[SPOILERS]Zara Yaqob of Byzantium and the Melancholies of Gawdzak and BaII

[BaII]

Huh, hard question, I think just because of all the free spreads and someone else adopting our religion, a shrine might be the way to go if we get a GP.

[Gawdzak]

Turn 120

Game is back on. In case you haven't been following the tech thead. Suttree quit and now we got WilliamLP.

We building some forges.




Not sure whether to whip them or not, feels wrong to 4 pop whip a forge. Also we will finish the Moai next turn.

I would probably whip in a few forge ASAP because we need to expand onto these islands:




Zanth/Bacchus is now teching Machinery, not entirely sure why. Xbow to deal with Gavagai? Pretty sure they don't have Civil Service for maces.

We are actually 1 turn away from Machinery and maces ourselves. I see no reason finishing it now to give Zanth the known tech bonus since we don't really need to build maces right now. Grabbing Iron Working to make sure we have Iron. Good chance that it's at the capital since that's where Gavagai's is. Mikasa could really use those hammers.

This game seems to be a slow teching game. Somewhat understandable since it's Emperor difficulty. Music still not gone yet. Barteq, who's leading in land area, is heading towards CoL. Gavagai just finished Aesthetics. We get research visibility on Azza in 3 turns. Both Joey and Barteq do less than 100 gold per turn on 0% Science. We can do over 200 gold per turn now with the completion of a market in Mikasa.

I just spewed a bunch of information about this game as I remembered it, hope it was at least somewhat coherent.

[Gawdzak]

Turn 121

Something weird I noticed while exploring:




Well we got capital Iron, but I'm a little annoyed at the location:




Going to have to bulldoze the hamlet, which I don't like to do. Even though we got another Iron down south, building a mine there is probably still the right call given how production poor our capital is.

Moai complete:




It will look better once we finish getting our Great Person and grow it a little more. The goal is to eventually workshop all the flat land tiles.

[Gawdzak]

Settled another island city.




GermanJoey builds the Colossus. Can see research on everyone we met.

[BaII]

If we head over to music and grab the Artist, is a artist bomb of any use?

[Gawdzak]

I think it's probably too late now for us to go there. If we miss it, the situation would be pretty bad as it would delay the path to Guilds.

I think we definitely could have gotten it if we had tried for it earlier, but Aesthetics->Drama->Music is almost 2000 beakers. Literature doesn't seem very good, since I didn't manage to grab the marble and we don't have a heroic epic unit. Drama unlocks our unique building which is at half price since we are Creative. Did I make the right choice? I'm not too sure.

Looking at the big picture, I think we should continue to beeline Guilds. I'm guessing we can attack with Cataphracts in ~15 turns.

[Gawdzak]

Turn 123

Mikasa looks really good now. After the Forge we build an Aqueduct and a Courthouse.




It has been a while, but I will do a quick trait comparison to show you how strong Organized has been for us.




With the Civic saving portion of the trait alone we save ~45 gold per turn factoring in inflation.

On top of that, we have built 8 Lighthouses and 15 Courthouses.

The new Financial would give us 18 extra commerce. I wouldn't have played any differently when it comes to tile improvement if I was Financial in this game.

With these game settings on this map, Organized completely outshines Financial pre-Wharves.

[BaII]

Looks like the Artist is out of play, if we're going to phract anybody, are they going to have pikes by the time when we invade? We might want to start pre building stables right now to prepare for phract production.

[SevenSpirits]

Not disputing your overall conclusion, but surely a non-ORG FIN player should build wharves before courthouses. Your playstyle seems very suited to ORG and maybe less suited to FIN.

[Gawdzak]

Not disputing your overall conclusion, but surely a non-ORG FIN player should build wharves before courthouses. Your playstyle seems very suited to ORG and maybe less suited to FIN.

I definitely agree FIN leaders should prioritize wharves over courthouses. However, I just think Compass is at a much worse position in the tech tree compared to CoL. CoL leads to Civil Service and Philosophy which are both good techs. While Compass leads to Optics, a tech most people ignore until they decide to tech Astronomy. On top of that, CoL is actually cheaper than Compass. I could be wrong but I'm think both FIN players in this game went CoL before Compass.

FIN leaders will eventually catch up to ORG leaders after wharves are built. I will probably make another comparison once I finish building wharves in my cities. I think they are still essential buildings for most coastal cities even if we aren't FIN.

Looks like the Artist is out of play, if we're going to phract anybody, are they going to have pikes by the time when we invade? We might want to start pre building stables right now to prepare for phract production.

Zanth might get to Engineering but Gavagai probably won't be able to. I'm leaning towards not building any stables and research Theology for Theocracy in order to save all the hammers we have for actual units. What do you think about that?