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

[Fintourist]

Suttree ruined his game by playing really weak the first 100 turns..

I bet he discovered he started by YuriMack and decided axes were better than plowshares. Actually I'd bet they contested that gold site and Suttree lost. Against Mackoti that isn't weak, its normal. I do think deleting two workers to dry-whip three chariots was stupid though. He could have given us that city and then come back in ten turns with a far more efficiently-assembled army and taken Hastings then Jamestown off us (because we wouldn't have built all these units if he hadn't put up a fight...)

Well, I don't see a huge power drop in his early graphs (is there any?) and thus evidence for too crippling early fighting. His expansion speed was simply so slow that there really has to be some total catastrophes in the background before it's justified.. The city we razed was just his 5th city IIRC, while we settled our 10th just five turns after the city raze.

Just because the roll-over says chop doesn't mean that's what the worker did...

I think this is the tile THH meant. And this is probably the move that causes us most trouble, splitting our forces and threatening to cut Jamestown off completely, but he's been able to move SE of Hastings for ages and hasn't done it, so I think he's after Jamestown. If he does go there we move our four bowmen, spear and two shock axes into the city and win all of the initial defensive battles, thanks to bowmen on hills. Then hopefully our defenders are still strong enough to repel the second wave and our reinforcements from Jamestown arrive to mop up...

I'd really like to chop all the jungle south of Hastings ASAP, but I don't see a safe way to do it.

Yeah, if he moves to that tile, his troops will be annoying to remove, but there goes also his forking possibility, which means that his attack will probably be easier to handle. Thanks to hill defense bonus and unit specialty of bowmen defending Hastings should be pretty easy so I guess we would prefer having suttree's units stuck there instead of 2-turn attacking distance from Jamestown.

In other thoughts - hey! We can build spies now! Should we go peek inside Suttree's borders?

Wasn't it so that RBMod spies only see the tile where they stand? Can they still use enemy roads?

So mmmmaybe. I guess we would currently still prefer having an extra axe or something, right?