RBP3 [SPOILERS] Hannibal of Byzantium (Bobchillingworth, ManiaMuse & SleepingMoogle)

[Bobchillingworth]

The sooner we can get a least a couple chariots out, the better. I prefer to not delay their production.

[SleepingMoogle]

Turn 42:

Scouting the west is already showing results.



That marked plains tile seems like a pretty strong production city site now.

Other than that, not too much to report. Builds are continuing as expected, and we'll finish Bronze Working in two turns. Hopefully it will reveal Copper somewhere!

[Bobchillingworth]

First contact! Moved Jenkins NW and met Kyan and Twinlketoe's (Babylon) warrior. I don't have an image sharing account, I'll take a screen cap and see if I can upload it, but one of you may want to log in.

Haven't sent a message yet, we should probably coordinate a response. It's good that our first neighbor has a builder-oriented civ. I suggest we open relations with a mutual exchange of information- basic info on resources, land surveyed, other civs met thus far. I don't want to be like Spulla and try to attach some sort of hard value to the exchange of any and all information.

Edit: They also have 2 cities.

[Bobchillingworth]

There we go.


Exploration also revealed a pig- 1W of the marked plains tile may be a preferable city spot. Might be a good location for the 4th city, although I still want to settle the FP in the south ASAP as well. Lots to build!

[SleepingMoogle]

Woohoo! Finally we're not alone in this world anymore.

Okay, here is what we know so far about the team:

Pericles of Babylon
Played by Kyan, Twinkletoes89 and Whosit
Leader traits: Philosophical/Creative
Civ UU and UB: Bowman (Archer with +50% against melee units) and Garden (Colosseum with +2 Health)
Starting techs: Agriculture, The Wheel

Current ingame score: 62 (We have 61 atm)

I checked the victory conditions screen, and it looks like Babylon has two cities like us. Culture figures suggest they founded their second city on T37. They also have less population than us, which probably means they whipped their capital once.

Best guess is they followed a Mining - BW tech path and chopped/whipped out a settler.

Diplomatically speaking, I think they will be a pretty solid team, provided Kyan and Twinkletoes can keep Whosit in check. He's a good Civ player, but his decisions can be a bit erratic (which may or may not be good for us).

Let's send them a quick greeting without giving away too much yet. Ideally we'd like to know in which direction their lands lie, and approximately how far they are from ours. Alongisde promising not to attack each other, that should be enough a base to start building more formal relations on.

How about this as a quick greeting? Exchanging further info can always go through later messages:

Greetings and well met!

It is our utmost pleasure to have established contact between our great nations. Hopefully this is to be a sign that will carry both of us to glory!

Our humble leaders are very curious about you, and wonder if you would be interested in a mutually beneficial exchange of information.

On behalf of the Spectre council,
-SleepingMoogle

That should get the ball rolling. If the message is good, please feel free to send it through our team email; I'll have to catch some sleep soon. Their email address is kttwrbpb3 at gmail dot com


Also, I have reduced our science to 50% for this turn. It'll net us a few extra gold pieces while still finishing BW next turn. If that is not a good idea, please feel free to set the slider back to full.

[Bobchillingworth]

So, Moogle and I had a nice & long chat with Kyan. I then talked to Kyan myself for a little while longer after Moogle logged off for the night. We discussed a number of issues and Kyan was very forthcoming with information; we reciprocated a good deal, but I think it was entirely worth it for the diplomatic benefit and map information we got out of him. I'll be forwarding the entire chat to both Moogle and Mania in case you want to review it, but a (not at all) brief summary for lurkers / ourselves / whoever as follows:


* Kyan believes the map to be a heavily modified Team Battleground script set as North vs. South, with the far north and south edited to remove tundra, a toroidal wrap, and the size edited to be larger than the standard "huge". Kyan confirms that he has a similar large band of FP to his south, and suspects that all players will have a similar advantage. He has determined the map type through analysis of the amount of map tiles and then testing map scripts until he got a result that appeared to correspond to what his scouting revealed. So it's no definite, but it's better than any other map info we have to go on. Very valuable information, and he noted that it was his "biggest diplomatic chip".

* Kyan has met DSP / Swiss / Broker of Mali, who are about 10 tiles to his West. He (with permission from Moogle and myself) has informed them of our general location and desire to contact them. We should probably work with Kyan to arrange a meeting using Jenkins.

* Based on Kyan's map knowledge, we should have a civ fairly close to us in the East, so we may want to send one of our scouting chariots that way.

* Kyan has Copper (don't know if it's hooked up), but has not found horses yet. He is aware that we have horses (does not know their location or that they are pastured).

* Kyan and Mali have a jungle silver, just like us. We should assume that everyone has an identical or equivalent resource. Not much of a surprise, but nice to have confirmation.

* Kyan founded their second city in a direction away from us. Our 2nd city managed to take some land that might have otherwise been disputed, so I think we got fairly lucky there. He intends to settle his 3rd city location toward us; however, he is aware that we also have plans for the area. Given that his capital is about 3 tiles W from Jenkin's current position, I think that our (my) ideal city location of 1W of the marked plains square is fairly aggressive. I also don't care. Kyan does not know where exactly we would like to settle, and we have agreed to discuss the location and try to compromise a dot-map before either team makes a move for the area. I suggest we try to argue for the 1W grassland square; if we can't bargain successfully for it then attempt to compromise and take the plains tile instead. Kyan is discussing sharing screenshots with the rest of his team, but believes that he will get approval. Should that occur, we may want to exchange edited screen caps of the "disputed" western area to work out settling locations. Any screen caps we give them should go with the condition that they cannot be shared with other teams.

* Kyan would like a NAP agreement, but we are going to hold off until we have an understand over the western border.

* Kyan has admitted that he is afraid of us. He (correctly) feels that our civ has vast potential as both a teching civ and aggressor. I confirmed with him that we are well aware of how our civ looks, and confided that we are more interested in peaceful cooperation with his team than aggression. I mentioned that we might be interested in an agreement (assuming team approval) of partnering for teching and early-game nonaggression with the understanding that we will not deploy uber-knights against their civ. Kyan was very interested in such an arrangement. This was part of my 1-on-1 conversation with him, I didn't promise anything on my own, and you all may wish to review it because there's some interesting information.

* Kyan tends to be a pacifist. Twinkletoes is urging him to construct more military; they apparently do not have enough. Whosit seems to be keeping his participation minimal at the moment, which makes sense given his commitment to PB2.

* Kyan is interested in paying for cataphracts in the future, should we feel like selling him some down the road. Something to consider later.

* Kyan has had trouble with barbarians. Claims to have killed 8 lions so far. Warns that barb warriors will appear soon, has offered assistance with his bowmen should we require it (I thanked him and let him know that we would extend the same offer if he was in trouble from barbs).

* Kyan is doing C&D work, at least for the time being. I think it's painfully boring business, but unless we're going to try something similar (personally not interested), we should assume he knows more about our builds than we do of his. I forgot to make an espionage agreement with him, we may want to do something later like Athlete established in PB2 where we switch spending after we get his demographics. Or not.

* Kyan wants us to tell any other teams we meet where they are. I have no problem with this.


-Overall thoughts-

Honestly, we probably could not have asked for a more ideal neighbor. I get the impression that Kyan and Twinkletoes are competent players, but they have a weak civ and are self-admittedly adverse to war. If we want a cataphract target, then these guys are probably going to be pretty easy to knock out (watch me eat those words later). However, because they seem so non-threatening, and because Kyan was so accommodating, I would prefer we attempt to cultivate their team as a long-term ally. I get the impression that all they want is an assurance that we won't run them over with cataphracts. I would be more than willing to offer them such an agreement, if they help us fill in the top portion of the tech tree (which benefits them as well, unlocking their creative trait building discounts). It sounds like this will be a fairly crowded map, and that we will have no lack for close targets. Still, if Mali comes to us with some sort of agreement to divide up Babylon, we may want to at least hear them out. Babylon does have copper, so we can't use a wholly chariot defense against them, but I don't expect any sort of attack from them soon anyway.

[SleepingMoogle]

Very nice write-up Bob. The one thing I'd like to note here is that it's not their capital, but their capital's borders that are 3W of Jenkins (and given that they expanded to a third ring already, the capital is probably 6W of him).

Generally I agree with your assessments; for now I'm more interested in buddying up with Babylon than declaring against them in the near future. They know that we have access to horses, and we know they have copper. So we can expect them to build a spear or two just in case. On the other hand, allying with them (and perhaps Mali as well) could be a good starting point for a tech-trading alliance. Probably too early to say at this point though.

Anyway, what should be most important at this point is to figure out where they intend to place their third city. Given the distances between our capitals, I would favor trying to get them to agree to allow us to settle the plains tile, in return for our promise not to settle further to the west. This should neatly divide the land between our Civs in half, so hopefully they will agree to this once we exchange a map or two. We may have to build some culture enhancers in that city though, to keep up with their Creative trait.

For now our third city should still go south. The earlier we can get some proper commerce going, the better. But we should probably fill up the area to the west after that. If we wait too long with it, it'll probably be hard to expand city borders properly.



As an aside, I will finish the updated turnplan once we have started on Pottery. I'd like to know when we finish it to avoid having to change it again down the road.

[SleepingMoogle]

Turn plan in progress.. I'm curious as to why both of you are opposed to whipping the Citadel every once in a while. Timed well enough, they provide a lot of additional production without serious repercussions. For example, doing a 1-pop whip just before the Citadel reaches size 4 would cause it to regrow back to size 3 the turn after, and gives us 30 hammers in the process. In the last plan (not the one on the first page), I timed it with a forest chop to push out a worker in just 3 turns opposed to 6 if we wouldn't. I'm not saying we should keep the Citadel at size 3-4; We will want to grow to our happy cap. I just don't see why we should do so without the occasional well-timed whip to help with churning out units.

At size 3, the Citadel currently has a 6-food surplus (Rice + Sheep + grassland mine + City tile = 12 food, minus 6 for population), so we can regrow easily enough, even more so once we get some cottages into play. Additionally, this whip would avoid us having to work any unimproved tiles and once we regrow to size 4, we can (hopefully) switch from mines to cottages to push growth and commerce. Using cottages for growth and whips for production is preferable this early in the game, as it provides more or less the same production as using mines, while boosting commerce at the same time.

Anyway, just leaving the suggestion out here for now. But the extra hammers would help a lot getting out units a bit faster. After said worker, we could get out another Chariot while growing to size 4, and then probably chop out the third Settler earlier than T60.

[ManiaMuse]

I'm not sure if I said I was opposed to whipping the citadel, just that we should be growth focussed unless for the most part and make sure that whips mostly go into workers/settlers and timed well with chops/city regrowth.

Excellent work on all the diplo work, sorry I couldn't be there to join in the chat but I've been pretty busy recently and needed to catch up an awful lot of sleep last night.

But yeah lots of positives. They've only met one more civ than us and aren't already in some monster tech alliance is another important thing. We should defitely try to continue cultivating good relations, especially if our copper isn't so accessible. Since map screenshots is allowed I reckon we should try and encourage them to take up that offer even though we probably gain a bit more from it, maybe we could agree to coordinate scouting with them (after all going west now might not be so useful, maybe going north or south with jenkins instead?)

As for cities in the west, I imagine the pigs are in quite a contested region. Personally I would let them have it unless they plan to focus their expansion in a different direction. After all, they could have perfectly reasonably got "our" stone with a pink dot city. The rice is fair game I think but the FP in the fog again probably a step too far.

I'm a bit wary of the dsplaisted team since they are good players and have a decent civ but maybe we can work through babylon to encourage them to stay on our side. They aren't a direct neighbour if their mapinfo is correct so not too much of an immediate threat. Also as I've said before I'm not so into NAPs since they seem a bit pointless but I think if their team is keen to have one then it might be best to take up the offer to affirm relations.

Again really good work on getting so much out of them so quickly, we shouldn't be stingy and try and follow it up with mapscreens/discussing tech paths (as an idea, would getting IW and HBR early make us popular for tech trades?)

Though another thought, they may be trying to butter us up so we neglect our military for a while, we should definitely make sure our military stays relevant especially since they have copper. Are we sure we want to skip over hunting/archery for even longer?

[SleepingMoogle]

The pig tile would probably be too much to ask, yes we should try and get the rice one at least. We could offer them a city to the SW (W of Feros) in return. It could be an appealing site that they probably want to settle anyway to establish a border. Good for us then that the area appears to require a fair amount of jungle clearing, giving us time to establish a nice culture border. Plus if it were to come to aggression, we would threaten both that city and cities to the West simply by gathering forces in the town. Not that the latter bits need to be shared, of course.

Discussing tech paths should be a good idea. If we were to follow the lower part of the tree (Masonry/IW, maybe HBR as well), there's a good chance we can trade those if Babylon or Mali goes for the upper part and grabs Alphabet. We should definitely broach the topic if our relations continue to go well.


Anyway, about the whipping post earlier, I mentioned this because I think a single whip would allow us to pump out two chariots, a worker and a settler by T60 from the Citadel alone, while still having it on size 4. We could then follow up by constructing a Granary while growing to size 5.5 before applying another whip so that we get the maximum affect out of the granary right away. After quickly regrowing to size 5 (or perhaps 6) we can pump out more Workers and Settlers.
Still trying to work out how Feros will fit into this. But Feros will probably mostly focus on growth and not touch the whip. We should get it to size 3 and work two farms as quickly as possible. Perhaps by that time we'll have finished Masonry and can hook up the stone at size 4.