[SPOILERS] naufragar and Rusten get nickel-and-dimed

[naufragar]

Nothing interesting discovered. One panther flawlessly lost; another moved away.

[Rusten]

We've killed another panther. Just missing 1xp for woody2 now, and we need to make sure we get it before barbarians start spawning. Keeping that scout alive to fogbust is a huge deal. Not only does it save us 15 hammers, but it's a huge upgrade on warriors.

There's a decent chance the copper could spawn on the fogged desert tile 1S of the oasis, but I guess we'd find out anyway through process of elimination. If we don't see any copper within 5 more scouting turns it will have to be there. And the scout will circle back by T30 anyway to help settling in most cases. We can continue with the move towards coast plan.

[naufragar]

Wonderful! But you wanted to log in without playing? Feel free to take the turn, if you want. Copper on that fogged desert by the oasis would be pretty horrific.

We found more food, after a fashion.



Superdeath is on pop 2 and somebody built a warrior. Will do demos later (he says, not entirely convincingly).

[Rusten]

Wonderful! But you wanted to log in without playing? Feel free to take the turn, if you want.

And have you miss out on the joys of discovering new food tiles? No way. 
Alright, next time around I'll just play the turn and upload demos here.

I really just wanted to look around. I think better browsing in-game than looking at screenshots.

[naufragar]

We have Woody 2!



The Event Log doesn't like showing all our animal combat, but we got hit by another panther (that got three hits in despite having 0.0% odds of winning    ). I figure we go straight south next turn and then start going east with an eye towards eventually coming back to scout for the settler.

Superdeath now has a warrior. I didn't check  last turn, but this turn I saw the MSCC have improved their wet corn expected. We'll get graphs in 3 turns.

[Rusten]

Wouldn't SE-SW reveal more tiles? We might want 1 more turn to the south before heading east, but perhaps SE-SE will do. Depends on what we find.
I didn't calculate, so I don't know how far we can go and still return in time, but if there is another player down there it would be good to know where exactly. We're already 7 tiles south of capital, so they'd be right around the corner. If we can afford going 3-4 tiles further south that would be useful.

Excited to see copper next turn!

[naufragar]

If there is another player down there it would be good to know where exactly. We're already 7 tiles south of capital, so they'd be right around the corner. If we can afford going 3-4 tiles further south that would be useful.

Excited to see copper next turn!

Made the SE move, because of course that's flat better than straight south. Discovered our friendly neighborhood Superdeath with a scouting warrior. (Scouting warriors don't exactly put the neighbors at ease. It's 10 turns away, so we can build a warrior of our own in time. If when he finally arrives at our borders, he messes with our micro, in the words of the queen, we would not be amused.) He's on 2 pop with a worker, the warrior, and Bronze Working.

I moved away.


I did this for a few reasons besides my own timid nature. Mainly, if we continued along the coast, the return trip would have been complicated by Superdeath's units and potential cities, and we really need the scout fogbusting for the settler when the time comes. Note all the resources in the jungle. This will spur Superdeath on to Iron Working. On the one hand, this is a little rough for us because swords are excellent offensive units. On the other hand, this is great if it delays him getting a samurai counter. Samurai eat swords alive, so if we can get to samurai before he hits us with swords, we're very happy. I also like how the jungle slows down horse archer/chariot attacks. Our own attack on Superdeath will likely use boats down the coast.

Copper had a friendly enough placement:


We should start thinking about second city placement. I'd like to found second city for bronze. Perhaps I'm being too timid, but the neighbors feel awfully close, and they are Babylon and Superdeath. Founding on the desert hill is a slower start because it's got nothing in its first ring, but I like it for our next city. It claims territory towards MSCC, and the sooner we settle it, the sooner we can start growing its many cottages. A granary and a barracks are easily chop/whipped out. I think with the position of the copper near the furs, I'm more drawn to a city 1SW of the furs rather than 2S. With grassland copper, that city should be able to get its starter buildings up early, plus we get earlier access to the furs.

Here's an overview for dotmapping:


Apologies for not having resource icons. I wanted to show territory and couldn't do both. My instinct tells me to go east to the desert hill for the first city, then south to the cow (with plenty of defenders), and then up to the furs. After that, we'll see how are neighbors are doing. Further cities can go by the northern deer, further south along our river, and of course on the overseas stone.

This was an interesting turn.

[Rusten]

Big turn. Sad to see that we got the 2 neighbours I wanted the least.

I'll log in and see later for a better overview, but the situation is critical. My early worries of us not being able to share the capital food is very much coming to fruition. We'd be in a much better position if we simply had a land tile 3S of the capital to enable settling. Another thing that scares me long term is a lack of hill tiles. With slavery being so nerfed in RtR we really want hills for hammers before workshops become a thing if we're going warfare. Not sure we can afford planting on a hill towards superdeath for instance.

Every possible 2nd city looks slow to me. Mainly because it's impossible to share food except for 3N of the capital, but that delays the fish significantly and like you I feel it has to be settled by the furs. I'd make a case for settling a city on the desert copper hill, but the problem is that even if we get away with it we will completely ruin our dotmap in the process. We'd end up with too much food in the capital making it go to waste. The extra land claimed would do nothing as it's desert and MSCC will get the rice anyway through a defensive plant. Perhaps we need to accept just having 4 good cities (with 2 minor ones coming later) on the mainland and settle the next few overseas.

Positives: We're forced to use samurai, flavour be damned.

My first thoughts on city placements:
1SW of furs + the desert hill + cows+gem + deer with sheep shared (can be delayed) + what we find overseas. We can put a filler by the banana to share tiles after calendar. Might also be worth it to settle the deer, depending on what our options are.

Plan: Focus on quick development (commerce) and claim more land through conquest rather than aggressive settling.
Important: We should get an early work boat to scout settling opportunities to the immediate west. It can come back for the fish in our 2nd city.


P.S. After thinking about it while typing I'm not sure I can justify settling such a weak 2nd city. We may have to go 3N of the capital. We can still claim the fish through overseas. We should probably farm the available flood plains tile in that case. I'll need to test this.

[Rusten]

I will play a test game to see/prove if I have the right idea, but I'm convinced we need to go 3N of capital and not SW of furs.

The 2nd city needs to contribute to settling, and having it run a 2F tile while working on a barracks stunts our growth too much. We'll get the fish too late. If we settle 3N of the capital we can grow to size 2 on a farmed flood plains and then work the copper. Not only is this more productive in terms of hammers, but it also delays the need for 30 hammers put into a barracks (and 30 hammers put into a work boat). 3N also has forests available, while SW of furs have none.

Furthermore, our desert city really needs a granary as it has low base food. I think we should aim to 3x chop it on size 1. I'll need to play to see the timings, but I remember that we at least get to pottery in time without problems.

It's amusing how we may have to share a fp/unimproved clam while MSCC can share 6F corn while settling next to pigs and wheat, but that's life I guess. Fortunately we look to have a commerce advantage in return, so we need to act on it (samurai) while making sure we don't fall too much behind.

[naufragar]

I will play a test game to see/prove if I have the right idea, but I'm convinced we need to go 3N of capital and not SW of furs.

The 2nd city needs to contribute to settling, and having it run a 2F tile while working on a barracks stunts our growth too much. We'll get the fish too late. If we settle 3N of the capital we can grow to size 2 on a farmed flood plains and then work the copper. Not only is this more productive in terms of hammers, but it also delays the need for 30 hammers put into a barracks (and 30 hammers put into a work boat). 3N also has forests available, while SW of furs have none.

Furthermore, our desert city really needs a granary as it has low base food. I think we should aim to 3x chop it on size 1. I'll need to play to see the timings, but I remember that we at least get to pottery in time without problems.

It's amusing how we may have to share a fp/unimproved clam while MSCC can share 6F corn while settling next to pigs and wheat, but that's life I guess. Fortunately we look to have a commerce advantage in return, so we need to act on it (samurai) while making sure we don't fall too much behind.

Ah, I was just typing up a response to your previous post when you sent this. Yeah, I'm in 99% agreement. (Even mentioned MSCC's beautiful next two cities.)

My 1% disagreement is about the farmed floodplains vs getting a work boat from the cap. We'll figure this out during testing, but it is 7 worker turns versus a 1 pop whip for the boat. Plus I suspect our next city will be whipped down to 2 very often, so copper mine + clams is fine for that city. As I understand the current plan, the cap finishes the settler with no overflow and 2 pop, so a whip isn't tough. (Assuming Superdeath doesn't try to warrior choke us. )

3x chopping a granary in the desert city at size 1 is easy enough with two workers. (Although I think it's impossible with 1.)

MSCC is going to crush us. They can even deny us the northern deer if they found for it second ring on the desert. I'm trying to shed my pessimism and look on the bright side, however! The upside to the low hammer, high commerce land, as you say, is an earlier Metal Casting. I'm assuming that even a handful of samurai in a neighbor's borders by turn 90 kills them. With the commerce, hopefully we can get there. The hammer issue for the initial samurai push can be solved by queue upgrading axes with whips in them. We don't have many forests, but I still like your plan to bulb Math, so we get to currency faster (and hopefully make our conquests more profitable    )