the worker, which finished the chop finishes the grassland mine 4/4, 2 workers that were mining that grassland hill now start mining the plains hill 1/4 and 2/4
T79: Workers that started mining the plains hill move onto the tiles S and SE of Dunkirk, where they build roads T80-81 and start improving cows on T82.

We could 3-turn a bowman in BoP getting the food box to 22/26 before starting the worker? It would cost three beakers by working the gold instead of Cannae (and might delay that worker too), but with the other bowman out of place I'm feeling exposed. I'd like to change this before the turn flips tomorrow afternoon, what do you think?

Mixed feelings! I think that we can still afford to gamble with a low military because:
M_H: When we had graphs his power was even lower than ours. And there's still a good bunch of jungle between us so I highly doubt that it would make sense for m_h to send units our way
Yurimack: They are simply too far. They are basically neighbors of our neighbors
dtay: Dtay has more power than us, but it's not like he is the rival best or something like that. We believe that he is located to N/NE of us. If you look at the land quality in that direction... Well, it's crap. Therefore I highly doubt that there will be tensions between us in the near future..
Barbs: It's still a warrior era. Our few bowmen can take care of visitors..
Unknown neighbors in the west: I have a good feeling about the island that we are going to settle. I would bet money that it is a small piece of land with no opponents yet. I base this guess partly on the fact that we have had the visibility of that coast for a good while and we haven't made contact with anybody over that water. I might be wrong, but it's reasonable to believe that it's peaceful out there..
Suttree: Suttree is the only opponent that I believe we are going to have to worry about in the near-term. We have now seen 5 axes of him, but 3 of them were located in the extreme south were suttree has tensions with yurimack. I highly doubt that he will be sending some kind of invasion force towards us until we settle that "x"-site where his axe currently is..

Consequently: Building an extra bowman in BoP is not a huge deal. It will delay our worker couple of turns (it will have work to do but we will manage) and probably costs us some beakers, so if you really want we can do it! We will of course need more bowmen eventually However, I'm not feeling the pressure yet and would be willing to continue with a low military still for a while. Our demos and victory screen show the depressive reality: I think we have a competitive amount of pop points, but the tiles we are working are not good enough to earn us top demos.. I'm totally not interested of finishing 2nd so that affects my gamble mentality a bit... Anyways, I will honestly be fine with whatever you decide!

So I move him NW-NW so we can put him on the galley on t80 and go find some adventure!

Agreed!

This uncovers Sutree's Axe, which can reach Dunkirk in three turns - it can only attack the turn after we build the bowman, but it would still be advisable to get the other bowman over here. Moving onto the forest gets us a coin flip on defense, which if it hits two or three times means 70% or 97% odds for our other bowman to kill the axe and get to five XP...

Yeah let's keep our barb killer nearby and see what suttree does. I don't have a bad feeling about this yet..

Does granary-first in F beat the value we'd get from claiming the whale tile earlier? Happy and 2/1/3?

A very good question. In practice it would allow Cannae and BoP grow +1 size probably ~5 turns before our first calendar luxury resource comes in. I check this later today, so that we have something more concrete to base our decision on.

On t81-4 we could grow Agincourt on a work boat to get another couple of hammers a turn or an extra pop point to be whipped for the settler...

Yeah, this will probably make sense.

So the big question is: Do we settle G in the south or the east? I wonder if the hill by the dye will still be available on t90? I wish we knew a bit more about Suttree's land - does he have space to expand east? Can we afford to wait?

I think I'm willing to wait and risk us losing that site. The southern G spot is also valuable to us and it keeps our civ compact and works nicely for our expansion. I think that streching east already would be just a bit too much as I see it as an invitation for trouble. Who knows, maybe we would get away with it and waiting here is totally the wrong move, but I'm still crossing our fingers that T90 will be fast enough. IIRC suttree is still at 3 cities and making a 4-city line from north to west must seem for him as well.

And yeah, let's hope that there is something east of suttree's current city sites and we can live peacefully without border tensions still for a while..

By the way no-one suggested names for the F-city, so I think we just have to call it France.