[SPOILERS - El Grillo & Charriu PB51] One step at a time

[El Grillo]

T35 war council:

That riverside copper city, while a major headache, also represents an opportunity for us. Amicalola founded this spot 4 tiles from his capital without The Wheel and with only a single Worker, which means that city is entirely on its own for defense, probably garrisoned by a single Quechua, at most 2 at this point. It has no first-ring tiles to chop and needs 8t on the floodplains to grow to size 2 on t42 before it can be whipped. We absolutely have to raze this city before t43 and a spear finishes. Fortunately, our roads and the terrain allow us to deploy to achieve that goal. A WC faces no worse than 79.8% against a fully-fortified Quechua in a 0-culture hill city, and we can't expect much better odds than that.

As I understand it, if I play after Amicalola on t39, I can declare war on the second half of t40, enter his borders, and attack on that turn. Charriu or another lurker, am I getting that right?



Our first pair of WCs will take the western route. In the vast majority of circumstances they will succeed in razing the city on t40. Meanwhile, the 4 WCs finishing on t39, t40, and 2x t42 will take the original eastern route toward Springer Mtn. as originally planned. They will link up with the survivors from the west, who will be able to promo-heal, and hit the capital together on t43, with reinforcements arriving on t45.

I expect Amicalola to finish Hunting either on t39 or t40 (59b with 0 prereqs, last finished a tech on t32 plus a revolt turn on t34), depending on if he saves a turn of gold or is going at it break-even. He then needs ~6-7 turns for Archery (89b with 1 prereq). If everything goes to plan, all of the WCs we've produced will be in position before he can have an Archer defend, though I expect him to whip a steady stream of Quechuas starting on t41 to delay. The timing will be tight, and we'll be at the mercy of the dice, but I still believe that the chance to gain is worth the risks.

[Charriu]

You are correct about the turn order. And great management of the empire so far.

[El Grillo]

Good to know, that turn will be upon us soon at the pace we've been going.

T36:

Our proud people are subjected to the whip for the first, but certainly not last time. Time to be top power for a while

I realized in hindsight while updating my score-tracking spreadsheet that I could've tried to make good use of that trick where you whip twice very quickly and the tracker records it as one log entry looking like a 2-pop whip. Does that still work with zulan's tracker, or is it a bit of old trivia from the pbspy days that I remember for some reason?



Whipping off two 3-yield tiles doesn't hurt us all that much in the demos for now. For whatever reasons, half the players still haven't settled their second city yet: Ramk (FIN/PRO Mali), Lazteuq (CRE/PHI France), Vanrober (AGG/CRE Zulu), and Giraflorens (IND/SPI Persia). They're all somewhat slow starters with no early traits outside of the CRE pair, but still. That said, vanrober and giraflorens have both 2-pop whipped, but given vanrober's was on t27 and he still hasn't founded that was presumably a 2-pop Worker whip? But then what has he been building for so long, Work Boats? Ramk hasn't whipped and isn't even in Slavery yet.

[Charriu]

I like how we declare war on a mountain in T40

[El Grillo]

It's only fitting, as one hiking-themed civ declaring war on another, that it be done via climbing some hills at the foot of mountains. Can't say I've personally visited anywhere near terrain I'd describe as desert or floodplains though

[Charriu]

Also we should declare war in T39 not T40 to ensure we get the second half. It's not a disadvantage for us, because he will see the war coming when he logs in to T40 and sees the WCs. But if we not declare in T39, he could login in T39, see our forces and do emergency whips.

[El Grillo]

Gotcha, makes sense. And to do that, I'd need to play after Amicalola a turn earlier on t38, right? That shouldn't be an issue logistics-wise since he typically isn't the one to roll the turn.

[Charriu]

Correct about T38

[El Grillo]

While we're waiting for Amicalola to figure out his temporary turnplayer substitution, I skimmed a bit of Plemo's PB80 thread with the help of Google's automated website translation tool. That game had some interesting setup and starting conditions including tribal villages and events on and preplaced barbs and tile improvements. Plemo ended up with a water-heavy isolated start, built 2-city GLH on t54, and boomed to 10 coastal cities by t92. He reported his turns in detail and played solidly with deliberation and planning. The midgame turned into a huge mess of wars that Plemo largely stayed out of thanks to keeping a state-of-the-art military, and he reached Communism and started a GA for lategame civics in t194. He then conquered 6 more cities from a weak neighbor, built powered factories early, and built Cristo Redentor to be solidly in 1st place economically. Corporations accelerated the game quite a bit and then he declared war against the 2nd-power player on t240 with a huge bomber-enabled alpha strike, slowing them down while continuing toward spaceship techs, leaving a competitor aiming for a cultural victory. Espionage started playing a big role, and he generated a ton of gold with Kremlin-powered whips of duplicate national wonders for failgold to power his 100% research rate. His spaceship timing was competitive with the cultural victory attempt, and the two of them fought at the end with Plemo landing spies to incite revolts in all three of the German cultural cities. Despite some last-minute Great Artist gifting and other shenanigans by third parties, the spaceship victory was successful on t286, with the cultural victory one turn away.

Now the settings were so different that it's hard to draw meaningful direct comparisons with the games here, but Plemo read like a solid technical player and capable of managing a big civ through the endgame, though he also got some advice from the lurkers in his thread. I'm still a bit confused about the Netherlands civ pick (perhaps he thought the game would go longer than is typical here, and that the map would be significantly more watery than it appears to have ended up), but he could certainly be a dangerous lategame opponent.

[El Grillo]

T37:

Our military build-up and deployment proceeds as planned. Elsewhere, giraflorens built Stonehenge, but has yet to settle a second city after his 2-pop whip on t32, which sounds like he whipped a 1/3-built Settler for 60 overflow into Stonehenge, and then put a chop into it plus 3 turns of natural production. Bear in mind giraflorens' Persia doesn't start with Mysticism, so that could've been his t30 score increase. Time will tell if this opening bears fruit, but with Ramk and Lazteuq both founding cities last turn, giraflorens and vanrober will be the last to a second city. They presumably both have Settlers en route, but either are settling a fair distance away from their capitals or are moving cautiously to avoid barbarians.



I reinstalled Blue Marble with different interface colors but the default graph background has this old-paper design so the combination of Egypt/Inca/Mali graphs are still kind of a pain to read . Anyway, Amicalola's power graph has been flat for a while now, which I've interpreted as 2 Quechuas.