[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Old Harry]

Azza has met Cyneheard (and quite early based on EP amounts) so my hypothesis is that Barry is NE/N of us and Cyneheard is somewhere NW of us. Planting a beach-head for furs sounds interesting, but at the moment we are still busy securing land on our own continent (and don't have Sailing yet) so we could re-evaluate this in ~15 turns.

Actually I was imagining that taking his three cities off him would count as a beach-head .

Once we get to Currency then hammers will be pretty useful for bagging techs. After Currency I guess we want Sailing then CoL (although we want Sailing to arrive the turn we can net the whales which may be before Currency?) but thinking about conquest we could get Sailing->Construction or Sailing->HBR then get CoL to help assimilate our conquests.

I have pretty much convinced myself that Sailing should be our next tech. We can get it significantly before Currency and it provides us a reasonable boost:
1. In practice it will mean 4 extra cottages worked (A, B, C & D) thanks to higher happ cap from whales
2. Whales is a nice 3/1/4 tile on its own
3. Couple of our cities would like to start building a lighthouse
4. When we get our 9th city down I want to build a galley there pretty fast (I'm not 100 % sure if we would have time to get Currency first though)
Overall I think that these factors compensate pretty well for extra trade route and ability to build wealth earlier.

I roughly played through a Currency-first sandbox and it will be t90 before we get it. It felt like we had a lot of hammers that I didn't want to spend on new cities, so yeah, Sailing for lighthouses, extra happy and IC trade route cities is fine by me.

After Sailing+Currency we want:
Economic: Calendar + CoL
Military: HBR + Construction

What's the order for these 4 techs I'm not sure, it depends a lot on our preference towards aggression. One could make a case for Calendar instead of Currency also, but maybe Currency is the right bet especially if we manage to settle couple of island cities soon enough.

Btw, I think building wealth is not such a big thing for us in this game (compared to PB13) and we don't really need mines for that. That's because we are FIN this time and working 2/0/3 coast/lakes/hamlets beats grass mines. That said, I'm sure we still want to squeeze couple of turns off from some key techs by building wealth, but as said we don't need to build production capabilities for wealth purposes.

I think the fact this map is constrained on tech not hammers argues more for wealth builds than PB13 did, the sooner we can be converting hammers into commerce the better. But we should be taking advantage of FIN coast and cottages as well.

Yeah, we are not getting city visibility on Azza as long as he is putting EPs on us. I'll start working slowly towards Barry, but will keep our research visibility on Azza. I want to know if heads e.g. for HBR.. Overall I agree that if Azza is strong enough naval attack might be the better option as it offers a possibility of clear surprise. However, galleys require a bunch of hammers and travel slowly so an immediate attack does not sound lucrative. We are developing fast now, so in ~15 turns we should be in position where we could start building real military if that's the path we choose.

Attacking CH would be easier as it's less far to ship in reinforcements. Barry would require two or three boats full of 1-movers along with pre-landed 2 movers, so not that appealing, but having the Hindu holy city is very appealing...

The Great Lighthouse is also still available, if it has not fallen we can speculate about an opportunistic attempt on it once we get closer to Sailing.

Worth it for fail gold if nothing else... Masonry is fairly cheap, but I don't like delaying Currency even further...