Another barb city popped up 666 of stone. Prime real estate! Perhaps that corner of the world is one of the few places for which they're eligible at all. In response, I've whipped the Munsal axe, since I figure this will attract Zulu again and I'd like to show more than just one pitiful archer at newly-founded X7. More amusing is that its culture has cut our trade connection with Zulu, and superdeath had asked for Open Borders (and crab/crab) last turn. Uh, we'd have loved to, but completely neutral pirates have eaten our homework.
Magic Science made his quechua step on the desert road. Oy. If he cuts neutral roads which we can immediately replace, then that's a clear sign we can forget about any sort of cooperation with Inca in this game. The road itself is almost meaningless -- we can reconnect Schilda by roading our own tiles -- but I might toss superdeath his coveted crab/crab deal in response. We'll see.
Next turn will have a more interesting update, I hope.
shallow_thought has too much pop. I think he took a metallic happiness resource with that city earlier, because he simply keeps growing. After our double-whip, the victory screen shows him as having 23% (!!) of the world's population -- we're at 17.35% now. There's a remedy, though.
That would be Buddhism, which has spread to all the important cities by now (Munsal is important, but grows too slowly for Buddhism to change much).
We've whipped off a lot of pop recently, which shows in our happy surplus (and demographics, see below). Gold comes online T77, but four of our cities grow eoT75 (which is why I think the revolt would be well-timed -- most of the extra citizens aren't going to do anything on T76 because they'd be unhappy). What we need to compete with shallow_thought isn't more cities than him; it's working more of our tiles that we already have, and whipping off excess pop instead of mines. There is another way (not exclusive with this one), but I'll get to that in a minute.
My vote is that we should revolt to Buddhism on T75, with the X7 settler en route.
Speaking of which -- I'm not sure we should settle the stone city after all, or try for Henge. Library + barracks should be "good enough" for Schilda; we're currently tied for #1 soldiers, and for as long as that barb city exists, its first ring blocks that site's sole food resource. I want to settle the wheat city -- yes, it's marginal in food until Calendar, but by sharing the floodplain, it can at least work a +5 surplus, and we can get ample worker labour into that area, unlike with stone. We've just settled a city that only helps others develop -- we need to claim more hammers, more land, more pop. Wheat city has third-ring dyes (but we'll possibly never get them as it's adjacent to RFS' current culture), second-ring sugar, and will block off RFS' expansion, which is important. More in a minute.
Not looking good after whipping ~10 pop over the last 6 turns, I think, but if we push growth at all our cities, it will look different. Our GNP is properly absurd at least (87 at 100% sci). shallow_thought is essentially working the mines we've been whipping off for various reasons -- if we regrow fast enough, this isn't a problem; thus also my want for Buddhism (and Schilda's gold), because happiness, not food is our bottleneck right now. Any Golden Age is too far away.
Strategically -- we could acquire Iron Working in 6t (not including anarchy if so). RFS-81 continues to sit on three cities (will settle #4 soon) and isn't AGG or PRO. We have barracks everywhere, and can push our cities for pop growth more than he can. Can we successfully attack him with massed Praetorians before catapults, on t95-100? I think we can... The other option is to take Maths in 8t. But I have a dream -- a dream to make all these forests into Praetorians. Including those at Schilda (one for barracks). e: MSci would also be a possible target, no AGG axes from him either, essentially no current GNP at all. If we go for IW now it's important not to establish trade routes with anyone except Charriu if possible (unfortunately Nobis will pop borders and MSci will see iron, but RFS importantly should not).
I've left the turn unfinished for now so we can decide what to do here. Wheat or stone, Buddhism or not, IW or Maths.
E: Back-of-the-envelope calcing suggests we can make 30-35 praetorians by T100 (if we build pretty much nothing but those, and chop all our forests). That's 1200-1400h, which becomes economic compared to settlers roughly once they've captured 12-14 pop. Doesn't look too exotic. Also, land is king and the map cramped as it is. Conquering anyone here is sure to give us an advantage; I'm sure that at least one of our neighbours will not (be able to) react appropriately to a buildup.
S_T has ~23 pop. We have 17 and it is 17%. Overall population is 97 so we are at the middle.
I am ok with revolting to Buddism. Let's use what we have got. Why not?
Delaying Maths for IW is also ok. I have concerns that we need 30+ praets to attack though. Sid says "dont bring fifty when fifteen can do" and I try to follow this advice. I think we must go for barb cities and kick anything superdeath if he tries to challenge us. But I wouldnt commit to attack somebody from South because even in case of success our position will be awful. After we attach barb cities we can think of HG again or continue advancing on superdeath. Magic Science unlikely will come for us from the back because of AGG-praets mainly.
I hope we won't be needing 30 praetorians that soon, either -- but wanted to give you an estimate of our ceiling. I'd like to settle an island city if the Arctic seafood situation turns out better than what we can see now, for instance, and what we save on praets, we can put into research.
I'm just about sure that the southern barb city has already been razed by superdeath (there was a matching midturn score increase/decrease recently). I'm not sure what he'll do with the northern one; he might want to keep it. You've probably seen our rather miserable expedition of 1 axe + 1 archer heading towards that place; I have no illusions that we can reliably capture the city with that, but it might be enough to dissuade impi from attacking it. If superdeath still wants good relations (and OB) with us, he could be reluctant to deal with our units by declaring war, too. (MSci opted to retreat his quechua even without trying to see Munsalvaesche, for what it's worth, and didn't pillage the road.) -- Anyhow, I doubt the barb city will still be there when we reach our first praetorian, no matter what. Maybe we can get superdeath to leave it alone if we show interest and he understands that this would be rewarded with finally signing crab/crab or OB, for whatever that is worth.
Sure, pop-wise we're in the middle with everyone else right now, but I don't want us to be at the middle, I want us to be at the top -- Of course, shallow_thought has IMP, presumably +1 happiness over us (which already explains the 6-pop difference from his 7 cities -- we had to whip those off, he could grow them), and a slightly-faster 7th city as well, which already reflects on his graphs, while our current advantage is research (but for how long? he's surely going straight for Currency) and +1 happiness over him in a few turns (he might be going for Poly, frankly). If there was any further doubt that he's Rival Best Everything, btw, demographics confirm this since he was the only one to play in between my logins.
His cap is the highest city from the top5. 2 extra citizens in it can bring raw 8 hammers while our last city is notgoing to make big impact in demographs. But dont pay too much attention to demos, they are changing drastically and the goal is to be in the right place in the right time. Making some praets will mean that we are up for something. Lets do it.
RFS-81 can choose whether to settle in place only for the pigs, or 122 to claim wheat as well. My estimate is that this choice is equivalent to whether we attack him with a ministack of praetorians in some 15t or not. I don't think this city would even touch his culture with second-ring borders, although we don't have enough information yet (but two warriors in the area to obtain some; he might kill the spotter, actually; I'm not sure if he even knows how close this spot is to Venusberg). Not pictured: our settler is actually 9 of Venusberg, in case he does allow the wheat, but RFS seems to be far behind to me and might just go all-in.
e: We might be able to set a trap here, as he can't cover all his workers and we have units coming in from three directions; we do need to whip an axe at Venus though, and the city would only raze, which isn't that useful (although we could of course replant our own, and that's a great city; lol at the pigs being the one unforested tile I neglected to scout, this is the Universal Metaconstant of my games, I suck at scouting food resources)
Due to the anarchy popping Nobis' borders 1t later, I decided we do have time to briefly steer the wb towards Kolguev without much of a loss:
Behold, (mediocre) seafood (whale means +5 surplus at least) and another +1 happy, all we need is an AGG barracks, two EXP wbs -- and Sailing; but we should be able to research-build that after IW while saving gold for Maths. If RFS settles the greedy option that invalidates "our" wheat, letting the settler sit around until we've whipped a galley might not be the best decision, but I don't know where else it could go -- maybe found stone such that it overlaps the capital's clams, but that's marginal at best, especially without Masonry. So, what to do?
Foreign news include that yet another barb approaching Munsalvaesche (this time an axe from 33 of the city) has forced me to recall our own axe to superdeath's benefit; furthermore, an Incan work boat has peeked into Nobiskrug (it has absolutely no other reason to be facing west where I saw it). I'll take that as a sign of an imminent attack; we'll whip the city for an axe soon, with an archer additionally enqueued. It could just be that MSci is paranoid about the possible road we could have made with our worker pair, but why would we have left any attackers inside the city, when the staging tile is right there?
He can be travelling to superdeath. Agree that we need to take measures. However attacking us is a bit crazy move from MSci
If we lose what site I think we shall focus on that arctic shore. May be go Sailing before IW? We will need happy and even if we dont see the lack of it right now after Buddhism revolt and connecting gold we will hit limit in like 10 turns again and it will take a while to connect whales.
Can't be travelling to superdeath because the work boat was facing west. Played before us this turn. I swapped research to Sailing.
It's looking likely that the settler will go for whales -- RFS is going for the greedy spot.
Also I've managed to fuck up extremely hard and we can, probably will lose the game this turn. The reason will be left to guess as an exercise for the readers, but it is plainly obvious from the next screenshot, which is of course why I've missed it. End Report.
Have you found it?
Combat road the desert south of the peak, win with axe + warrior against unpromoted 10% fortified archer (74% odds on aggregate), capture 3 workers and raze Schilda. No defense. He would lose his 4th city to us in return (we have more than enough units to kill a single axe), but who cares. My only hope is that RFS currently does not have vision on the gold tile and did not have it for several turns (but who knows where he'll move his scout), and that the unit concentration near his city-to-be forces him to be similarly inattentive with his movement. For instance, he might want to combat-road to capture our worker on the floodplain. That's actually an intentional trap: if he does so, he'll leave his axe exposed and we can overwhelm it, then the other one, and claim this spot for ourselves. A worker is worth a settler.
If LOSE THE GAME occurs, at least we can tech Iron Working within 4t and make him pay dearly, but it's not going to win. I should neither have played the turn when I was upset at real-life events, nor signed up for this game at all. Although I doubt the former matters a lot; I automatically clicked BUILD MINE which might have been LOSE THE GAME.
Edit: I could move the archer back into Schilda. That might at least save the city, but also makes him much more likely to declare. Or delete the workers, which is still better than him capturing them. He doesn't know Schilda is empty (Charriu does but his chariot is gone, so I'm alright with this) and might suspect there are more units (we showed him two archers when he was last there, and he didn't want to declare with his two axes back then either), which is why I'm in favour of doing neither, the archer guarding the worker party might at least look like I am careful lol.
So to sum it up, RFS isn't clairvoyant, doesn't have vision on the relevant tiles, and would need luck and extreme care to spot the opportunity (if he just moves his axe towards the pig/wheat site as "common sense" would suggest when founding right next to our borders, all is well), but if he does, we will have to make our only strategic goal to capture (not raze) the pig city from him afterwards, which *may* allow us to compensate. Somewhat.
We lost with shock axe vs barb axe, too. The reward is #6 soldiers and nothing great anywhere else, either. 4 pop grow eot.
-- Of course, shallow_thought has IMP, presumably +1 happiness over us (which already explains the 6-pop difference from his 7 cities -- we had to whip those off, he could grow them), and a slightly-faster 7th city as well, which already reflects on his graphs, while our current advantage is research (but for how long? he's surely going straight for Currency) and +1 happiness over him in a few turns (he might be going for Poly, frankly). If there was any further doubt that he's Rival Best Everything, btw, demographics confirm this since he was the only one to play in between my logins.
