[SPOILERS] scooter Expands the Empire Across the Sea

[scooter]

I feel like SD has been whipping a lot. Maybe too much. Sure he has CHA happy, and whipping is a good source of hammers for expansion, but if all his cities are constantly tiny, is that really the best way to build an economy?

#whips since T48:
Us: 3
SD: 8
Cairo: 3
Bing: 3
Yuri: 3

Yeah, I agree that seems like a ton, especially given that I doubt he has (m)any Granaries as he's not EXP.











Overall numbers and empire continue to look fairly good. Aren has one awkward turn of working a bad tile, but in general there's going to be a wave of tile adjusting. Relief is coming soon as Aren is about to control its two seafood and can net them more or less immediately. Speaking of some relief.






Found our next city site. First ring Pigs/Gold and a canal east means this will be a very important city. The Galley returns home next turn to pickup the settler for this city. I'll have to decide whether to keep sending the scout south or whether to turn around and scout up by the Stone next turn. In general though it doesn't look like we'll be contested on this island as there's another mass east of here with no cultural borders, so that's a very good sign.





We agreed on not contacting Bing, so I circled north with the WB. This is tricky up here. In theory it would be nice to grab this spot before Bing. In practice it's a bit far-flung as we wouldn't settle the Jungle quickly.

[Zed-F]

Are we very likely to settle stone before Furs? This might depend on whether we need to prepare HG first or need the happy first, or whether we see anyone else sniffing around here. We aren't close to needing stone for walls and castles yet, it doesn't seem like. I imagine the furs would be more useful first, and it's probably easier to pick the scout back up later from a more northerly position, so I would be inclined to send him south first and scout the stone area after. The scout might go SW->S-SE->NW-SW over 3 turns and see almost everything down there due to hills / coast tiles. I'm pretty confident he can get back to the gold area sometime around our next city settle and proceed north before a second settler could come over to this island.

We might have other priorities than settling either stone or furs right away. Might it make sense to have our northern scouting workboat keep scouting and our western workboat net Aren's western seafood, and have Unta's forthcoming boat net Aren's eastern food? It looks like that landmass we just found up there is past the jungle belt. I don't know if we would be interested in staking a claim there -- it's a bit far from home and Bing might be interested in exploring/settling there -- but it's at least not jungle. Otherwise, I am wondering if the civilizations are kind of spread out in a M or W shape an we might encounter someone to our NW that might also be interested in that northern area. I kind of feel that getting several additional scouting turns with our most advanced workboats might be worth waiting for the Unta WB to net Aren's second seafood.

Also glad to see some non-seafood on the western jungle island but that won't be a priority soon. Curious to see if the western ocean continues to be oceanic or if there continues to be a coastal path west from here, but there's only so much scouting we can do before at least one of our boats needs to net Aren's food.

[Tarkeel]

I feel like SD has been whipping a lot. Maybe too much. Sure he has CHA happy, and whipping is a good source of hammers for expansion, but if all his cities are constantly tiny, is that really the best way to build an economy?

I've seen SD whip cities down to size 1 without really needing to in other games.

Found our next city site. First ring Pigs/Gold and a canal east means this will be a very important city.

Agree that the GoldenBacon should come next, but the deer and furs aren't too shabby either! At first glance the tile 2N of furs looks like the "ideal" spot for it, but I think we have to settle it W (with inner-ring deer).

We agreed on not contacting Bing, so I circled north with the WB. This is tricky up here. In theory it would be nice to grab this spot before Bing. In practice it's a bit far-flung as we wouldn't settle the Jungle quickly.

It would be nice to have an outpost on the clam/dye island for vision if nothing else, but I don't see it as a very high priority.

[scooter]

Found our next city site. First ring Pigs/Gold and a canal east means this will be a very important city.

Agree that the GoldenBacon should come next, but the deer and furs aren't too shabby either! At first glance the tile 2N of furs looks like the "ideal" spot for it, but I think we have to settle it W (with inner-ring deer).

Yeah I was thinking about this. Riverside grassland tiles are so rare on this map that it hurts me to even consider settling on one. But you're right that the city is rough initially if we do not settle there. I am definitely leaning towards continuing the scout south like Zed-F suggested just to see if there's anything else there. It definitely feels like these could be our next two cities as it'll give us significant happy wiggle room.

[Zed-F]

For the furs site, right now I see either 2W of furs (and 1S of deer) or on the grass as being possible. I agree we'd really prefer not to settle on the grass. Potentially if there is seafood or other resources we might have other options -- if things work out we could even settle 2 cities down there, on the western and eastern tundra regions. It might be the case that we could even settle W of deer with one city and N of furs with a second, if seafood locations turn out such that sharing the deer east is the right thing to do. We'll need our scout to check the area at least reasonably thoroughly before we can complete our dotmap.

[Tarkeel]

For the furs site, right now I see either 2W of furs (and 1S of deer) or on the grass as being possible.

Yeah, that's also a very good option. I initially didn't consider it due to the amount of "dead tiles" between it and bacon, but there could be a fishing village inbetween. No use locking anything in before we've scouted the seafood situation though.

[Zed-F]

There's a lot of stuff we'd like over the next 10-15 turns -- settlers, workers, defenders, a granary in Pale, a temple somewhere (Ehrlitan?), Lighthouses, a second galley, workboats as needed for seafood. We also have several cities that have finished or are about to finish builds. What's the next couple builds for Unta, Pale, Ehrlitan, and Aren?

[scooter]

There's a lot of stuff we'd like over the next 10-15 turns -- settlers, workers, defenders, a granary in Pale, a temple somewhere (Ehrlitan?), Lighthouses, a second galley, workboats as needed for seafood. We also have several cities that have finished or are about to finish builds. What's the next couple builds for Unta, Pale, Ehrlitan, and Aren?

I'll try to go into more detail on this next turn, but a few highlights.

* Pale is going to get some infrastructure while growing for a few turns after completing its settler. The shared cottage is online, so it can work that once it grows. It's huge hammer numbers means it can do this pretty easily.


* Unta was going to grow into unhappiness at size6, so I'm putting a couple turns into a settler at size 5. As unhappy wears off, I'll likely grow it.


* In general Granary-Lighthouse ASAP is important in all our cities. There are so few good land tiles in some of these cities that I'd really like to unlock the coast right away. Y'Ghatan may need a Monument too.


Also, can never have too many WBs at this stage.

For the furs site, right now I see either 2W of furs (and 1S of deer) or on the grass as being possible.

Yeah, that's also a very good option. I initially didn't consider it due to the amount of "dead tiles" between it and bacon, but there could be a fishing village inbetween. No use locking anything in before we've scouted the seafood situation though.

From the current turn, we have more options now.





I missed taking anything else from this turn, but this gives us nice options. For example, we could settle between Fish and Deer, then settle a city on the east coast by Fur that can instantly share the Deer. I'll have our Scout defog the rest of this.

[Zed-F]

I’m glad to see that fish, it does make things much simpler. Given what we know & can fog-gaze I’m pretty sure the ‘settle fish-deer + settle 1N of furs’ plan will be the right one regardless of what we find — though we might choose to settle furs first if it also has first ring seafood & we need to prioritize happy over local growth on that island.

Growing Pale & Unta sounds like we’d be interested in doing a 3-whip on each for foodhammers (settlers?) & regrow on Lighthouse, since we can’t regrow on the foodhammer builds and they are our two best cities for building settlers/workers until Aren gets both seafood hooked and grows some more. But we probably don’t want to 3-whip Unta and Pale at the same time since we want to keep cottages being worked. I guess another alternative is 2-whip a lighthouse & regrow on workboat / transport / military.

[Zed-F]

I had another thought about a Monument in Y’Ghatan. This city is only 3 tiles from our holy city so we might get a natural religion spread. From a pure hammers point of view it might be more efficient to build a missionary somewhere and a settler for stone city and use that as the mechanism to get horse in culture for Y’Ghatan — especially since we need culture at the stone city to get the fish netted anyway. The sticking point is we are not sure about the relative priority of when that stone city would be settled.