Uncommonly Good: A Story of Elves

[Mardoc]

In the interim, I'm mentally leaning more and more towards Education and then beelining Way of the Forests. Rather than discuss the territory we might have, given all the forests in the BFC, wouldn't the best thing be get as many Ancient Forests up as we can as soon as possible, now that the Sheaim threat has been pushed off? Along the way we get Hunters/Hawks and can accelerate exploration as well.

Yes, I mostly agree. I do want to point out that Mysticism is a pre-req for Way of the Forests, so including it before Education is essentially a WotF beeline + Education anyway.

[Man Behind the Mask]

We really need to get some more info on the south before talking borders. Third ring culture is not too far away, which will help a little. You can sort of fog-gaze a line of peaks directly south - they might be able to settle to border those (i.e. a little north of the line) if we take the jumbo/banana/pyre site to the west.

On tech path, the big downside with going straight to WotF is we don't pick up any extra worker techs. They can cottage and farm everything they see, which isn't a bad deal, but we won't be hooking up any resources (apart from maybe the ivory??).

Much to my own surprise and delight, I managed to check all my workings in game. Basically, everything I've said in my long rambles holds true, but I think you can get Education one turn quicker. None of the conclusions change; if you want both Myst and Edu its better to go in that order; the worker will be a little bored (if not dodging barbs) with that arrangement; and it might slightly delay a possible settler by building the Elder Council.

From a micro point of view, I was basically working just tiles with commerce (used the Ancient Forest a little at the beginning, but you grow to the cap pretty quickly anyway). If you just train settler and worker during the period where you're teching Education, you can actually switch to Pacifism at the same time as God King for the GPP boost. You can take Nationhood again when you pick up Apprenticeship.

Good luck with the turn....

[Gaspar]

Turn here. Second tech in for the Grigori, no other news. Is there anything they can research that fast? Must have been a hut, no? Chong discovered nothing interesting in the north, though there's a barrow I could explore next turn if it doesn't spawn a skeleton on this turn.

Sheaim are catty corner to our Capital, so I dither a bit on whether or not to swap to the plains hill forest. That gets the warrior out in 2, so if I understand how PBEM turns resolve, the warrior would be in place before he can hit the capital. There's forest/jungle on every tile he can move to, so he can't hit me in 1T. Still we have a NAP, and the idea behind that sort of thing is why you want NAPs, so you don't have to delay growth in favor of defense. On the same token, Nicolae doesn't have enough of a RB-history for me to know how he really feels about these sorts of things.



Meh, playing boldly worked once, I'm going to do it again and not change the tile arrangement.

[Gaspar]

Proposed reply to Nicolae:

Hi Nicolae,

Rice for Corn sounds likely fine, though I'm sure you'll build Dereptus before me, so a little extra commerce boost for you. No problems on that end, just mentioning it. No land at all to your south, huh? Ravus sure wanted us to be cozy. Maybe he doesn't like us. How far do things extend to your east? I can get a city or two north of my capital but its certainly not going to be a lot. Perhaps we should intend to settle west-ish towards other neighbors to avoid border tensions. I want us to work together, but obviously I'm not going to agree to you settling on the borders of my capital, as I would expect you not to agree to as well. Perhaps we can both aim to get one city down towards the other's capital and work in other directions otherwise? I don't have great map info to the south, so I'll probably ask that we refrain from making any formal agreements until I can get myself another scouting unit in that direction or we make a map/screenshot trade.

I do agree you're more likely to be at Bronze Working well before I am, given our Civilization's priorities. We can discuss the likelihood of working out a jungle chop trade when the time comes, but I certainly appreciate the offer. Entirely plausible that I will take you up on it. How are things with the angry Lizardman down there? No combat log so I don't know if Cheech took enough a bite out of him to make him easier for you or just gave him a free C1, hope it was the former.

Not much else going on, though my turns are 50% less interesting with Cheech dead.

Regards,
Gaspar

Thoughts, gentlemen?

[Mardoc]

Thoughts, gentlemen?

I don't think I'd emphasize quite that thoroughly that we lost a scout (and are vulnerable vulnerable vulnerable!) - take out the last sentence probably.

Also, it would be good to mention that we want wines, once we find something to trade for them.

The only other question I have is, how much would it really hurt to cede most of the jungle to him? We can, ahem, "renegotiate" at T100 with Priests of Leaves, hopefully, but he's right that we can't use it before that. It wouldn't hurt too badly to let him dejungle, then take possession ourselves and put up forests, would it? And that way, we could grab the Remnants site, and a bunch of forests that we're currently planning to Ancientify, and so on.

On the other hand, of course, even if we end up ceding most of the jungle, might as well make him work for it in negotiations, so I don't object to your current position at all.

[NobleHelium]

Hello Gaspar, I'll be following this thread a bit when I get a chance. Skimmed to the end, didn't read much of the interim. I wouldn't worry about losing the scout too much, scouting will be cake once you can afford Hunting.

[Gaspar]

Happy to have you aboard, NobleHelium. There's a lot of quality in the early thread, before I get too deeply into paranoia and derail the whole thing the last couple pages.

And yeah, I agree wholeheartedly, Mardoc. Basically, either he's going to gives us strong reason to be his friend or we're just going to annex him later anyway. There's really no point after T100 where he has the upper hand on us, given that we should be stronger economically and we'll have Destroy Undead on all our Mages for his late game nonsense. Personally, given the potential destructive nature of both worldbreak and raising the AC, I think I'd be more inclined to kill him off before he gets there if he doesn't give us a strong reason to let him live.

Nonetheless, I don't want to give him the pyre site if we can help it. But whatever I give him, I'd like him to negotiate for it.

Message sent with Mardoc's modifications.

[Mardoc]

A minor note on this:

we'll have Destroy Undead on all our Mages for his late game nonsense.

Destroy Undead will only help us on half of his late game nonsense . That is, it'll help against Pyre Zombies, Diseased Corpses, and probably Skeletons. I don't expect it to be much use against Spectres, since he can summon and use them before we can react, and most of the other Gate and Ashen Veil units are Demons, not Undead.

Still will be extremely helpful, of course, particularly if he spends a lot of hammers on Zombies/Corpses that we can kill for free. Just not a free ticket on everything.

[Azoth]

Destroy Undead will only help us on half of his late game nonsense . That is, it'll help against Pyre Zombies, Diseased Corpses, and probably Skeletons. I don't expect it to be much use against Spectres, since he can summon and use them before we can react, and most of the other Gate and Ashen Veil units are Demons, not Undead.

Well, Destroy Undead will at least let you clean up his Spectres before they get a second attack. Now that I think about it, that's pretty powerful: with enough Life II mages, you can almost completely negate his Summoner trait. (Assuming Nicolae sticks to Spectres, that is. Once he sees the Tomb of Sucellus, he might switch to Pit Beasts.)

[Gaspar]

A minor note on this:



Destroy Undead will only help us on half of his late game nonsense . That is, it'll help against Pyre Zombies, Diseased Corpses, and probably Skeletons. I don't expect it to be much use against Spectres, since he can summon and use them before we can react, and most of the other Gate and Ashen Veil units are Demons, not Undead.

Still will be extremely helpful, of course, particularly if he spends a lot of hammers on Zombies/Corpses that we can kill for free. Just not a free ticket on everything.

I really do misstate something everytime I discuss game mechanics. Thank god I have you guys around. By the end here, hopefully I'll actually know what I'm doing. Regardless, unless something really changes, I fully expect to bring the full force of the Fellowship of Leaves on him @T100, so we won't see Liches and Tar Demons and all that nonsense. Just most likely Tiger Priests with Hunter support against PZs. I'll take our chances, but we still have another 50T before we really need to start preparing for that. Maybe tomorrow, maybe tonight I'll try and lay out a plan there. Then you and the rest of the lurker council can teach me how I'm an idiot. Then we can get to work on the real plan.

Anyway, we have a turn. Huzzah! Nicolae up to 44 points, so that's a tech for him now. No other score increases. Someone, either me or one of you helpful fellows should probably put together a C&D post so we can consolidate what we know while its still easy to tell. Then we can update it every turn. Techs/Pop is still pretty useful information to have on everyone.

The drama of this turn is in the north. You'll recall I mentioned a barrow that I discovered last turn that I planned to explore this turn. Well, I moved onto it and...



So I have a choice, run away and try and save my scout and skip popping the barrow or pop it now and say goodbye to Chong. I'm actually quite torn. On one hand, I was really looking forward to popping this barrow. On the other, I'd really like to make contact with someone else. Chong is likely to die soon anyway, and we're nearing the end of the time of empty barrows/ruins. But I could just end up popping some sort of a baddie and making this area unexplorable for the foreseeable future. Of course, with a Giant Spider, one could argue this area is already unexplorable until Hunters.

Decisions, Decisions. Well... we've already learned once this game that Fortune Favors The Bold™, so I decided to pop it, and say goodbye to Chong.



\o/ *pimp* *pimp* *pimp*

Yes, thank you, I'll trade a scout for an Adventurer any day of the week. Now... can I get him home? Probably not, but its worth a shot. Back home, 2T to corn farm, 2T to growth, 2T to warrior. Basically everything interesting happens in 2T. Next turns drama will be whether or not Bahamet the Second gets eaten by a wandering barb on the interturn. At least as Elven we can move 2T most of the way.

Lads, assuming he can make it home: Mage, Melee, Disciple, Recon? Pros and Cons? Thinking not Disciple, since we already get potent Priests, but all the other options have their arguments. He could be important in the Sheaim war should it occur. He could also be bear meat in a minute.

Here are the EOT demos.



Thus far, all the luck I've not had in WW5 has come around in this game. Ultimately, if I had a choice, I'd rather have it here. I've also heard... It's Better to Be Lucky than Good™