Ride to ruin and the world's ending! (TBS, Becko & Joao)

[The Black Sword]

Giving Thoth too much of a head start in the thread spam, got to make the podium!

A city where the warrior is standing is reasonable. Alternatively NE of the gold might also work, depending on the location of pindicator's cities back there. That city needs to pick up the gold and rice and the gold should pretty much pay for itself.

I've been thinking a bit more about our medium term tech goals too, still no solutions yet. I've been thinking that MC might not be a bad choice, with 2 happy forges and a great map for the Colossus. Unfortunately I guess that's what Commodore will Oracle, CoL is just not all that great for him since he already has a religion, he shouldn't build courthouses for a while, so all he gets is caste border popping. I was thinking about a possible Oracle build ourselves btw, but I think we have to cede it to Commodore. If we're going priesthood anyway, let's try set up to 1t it somewhere.

Anyway, in the short term, I think we have a couple of opportunities. First, we don't have any known tech bonus on Sailing. What do you think about the GLH in Maker of Men? 5 forests +whip overflow from a LH would get us most of the way there. (I probably shouldn't have chopped the 6th forest this turn.) For the moment, lets save gold and we can decide between Meditation, Masonry or Archery in an emergency.

The medium term tech choice comes down to Monarchy vs Currency IMO, perhaps Metal Casing could compete if we Commodore doesn't take it. Then in the Monarchy case, do we go directly med->priest or go through Mono to try for a religion. We probably want to pair the revolt with OR anyway. You're first 4 points regarding CoL are good, but none of them really apply to us, we'd only want CoL before a GA. The last 4 aren't too relevant IMO. As for experience, I don't have much myself, it's more fun to figure these things out yourself anyway IMO.

Fleshing out a possible GA path, I imagine it'd be something like:
Monarchy -> Writing -> Col -> GA -> Maths -> CS
Assuming we let whip anger wear off in the run up to the GA, we could be size8 with full food boxes to grow to size 9 as we revolt to HR on the first GA turn. If we can trade away our second wines, size 10 cities. That's 1266b to generate over the next the next 38 turns, approximately 33bpt which sounds doable. 1308b or 163bpt during the GA to get CS on time which sounds a little more difficult but doable, maybe with a bit of a delay. We could probably get 10 full cities under the GA effect, save 2-3 revolt turns, get out at least 2 GPs(academy +trade mission?).

Current turn:


We have a road connecting to that river, we actually might get trade routes next turn ... let's hope Oxy doesn't cancel when they should up on the demos.


Stay on the forests ...

[The Black Sword]

Upon further reflection, I'll go back to my previous position of ignoring the GLH.

Both MoM and 3 Texas Steers are only size 2, MoM has forests but no natural production, 3 has natural production but few forests(little food too). The wonder is hammer constrained, not tech, so we don't really have any advantage. Additionally, we'd probably lose all OB deals when we built it, so we'd need 3 weak IC trade route cities to start getting full value.

My quick run date was T73, might be able to shave a little bit off that date, but lets see when it falls.

[The Black Sword]

Lose again. Need more blood for that baptism.

These are getting rather annoying now, painful though it was, I went and whipped the chariot in Maker of Men.


Pindicator's chariot is on the sign. He just lost a city to Thoth though(), hopefully he's got better things to do with it than annoy us. If he does, I guess we'll have to whip 3 Texas Steers too for a chariot to deal with this latest barb.

That's a very nice oracle time from Commodore, he hasn't selected his tech yet though, so I couldn't confirm MC. Definitely puts him up into the top contenders.



I'm feeling a bit negative about our chances at the minute. Just got to keep trying to make good decision I suppose. And a lesson for the future not to delay the first real military unit so long.

[Krill]

You're playing Joao with free border pops, how can you lose this?

[The Black Sword]

Way to take the pressure off.

Short term, the leader's almost 50% greater food advantage looks a bit intimidating. Longer term, I'm a bit afraid of expanding past that 7 city mark without really hurting the economy. That's probably only Stonehenge's break even even point though.

We do have 3 really great city spots coming up at least, getting 3 fish, 2 pigs, gold, copper, horses, a flood plain and a plains hill plant.

[The Black Sword]

I guess Thoth's the one with the 74k power in those demos. I feel sorry for pindicator but it should be good news for us at least, if a neighbour is being taken out we have more room to expand into, which is just what Joao needs.

Pindicator didn't move his chariot up, so no need to whip 3TS and Oxy didn't cancel OBs too, lots of good news!

I'm not sure whether to switch EPs to dtay from pindicator yet. If he goes down as fast as he seems to expect in the tech thread I guess there's no point. Still, dtay's graphs are pretty low priority.

It looks like Thoth razed the first city and kept the second, it'll definitely be interesting to meet him.

[Becko]

Wow, miss a day or two... [EDIT: crosspost]

Giving Thoth too much of a head start in the thread spam, got to make the podium!

That's the spirit! Unfortunately, he seems to be focusing more on cities now. Pindicator's posts in the tech thread and Civstats seem to indicate that he's been decapitated by Thoth. In which case, wow, good for Thoth and sorry for Pindicator. Trying to figure what happened through civstats:

T58 -- Pindicator logs in, sees Thoth coming out of the fog, whips two cities. Thoth logs in, captures and razes a size-2 city.
T59 -- Pindicator logs in, does not whip. Thoth logs in, captures Pindicator's size-4 (?) capital.

An opponent with two capitals is bad news, especially since he doesn't seem to have sacrificed a lot of expansion. Still, if someone was to be eliminated early, it being Pindicator is good for us, right?

Upon further reflection, I'll go back to my previous position of ignoring the GLH.

I agree with that decision, not because I think the GLH is not great here, but because we don't have any real advantage for it. Better to save forests for Maths chopping and see if we can't extract enough value from Sailing through OB's.

It's interesting that we are tops in production, while relatively low in food. Fortunately, our advantage lies in converting hammers to food (Imp/Exp -> settlers/workers). Our tech path should try to exploit that fact, I think. HR does provide another option for growing with hammers, but doesn't that work better for a more vertically inclined strategy?

With our closest (?) competitor practically eliminated, this seems like an opportunity to go for broke (literally). Now, I don't know what the best tech path is for that, but Currency ASAP and then Wealth builds doesn't sound too far off. As long as we can keep militarily secure -- damn barbs! -- we can reevaluate when we're at our rightful place at the top of the food [strike]chain[/strike] leaderboard.

[The Black Sword]

You think that city capture is his capital? Is there anyway to confirm that? If you're just going off pop, it's quite possible both his second and third cities could be size 4. Lonely Trail has whipped 4 pop points and is currently size 3, 3TS has whipped 1 pop point, is currently size 2, is food poor and was delayed relative to the rest of the world by SH.

I had forgotten that Thoth was Zulu btw. If pindicator was in a similar situation to us, with an awkward copper spot and relying on chariots you can easily see how 2 move impis would be hard to stop.

Regarding Monarchy, I doubt we'd really be building loads of military units for the happiness. I'd view HR mainly as +1 happy per city, because we need a garrison unit anyway, then the wines as another +1, possibly another via trading. You could think of each happiness of growing onto one additional cottage and that's the equivalent of 2c per city already. Of course the currency benefits occur immediately for size 1 cities but I'm still not sure. I'm happy to take a run at meditation for the moment anyway. Btw, another point about pindicator's fall, that only leaves dtay without an efficient border popping method and we still have the 2 early religions available. Given Commodore is Spi though, he might want to head onto Monotheism himself. I confirmed he picked up MC too.

I really have to write up my opponent analysis, I've jotted down a few notes on each player but haven't had a chance to write them up, getting a bit late now.

[Becko]

Not positive (on Pin's cap), but confident. On the phone, so can't check the numbers right now, but IIRC the circumstantial evidence was a) if the first city conquered was in the first ring, it makes sense to go for the cap next, b) Pin's apparent despondency in the tech thread, and most importantly c) the difference between Pin's drop in score and Thoth's increase was something like 25 pts, which I figured to be second-ring land points, which would have to be the cap.*

Thoth = Zulu is big, yeah, that seems like a good explanation.

As always I trust your judgment -- a lot of my advice is argument for the sake of argument, so don't overthink it.

*) Assuming that the Palace is moved instantly so no wonder score change, which I haven't actually verified. Also, 25 pts is from memory, so might be anywhere between 10 and 50.

[The Black Sword]

Regardless, it seems like he was being quite serious when he said it didn't matter:


Rival worst power is something like 18k too. If he still does have his capital, he won't for long. It really is a dangerous world out there:






Looks like we'd have to declare on dtay to move our scout through. I don't like another Oxy power increase, I think we're definitely going to have to slot archery in if we're delaying the copper so long.