Ranamar and Lewwyn, ministers for Bismarck of Mali

[SevenSpirits]

Our response back to Yuris:

Yes. Although we wanted Oracle of course, so you're ahead there.

We have secured a source of marble and are on our way to building the Great Library. That's our top pick. GLH would be nice too - we are currently debating when to build it - but we're open to negotiation there if you want it. That plus Colossus would sure be an amazing combo for you. What are your own current thoughts on wonder builds?

Tangentially, we have writing and would appreciate if you offered OB immediately so our warrior can continue west.

Cheers,
Seven

[Ranamar]

E-mail responses from Yuris & Co.

Hi,

Just would like to acknowledge your message; unfortunately, I won't be
able to reply until after work, I have 10 mins left of the lunch break
and need to play the turn in PBEM20 too

Best
yuris125

PS I sent the OB offer with the turn, hope I did everything correctly
and you will get it

yuris125

Hey all,

Sorry for my low availability this weekend. Father's Day with the girlfriend's family kept me away from the computer. For the record, I'm in the USA (Colorado, MDT, GMT-6) and available on google chat most of the day. Feel free to hit me up on chat any time.

-Eric (Maestro)

and directions from GES:

Just head straight south.

JTG

I offered GES Open Borders during our turn, although the warrior will take some time to get there. (Turn report in next post, though.)

[Ranamar]

Moved warriors. We need more names.

The nameless one in the north of our island cleared up the last of the land-accessible water fog on the east coast. There's one tile of it left in the northwest of the island, and we may need to defog a certain single tile on the land bridge to Yuris.

Denethor moved into Minas Tirith, where he's going to stay while another nameless warrior (Boromir, perhaps?) goes south to defog some of GES's territory. As noted before, I offered GES open borders this turn.

Gandalf entered Yuris's territory:

Yes, they offered Open Borders and we accepted.

Strider continued across the blasted wastes of the center:

I think that land bridge in the southeast goes to GES's island.

Techwise, I turned science down to zero to get a nest egg and put the overflow from writing (and the base beaker) into Polytheism. We'll get it in one turn if we put our tech rate back up, but I want to see if we can get some more dialogue in with Yuris and Maestro before setting down more.

EOT, I took pictures of demographics. I failed to notice it at the time, but, later, when I was looking through the pictures...
Apparently, we already have trade routes to Yuris. Notice our imports-exports:

I wonder when they'll kick in for GES as well.

[Lewwyn]

Wow I missed a lot today. Today was my busiest day of the week.

BTW if GES and someone else went after Judaism then we have a lot of religion chasers no? Maybe that will help in putting us ahead.

[SevenSpirits]

Wow I missed a lot today. Today was my busiest day of the week.

BTW if GES and someone else went after Judaism then we have a lot of religion chasers no? Maybe that will help in putting us ahead.

Good point!

I'm guessing whoever went after Hinduism also too Judaism. Hattie would make sense being spiritual, but then why isn't MNG in a religion already? Huh.

Nice that Yuris came through with OB. That's a slightly higher chance of circumnav and 2 extra cpt immediately! Sweet.

BD and MT will both grow above their happy cap next turn. At that point they should start settlers (the unhappy citizen won't eat any food then), then whip them, and probably overflow into workers. And we need to decide where they're going to go.

Did you send the new warrior in barad-dur northwestish? I think that's where he should be, to defog somewhere we might want to settle soon.

Oh and I think strider should try to contact GES' neighbor, i.e. take the next bridge after GES's one, going SW.

[SevenSpirits]

Reply from Yuris. They are willing to concede GL to us if we can guarantee them Mausoleum.

Greeting to the RL7 team,

I have to admit that we also had plans for the Great Library; your
interest in this wonder, while unsurprising, makes things complicated.
However, we discussed this matter at length, and decided that our
friendly relations would be very important for us; therefore, we think
we can concede this wonder to you. In exchange, we ask you not to
compete with us for Mausoleum of Maussollos, which is our 2nd pick
wonder of this era

I would also like to impose a time limit for it, so that the other
side can got for the wonder if it's not built in a reasonable
timeframe. Does T80 sound good to you?

Here is the agreement we're proposing

1. The Radioland empire does not attempt to build The Great Library
2. The Middle Earth empire does not attempt to build Mausoleum of Maussollos
3. This agreement becomes void on T80; if either wonder is not built
by that time, both empires can attempt to build it without
repercussions

Would you agree to this?

As for other wonders, Colossus currently is our only firm intention;
we're considering TGLH and The Pyramids, but have no solid plans for
them, and won't start them for the next few turns. If you finalise the
plans for any of them, we would appreciate if you could let us know,
so that we don't start our attempts

We highly value our relations, and look forward to future cooperation
between our great empires

Best regards,
yuris125, Music Director of Radioland

Though we would really like Mausoleum too, we can't have everything. I suggest we accept their proposal.

My proposed response:

Well darn, Mausoleum is our second-choice wonder as well. Nevertheless, we want to be friendly too, so we'll accept your proposal contingent on these additional, perhaps unnecessary points:

4. We keep our agreement secret.
5. We do not in any way encourage other teams to compete for the wonders in question.
6. We haven't already done anything that would violate these terms.

Sound good to you?

By the way, have you met anyone else? We have found GES to our south.

Cheers,
Seven

[Ranamar]

It could be worth asking them if they have stone, considering we have it. It's also worth noting that, while building the Pyramids for Republic isn't amazing, it could be at least marginally worthwhile, and it'd synergize at least a bit with the Great Library. I'm not sure I'd want to actually trade it for the Great Lighthouse, given the potential of that latter wonder when all but two of our cities are coastal, but it could be worth considering. We could build the Pyramids in Barad-Dur, after all.

Actually, no, the more I think about it, the more I think that'd be a terrible trade unless we're expecting to run approximately one specialist per city we have, although I suppose it does give us some extra happy to make up for it... but it's probably still a bad deal.

Bah; I am excessively enamored of stuff that seems cheesy... and it's not actually always better.

[SevenSpirits]

Played, will report in a few hours.

We met MNG in the middle. Haven't sent a greeting yet.

[SevenSpirits]

OK, t39 report.

First, we meet MNG in the middle:



Still haven't sent him a greeting.

MNG and GES both have four cities at this point (can tell by trade screen. I guess we need to get cracking! Luckily we are in good shape to do just that: Barad-dur and Minas Tirith just passed their happy caps. Next turn we can start settlers in each, and the turn after that whip away three pop.



There is one catch: the mine+chop is finishing next turn! If we allowed that to go through we would only be able to 2-whip the settler. And we'd really like to convert as many people to hammers per happiness as possible. So my suggestion:

Cancel Frodo's current action - have him put a turn into a road first instead. THEN mine. Then finish the road. Since it didn't occur to me when I played, whoever plays next will have to do this before he completes the action of his own volition.

After the settlers are built, each city can build a 1t worker. Yes!

In Minas Tirith, I started a Granary for us to whip next turn. Warrior is still at 9/10h. Overflow from the granary should probably go into an axe which will be our one actually good unit, for barb killing and hopefully reaching Heroic Epic XP levels.

Here's Gandalf, checking our Yuris' lands:


Here is the top 5 cities screen showcasing our monstrously populated about-to-be-whipped cities.



Finally, demographics:



GNP is low because I left research at 0% for one more turn. I think we should turn it back on next turn though, or we risk delaying when we get Literature. (Probably not... but I'm not sure exactly how getting more cities will affect us. And we might get and settle a prophet.)

Highest crop yield, MFG and power (lol). And also, the only team getting foreign trade routes. Oh yeah. That's $3 free that only we are getting. And future cities will also come with $2 trade routes!

So: where do want to plant our next two cities?

[SevenSpirits]

Here is a different possible dotmap. It only uses 8 major cities (current in red, future in yellow) but can squeeze in one or two more on the blue circles to match the previous dotmap's count, if we want/need to. (Neither of those is better than settling on the land bridge to the middle.)



Main features are:

- Horse city is 1n (on the spices; which aren't a very good improved tile anyway), to give access to a food resource (the corn).

- Eastern pig city is 2n to share the corn and crab.

- Western peninsula pig/cow city is 1SE. It gets more land tiles and is closer to us, so I like it more. This is negotiable though and independent of other changes.

If we go with this, the three next settlable cities are all quite strong.