Turn Tracking Thread

[Sullla]

Turn 97 - 450BC

Well excuse me for not writing up a full report before heading off to work. The turn rolled at about 5am local time, and I had a short window to play (but not write) before heading off. Be glad that I have this up now and not in another 12 hours.



We continued to find more sweet resources over in the extreme east where we have no prayer of claiming them. This will make for a nice city for someone else some day. Looks like we move this scout another tile northeast next turn and continue to hope for the best with barb luck.



We found nothing in the northwest jungle this turn except a new barb warrior. The southern axe will move southeast next turn, and there's only one tile left in this region for a potential food resource. Cross your fingers for that northern fogged tile, as we know the southern one has a peak. The Woodsman axe will go right on healing this turn, as there's no reason to attack the barb warrior at 95% odds and risk a low-odds loss. The warrior won't attack our unit, the odds are too low for the AI to go for that, but we'll be able to kill it after another turn or two of healing and claim our 5th experience point for Woodsman II promotion.



The southeast was the true cluster bomb for this turn, due to a bad dice roll and a misplaced barbarian axe. The situation was set up by attacking with our war chariot against a barb warrior on the corn tile at the start of the turn. We did win this battle, but took very heavy damage despite the 99% combat odds. Because the battle was so one-sided, we also only earned 1 XP and cannot promote the chariot next turn to heal it. The chariot then also revealed another barb axe hiding behind the warrior, making things a lot more complicated. (Why did we name this unit the war scooter? Is it any wonder this thing had a poor combat result? I think we did this to ourselves! )

Let's think about how to play this out tactically. The war chariot still has its second movement point left, which means it should survive this turn no problem. I suggest that we move it northeast, onto the pink spot south of the oasis. I've also gone ahead and promoted our 5 XP axe that started the turn in Focal Point to Shock, and moved it up toward the front. This will open up the following scenarios:

1) The barb axe moves off to the south. Best result for us, we'll have time to heal and found our city without problems.

2) The barb axe moves north onto the forested plains hill. This is a pretty good result for us. We hold the axe in place to heal for a turn (going from 3.8 to 4.3 health) and the chariot in place to heal (now inside a city as pink spot gets founded, healing from 2.6 to 3.6 health). We keep healing so long as the axe stays on defensive cover and then kill it when it comes down out of the forests.

3) The barb axe moves northeast onto the corn tile. This is the worst result, because we'll have to delay the founding our city by a turn. Under this scenario, we probably bait the axe into attacking and killing our warrior (leaving it on the tile southwest of the oasis) and then destroy the wounded barb axe with our healed Shock axe or our war chariot, which will have to retreat itself rather than heal on T98.

I don't see any other alternatives to this at the moment. All of our other units are too far away. Basically, just pray that the barb axe moves somewhere other than the corn tile on this upcoming interturn, we should be fine under any other scenario. I expect the barb to move north onto the forested hill, since the barb AI prioritizes taking cover if there are no objectives to attack. We can deal with the axe from that spot, even if it delays farming the oasis corn by one turn.



In contrast, there is absolutely nothing going on here in the northeast. Our new city should go up here without issue. The cultural overlay confirms that WPC has no cities in this region at all, and we should be able to clean up this very fertile region. After getting this spot, we can push northwest up the river toward the cows and through the eastern jungle for the dyes.

Overview and tile micro:

We grew a total of four pop between turns and picked up several more cottages as a result. We're actually working 25 cottages right now along with 19 resource tiles; the only unimproved tiles that we're working are 4 coastal tiles + 1 lake tile at Horse Feathers, and with a lighthouse I hesitate to even call them unimproved. On this particular turn, Adventure One has taken back its corn tile to start growing in anticipation of Hereditary Rule happiness (growth 2t, revolt 2t). Mansa has taken back corn + deer to push growth a little bit as well, although we'll trade that corn back to Forbidden Fruit next turn to let it grow immediate to size 5. Focal Point goes back to +5 food surplus the next two turns to shave a turn off of growth. Eastern Dealers whipped its granary last turn and is preparing to whip its work boat for the clams. Lots of steady improvement.

Research has been turned on for Monarchy tech, due in 2t at the eot 99. We're making 201 base beakers / 298 modified beakers this turn, easily enough to get the tech at 90% research next turn, possibly 80% depending on how the numbers shake out. If we're lucky, we'll be able to sign Open Borders with CivPlayers this turn, to have access to their trade route income next turn. This has predictably caused a surge in the GNP number:



Our top rate of 270 easily clears the field; I feel sorry for whoever has that 37 number. We're also still tops in Food, which will itself take a major swing upwards as we found two new cities next turn. We have the third mark in Production and Power without making much real effort to concentrate on either category. Obviously our focus has been on winning the Food and GNP categories, and I'm happy to see that we maintain a comfortable lead in both. To be 20% of the Rival Best in Food and 30% of the Rival Best in GNP - which are not the same team - has us in truly excellent position on the econ front.

I think that's all for the moment, although I will still have to log in later and move the war chariot to the northeast. Pray that there are no further barb axes hanging out at the oasis.

[Sullla]

Turn 98 - 425BC

Two more cities and another new civ met. Now if we could just find some way to get long-term peace with CivPlayers...



This was the easiest part of the turn. We moved the scout northwest and established contact with UniversCiv through their culture. (We also found a random wandering German quechua.) This scout will head east next and see if it can find another team before it runs into a barb and died. We've got contact with everyone other than Apolyton and CivFr at this point.

Time to send UniversCiv a standard greeting message.



Here's the screen of who has met whom. CivPlayers wasn't lying about having few contacts, and they haven't signed Open Borders with anyone that we can see. I'm assuming that they do have them with Apolyton, and that's probably enough to fill up their 7 cities with pre-Currency routes. We could really use a road connection to CFC, as that would be worth another 2 commerce trade route with every single one of our cities. We should be able to get that up sometime in the next ten turns after we finish connecting resources in the east.



Unfortunately we still have not found any food resources in the jungle near the ivory. The region between that row of peaks is completely barren. Still, not all hope is lost for a decent city up here. The northern axe killed a barb warrior this turn, and will promote to Woodsman II next turn. It's sitting at 3.0 health right now, which means the promotion will take it to 4.0 health, and that should be good enough for scouting a jungle region with Woody II. We'll be able to defog the northern river area over the next two turns and find out if there's anything useful up there. We could potentially place a city on the tile north or northeast of the ivory; there's still a chance that a city on either of those spots could have something useful in its radius. Just have to wait a couple more turns to see.

There was some discussion about how fast we could get a settler up to this ivory. The sad truth is that if the settler CivPlayers whipped last turn is heading for the ivory, we definitely cannot beat them to it. Simply not possible. That said, if they would settle two tiles east of the gems, where I expect, then we could settle first-ring to the ivory on the tile northeast of it, and we would win that cultural battle 100%. I'll keep the southern axe in this region to watch and find out what they choose to do. Still crossing fingers that we can plant a not-terrible city somewhere nearby that claims the ivory.

In pure tactical terms, a city north of the ivory is not really all that safe. It could be attacked along both diagonals, SW-SW and NW-NW. On the other hand, a city placed northeast of the ivory would be extremely difficult for anyone to attack, with peaks and hills blocking nearly all approaches. If we have to stick a garbage city here purely for resource control, northeast of the ivory is definitely the way to go. I would dance for joy if there's a pigs resource sitting 3N of that ivory...

Again, we'll re-evaluate here after scouting next turn.



Here's some good news. We've finally found "our" horses down in the south, on one of the few tiles that we didn't scout. If we would somehow lose Brick By Brick, heaven forbid, we will still have the option to build war chariots and knights with a city down here. As we discussed before, a city on the green dot looks like the most efficient way to use the terrain down here. The spot redeems an otherwise wasted floodplains and river grassland tile, claims horses, has a wheat for food, and fills in some weakish space that would otherwise be wasted. I've drawn in the irrigation line to that wheat tile, through a bunch of plains tiles. Not sure exactly when we would want to put a city here, as it's completely safe and not the greatest land. We'd want to make sure to have this backup source of horses connected if we were anticipating war, however.

This also leaves the southern plains cows for another city down in the southern tundra. I'll be moving the war chariot onto that tundra hill in the south next turn, and that should give us a great deal more vision of what's down there.



Now we get to the new cities. Starfall seemed to be the most popular name for this spot in the desert, and that's what I went with. We were able to found the city on schedule because the barb axe moved onto the plains hill tile, as I was hoping it would do. Unfortunately I made a micro mistake here; I did not chop the forest tile that the workers are standing on before founding Starfall. That would have funneled the chop into the Mausoleum in Focal Point; now that same forest goes to Starfall. This was not written into the micro plan, but I still should have remembered it from our discussions earlier. Mea culpa, mea culpa. Now we need a new job for these two workers on this turn, as they still can't move onto the corn and start farming it due to the barb axe. Suggestions?

With regards to the barb axe... My plan is to move our own Shock axe southeast onto the forest next to that barb. This should induce the barb to suicide itself against our own axe, which is at 3.8 health but would be getting +85% bonus from forest + Combat I + Shock promotions. We would have very high odds to win that battle, and if we lost, our war chariot would be able to clean up the wounded barb. If the barb axe didn't take the bait, by moving onto the corn or grassland tile next to Starfall, then our axe would still be able to attack it if needed next turn. If the barb axe moved the other way, to the west, then we'd be buying more time for the chariot to heal. Any other thoughts on this plan?



This is our other city in the northeast, where people seemed to favor The Covenant for the name. Hope people don't misinterpret that as a Halo reference. Anyway, this takes us to 12 cities; UniversCiv has 10 cities and no one else has more than 8. If we're trying to stay inconspicuous, then we're failing.

Micro note: our worker that moved onto the grassland spice 2N of Forbidden Fruit has orders to chop that jungle tile. Are we sure we don't want to road that tile first instead? Feels like that would give us a lot more flexibility instead of slowing chopping the jungle over 4 turns. Am I crazy for thinking this? Think that roading the tile first so other workers can help chop/plantation would be better.

Overview / tile micro:

We only grew one pop point this turn, and we lost than in a whip at Horse Feathers which will overflow into an Organized Religion missionary for Seven Tribes. Actually, nearly all of these Wealth builds are production overflow being saved for OR purposes or missionary builds. Our economy is not quite as good as it looks at present, since we're getting about 15gpt from Wealth. We can easily dump this into military if we would need it.

Anyway, we easily finish Monarchy tech with gold in the bank at 80% research. We're fairly close to being able to finish it at 70% research, although this number sets up really nicely to avoid rounding errors on the pre-requisite beaker multiplier. We're getting 174 base / 259 modified beakers from research this turn. The old plan was to tech Code of Laws -> Civil Service next; we may have to re-evaluate this depending on what CivPlayers does in upcoming turns. In any case, a revolt to Hereditary Rule and Organized Religion will be taking place next turn.



Demos still looking strong. Whoever was running the 200+ GNP last turn has dialed down research or swapped to a tech with fewer pre-requisite bonuses. We continue to lead comfortably in the key categories. I think we were still in first at 0% research when I checked, although that depends on what rate other teams are running.

We're going to grow SIX population points next turn and also discover Monarchy tech, so, uh, if we want to push a diplomatic agenda, now might be a good time before more flashing "RUNAWAY CIV" lights go off around the world.

[Sullla]

Turn 99 - 400BC

Revolution! We swapped this turn to Organized Religion and Hereditary Rule civics. No city micro as a result, although there are still plenty of units to move and issues to discuss.



There's not much to see with the normal view of our eastern scout, so here's the cultural overlay instead. Our scout is on the tile north of the gems. This allows us to see a pair of UniversCiv cities on either side. We may want to ask them for Open Borders and see if they'll let our scout through; it's worth a shot at least. Assuming they are not interested, our scout will try to slip through to the east in the middle region between UniversCiv and Spanish Apolyton.

Up in the northwest, I promoted our axe to Woodsman II, moved one tile, and found this:



Another barb axe in the way. My thought is that we still move another tile northwest anyway; if the barb wants to attack, we'll get +100% defensive bonus from forest and Woodsman II. Then we could go southwest-southwest next turn and have an excellent picture of this jungle region, spotting any resources that might be there. I only did this because I wanted to consult the team before putting one of our units in potential danger. We can still retreat back to the east if we want to avoid the barb axe. Thoughts?

The southern axe is monitoring the area around the ivory, and will also be in position to move northwest next turn and defog more tiles. That unit can still take Shock or Combat II promotion if needed. These two axes should be useful if CivPlayers tries to do anything in the region.



Down in the extreme south, we found... another barb axe. Ugh. The war chariot will face a straight 50/50 chance to survive next turn: cross your fingers. At least we found another food resources here in the form of that sheep. We can eventually plant a city on the plains tile two west of the sheep, which will be able to work cows + sheep + six grassland tiles. Backline city, low priority, worth founding eventually down the road. I'm hoping that we'll be able to survive this battle and move onto that desert tile two east, which would reveal most of the rest of the south. This wave of barbarian axes has been most annoying. Thank goodness we at least have horses connected, and don't have to keep taking 60-70% dice rolls with axe vs axe battles.



The barb axe near Starfall moved northeast onto the grassland tile between turns. We had 81% odds with the war chariot, so I went ahead and attacked... only to get a retreat roll. Well, I was not expecting that, and the odds in that picture kjn posted above tells us that we had 1.88% odds to get a retreat, but I'm not complaining. The War Scooter went down to 0.6 health, gained a second experience point, and lived to fight another day. Our Shock axe then cleaned up the mess at 99% odds. We'll be able to promote the chariot to Combat I next turn, heal up inside Starfall without moving, and then probably go check out that new CFC city. We could see into Astan from the hill next to the cows, and that's worth doing so long as there are no barbs to whack in the area.

One worker at Starfall roaded to finish the one started next turn, and the other one moved to the corn to begin farming it. You know, we talked about this in the micro thread, and I still believe that roading that desert tile was the best choice. The corn farm gets finished the same turn regardless (T101), and I would rather have a completed road on that desert tile than 1/5 of a farm on a non-river grassland tile that we won't be working. You never know when having a road might be useful for tactical purposes.

I made an incredibly stupid mistake over here this turn with a different worker. Worker L, the worker on the tile southwest of the copper, has been minechopping that forest hill for the last half-dozen turns. I had specifically made a note to revolt to Organized Religion and then finish the minechop, just to make sure that we would get the OR production bonus, and then when I came back to this worker, my mind saw the forest sitting there and stupid thought "click the chop button." This did not finish the mine, and our worker action for the turn ended up being completely wasted. Stupid, stupid, careless play. Now that chop will be delayed a turn, and it will likely delay our Mausoleum build a turn as well. There's no excuse for this other than having a brainfart and clicking the wrong action, something I work hard to try and avoid. I'm sorry about all of this; we may need to re-evaluate some of the worker/tile micro on the Mausoleum as a result. Blah.



The northeast doesn't have a whole lot happening right now. Workers finished the plantation on the grassland spices between Forbidden Fruit and The Covenant, granting the latter city a 3 food tile to work while waiting for borders to expand. I've boxed in the tile with Worker F, where I've suggested that we might want to road instead of chop the jungle this turn. That worker is unmoved for the moment until we can get a more firm response from our micro team on that subject.

I also went through and cleared out a whole bunch of signs indicating half-finished tile improvements. Please do keep those signs in the sandbox for reference purposes, but they clutter up the view too much for the in-game screenshots. It's hard to illustrate what's going on when there are "cottage 1" signs all over the place. Thanks.



I'm not doing an overview picture this turn of tile micro because we're technically not working any tiles this turn. Don't anyone faint at the unimproved grassland tile being "worked" above - we are in Anarchy, after all. Anyway, we finished the whipped axeman in Horse Feathers at the start of this turn; where is this fellow going? I did not have a firm destination in mind. We could potentially send the axe to garrison Focal Point, which doesn't have any units inside at present. (Mansa's Muse will be garrisoned by the warrior slowly walking back from Starfall; the axe on the right side of the picture is going to Forbidden Fruit.) We could also use this axe as a defender for a yet-to-be-planted city somewhere on the map, or sail the axe over to Brick By Brick. There's a spear in the galley heading over there in this screenshot. Where do you want this axe to be positioned?

There are three Wealth builds to be processed as well:

* Horse Feathers is turning its axeman whip overflow into a Hindu missionary. This is actually not up for debate, as we need it for our Hanging Gardens plan.

* Tree Huggers has 10 overflow sitting in the queue. Our micro plan has this turning into a missionary as well, and I agree that this would be a great chance to spread religion into our capital. If you would rather build another unit, speak now.

* Gourmet Menu has 14 overflow. It's written into the micro plan as using the overflow for another worker, but that's just a vague suggestion. Thoughts here?

* Forbidden Fruit has 30 overflow left over from a forest chop. This is probably best used on a worker, and there's even a shortage of improved tiles to go beyond size 5 here at the moment. Willing to hear other thoughts on this before we decide.

Our current micro plan starts to run out next turn on T100, which means this is a good time to start working on it again. Interested parties can find it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...kdWc#gid=1



The one weird thing on the Demographics screen was that Imports/Exports number. How in the world did someone get a rating of 30 in this category? Is that some weird artifact of us being in Anarchy? No one has built the Great Lighthouse or Temple of Artemis for trade route silliness, I checked. I don't see how one team could be getting +30 income from trade routes at this point in time. Perhaps that will disappear when we get out of anarchy next turn. Everything else looks extremely good; we're even up to second in Power again behind the German team.

We'll run max gold for a few turns before we have to decide on our next research project. This is one situation where binary research works very well indeed. The econ path is Code of Laws -> Civil Service, and our preferred route ahead. The military path is Construction next, and Horseback Riding later if we're able to secure ivory. I still hope that we can work something out with CivPlayers.

One final note on them: one of their people logged into the game while I was playing. I sent them a quick message asking them if they wanted to chat, no answer. After waiting a few minutes, I sent another message saying "that's fine, we're looking forward to hearing back from your next message". No answer again. Maybe their player was AFK, maybe they are still stalling for an attack. I have no idea.

[Sullla]

Turn 100 - 375BC

Most everything this turn looks pretty good - except that our war chariot still lost the 50/50 battle and died.



I'll start with the far eastern scout as usual. I wasn't going to post a picture of this routine scout movement, at least until I noticed what UniversCiv was doing with their worker. They are farm-chopping a non-river plains tile... uh, ok? I guess that they really wanted that 2/1/0 tile yield for some reason, enough to spend 8 worker turns on it. Very strange.

This picture also shows one of the other big developments for the turn: CFC finished the road to our territory, and we now have a trade connection to their team and also to UniversCiv. Kudos to our team members for the excellent detective work, I think kjn predicted ahead of time that a connection to CivFanatics would connect to UniversCiv as well. Now we'll get the CFC trade routes automatically starting next turn, as trade routes are calculated at the beginning of each turn and they haven't gone through just yet. When I saw the connection to UniversCiv, I went ahead and requested Open Borders with them in-game, sending them a basic message that said something like "we have a trade connection, how about we sign Open Borders for trade route income?" I think they'll probably accept (they have not logged into the game yet), since we're extremely far away and they seemed pretty friendly from their first message. If UniversCiv would sign OB, then we have absolutely no need for CivPlayers trade route income. Suck on it, jerks.



In the nothwest, we found pretty much nothing. (The barb axe did not go for our Woodsman II axe and continued wandering eastward. I figured that was fine, the barb axe can go bother the German team.) Anyway, we did spot another spice and a grassland cow, but certainly nowhere near the ivory resource. If we want that ivory, it's probably going to have to be a resourceless, thoroughly crappy city until much later in the game. We can discuss this further, but I'm going to set up a separate post in the dot mapping thread for us to cover "where do we settle next?" in more detail.



Here's the sad new from the turn, as our war chariot proved unable to win its coinflip battle with the barb axe. The combat log had to twist the knife further by having Ruff's Riders rally from near-death to come within one hit of victory... and then still fall short. Sigh.

Fortunately, there's a barb warrior incoming towards Seven Tribes which should give us experience point #10 and a guaranteed Heroic Epic. I expect that we'll be researching Literature in about 25-30 turns, and hopefully can get the HE up shortly thereafter.



The second piece of good news this turn came at Adventure One, where we (finally) received a free spread of Hinduism into the capital. This basically saves us the cost of one missionary; we might want to build a war chariot (to replace the one that died) in Tree Huggers instead of a missionary now. I'll leave that up to the team's call. Plenty of cities could still use a religion spread, including Gourmet Menu, which doesn't really want to whip any buildings until it can make use of that Oganized Religion bonus.

In the south, there's a barb spearman incoming near Focal Point. There's an axe inside the city that should be able to stop it from causing any trouble, and if the barb shifts towards the capital, the axe in Gourmet Menu can shuffle over and whack it. I don't anticipate a problem. The axe and war chariot at Starfall are both recovering from their battles last turn. We were a retreat at 2% odds away from having BOTH war chariots die, sheesh.



Here is the northeast with the new CivFanatics road connection clearly visible. For scooter and our diplo team: this seems like a perfect opportunity to dial up CFC and request an NAP extension. I would suggest writing something along the lines of "thank you so much for building the road to our civ, this seems like a great time to extend our peaceful intentions for another 20-30 turns etc etc". Let's try to lock them up before they can concoct anything with CivPlayers, who they will meet next turn.

Overview / tile micro:

We actually changed a lot of stuff around this turn as a result of coming out of Anarchy. With Organized Religion in hand, we can finally start emphasizing production on some of these wonders. Focal Point picked up three mine tiles, for example, and along with the pigs + copper + one plains cottage, it is food neutral and producing 17 base / 21 modified production/turn. Mausoleum is due there at eot 107 with a lot of chops and a whipped worker overflow. This caused a shuffling of tiles in the area around Focal Point, with Mansa's Muse taking a grassland cottage and borrowing the corn to grow to size 6. We have this one turn where we don't work a grassland cottage (S of Mansa), but the city will grab it upon growth next turn.

Elsewhere, our former Wealth builds have been turned into three missionaries and a worker build at Gourmet Menu. The missionaries at Horse Feathers and Forbidden Fruit are very much needed for Seven Tribes and The Covenant respectively - they are not really up for discussion. The missionary at Tree Huggers could definitely be turned into a war chariot, and that's a discussion worth having. What do you guys think? The Gourmet Menu worker gives us a good excuse to work a bunch of plains tiles at no "penalty" while Seven Tribes borrows the floodplains tiles to grow quickly, for use in our Hanging Gardens operations. I think that's the most efficient way to use the tiles down there in the southwest. By the way, Hanging Gardens due eot 104. Getting pretty close there. We're looking more and more likely to get Great Wall as well, or at the very least a nice sum of failgold.

Worker micro note: I left the worker northeast of Horse Feathers (Worker J) unmoved for this turn so far. The notes have this guy move to the forest west of the silks and chopping it, but my understand was that we were saving this forest for a granary chop for a future city two west of the jungle rice. We might want to send this worker somewhere else as a result. We could road southeast of the rice towards that future city, or mine one of the hills around the capital, or go somewhere else entirely. Thoughts?

Swapping all those cities off of Wealth and changing into the High upkeep Organized Religion civic definitely did cut into our economy. We went from running break-even on research at about 55% to break-even at about 45%. Having a Shrine that contributes 7 gold/turn is definitely helping out, as we'd be losing money at 40% research otherwise. This map is rough on expansion. Anyway, that will get better as our cities grow (we have four cities at size 1 right now contributing relatively little) and when our trade routes connect next turn. We're currently getting 11 international trade routes; that will go up to the full 24 if UniversCiv accepts our Open Borders offer. Thirteen extra commerce/turn will help a lot.

Research sits at 0% on Code of Laws until we get a better answer from CivPlayers.



These are the Demographics after I whipped Eastern Dealers and after CFC captured their barb city for their 9th overall city. We've essentially traded some GNP for Production in these numbers; we were still at almost 200 GNP when running break-even research. But we'll probably be a bit slower at research for the moment with our 12 cities compared to the 8 cities of Apolyton and CivFr with their Academy capitals. Obviously being ahead so many cities and so much Food is worth somewhat slower research (at least until we get our own Bureacademy capital).



And here are our expenses showing where all that money was going. This is a pretty solid map for Organized, although the lighthouse bonus is essentially wasted.

I think that's it for now; I'll put up some more elaborate Turn 100 stuff sometime tomorrow.

[Sullla]

It's Turn 100. Let's do some empire overview stuff.

This is the overview screenshot from the current turn. Typically I don't like to do screenshots of each individual city, as they don't change too much from turn to turn and overloading a turn report with images takes away focus from the actual subjects to discuss. For the Turn 100 report though, this is a good chance to look at how our cities are progressing one at a time.



The capital is currently growing at max food towards the happy cap, which is size 12 without a whip penalty and more realistically size 11. We can also stuff more units into the capital for Hereditary Rule happiness as needed, although that's not too terribly useful until we can get our Bureacademy up and running. Most of our primary competitors are relying on that very setup, a capital with Academy stuff with HR warrior, to conduct their research right now. We're running much more of a wide setup at present. There's not too much more to say right now; we'll eventually want to get a marketplace in here at some point, but growth and working cottages are the current order of the day. (We did get our first and only 3 commerce trade route here via our connection to CFC's capital.)



Mansa is finally regrowing after having been thoroughly whipped and capped at food-neutral status for the good of the empire earlier. This is where our next Great Person will be produced at some time in the next 20 or so turns; landing the Great Wall would go a long way towards helping that process. We don't have a long term plan written our here, but I believe the idea is to grow to size 7 using the current configuration + the open grassland cottage that will be picked up next turn, and then swap to the mine tiles and complete the wonder if it's still there; I believe from eyeballing the city that we can finish Great Wall eot 105 via that method. Obviously this is subject to further simulation work, so sandbox away if you feel the time and desire. Mansa is not a good candidate to whip since we'll need to run 3 or 4 specialists here to pop out that Great Person for our planned Golden Age. It's likely the most cultured city in the entire world based on what we've seen from the Top Five Cities list.



Focal Point is on Mausoleum duty at the moment, and should land the wonder eot 107 with a whole bunch of chops and a worker overflow whip. This is the one city where we are using tons of mines at present. Since we haven't seen any other teams with Calendar resources connected thus far, I am cautiously optimistic that we will be able to land this wonder, which has been our #1 wonder target ever since the early portions of the game. Longer term, this will probably turn into a production city due to all the hill tiles and the lack of much in the way of riverside commerce. Mansa and the capital can take over all of the cottage tiles, and we can farm/mine/workshop here as an eventual unit pump. Note that we are close to expanding borders at Focal Point as well, six more turns to go. That will help a lot with barb visibility in the wild south.



Horse Feathers is the planned Moai Statues city, and probably the Heroic Epic city as well for lack of better midgame options. This city has always been very high on food, thanks to the fish + corn + lake tiles, and we've produced a lot of settlers and workers out of here. Long term the commercial potential here is relatively small, but we'll probably still want a library here because of its cheapness. The upcoming build here is likely something along the lines of Moai -> barracks -> Heroic Epic, with worker whips and such scattered in. The current build is a missionary for Seven Tribes' Hanging Gardens operations.



Gourmet Menu is an awesome commercial city limited in the long run by its cramped position around several other cities. Nevertheless, we've gotten tons of value from this spot and it should continue to be one of our best cities for a very long time. The two key city improvements that we need here next are library and lighthouse in some order; once we get a religious spread inside for the Organized Religion bonus, we will likely double whip one and overflow into the other. Lighthouse first would likely be more useful (bringing all of those coastal tiles into play). We are building a worker for the moment to make use of the improved tiles in the area; still need more cottages to continue the endless tile swapping between this city and Seven Tribes.



Tree Huggers has massive potential for lategame, as nearly every single tile here is a flatland grassland. Unfortunately much of it remains buried under jungle, as we simply have not had the worker labor to spare to improve this region. There are still two riverside grassland tiles to cottage sitting under that jungle when we get a chance to go fix them up. For this very reason, Tree Huggers should probably be our next city to produce a settler: grow to size 6 and triple-whip to completion. Because we currently lack more improved tiles, there's no reason to keep growing this city just yet. I expect that if we make a play for the ivory spot, this is where we're going to get the settler from. (We can start a settler at size 6, take the free Hanging Gardens pop to size 7, and then whip down to size 4 to produce the settler. Something like that feels like a good option here.)



Seven Tribes remains locked in an intimate mating dance with Gourmet Menu, as they trade their respective cottages back and forth nearly every turn. It is preparing for Hanging Gardens, due at eot 104. (If we're lucky, we'll land three wonders in the next half dozen turns. Cross your fingers for all of them, especially Great Wall.) Note the axeman in the queue at 34/35 production; the Hanging Gardens build involves whipping the axe, overflow into the aqueduct and then triple-whipping it, then overflow/chopping all three forests to complete the wonder in a single turn. It's some beautiful work in terms of how the micro is done, so please give your thanks to SevenSpirits for putting it together.



Forbidden Fruits is still in the process of being hacked out of the jungle. This is an extremely strong city, but has required a large amount of worker labor to get up and running. We still have the third spice resource to improve (currently being jungle cleared), two grassland river cottages to build hiding under the jungle, and then three plains river cottages on top of that. (And that's not even including the three non-river grassland tiles and the forested hill that can be chopping into something nice.) We are currently building a missionary to spread religion into The Covenant, which is strictly limited as a city until its borders pop. I see Forbidden Fruits as another candidate for an upcoming settler whip, again due to a shortage of improved tiles at the moment. We could grow to size 6, take the Hanging Gardens pop increase to size 7, and then triple-whip settler for another city in the area, possibly the one by the northern rice to lock down the German border. Too many of our core cities are locked up on wonders to produce settlers in the immediate future, and we only really need to be size 4/5 here anyway to work all of the good tiles (bananas, floodplains cottage, and the spice resources).



Eastern Dealers is our planned National Epic city, and it's a great location to run a whole bunch of specialists. This city has already been whipped twice (for granary and work boat), and it will just now begin to take off in its own right. We'll be able to work pigs + clams + farmed floodplains for +10 food surplus; a grassland farm and the gems mine together are food-neutral, allowing the city to run 5 specialists at size 10. We'll also be able to run massive food deficit here during a Golden Age + Caste System to pop out a Great Person of our choice. This city and possibly Starfall are likely the best options for that during our first Golden Age. In any case, the future is bright here at Eastern Dealers.



Brick By Brick is essentially a military camp and resource dump. This is one city that has little to no commerce potential at all. We will farm the floodplains and farm over to the wheat, then work all mines. By my tally, we can hit 18-20 shields/turn here pretty easily and should be pretty close to 2t catapults and horse archers with a forge. We'll need to build military here because it's our most exposed city, right on the border with the seemingly hostile CivPlayers team. The basic plan is to connect our resources (wines then wheat), chop out a library for cultural push reasons, and then go all military.



There's not too much to say about The Covenant yet, as it's just getting started. Grassland cows and irrigated rice are both in the second ring, which is why we have a missionary coming from Forbidden Fruit to pop those borders faster. There are massive tracks of jungle to clear out here. Eventually though, The Covenant will be a very strong city indeed, with plenty of food and riverside cottages everywhere. Note that this is the first city with purely domestic trade routes; we are currently 4 trade routes short from other civs.



Starfall is also just getting started, another net loss at the moment. This is the planned Globe Theatre draft camp down the road, as it can reach +12 food surplus at size 5, nearly enough to draft every turn. The city is also rather limited in terms of terrain after its corn and fish resources, with lots of desert and plains tiles. We may be able to trade the stone to another team later for something nice; it would be awesome to trade that extra stone for marble, for example. Maybe!



And here are the Demos after our trade routes were recalculated with CivFanatics. We are up from +84gpt to +95gpt at 0% science, which is a pretty sizable increase. Our break-even point on research is now almost extactly between 40% and 50% science; we are slightly losing money at 50% rate. On the positive side, our max 100% research rate is pretty ridiculous, and we can research Code of Laws or Construction tech in 2t. The top competitors seem to have their science turned off for the current turn, and we sit just below the leaders in GNP. We are comfortably ahead in Food, Production, and Land Area. Our Exports/Imports also jumped up sharply this turn as well. We're actually getting 20 trade routes worth 41 commerce at the moment, but apparently we're paying another 14 commerce to other civs. Obviously the trade route situation heavily favors us with our early Currency push. (One other team has Currency right now, probably Apolyton or CivFr. There's no way a team could get 32 income from trade routes without having Currency for the second trade route per city.)

There's the overview of our civ at this milestone date. I will post later on the international situation and a comparison to where we stand with the other teams in this game. Thanks for everyone's involvement in this game.

[Sullla]

Turn 101 - 350BC

Not every turn can be eventful; this one is roughly the equivalent of the Coolidge administration. Slow, steady progress.



This is the cul de sac into which our eastern scout has run itself. I would like to suggest again to our diplo team that we drop our objections to UniversCiv and simply accept the Open Borders proposal that they made. OB are worth 4 commerce/turn at present, more once we settle our next city, and will allow our scout to keep heading east. Right now he's pretty much stuck. Food for thought.

The UniversCiv worker is still farming that plains forest tile northeast of their lake. 3t to go. Poor fellow.



The Woodsman II scouting axe in the far northwest continues to find not much of anything. There's a desert to the west of the German team, with iron inside, and we still cannot see any other cultural borders peeking out from under the fog. I will keep going northwest until we run into something, most likely Apolyton (they are supposed to be west of the Germans).

The southern axe has basically confirmed that there are no food resources anywhere remotely close to the ivory, unless you count that plains cow three tiles to the southeast and already within CivPlayers borders. I will keep this axe in the area to watch CivPlayers movements and stake our early claim to that ivory resource.



In the southwest, the barb warrior has happily volunteered to give us our tenth experience point and Heroic Epic status. However, I have not attacked yet because I want to make sure that the lack of a military police garrison will not make Seven Tribes unhappy and mess with our Hanging Gardens plans. I am about 90% certain that the city will be fine next turn, since we are connecting wines for an additional happy point. That said, it is at the happy cap right now, and I do not want to screw things up. Can someone test this with out sandbox just to confirm that we don't need a unit inside Seven Tribes next turn? I do not want to move out the axe if it delays the wonder.



The barb spearman moved up a tile towards our southern border. We have an axe with 0 XP sitting on the copper resource which can move onto either the mined hill or the forest tile this turn. My suggestion is to move onto the forest to cover the worker, and then attack the spear when it moves northeast onto the plains hill next turn. However, I'm open to hearing suggestions on this. We would have 91.2% odds to win the axe vs spear battle on the hill: very good but not unbeatable. And we don't really have a unit for followup if the axe vs spear battle would fail. Any alternate suggestions for me on how to play this tactically?

The worker on the grassland hill mine (Worker L) has not moved and has no current instructions for this turn. Please let me know where you want this fellow to go next. If I get no instructions, I will move one tile north and road this turn, then move next turn to the grassland tile between Mansa and Focal Point and work on cottaging it to completion.

The Shock axe by Starfall is sitting at 4.6 / 5 health and can certainly be moved this turn if needed. I'd prefer to complete healing up to full if possible. The war chariot needs another two turns to finish its own healing, and probably wouldn't be that useful against a spear anyway. Again, very happy to listen to advice.



We found the location of WPC's new city early in the turn, located here in their dye patch. While this probably rules out our own chance to found a dyes city, I don't think it's that big of a deal. We have massive tracts of jungle to clear out already, and WPC will probably be more than willing to trade a dye resource later for one of our own spare luxuries. The work boat at Eastern Dealers will not be needed for a couple of turns, and is therefore free to explore a bit more of the little lake. Barb galleys cannot spawn on that body of water either - it's safe.

Amongst our cities, two workers finished a plains cottage east of Forbidden Fruit that the city picked up, allowing the 3f grassland spices to go back to The Covenant for this turn. The jungle will be cleared out of the final grassland spice next turn, which will allow our workers to begin the final plantation there. We may be able to trade that spice for another useful resource, to CFC or WPC.



If anyone wants to debate city management, here's a interesting puzzle. How do we want to plan out Horse Feathers? There are no further instruction in the last micro plan written by SevenSpirits. We have a whipping penalty for the next 7 turns, plenty of room to grow before reaching the happiness cap, and Moai Statues in the early stages of construction. What do we do here? I'm thinking... grow to the happy cap, double-whip another worker, and overflow into Moai? Something like that? Please give me suggestions so that I'm not simply playing by feel. (I don't think that this is a great city to whip a settler because we want to get Moai up and running ASAP, at which time we want to work every water tile possible.)

Overview / tile micro:

We only grew one pop point this turn, which made for minimal change in terms of what cities were working. The missionary from Horse Feathers is on the way to Seven Tribes and will spread our religion there on T103. Forbidden Fruit will similarly produce a missionary next turn for The Covenant, and Tree Huggers is working on a missionary for Gourmet Menu. That will cover every city aside from Starfall and Eastern Dealers. All wonder projects continue to proceed on schedule.



No major changes in Demographics since the last turn. It appears as though the other top teams are also building gold towards their next tech, and not running a high GNP rate. We are still sitting at 0% research this turn while waiting to decide on Code of Laws or Construction next. We're still very far ahead in Food, and we've been leading in Production ever since we flipped Focal Point over to working all those mines for Mausoleum.

I have been spending our Espionage Points on UniversCiv since we met them, but we are still a number of turns away from having graph visibility. CivPlayers continues to spend huge numbers of EP against us thanks to all their sacrificial altars. CFC generated a Great Scientist this turn and built an Academy in their capital. We believe that CFC, CivFr, and Apolyton all have Academy capitals to this point in the game. Until we get our own, we'll have to continue to offset quality with quantity, something we're doing very well.

Should be all for the moment, as always post your thoughts and feedback.

[Sullla]

Turn 102 - 325BC

This is going to be relatively short, as there wasn't all that much going on this turn.



Woodsman axe kept moving to the north and west, eventually finding an end to the forests at this patch of desert. Still no borders spotted anywhere. I'll probably rest this unit in place for two turns to get it up to full, and then we can decide where to go from there. If CivPlayers is still being uncommunicative, we can bring the axe back home to guard and harass. If they actually talk to us and sign something, then we'll be good to keep exploring.

There was a barb axe on the indicated tile at the start of the turn. Another reason I'd like to heal up to full before moving.



Good suggestion over in the C&D thread to move our axe southwest and reveal the center tile of the nearby CivPlayers city. Xochicalco is size 2, no religion inside, no buildings present, defended by a single Combat I warrior. You know, I really don't get the whole deal with CivPlayers. If I were running a civ with 7 cities, with my cities defended by warriors, I wouldn't be antagonizing my neighbor which has 12 cities and axes walking around all over my borders. You'd think that they would have written something by now, right?

Well, if they do want to come after us, we should have elephants and catapults on hand to deal with them, plus a heck of a lot more production and population to throw at them. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.



This is the most interesting area at present, the tactical puzzle posed by this barb spear. I've covered our worker chopping the forest with an axe, and moved up the Shock axe to the copper tile. The hope is that the barb spear will move northwest onto our grassland hill mine; we get 97% odds to kill it with the Shock axe on that tile. If it moves northeast onto the forest tile, we can take a roughly 90% shot to kill it, with the other axe ready to clean up if we fail, or we can cover both workers again and try to bait the spear into moving onto the copper flatland tile. The worst result would be the spear moving northeast - northeast, and even then it should still be a fairly minor annoyance. We'll wait and see what the barb does on the interturn, and work from there.



We had a free religion spread into The Covenant this turn, allowing the missionary just produced in Forbidden Fruit to head off towards Starfall / Seven Tribes. (Cross your fingers that we don't fail the dice roll on spreading religion in the later city. Silly Confucianism!) This allowed me to finish chopping the granary in The Covenant a turn earlier than we expected. Exploring work boat found a bananas resource on the east side of the lake, although probably outside of what we can realistically claim. There are CFC and UniversCiv cities very close to that spot.

One other cool thing from this turn. See this?



We've finished our first town of the game. 3/0/6 floodplains tile at the capital. Since it takes 70 turns of continuous working to reach town status, we've been using this tile every turn since T32. This is one of the earliest dates that I've managed to reach a fully developed cottage; give credit to Egypt's awesome starting techs and our early Pottery research. It's too bad that the cottage on the tile to the west was pillaged by a barb earlier, as that was our original floodplains cottage. We could have had our first town even sooner!

Overview / tile micro:

Seven Tribes whipped an axe (starting value 34/35), to overflow into aqueduct next turn, then to be whipped and overflow (with chops) into Hanging Gardens. All cities are still on pace to finish their wonders on top. Horse Feathers swapped to a settler, to be whipped next turn for the ivory location. Overflow will go into Moai Statues. Eastern Dealers has to work the floodplains tile either this turn or next turn to grow to size 3 in the next 2t; it's better to work the floodplains tile this turn on 0% research and then go to the gems tile next turn at 100%.

The plan is to turn on research into Construction next turn; we are about 20 beakers short of being able to tech Construction in 2t, so we'll run 100% / 100% / 10% science and finish it in 3t. After that, one turn of 0% research followed by 2t of 100% research easily finishes Code of Laws tech with large amounts of overflow. Then on to either Civil Service or something military as needs dictate.



Demos continue to show a commanding lead in most areas, and now the geometric Population number is even starting to favor our team. Any time we feel the need, we can start converting this population into military and take the Power lead easily. I am continuing to spend our espionage points against UniversCiv; they must not be microing their EP, as they keep spending 1 EP/turn against us. All four of our points are going against them. We'll have graph visibility in about six more turns if nothing changes there.

Worker and city micro is now following this plan; feel free to read and comment over in the micro thread as everyone has time: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...ring#gid=0

[Sullla]

Turn 103 - 300BC

We succeed on all our dice rolls, and neighboring civs make some highly questionable city choices along our borders.



German team played a double turn, being the last ones to act on T102 and then immediately playing and ending at the start of T103. They planted a new city at the very end of the last turn, and here's the location. (We knew they were about to settle somewhere from production tracking; they slow built the settler over the course of 10 turns in Wismar, finished it T100, and settled T102.) I was worried that they were going to settle by the rice tile in our jungle, wrecking our dotmap. Instead they settled... this location. Okey dokey...

Wasserburg has no resources whatsoever, just a floodplains tile and a whole bunch of river tiles. This is pretty darn weak as far as location goes. To make matters worse, our city of Tree Huggers just expanded borders for 100 culture this turn, which means that the row of tiles south of Wasserburg will all flip to our control next turn. They'll chop a forest for a fast terrace, and will eventually get those tiles back, but they'll never control more than their first ring along the border. We have too much culture built up already. For this reason, the city should be extremely easy to attack and capture later when we go on the offensive, even if it is on a hill. Best of all, it does not interfere with any of our future cities in this region. The next city to be founded will be the green spot over in the east; micro plan has us founding it on T110 if I remember correctly. That's an infinitely better city than Wasserburg, it will lock down the northern border for good, and we'll be able to plant sooooo's blue dot city later in complete safety. We also want to add the white spot in the west (two west of the rice) when we have a chance later.

The German team has to have crashed their economy in dreadful manner by now. They have 8 cities with virtually no population or infrastructure handy. Their GNP has to be awful right now. Remember that they have researched the least beakers in the entire game thus far... not exactly the time to be planting resourceless, culturally crushed cities!



Here's the northwest. I'm healing the Woodsman II axe off screen further to the north, still waiting to see if CivPlayers ever responds in any way. There's a barb warrior on the ivory this turn, not much of a threat for our C1 axe in the area. Horse Feathers has triple-whipped its settler (overflow into Moai while we have stone), and a settler and worker will be hopping into the galley next turn, unloading on T105, city founded on ivory T108. Roads will have to come in behind the city this time, I'm afraid; not enough workers on hand to pre-road through that jungle. We can have the ivory and city connected by road the following turn on T109.



We won the first big dice roll of the turn at Seven Tribes, where our missionary successfully spread Hinduism. Odds were right around 90% with one foreign religion in the city. Whew! This kept the Hanging Gardens plan perfectly on track. We overflowed from last turn's axeman whip into an aqueduct, then triple-whipped that aqueduct and chopped a forest into the city. This results in the aqueduct getting 199/100 production this turn; we overflow 99 production, add two forest chops next turn for another 60 production, and that becomes 99 + 60 = 159 shields x 2 (stone) = 318 production. One turn Hanging Gardens. Credit SevenSpirits again with the fancy micro, it's looking pretty good at this point on the wonder.

This does mean that we now have a spare axe to play around with from last turn's whip. Where do you want to send him? My thought is to either send another axe over to Brick By Brick, or send an axe down to the south to scout. Which would everyone prefer? We'll have an axe + spear in Seven Tribes once all the overflow goes through, and Seven Tribes will very quickly expand out to 100 culture borders if the wonder completes, so I think the city will be relatively safe from attack. (We'll at least have warning if CivPlayers tries to do something.)

At Focal Point, the barb spear suicided into our axe in the forest. Huh. So much for all that tactical planning! I think we'll take it though. Both axes are healing in place this turn, the war chariot at Starfall is available to move out. I plan to send one of those axes over to Starfall for military police, and then send out the war chariot scouting, either in the south or to get a glimpse of the new CFC cities.

The workers at Focal Point chopped three forests this turn:



133 production after the Organized Religion modifier went through. The civic was worth 26 shields here this turn from the chops and natural production. Just four more turns and two forests left to go. (Pretty obvious which two forests we're chopping in this picture, right?)



Here's the bizarre movement from CFC's settler over in the southeast. We're discussing this over in the diplo thread, so please take your discussion on this subject over there. The hope is that we can convince them to found a city somewhere less aggressive, ideally on the tile southeast of the rice. I have no idea why they would want such a terrible spot in the desert like this, and it would almost inevitably drive conflict between our teams. Let's hope that saner minds will prevail here. This one makes the German team look downright brilliant by comparison.

Overview and tile micro:

We didn't grow much in the way of population this turn, which makes this picture look a lot like the one from last turn. Most of the tile micro involved reassigning stuff after our two triple whips at Horse Feathers and Seven Tribes. Mansa and Forbidden Fruit have juggled tiles slightly so that both will grow next turn and Mansa stays on pace to finish Great Wall in 3t. We also swapped the floodplains tile for the gems at Eastern Dealers now that research is back on.

In contrast to this turn, we grow 6 pop this turn, and then we'd grow another 12 pop the following turn if Hanging Gardens goes through. In the sandbox, suddenly every city was fighting desperately for improved tiles! Well, it's managed fairly well after we did some trial and error, only a few cases of having to work unimproved stuff. And we still need to land the wonder first, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Research is turned on and directed into Construction tech, useful both for bridge-building (surprisingly helpful in planning worker actions over in the east with all those rivers) and also for military purposes. We come extremely close to finishing the tech in 2t, coming up just short, but can lend the tech in three turns of 100% / 100% / 10% research. Code of Laws follows up very quickly from there. We'll have both techs at eot 108 and can re-evaluate tech path then.

Demos before and after our whips:





Losing six population always stinks, although we will grow most of it back really, really quickly. Note how the GNP plunges enormously; that's not due to the whipping, that's due to swapping our tech from Code of Laws to construction. We get 40% pre-requisite bonus on Code of Laws, plus another 3% bonus from CivPlayers knowing the tech, compared to only 20% bonus for Construction. That's nearly all of the difference in GNP. We only dropped from 257 base beakers to 242 beakers in the actual whip. (Where did it all come from? The six whipped pop were all located in the southwest. We dropped a plains hill mine, a grassland cottage, and four coastal tiles. Discounting the plains hill mine, that's 5 tiles with 3 commerce each = 15 less commerce. 257 beakers to 242 beakers.)

Pretty quiet turn in all. Main task is trying to talk some sense in CFC before they plant an idiotic city along our southeast border.

[Sullla]

Turn 104 - 275BC

I'm sorry for not posting this report last night when I first played. It was a bit late and I didn't have enough time until today.



First order of business was to ask Spanish Apolyton for Open Borders, complete with smiley face in the message. This was essentially a no-lose scenario, as the worst they could do was reject the initiative. Instead they accepted it when their turn player logged in, and we now have international trade routes in every one of our cities. That's two 2 commerce trade routes times 12 cities for 48 total income (actually 49 since we get a single 3 commerce route with CFC's capital). In other words, a lot of dough there. This is why rushing early Currency is so strong from an economic perspective; even without building the marketplaces, the second trade route grants so much additional income. Code of Laws, on the other hand, requires you to build those courthouses for the economic benefit, and they have to go up in your furthest-flung / weakest new cities for the savings to be most effective. This is why Currency >>> Code of Laws in most games. Very small or very high difficulty maps tend to be exception.

With Open Borders from the Spanish, our scout in the far east will now swing down to their borders and try to pass through to the other side. We actually do not need any kind of deal with UniversCiv at this point, although it might be worth it to send them another message just to keep dialogue going. We have no reason to be on bad terms with UniversCiv, since there's nothing contested between the two of us. But we no longer need their trade routes for economic benefit, and in fact we'll still be fine when we plant our next couple of cities, as there are CFC cities still left untapped for trade routes right now.

CivPlayers and their "two workers for OB" can go burn in a fire.



Here is the north where we have visibility into that terrible resourceless German city. No infrastructure yet, as expected, and defended by a chariot for some reason. Um ok. I'm also vastly amused to note how the exploring CivPlayers warrior is now blocked from moving any further forward by our culture and that of the Germans, and of course CivPlayers doesn't have Open Borders with either one of us. Sucks to be you guys! Good luck finding any other teams, you're sure as hell not passing through our territory to do it.



Our Woodsman II axe has found a friend while healing. This is why I didn't move out the axe last turn; I knew there was a barb axe in the area, and this is way too good of a unit to throw away in a coin flip battle on flatland ground. We'll heal again this turn, and dare the barb to attack us while defending in the forest (total defensive bonus about +100%). If it doesn't take the bait, we move on past to the south. From the hill, we'll be able to see if it's safe to move onto the flatland plains tile heading further west.



Here is the border region with CivPlayers. We have a settler and a worker on the galley, to be unloaded next turn and both move towards the ivory. City to be settled on T108, ivory connected to our trade network T109. Axeman Wyn in the north killed a barb warrior on the tile that you see above; he'll go ahead and heal in place over the next turn or two. That axe has a promotion available if we need it later. I still see no indication that CivPlayers is planning on settling at the ivory. Looks like they are going to declare war on someone (hopefully not us!) instead.

The team wanted to move our surplus axe from Seven Tribes over to the Brick By Brick theatre, and you can see that unit shuffling forward over on the right right of that picture, southwest of the capital. We have Lew (the C2/Shock axe with 10 XP) and a spear posted at Seven Tribes, with a war chariot planned to go there in the future. Axe/spear/WC is probably a decent garrison there for the moment. We have 3 axes and 1 spear covering the Brick By Brick / ivory region including the one moving there right now; that is definitely not enough, and we'll be getting an elephant or two over there as soon as we can do so.



Here's Horse Feathers putting the whip overflow from the settler into Moai Statues, knocking out about a fifth of the total cost this turn. I made sure that we'd be able to have the stone connected for the whip overflow here before we trade it to CFC. We'll need something else to build while waiting to connect our second stone resource; perhaps a barracks? We are under double whip penalty here for the moment, and so I'd prefer not to whip for a little while unless necessary.



Here is the southeast, where we've found our old enemy the barb axe with the blood of Ruff's war chariot on his hands. Fortunately it's only at 3/5 strength (barb units do not pause to heal if they take damage, only use promotion as they get them) and should be easy meat for our war chariot. I will move our war chariot in Starfall to the tile SE-SE of Focal Point before the turn ends, from which point we can hit the barb axe no matter where it goes. Even on the forested hill, I think we get about 98% odds to kill it. I just don't want to move a unit our of Starfall and leave it totally undefended until we get towards the end of the turn timer. Too tempting for other teams. I'll make that chariot move when I end turn, probably before I go to bed tonight.

One of our axes here is moving towards Starfall and intended to be its permanent garrison. The other one is covering a worker in the forest chopping S-SE of Focal Point; that axe will be the Focal Point defender moving forward. Some old workers are serving as Hereditary Rule military police in Mansa and Forbidden Fruit. (Note that Mansa is only 2t from Great Wall. We were able to work the tile configuration we wanted because CFC won't get stone until T106.)

Starfall got its religion spread this turn and will pop borders in 3t. Given the way things played out, I think it was the right decision to send our missionary here instead of towards Gourmet Menu. Of course, we couldn't have known that CFC would settle so stupidly... A worker has moved onto the plains hill near the city to chop and complete a work boat for the fish. We'll follow that up with a chopped/whipped library for the maximum culture available right now, religion + monument + library. And then since this is our Globe Theatre city, we'll be prioritizing a theatre here too, and can surely run from Artists for cultural push. (Same thing at Eastern Dealers, our National Epic city, which can run max Artists all day, every day.) Delhi will be able to hold its first ring of tiles, but we should get most everything else, with the one exception of the tile north of the stone, which is second-ring for them but third-ring or worse for our cities. With enough cultural pressure though, who knows. It's really a shame that they planted such a poorly located city.

If this were the AI, then I would settle a city northwest of the stone, and blitz that idiot plant with culture from three sides. Don't think that would be a good idea in this game though!

Finally, we did also whip Starfall this turn for its granary. We'll presumably get the Hanging Gardens free pop between turns, magically restoring the city back to size 2 instantly. Another reason why spreading religion here worked out nicely, as we get the OR bonus on that granary whip as we overflow into work boat.



This is the northeast, where WPC has a couple of units exploring around. No real danger however unless they are the biggest liars ever. We connected the final grassland spice this turn (the one two tiles north of Forbidden Fruit) so we once again have a surplus spice to trade. Unless someone is watching the F4 screen, it's going to look like there was no trade at all with CFC: we had 2 spices last turn, and 2 spices again this turn. Tricksy!

Forbidden Fruit ended up out growing its supply of improved tiles when I simmed this, so therefore it's swapping to a missionary this turn, then when we finish Hanging Gardens next turn, we two-pop whip the missionary and overflow into library with the OR bonus again. Eastern Dealers is a gigantic whip magnet where we want the OR bonus, plus we want the culture anyway for the CFC border wars. I'm really amused to see how they expect to win that fight with a city that has no forests to chop and a single non-irrigated rice for food, against two cities with double food bonuses (fish/corn and pigs/clams/floodplains). This region that we effectively stole from WPC is shocking good in terms of land quality. Everything is grassland, there are food bonuses galore, and there's about 40 tiles that border the river. Give us another 20 turns to chop the jungle and plant our final city in the north, and this will be an enormously productive region.



And this is the biggest action, the one turned Hanging Gardens play at Seven Tribes. Two forest chops + 99 overflow from aqueduct = 321 production. GG. We're guaranteed at least a coin flip at this point, and with not even one other team have stone connected that we've seen, I think we are looking pretty good here. Keep the fingers crossed.

Overview / tile micro:

We grew 5 pop this turn, and are poised to grow another 2 + 12 = 14 pop next turn. Along with the 16 points for the Hanging Gardens itself, that's going to give us a massive jump in score, and then we're planning on following that up with Construction tech and another wonder (Great Wall) the following turn. Expect to see a big gap opening up with the other teams. This is why getting deals in place with teams like CFC before we appear as the obvious runaway was so important. Just imagine that you are playing as Parkin from Pitboss #4 for the right diplo mindset.

We picked up more beakers than I expecting into Construction last turn due to known tech bonus giving us an extra 3%. Spanish Apolyton, of all teams, is the one we have pegged as knowing Construction. (CivFr may also have it but we don't know them.) With the trade routes from the Spanish, added after this picture, we make 265 base beakers / 328 modified beakers into Construction. Since we have 300 beakers into the tech right now, and it costs 630, this leaves us exactly 2 beakers short of the tech. But that's fine, as we don't need it next turn for anything, and we can run 0% science and pick up Construction the following turn while also piling up 120 more gold for the coffers.



These are the start of turn Demos, after I whipped Starfall but before any other teams took any population actions. It will be fun to do the comparison after we presumably land Hanging Gardens next turn.

That's really all for this turn. I see the biggest issue at the moment in working something out with CivPlayers, hopefully seeing them attack someone else and not us. See what we can do about that during the rest of this turn.

[Sullla]

Turn 105 - 250BC

The turn that the wonders started to fall.



First things first: the Hanging Gardens plan came to fruition as planned. Since we had 12 cities in play, the wonder gave us an additional 12 population, rather absurd for this point in the game. If each pop point is worth 30 production via Slavery, then we gained 360 production from a wonder that cost 300 shields... and effectively half that due to our stone resource. We also gained a permanent +1 health in all cities, and a massive boost to culture in Seven Tribes that will quickly push out borders to third ring (10 turns to go). This was a huge boost for our team, and everyone else has to be kicking themselves for letting the team in first land such a powerful wonder at such a late date.

That was by far the most eventful happening of the turn. Still, let's look at what else is taking place.



This is the northwest, where our settler continues to move towards the ivory without apparent opposition. Unfortunately CFC did see that worker/settler pair moving out when they moved their chariot this turn. We can only hope that this won't lead to diplo shenanigans with CivPlayers. We can't really stop CFC from scouting out the city, which they'll almost certainly see as they keep moving their chariot to the northwest. In any case, the ivory plan continues to proceed as planned.

Regarding wonders: I would love to build Statue of Zeus up here in Brick By Brick. It would be extremely easy to do with the three forests available for chopping, and the +10 culture/turn would allow us to control the border region. However, Statue of Zeus is simply too powerful of a wonder to put in a border city if we can't hammer out some kind of a deal with CivPlayers. If they are just stalling for time before an attack, the wonder has to go somewhere else. I'm hoping that scooter will be able to find their diplo guy in chat and work out some kind of long term deal. Waiting on that to happen before doing any extended planning for this city.



In the south, the barb axe didn't move at all as I expected, and headed northwest onto this plains hill instead of northeast onto the forested hill. That's a fine result for us though, and sets up the axe for easy killing next turn. We have a fortified 4.0 health axe protecting our chopping worker in the forest, and I moved our war chariot onto the same tile. If the barb attacks, we're defending in the forest with a nearly healed axe. If it doesn't attack, we can kill it no matter where it moves with our chariot next turn. Even if we would somehow lose on defense, the worker still won't be captured since we have two units in the forest. Most likely, the war chariot will just kill the barb next turn, and can then go scout in the deep south.

Starfall insta-grew back its whipped pop point, and is now filling up its granary at +7 food/turn. I think I've got a firm understanding of how to manage this city moving forward. We use one forest chop to finish the work boat for the fish, timed as soon as the city's borders expand. The overflow from that and a second chop goes into a library, using the Organized Religion bonus. We work corn/fish/oasis to grow quickly to size 4, then double-whip a worker, with the overflow finishing the library. The new worker plus the worker coming over from Focal Point post-Mausoleum (three workers total) allow us to reconnect stone quickly for our own use in building Moai Statues. We'll get to 4 culture/turn quickly (religion, monument, library) and that should be enough to win the early game culture battle.



I went ahead and drew in what the borders should look like eventually in this disputed region. I'm assuming that we'll be able to win the second-ring battles at both Starfall and Eastern Dealers. We get nearly all of the tiles, except the tile north of the stone is second-ring for them, but third-ring for Starfall and fourth-ring for Eastern Dealers. They should be able to hold that one. CFC spread religion into their city this turn, and so Delhi will pop borders on T115, but they will be hard pressed to get much culture beyond that, with only +4 food from the dry rice and no forests to chop.

That said, this whole region is a mess purely due to the dumb city placement of Delhi. This is seriously one of the stupidest plants I have seen in a long time. It's a low-quality city, essentially impossible to defend, and extremely antagonistic to achieve... uh... nothing? CFC could easily claim all of the resources in this area by putting down cities in vastly more defensible and stronger locations. If I'm dotmapping this region, I place two cities to claim all of the resources here. One goes south of the horses, a location that claims double food resources (grassland cows + dry rice) along with horses and two plains wines. Then I put my second city on the plains hill southwest-south of the cows, where it can share the grassland cows, claim the last wine resource, and also use the offscreen grassland pigs two south of the city. These locations would claim every resource in the area and would both be very difficult to attack, with a clear flatland killing zone that any invading army would have to walk through. Instead, this city of Delhi is completely open to attack, it will be swamped culturally for its entire existence, and they've made a needlessly provacative gesture towards a neighbor who has been very friendly throughout the game. All told, it's one of the dumbest things I've seen in a very long time.

Anyway... at the top corner of that picture, note that Great Wall is also one turn from completion. We've got at least a coin flip chance of landing it too, and given the lack of interest in wonders thus far, I'm feeling pretty good. Forbidden Fruit did not have enough improved tiles to work in the post-Hanging Garden boom, so it has double-whipped a missionary for Eastern Dealers. Here's a question I'm going to repost in the diplo thread: how about we ask WPC if they'd like a missionary? We can overflow from missionary to a second missionary in the city, and send the second one to WPC's capital. Getting another civ's worth of shrine income can only be a good thing, and WPC would probably jump at the chance for religion. How about it?



City management question for Focal Point. This city is awesome up to about size 6, and then really has nothing much to offer after that. I think that we cap this on growth, either as shown at size 7, or we can grow to size 8 and work two grassland cottages (the tile NE of the pigs and the tile south of the copper). But it might just be better to leave those unimproved and save them for workshops later. The cottages north of the city will pretty much all be going over to Mansa's Muse in the long run.

Here's my question: farm or cottage on the boxed white tile? I'm thinking we cottage this and work this cottage along with the three hills, the two resources, and 0-2 grassland cottages, which caps us at food-neutral status at size 6-8. Alternately, we can farm the tile and that opens up an irrigation chain to the city's center tile. But... what's really the point of irrigating here? I mean, none of the other tiles are particularly useful until much later in the game. Plus we can always bring irrigation over from Starfall's oasis if we need it. Anyway, my thought is therefore cottage here, but I'm wondering what others think. This is one city where growing to a large size doesn't really do that much for us.

Overview / tile micro:

We grew a LOT of population between turns. As such, there are some tiles being worked that aren't strictly optimal due to lack of worker improvement. The capital is losing -1 food this turn and running two Scientist specialists; I'll probably have it take back the corn next turn to start growing towards size 13, to make use of the ivory happiness coming in. We probably need to cottage the plains tiles there soonish (I see a way to do it down the road without wasting worker turns). The cities to the east are mostly pretty good thanks to that whip at Forbidden Fruit, just an unimproved floodplains being worked at Eastern Dealers and a bare grassland tile at The Covenant. TC gets an irrigated rice farm next turn when borders expand, all five workers insta-completing the farm in one turn. That's going to be another awesome city with time.

Tree Huggers has no improved tiles to use, and so works a Scientist while growing to size 8, then changes to worker and double-whips out the worker. Horse Feathers is working +9 food configuration to grow to size 7. We'll swap to barracks and keep growing next turn when the stone gets traded away, let that city just build population for the moment. There's a forest chop on the tile N-NW of the city timed for 8t from now which should finish Moai after we reconnect stone. Gourmet Menu and Seven Tribes are nearly able to cover all tiles, having to work one 1/0/3 coastal tile before a plains cottage completes next turn. I don't want to whip GM while there's a missionary on its way down there (from Tree Huggers), better to wait for the OR bonus. And I value the 1/0/3 coastal tile over working a priest specialist.

With our team being 3 beakers short of Construction tech, the Scientists are easily enough to finish the tech as we run 100% cash for +127 gold. We are almost exactly break-even at 50% science currently, making about 150 beakers/turn at that rate. Next tech is somewhat up in the air; we want some combination of Code of Laws, Aesthetics, and maybe Horseback Riding (for elephants) in upcoming turns. I'm hoping that we'll get an answer from CivPlayers before having to choose.



Demos are as good as we could hope for. Second in GNP at 0% science rate, first in Production, first in Food, first in Land Area, first in Total Pop, second in geometric pop, third in Power despite not making any real efforts to build military. I have nothing further to add, just waiting to hear from CivPlayers. Chase them down, scooter!