RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Sullla]

Here's an overview picture of our territory to add to what Speaker posted earlier:



You can see why our maintenance costs are so awful, with our capital at the extreme end of our territory. That wouldn't be so bad if this weren't a Toroidal map... but of course, it is. Anyway, we'll be fine given a little time to develop. Just working our gold and fur tiles pulls us up a full 10% research, and our cities are going to be growing very quickly onto more and more grassland river cottages. Happiness isn't really an issue with about a gazillion spare MP units lying around.

Some quick comments on each city, using Speaker's nice pictures from earlier:



Our capital's in great shape. Needs more cottages, although we're a little tight on workers right now... so the plan is to get another settler for the island city out of here next. The Jewish missionary actually completes in 2 turns after growth, not 3.



I'm going to send one excess worker down here next turn, to complete another grassland river cottage. (We have one turn of work already done, you can see from the sign.) There's really no reason not to keep growing and working more cottages until we hit size 10-11. We wouldn't be working the grassland hill mine if there were more cottages here. Of course we had more, but Dantski pillaged them... bah!



Recovering from its latest triple whip, heh. I believe that we grow to size 8 in four more turns, and we'll pick up the two grassland river cottages that Fort Henry is stealing right now. Then we can finally grab the furs tile at size 9; with five grassland river cottages + furs, we'll be pumping some real commercial power here, and still getting +6 food/turn.

Also note that poor Chancellorsville has a current whip unhappiness penalty of 54 turns. We may have gone a little overboard here, haha.



I don't have too much to say here; we'll grab the additional river grassland cottage at size 7, and then probably swap back to the gold resource when we reach size 8. Obviously we still need a lot of worker attention here for more cottages; we can fit a good 5-7 more superb cottages at Fred before all is said and done.



Max shields on Moai for now (yay, stone!) and then we'll whip a forge and push max growth with the fish and all water tiles. 2/1/3 yield is very powerful, and then we can grab the land tiles at size 8-10 to get a fleet of galleys and triremes going. We can get 16 shields/turn (20/turn with forge) at size 8 here for some real naval power.

I'm also going to chop the last remaining forest here in a couple of turns to speed along Moai to completion. This city will be even better post-Calendar when we can improve that silks tile!

You've seen the new cities so I'll stop there. I will try to get a shot of the new town of Spartansburg sometime tomorrow, even though there's not too much to see just yet.

[Sullla]

Broker/plako have sent us another message:

Dear Killer Angels,

I'm discussing with Nakor/DMOC about the NAP, but we haven't signed
anything official yet.

In general our communication isn't working. Are you still intrested in
doing co-operation with us or what is going on? I'm too impatient to
wait 2 days regular basis and we really can't coordinate common
operations in the future with this communication rate.

We need to know where we can get help after T150. We're surrounded by
the most powerful Rebels and Whosit just planted a really aggressively
a city right in front of the gates of Seoul. We can manage against him
alone, but we need to do something to keep other Rebels out of the
fight. I can try to sign long NAPs with them, but that would tie our
hands and we might hand to give in for some of their demands.
Best regards,
Plako

Wow, that's not good. Have we dropped the ball here? Honestly, we emailed them less than 48 hours earlier, and yesterday was a Sunday where I wasn't even home for most of the day. I'll go ahead and write them back now:

Dear Broker and plako,

Our apologies for not writing you back sooner, but we did send you a message barely more than 36 hours ago. Speaker needs to travel for work on most weekends, and I was occupied all day Sunday. We also just finished a very large conflict and had a lot of planning to do involving our aquisition of three new cities in the span of two turns. I'm sorry that your message slipped down in the queue, but we really did not have a lot of free time to spare. I honestly don't think we've been particularly out of touch or hard to reach diplomatically. Anyway, let me address your concerns.

Jowy's military was not really as strong as it might seem; he looked strong because he had been gifted 8 Praetorians from Whosit (64k of Power on the bar graph). He had also beelined to Construction via Mathematics, and those techs both give a lot of Soldier points as well. We were able to attack him in an unexpected place, raze one city, and force him to sign peace and give us two cities - or else we were going to raze his capital too! You really shouldn't have anything to worry about from Jowy, since we've never seen even one ship out of him. Jowy is all land units, so I don't see how he could even reach you. I think he's going to have a lot of rebuilding to do in the upcoming turns, and I really really don't see how or why he would go attacking your team. Jowy is basically crippled now.

No, we don't have any plans with Dantski which would require a commitment from your team. I don't see any reason why you shouldn't accept the offered NAP from Nakor, unless you want to join with Dantski in an attack on him. (That might be a valid strategy, obviously you know more about the situation down there than we do.) We have no desire for offensive action ourselves at the moment - you can imagine that there's a major infrastructure backlog from being at war for such a very long time.

We said before that we're prepared to provide assistance if needed after Turn 150. In fact, we specifically made that the ending date for our peace treaty enforced NAP so that we could join your team if needed. By that date we will have some real naval power on hand, hopefully enough to keep Kathlete off your back side, should it come to that. Dantski should be enough to keep Nakor busy for you, although he never responds to our emails either and doesn't make for a good ally. Unfortunate, that...

Speaker recommends that you emphasize Metal Casting for triremes. We had a situation during our war where a single Kathlete galley used the "blockade" mission and stripped our coastal cities from working any water tiles. And since galley vs. galley is a losing proposition, we couldn't do much about it. Metal Casting is a useful tech to have, not to mention getting those forges up for the extra production.

We will certainly try to be more prompt in returning your emails; you sort of caught us on a bad day yesterday.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

As far as our own game, we're waiting for Jowy to finish his turn. Looks like he actually played it, just never hit end turn. Maybe he forgot that the war was over, and he doesn't need to play silly clock games anymore?

EDIT: Went ahead and replied to Kathlete as well:

Dear Rebel Alliance,

Our soldiers are content to return home and tell glorious war stories to their children and grandchildren. I think we're pretty happy to use this Non-Aggression Pact for... umm, non-aggression.

As far as how our relationship stands, well, that all depends on what happens moving forward, doesn't it? Speaker and I would be less than pleased if we were to face another 4 vs. 1 attack as soon as Turn 150 arrives, for example. But it's the future moving forward that we're interested in, not past actions. Both of us have done a lot of Multiplayer before, and experienced players know not to take things that happen in games too personally. They are ultimately games, after all.

Long story short, we'd certainly like to carry on relations with your team specifically, rather than your team as one entity in some supra-alliance bent on our destruction. I'd like to be able to make deals with athlete and kalin, rather than athlete/kalin/Jowy/Nakor/DMOC/Whosit. And I'm confident that there will be room to make those sort of agreements moving forward. As for the specifics, we'll work things out as we go along.

Do stay in touch,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

It's pretty disingenous, because we view Kathlete as the puppetmaster behind the alliance gangpile against us; whether or not they had the original idea, they were the ones trying to coordinate the big attack. Kathlete is also probably our biggest competition to win the game, and I'd rank them ahead of the other top teams (Whosit and slaze) at the moment. At some point, we are going to clash. Still, we can hear them out, and who knows? Maybe we could find common somewhere. Stranger things have happened.

Then again, they were the ones who sent us this message when we were fighting desperately for our lives:

We did see the result of the battle outside Chancellorville and we are
mourning our lost brave Horse Archer. Our remaining troops, while
injured, enjoy a very high morale at the moment, and they demanded to
continue the fight. We have heard voices saying that the "[COLOR="Yellow"]Fun has just
started![/COLOR]" and that "The show must go on!".

Maybe they intended those messages to be playful, but it sure felt like they were rubbing our noses in it just because they could. Sooner or later, we've got to go whack this team hard.

[darrelljs]

Thanks for the overview pic of the cities; not that you need my approbation but they are very well managed . They all have sufficient food surplus for growth, and nice tiles to grow into (or nice tiles planned). You guys are going to really be cranking when your pop recovers. My only real question was Antietam. In a very short time that city is going to be working mad commerce, I would think a Library makes more sense. Also, do you have a GPP city planned yet? Obviously with your traits you can get Academies and cities that need Academies faster than anyone .

Darrell

[spacemanmf]

Maybe he forgot that the war was over, and he doesn't need to play silly clock games anymore?

I was under the impression (from the Public Players Thread) that Jowy just wanted to play at about the same time every day?

[antisocialmunky]

Well its a 24 hour timer, he can do that without running the clock. However, Jowy apparently hasn't been feeling well for a few days so some allowances might be in order.

In other news. I love the epic picture posts!

[spacemanmf]

Except it was effectively a 12 hour timer. If say the turn rolled after 15 hours instead of running to 24 hours, then that would change the 12 hour window. But anyway...

[WilliamLP]

To help educate a Civ noob, could you expand on the pros and cons of Metal Casting vs. Currency at this point in the game, since the decision was made in the dark period? Is it an easy choice? I'd somewhat reflexively choose currency, so I'm curious.

[Speaker]

To help educate a Civ noob, could you expand on the pros and cons of Metal Casting vs. Currency at this point in the game, since the decision was made in the dark period? Is it an easy choice? I'd somewhat reflexively choose currency, so I'm curious.

Well, when we started researching Metal Casting we didn't have the crushing maintenance costs that we have now, having added 3 more cities. I definitely underestimated how bad it would be, and I'm sure Sullla did as well. St. Albans ne-Argos is costing us a full 10 gold per turn in maintenance! And our unit costs are very high as well, with our huge stacks of Ancient Era n00bness.

We are almost certainly going to need to tech Currency before Code of Laws, unless someone (T-Hawk?) can show us that CoL would help cut the costs more than Currency. We may very well need to build Wealth in a few cities and slave a couple markets in other cities, to get Code of Laws in some sort of reasonable time frame. Once we have both Currency and Code of Laws, we should be able to get out of this economic malaise, with markets, courthouses, and the extra trade route per city. But it will take us quite a while to build Forges, Markets, and Courthouses in our core cities. I wonder how the other Civs in the game are handling this? Holy Rome is clearly doing well, as their GNP continues to shoot up. I guess the combination of Organized and their UB, which they rushed to, are pretty powerful. But who would have known that the map was going to have such insane maintenance. I don't recall us knowing the map would be toroidal before we started, plus the way they placed our starting locations on the coast encourages high distance maintenance.

[Krill]

I'm a bastard. So shoot me

[T-hawk]

We are almost certainly going to need to tech Currency before Code of Laws, unless someone (T-Hawk?) can show us that CoL would help cut the costs more than Currency.

You need me for this? Courthouses cut costs. Currency doesn't, it adds commerce and markets add gold. Therefore CoL cuts the costs more than Currency.

More seriously, the gold/hammer payback ratio is probably just about even for courthouses and markets. (You've got the numbers in-game, you can do the math.) Currency wins in most cases since the trade route kicks in immediately and helps you get to CoL, plus you can build Wealth to help with that too. Usually only an Organized civ wants CoL before Currency.