I should mention that I was close on CoL but it looks like Gavagai beat me to it by 2t for Confucianism. In a game this big I don't think 2t is really all that close.
Cities:
I accidentally whipped my cap last turn. Got hit with a lag spike or something and double clicked on the flag icon to open my capital. Full growth mode right now, forge on the way. This is a significant chunk of my economy.
Early food/hammer city, now a wealth/unit pump. The three forests will, someday, be for the Heroic Epic. I haven't investigated how long that detour would take to Aesthetics but I have a feeling I'll need it soon. Eventually all the hills except the bronze will be pared off to another city but the transition to workshops will leave this food neutral. I'll need a farm, watermill, and 6 workshops here, paving over the early cottage that is no longer being used.
The empire's other market. Three chops went into that thing and I still had to whip it. Anyway, it was necessary. The goal was to cottage everything, even the nasty non-river plains, but I'm not sure that will ever happen. The idea was to have the fishing village to the north incubate through the slow 1/1/1 stage but that never happened due to other needs.
This was a slow starter as well, needing a border pop for the second deer tile. I got this out fast enough to secure a good chunk of territory and set a defensive border against dtay. You see here another ugly plains cottage but when my economy was in dire straights I put them down wherever it was convenient for my workers to get to quickly. There is a lot of infrastructure here, ready to churn out units soon.
A highly provocative frontier city. I squeezed this one in to invalidate other settling options for dtay to ensure that he would have bad options for settling. I could have moved this adjacent to the clams on the PH but that would have left dtay a defensible PH settlement minimum distance to BEAUTIFUL WALL, which would have pissed me off. Anyway, this one's now a hybrid. I don't like cottages on the frontier but it was necessary at the time and I have little other use for this land. I don't have an easy way to get water to the rice, unfortunately, unless dtay drags water to his wheat.
This city has been whipped for settlers and has been deprived growth for GPP generation, more recently. Poor scouting led to this settlement rather than closer to the coast and taking the clams/fish. Ultimately, though, dtay got to the island much sooner than I could have and this alternative settling would have likely resulted in conflict.
It took ages to this location and get gems online. Others, I think, had easier access to gems, and much sooner. That said, this city, for a change, took off quickly with three resources first ring. This was the key to salvaging the economy: gems and Sailing for island trade routes at Currency. This will be a production powerhouse very soon via workshops and mines. I'll need to fit a lighthouse in too.
The anchor of my defensive line of cities. Superdeath settled minimum distance with two cities that I eventually would have attempted to remove. dtay recently captured the northern abomination, Rusten the southern. I have a culture lead on keeping the contested second ring bananas against dtay and will have third ring borders around when he can get second ring. I don't see him taking the bananas without forcing me out of the city. Enforced peace with Rusten ended this turn but I'm in no mood to pick another fight with him while mackoti sprints toward knights. I'm close to the point of being able to transition the economy to workshops and hammers to make myself thorny. Losing the sugar is the cost of doing business. I have another sugar resource anyway. If I can survive the 50 turns to Astronomy then I won't care about the lost food anyway and I'll be in a better position to swat at Rusten.
I need to grow this city quickly so I can swap to Caste and starve with GS for the 3rd great person. Eventually I'll get the Moai in here for a solid naval production city. The PH mine next to the wheat ultimately will belong here, along with a watermill.
A barbarian conquest, this city has been an absolute albatross for 20 turns. For the longest time I didn't even have a road for trade routes. No first ring food, and limited chopping options, I would have been better off economically to raze this one. However, I needed to claim a forward location vs. mackoti as he finished off Aretas and this provided just the opportunity, sooner than I otherwise could have done if I had built a settler and trekked through the jungle. Once I hack the rice free I'll start workshopping and this little piece of shit will finally have something to offer. Just in time for mackoti to take it away. I knew when I captured this one it would be vulnerable and most likely end up a speed bump. We'll see. I'll remain sanguine and dispassionate over this bastard child of a city.
Early on this was targeted as a cottage incubator for the capital but I built it so late that it's really just a frontier buffer against Rusten. Prior to Calendar, food resources were sparse here adjacent to the jungle on the southern edge of my empire. As you can see, when the better cities need the food resources this city is pretty useless.
I had to hack through jungle to get that mine ready. Yet another slow starter. What else is there? This would be a fine Moai if I could ever get it built. Chances are it would take too long to be worth it over the other city I picked
Workshop everything, build boats. I'll want a forge here. There's also an outside chance that I just grow this one and starve it for GS points. Astronomy is going to be a bitch, even with 2 GS into it I'll still need ~1100b to go after my very rough estimate.
I screwed up and whipped the walls when I meant to whip into the library instead. Maybe it should have just been barracks anyway as this city is destined for units being on the border. Certainly I intended to keep the first ring mountains. Geography makes this location more defensible than you'd think. I'm not concerned here until mack's forests east of his city are chopped. After that I'll need to pack in some spears. The cottage is an anachronism: this will be hammers and workshops.
Just add hammers. All workshops/mines. Enough with the slow starting cities already. Ugh.
Defensible border against Rusten that I'll have to carve out of the jungle. As with everything else, nothing of much use first ring, though I don't hate the oasis and it protects the diagonal. A border pop and help are on the way. I'd rather I had won some combats against Rusten and wiped his city off the hill and replaced it with my own but that isn't how it worked out and now we're all on the clock against mack.
The other X visible south of here isn't happening. That city would just be needlessly provocative and bring me no value at all with no unique food available. Removing Rusten's city would make it possibly useful, but would still need to share food from other cities. Not a great investment. This will be mines and workshop(s).
I need a better way of attaching pictures. Using this attachment feature is garbage and needlessly tedious. Any suggestions? I was holding out for xenu's homebrew hosting solution but he's never gotten around to getting it put together for me so I'm out of pocket. I have graphs and demos but fuck it, I've been posting and clicking for an age of man by now and I've had it.
Mack offered deer/deer this turn. I think we already have two fish/fish deals active. I have no idea what he is trying to communicate with the deer. My best guess is misdirection. He has a scout in my eastern frontier region bordering dtay. Is he telling me dtay is about to invade? That's all I can come up with, but I think it is an attempt at misdirection. Dtay just finished a bloody war with superdeath (good job dying hard, noobie) and will need to heal up and reposition before moving out. I am not sure if I have shown dtay that I can build formation pikes yet, but I'll do that in a turn or two just so he knows. He's teching machinery now IIRC on the road to knights. I have Ballistaphants and have either barracks/stables or barracks/colosseums in most hammer cities. And our power is mostly even. So I'm not really worreid about dtay when he can probably just attack dreylin instead with knights. Who would you fight, Boudica or FDR? If he decides to go for me it will be a bloody affair unless he can engineer a dogpile, but he must see the double fish/fish deal with mack and can only deduce that's a sign of friendly relations absent any other information. But I want to be certain of dtay's intentions so I decided to swap research to Alphabet (needed for Astronomy anyway), which will be a 1-turn tech from scratch. Lots of folks know that one, apparently. I'll offer open borders. If he accepts, then we can scout each other and sentry the border and live happily ever after. If he declines, well, I guess I just build up some stronger defenses and let him crash against castles and formation pikes, xbows, and whatever trash I have up there. And Phants. Always the Phants. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Back to what I think is Mack's misdirection: Mack has 2t left on engineering unless he logs back in before the turn rolls and shaves a turn off his tech. (If that happens then .) Mack also has a huge stack of HAs/knights presumably in position to hit Rusten, but with Engineering coming in immediately those units are only a turn away from my speed bump, former barb front city. Brief sidebar:
(Or, mack can attack next turn if he slightly repositions these stacks later this turn, by adjusting only a tile or two. I don't think he will, but he is ruthlessly playing the clock early and late nearly every turn and I know he's a highly competitive guy and some hyper competitive types just can't resist the urge to massage the rules sometimes. This is why I hate when players log in/out all of the time because you never know when someone is actually done with a turn. And I'm not taking screenshots every turn to document potential abuses because fuck it. And while I'm on a sidebar rant, what the fuck is with OT4E posting in Gavagai's thread and the so tepid as to be a limp dick response by other players and lurkers in the tech thread? I didn't comment because my immediate response was to ban the guy from the game when his immediate response wasn't "oh, I'm really sorry guys". Are you kidding me? Way to take a stand. I guess myself included. I know he'll be dead soon based on responses and watching civstats but this just shouldn't happen and the weak response isn't going to do anything to prevent it from happening. Seeing someone actually admit to reading a spoiler thread is just going to encourage that behavior by others. Anyway rand over...)
In addition, mack has a smaller stack of 4-6 units comprising xbow, knight, and some other trash within view of my sentry. This could be positioned to hit Rusten or to hit me. I have no idea. Mack, if you want to be friends, let's stop building roads that can stream units conveniently north and not position where I can be threatened immediately. Barring that, I just have to stuff units into my city and finish the castle. kthx.
Long term, Rusten is more of a threat to mack than I am. I am totally bottled up and can only expand through the seas. My neighbors are all just too big for me to try to go to war against without significant help. Superdeath would have been that expansion path but the attack vector sucked and would have been totally indefensible for me after the war so I eschewed the attack. Rusten also has a juicy wonder (SoZ) that I'm sure mack would love to have. I'd prefer that not happen, hell, I'd love it too but it just isn't realistically going to happen.
Anyway Rusten doesn't seem to have great expansion options now either, bordering me, dtay, mack, and naufrager in the south. I'd peg naufrager as the best attack option but he's played a strong game and I doubt Rusten wants to pick a fight very far away with mackoti looming over his shoulder. After Naufrager, I'm the next best tactical option but Rusten will have to do a huge buildup to make that work, again assuming no dogpile help. SoZ won't out promote my entire empire with as much infrastructure as I've invested in for high quality units. Even C3 knights (Barracks/Stable/SoZ and probably HE in the same city for a good churn of quality) don't get great odds against formation pikes and, maybe unknown to him, I can attack out of my cities with the Ballistaphants into his stack and my Phants will pick out his knights regardless of whatever covering units are in the stack (spears, etc). So I'm feeling relatively comfortable unless I get dogpiled, but I just think my neighbors have more attractive targets than me for a while longer: Mackoti --> Cairo; dtay--> Dreylin; Rusten--> Naufrager. As for Rusten, I've come to terms with the border we have established. I still don't like his plant in my second ring but my gambit to cheaply dislodge him didn't work out and I'm not concerned enough to take another crack at it now when there are islands (probably) for me to settle. Somewhere. I should have prioritized that location better. If hostilities commence maybe it burns but I'm not going out of my way to make it happen now.
Last thing before I go, I'm just shy of 5 weeks until delivery of my second child. Any lurkers looking to take over a decently ok civ with room to improve, please apply here. I'm not quite ready to repost this in the tech thread for meta reasons (don't want opponents looking for weakness due to new management), at least until some neighbors commit to warring against other targets.
(July 9th, 2018, 19:28)Boldly Going Nowhere Wrote: Last thing before I go, I'm just shy of 5 weeks until delivery of my second child. Any lurkers looking to take over a decently ok civ with room to improve, please apply here. I'm not quite ready to repost this in the tech thread for meta reasons (don't want opponents looking for weakness due to new management), at least until some neighbors commit to warring against other targets.
does this decently ok civ have lots of excess military laying around for revenge attacks?
"Superdeath seems to have acquired a rep for aggression somehow. In this game that's going to help us because he's going to go to the negotiating table with twitchy eyes and slightly too wide a grin and terrify the neighbors into favorable border agreements, one-sided tech deals and staggered NAPs."
-Old Harry. PB48.
(July 9th, 2018, 19:28)Boldly Going Nowhere Wrote: Last thing before I go, I'm just shy of 5 weeks until delivery of my second child. Any lurkers looking to take over a decently ok civ with room to improve, please apply here. I'm not quite ready to repost this in the tech thread for meta reasons (don't want opponents looking for weakness due to new management), at least until some neighbors commit to warring against other targets.
does this decently ok civ have lots of excess military laying around for revenge attacks?
Ha. Nope. There is no such thing as "excess military" when you neighbor mackoti. I'd say what I have is less than needed but I think the geopolitical situation means I can get away with it. Boudica is kind of her own geopolitical situation in that she is a guaranteed nightmare to conquer and generally not worth the trouble if there are other options. That said, this civ does have lots of infrastructure (Barracks/Colosseums/Stables). I'm building formation spears in several cities to counter the age of knigs. There will also be CRIII maces when I get to Civil Service. Or C3 knights with Vassalage/Theocracy. Or a truly supermedic (WoodyIII/MedicIII) if you want to spend the first GG on that. WoodyIII off the production line for melee units at 8xp with vassalage/theocracy. Lots of fun coming up if we can get there in decent shape.
If you think you'd be interested I suggest you ded-lurk here starting about now so that any lurker info you have from other threads will be less spoiler-ish by the time you take over. I would stick around to offer input if you want. My cities are tall and ripe for the whipping if you wanted to. I just haven't done that because I like to sandbox more than war, especially if I am pressed for time IRL, which I have been during long stretches of this game.
(June 22nd, 2018, 22:56)Boldly Going Nowhere Wrote: I need a better way of attaching pictures. Using this attachment feature is garbage and needlessly tedious. Any suggestions? I was holding out for xenu's homebrew hosting solution but he's never gotten around to getting it put together for me so I'm out of pocket. I have graphs and demos but fuck it, I've been posting and clicking for an age of man by now and I've had it.
I ponied up for pcloud and it works well, very similar to the old dropbox public folder. Downside is, obviously, it's not free. I have found it to be a handy use for personal, non-public things though, but there are lots other options for that, I suppose. Congrats on the new kid. I can't imagine how anyone has more than one.
Thanks, wetbandit. I'm all about free solutions so I'll just wait for xenu to finish his homebrew and I'll just suck at reporting until that happens, if ever.
Regarding the current reload request, my solution is that OT4E is forced to become game admin (since he seems to have no qualms reading player threads?) and that if he fucks the job up he is permabanned from RB games.
In game info: mack ran his stack into Rusten and, seemingly based on absence of info from Civstats, not into me. I don't care what anyone, including me, says to you, mack, you're an alright guy.*
*The fine print: terms of "alright guy" status subject to change and revocable immediately upon wrecking my civ so don't do it. Thanks!
That said, this city, for a change, took off quickly with three resources first ring. This was the key to salvaging the economy: gems and Sailing for island trade routes at Currency. This will be a production powerhouse very soon via workshops and mines. I'll need to fit a lighthouse in too. 
I knew when I captured this one it would be vulnerable and most likely end up a speed bump. We'll see. I'll remain sanguine and dispassionate over this bastard child of a city. 
Yet another slow starter. What else is there? This would be a fine Moai if I could ever get it built. Chances are it would take too long to be worth it over the other city I picked
Maybe it should have just been barracks anyway as this city is destined for units being on the border. Certainly I intended to keep the first ring mountains. Geography makes this location more defensible than you'd think. I'm not concerned here until mack's forests east of his city are chopped. After that I'll need to pack in some spears. The cottage is an anachronism: this will be hammers and workshops.
.) Mack also has a huge stack of HAs/knights presumably in position to hit Rusten, but with Engineering coming in immediately those units are only a turn away from my speed bump, former barb front city. Brief sidebar: 
![[Image: noidea.gif]](https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/images/smilies/noidea.gif)
In this game that's going to help us because he's going to go to the negotiating table with twitchy eyes and slightly too wide a grin and terrify the neighbors into favorable border agreements, one-sided tech deals and staggered NAPs."
