[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Old Harry]

Turn 132

William saw the light


Tensions on our border with Mack are high. He's got three horse archers on the pig hill and this welly and axe protecting the worker chopping our forest. How rude.


I shuffled tiles for BoP, Cannae and Gallipoli. I wonder if Agincourt should work coast over scientist to grow to the next level quicker? I put Hastings on a monastery, the culture swing on the peak has stopped, but not reversed, so we could wait 15 turns for the border pop or 2-pop whip the monastery in five turns (three turns if we give Hastings the horse this turn).

Koniggratz could build a forge or it could get straight into building units (chariot will finish the turn after we get Feudalim). However we need to build wealth if we're going to get Feudalism in three turns.

Five things left to do:
1. What to do with the galley? I think we should get vision on Eridu.
2. The worker at Nuremburg - start chopping another silk or start chopping the forest for Om? I think Silk.
3. The workers at Peterloo - Mack hasn't ended turn yet, so road and farm or move both on the jungle and chop?
4. We have a new worker at Koniggratz - cottage the bare grass, build workshops or chop more jungle? I think we build workshops.
5. The only other player with multiple wheat is Mackoti and I'd rather not trade with him. I think Bacchus is most likely of the others to give up his only source - so we can offer dye in exchange, but he finished turn already, so we won't know until next turn. Azza has two, but we haven't met him yet. Pindicooter should have two, so we could offer sugar for wheat there and see what happens. Not many people have crabs or deer either, we could offer some happy to slow for deer - it might annoy Ichabod, but I hope he won't notice... I went ahead and did this as slow hadn't played yet.


Power & Demos

I haven't ended turn, will you be able to do that?

[Fintourist]

Aaand here is Eridu:



How is it possible that exactly those cities that we need to fight culturally get free Taoism spreads, but e.g. our capital that is 4 tiles away from the holy city does not get one..

In other news, I don't think mack has enough power/units that he could be more than annoying. All his movements look more defensive and flashy stating "don't attack me, look, I have cats, HAs and even an elephant". Well, we get the point.. our slow axe stack is born to fight suttree and not too suitable for aggression. However, I don't want to start a new set of enforced peace next turn yet. I prefer t134 or t135 so that the ending dates of our deals with mack and suttree are not too close. Those dates should also enable signing a new peace deal ~t145, which would give us a safe border for the start of our GA. (btw we need to discuss more about our GA targets soonish. We were considering birthing scientists to bulb Astronomy, but that would require avoiding Civil Service and I'm not sure our military adventures will be that navy-focused due to our central position. Well, we need to think about this.)

Good news: Slow took the deer-deal so our short-term health issues are solved. When we grow our capital to size 13 and finish a forge we again need to get wheat/crabs somewhere and obviously it's not likely that slowcheetah is that long anymore in the game..

Confused point: I'm not completely sure how to interpret our financial advisor screen and the definition of vassalage. Currently our Financial Advisor states that our military costs are 0 and we are only paying for overall amount of units. Does the +13 free military units in Vassalage mean that we only get the cost reduction if we are running pacifism or are we getting some immediate benefits of this feature too? Krill? If we only get benefits from +13 free units Vassalage does not really bring much savings, but will of course help producing stronger units (& sentries) and soon be useful (~15 turns) when we do our GA-Caste-Pacifism sprint.

I finished the turn, did those leftover-things mentioned in your post (with slight modifications to worker micro as chatted), made 1 or 2 tile switchs, placed our main stack withing reaching distance of Peterloo etc.

Btw, thanks for the capital analysis! It was interesting. Those silver pops make our capital look more decent now, but during the first 100 turns it truly was weak compared to our opponents. I wish our other cities would have a bit more food too. Lack of high-crop tiles really makes it difficult to compete with our neighbors. M_h's land is quite nice, which is really bad news. Mackoti's growth curve will continue to be steep

[Krill]

Vassalage gives +X free units (any type of unit) depending on the population of your civ. It also has an effect whereby it covers some of the cost of units from the pacifism civic which costs +1g per (a certain type which I can't remember precisely right now) unit. They are separate effects.

[Fintourist]

Ok, thanks. I was dreaming of bigger combined savings, but that makes sense.

@Harry: We probably want Bureaucracy pretty soon too, but if we want to bulb Astronomy and build a horde of 2-promoted knights/cats/WEs and 3-promoted maces, Vassalage will still be our thing.

[Old Harry]

So right now Vassalage offers us 13 free units and 13 free military units, but costs 5gpt. Our unit costs are 30 but our military unit cost is 0 for 41 units (because we're not running Pacifism?) So Vassalage saves us 7 gpt.

Meanwhile Agincourt makes 44 commerce and 7 hammers if we don't work specialists (which aren't boosted by Bureau) while Bureau costs 9gpt. So that's 22 * 1.25 - 9 = 18 gold or beakers and 4 hammers per turn.

Cannae on the other hand could make 51 commerce and 10 hammers right now - so if we move the palace there that's +8 commerce, then Bureau nets 29 * 1.25 - 9 = 27 gold or beakers and 5 hammers per turn. The trouble is a palace is 160 hammers and even then Cannae isn't an amazing end-of-game bureaucap because of all the coast.

I suspect that going Feud-Machinery-Guilds-CS is our best option if we time a lot of Horse archers to be nearing completion when Guilds comes in and then whip out a bunch more knights while we get to CS. At which point we can produce Macemen once we're in Bureau and no longer need the extra promotions to get strong units.

The alternative is to go CS and load maces onto boats (CII maces can take amphibious by the way). That gets us fighting earlier, and could get us Eridu, the Collossus and m_h's capital, but probably no further, and I think we can deliver a harder blow with knights. Decisions, decisions.

[Fintourist]

...Decisions, decisions.

Yeah, before we actually decide what to tech after Feudalism I want us to construct a preliminary plan for our GA. In my earlier thoughts I was thinking that we birth 3 Scientists and 1 Merchant: 2 Scientists would be used for Astronomy bulbs and GM+GS will get us a 2nd GA, either immediately or a bit later when we feel that there is a good moment for some kind of a economy/production push. However, as already written if we want to bulb Astro, (which is at the very least an interesting option) we need to avoid Civil Service and because Vassalage is not quite as good as I was hoping this is a trade-off that we need to think thoroughly. There are of course other alternatives including more traditional Education bulbs, Academies, artist bombs, small shrine or GE chances etc.

I have today constructed (in my head) various attack plans/scenarios towards different opponents that could with either little or lots of luck improve our position. Unfortunately mackoti got a little bit too much for a fairly small investment so I'm sure we both agree that we need to improve our position significantly by getting more land from someone. We would of course do this anyway, but now we might need to do something more radical and risky, because I don't want to spend next 70 turns with 10 cities behind with no food to grow our cities big and without FIN-trait compensating for the lack of land.

Anyways the selection of an attack scenario of course impacts our tech choices and order so I try to post my ideas at latest by tomorrow. We are not in a hurry though because we can still remain flexible for the next ~10 turns if we want (we tech Feudalism and save money afterwards).

In other news:
- Mackoti has now again OBs with suttree. ****ing annoying. Suttree declined our OB offer so it's unfortunately fairly clear where the preferences of our little kingmaker lie.. So yeah, I guess we need to consider some kind of crazy attacks through suttree's land (that we are speculating ourselves ). Anyways, at mackoti's current power levels and distribution of units I doubt there is anything coming our way.
- Mackoti declared plako. We can of course hope for a real conflict, but I guess mackoti just got his OB set full and does not want to trade with the civ with GLH. (he has OBs at least with pindicator IIRC and also with some others I think but can't remember now). Well at least we agree with this policy.
- No new city captures for Ichabod this turn.. But only 1 whip from slowcheetah..

Should we try to do some kind of business with suttree? Without OBs (@lurkers: we want better vision of our border areas or reacting will be difficult) our life will be again annoying in 8 turns when our enforced peace ends and we probably need to whip once again more units in order to be safe from his stack... Any ideas apart from trying again in couple of turns with maybe some payment??

[TheHumanHydra]

Should we try to do some kind of business with suttree? Without OBs (@lurkers: we want better vision of our border areas or reacting will be difficult) our life will be again annoying in 8 turns when our enforced peace ends and we probably need to whip once again more units in order to be safe from his stack... Any ideas apart from trying again in couple of turns with maybe some payment??

Spies?

[Fintourist]

Spies?

Maybe we must.. :/ Spies just really suck in RBmod because they only see the tile where they are standing if I have understood it correctly.

[Old Harry]

Spies?

Maybe we must.. :/ Spies just really suck in RBmod because they only see the tile where they are standing if I have understood it correctly.

Well. They see the tile they start on, the one they move through and the one they end on. And if you check before and after the other guys play you have more chance to see stuff (that doesn't count as a double move does it?) I might be being a bit picky...

BTW plako offers 3 gpt for OBs. I turned it down.

Edit: And dtay offers crab for banana. I accepted.

[Old Harry]

Having sandboxed the Astronomy bulb I'm not so keen any more. Is it in the tier of techs that have had their costs doubled? Our scientists get about 1750 beakers for a 4000 beaker tech, also Astro doesn't really enable anything useful on this map. Galleys and triremes can do everything we require for the foreseeable future. It would be nice to be the only one with Frigates and Galleons on this map, but we probably have more important fish to fry before that.

We could try to take it with Liberalism. But I'm not sure we'd stand a chance in a Liberalism race. Avoiding the first-to races has worked out for us so far...

So lets ignore Astronomy in our choice between Maces and Knights.

By the way is our National Epic going in Jamestown? Any chance of getting it before our golden age (probably not)?