[SPOILERS!] Pericles of Babylon. Kyan, Twinkletoes, Whosit.

[Whosit]

Kysit's Periwinkles Cock-Up Scoreboard

Kyan - 1
TT - 1
Whosit - 0

Oh boy . . .

I suppose all I can do is to try to maintain the status quo in this regard.

On a secondary note, if there is ever time, please continue to post outgoing mail so as to allow me a chance to proof-read. The least I can do is to make our correspondence more grammatically correct. Hopefully it wouldn't be "spoilerish" to attest to my good punctuation, grammar, and style.

[Twinkletoes89]

[SIZE="7"]NOVICE LIVES!!!![/SIZE]

Yes, my dear friends the greatest warrior of his generation, Novice - Barbarian Hunter, has survived a brutal mauling by a vicious lion. He dared to venture where the rest of you feared to tread and he came through victorious

:2dance: :

And the evidence....



What a guy! Now where do we move him to recover?

Moved warrior 2 back towards Genesis, he will garrison while he heals, and Warrior 3, created next turn, will take over as scout.



Genesis



Foreign News

Broker's capital is now at size 2 and called 'Sirian'.

To-do this turn

Move Novice to cover and heal.
Discuss what we do next turn with Worker. (Can move to a hill next turn in anticipating mining in 2 turns?)

[Kyan]

Superb news about Novice! I think we should move him SE to heal as we need to move into forested terrain to heal and at least this way we gain some marginal amount of map intel. Bear in mind tho barbarian warriors will soon start spawning. Any turn around now i'd wager and barbs are based off of map size meaning that if this is huge and been increased further- the number of barbs could well be totally crazy. Good thing bowmen eat em alive for awhile eh

At this stage i'm more afraid of barbs than another civ. Great shout about moving warrior #2 back to base to fortify and sending 3 out scouting. That's the exact perfect move in my opinion. With mining + another warrior soon i expect our power rating to soar which will stop anybody who stumbles accross us from chancing their luck.

We have our first email!

[COLOR="Sienna"]Hail Team Kysit!


I happened to be logged in as the turn rolled over, and witnessed your brave warrior defeat another lion! He's down to 0.4 health, though. There's yet another lion 2S, 3W of your warrior, so we suggest that you move either N, or SE to the forest to heal.


We'll send a reply to your email later today.


Cheers


Swiss[/COLOR]

Swiss' initial email sounds very friendly but let's wait to see their proper message before getting carried away.
I agree about the worker move also. Superb job TT.

[Whosit]

I'm thinking that we move Novice 1 SE for now. Forest cover. It will have to do.

After Warrior 3 is . . . a Worker? Kyan, can you repost the plan? I am thinking that we may have to cut our scouting short if we want to secure the Marble. Novice + Warrior 3 should start fogbusting the route to the Exodus Hill.

Novice eventually goes to . . . the hill 1N of the pigs.
Warrior 3 should go to . . . oh, probably the other hill we have marked as "City."

Edit: Ah, 4th Warrior planned. Nevermind then, but the above still seem like good sentry positions.

[Kyan]

I'm thinking that we move Novice 1 SE for now. Forest cover. It will have to do.

After Warrior 3 is . . . a Worker? Kyan, can you repost the plan? I am thinking that we may have to cut our scouting short if we want to secure the Marble. Novice + Warrior 3 should start fogbusting the route to the Exodus Hill.

Novice eventually goes to . . . the hill 1N of the pigs.
Warrior 3 should go to . . . oh, probably the other hill we have marked as "City."

Edit: Ah, 4th Warrior planned. Nevermind then, but the above still seem like good sentry positions.

waiting on one more player to end turn and Novice will take a well earned rest.

Well, according to



We are going settler next to get him out as fast as possible. Our 1 worker can cover for now, but will immediately begin to chop out a 2nd worker when BW comes in. We have warrior #3 next turn.

I agree with your sentry positions and we will certainly endeavour to get a good sentry net out as early as possible. For now tho, time is money friend! (+1 newb points for recognising the reference )

Warrior #2 is heading back to capital to fortify whilst he heals. Novice is going to take like 8 turns to heal, then he will head towards Exodus.

Warrior #3 has time to head south towards what i am now dubbing 'Watchman Hill' before retreating back and providing an escort to our worker as he prep's Exodus site. I agree that roading all the way whilst settler builds is unneccessary. Worker's priorities will be building a mine and a farm (1N of pasture) asap then getting beta site ready to be hooked up asap.

I agree with your previous suggestion of doing BW before mysticism. More to come in next post as this is getting lengthy.

[Kyan]

We received the official response from Mali.

[COLOR="Sienna"]
Well met Babylon!


It seems you've braved the gauntlet of lions to reach our borders; we hope you can survive the one on the forest to your warrior's SE. For our part, we have been less bold, and our warrior guards our capital.


You are the only nation we've met so far, and we look forward to working with you. Have you met any other civs? If there's one lesson to be taken from the MP games at RB, it's that friends and allies are priceless. Our civs have complementary economic traits (PHI & FIN), and defensive UUs, so we believe there is every ground for co-operation between us. We realise you may not wish to commit your empire to an alliance so soon, but be assured that any overtures in this direction will be warmly received by Mali.


EDIT: the above text was written before we received your letter, so it's clear that we're both thinking along the same lines. We're open to chatting about the game rather than emailing, but bear in mind that our chat availability will be influenced by work commitments, and time-zone differences. Finally, we're intrigued by your nugget of map info; our conservative approach means we've seen little but lions, and our immediate surrounds. The map features resemble a team battleground, and judging by the river-flow we're in the southern hemisphere.


PS: no need to worry about 'overspill' from the Romano-Korean conflict in PB2 affecting this game.


Kind Regards


Emperor Capac of Mali

[/COLOR]

Without going into much detail, i have great respect and, msot importantly, trust for the players on this team. They are clearly testing the waters about a potential alliance and this could be huge for us if we play this right.

Their pure gold producing power combined with our late game tech rate (we get cheap libraries AND universities and can easily get scientists to bulb with!) will be a very strong combination. They are possibly the perfect potential ally if we can get tight with them. I appreciate this is REALLY early days but it can't hurt to at least discuss amongst us 3 how we would like to see this relationship go.

Me randomly thinking out loud

War against Mali would be a terrible idea. Especially right now. Although they're not aggresive and certainly an easier proposition than Rome or maybe Maya with their resourcless spears (speaking of which we have YET to see horses!!! Makes getting metal much much much more important). Their UU is dominant at this stage and a skirmisher or two would choke us out the game.

They have a perfect synergy with us in terms of economy.

They are industrious and the marble is perfectly placed between our two civ's. (Clearly not accidental. Hi Sullla! What are the odds that marble/stone are between each civ combination?). We are after the oracle as a backdoor means of getting the pyramids via: Oracle -> MC -> Forge -> Great Engineer -> Rush pyramids -> Representation. Welll.... we have discovered both pigs and corn on 'mali side' of the marble. We could let THEM claim the site as their second city and come up with some agreement. i.e. they use marble+industrious to get oracle and choose metal casting. In exchange we tech up to alphabet. We can then swap all our techs. This nets us TWICE as many techs as before and we still get metal casting. We can then chop out a forge in Genesis and get the engineer. This plan would have far less risk as oracle is much more certain and it also avoids polluting our great person pool with prophet points.

Biggest downside to that is it commands a great deal of trust between our two nations. If this went thru successfully, i feel it would be the clincher to an extremely strong bond between us and the start of a successful partnership.

IF we ally with Mali, i want it to remain a secret. There will be big mega-alliances for tech trades forming, that's fine. I think this should be a covert group within an overt group. Tech bloc's never last long and when the shake-up happens we want to have safe borders and friends to rely on. Their players are going strong in rbpb1 and are strong candidates in this game without me constantly worrying about a backstab- like i would with Krill.

[Kyan]

[COLOR="Plum"]Emperor Capac,

Babylon is acknowledging receipt of your message. We will respond in full in due course.

Yours,

Kyan
Kysit's Periwinkles[/COLOR]

Sent them this until we compose our official reply. I don't want to begin a draft yet til i get your views as this is a critical stage, possibly THE most important stage, in our game for a long while at least.

[Whosit]

Hmm hmm hmm. The gears turn and turn . . . .

First thing first: Let's not even consider letting them take the Marble site. In fact, let's not even mention that we found Marble. If they are speaking the truth, they may not have even seen it yet, but we can't be sure about that. There are just too many risks, I think, in allowing them to go for the Oracle.

I'll have to look it up (too lazy now), but No Tech Brokering is the only restriction, right?

I don't think our next letter needs to be very clever. Just say that we hope to work with them in the future. Share what we know of the map (within reason!). It sounds like they have a similar idea about the layout as we do. Perhaps we could float the idea of unit trades? Bowman for Skirmisher? Dunno if that would be worthwhile for either of us, though.

Oh, and agree with new plan to get Settler out faster, but we have to be EXTREMELY careful in how we use our Warriors. Barbarians could really screw things up for us.

[Twinkletoes89]

I have to agree with Whosit about Exodus. We have to aim for it ourselves, we have no control over what they would do with it and their Skirmishers mean that we couldn't exactly bitch-slap them for it. if stone and marble are evenly spaced, let them have the stone!

Bowman - Skirmisher trade is pointless, we gain nothing other than alerting other nations that we have a close bond with Mali, and we would want secrecy.

It seems they are on the same page on map ideas, so we can just say that we agree on team battleground and not mention resource theories.

I can see the profit in a relationship with Mali, but lets not come on too strong. We do have an opportunity before they find anyone else to 'butter them up'. But we must not come on too strong and give away the store!

Long live novice!

[Wyrmsbane]

What are your general thoughts about alliances? Are you opposed to big game-long ones? Opposed to tech bloc's?

Are you considering scouting out to try and find more civ's and therefore get more early allies?