[SPOILER] Asoka of the Vikings (Nakor & Gaspar)

[Nakor]

Interesting...
Saw that you logged in... anything of interest you want to share?

[Nakor]

Played our turn. Whipped the settler for 1, going to settle the coast up north to get the extra copper (2nd ring) and fish.

Gem city will be founded next turn (eight city), after the Libraries we need at least 2 more settler to move farther north towards LP. That should put us as 11-12 cities in about 10t. I think we're pushing expansive to the limit and that's the best we can do with our long NAP's.

[Gaspar]

Mostly what I noticed is we need to be working more cottages and we need more workers. But we're pushing production in the interest of getting as many settlers as possible out quickly, so I get that. Reasonably soon we need to find a way to push commerce though, we're way behind the leaders in tech pace and that's going to bite us if we don't start getting some villages and towns working.

I also noticed the world is starting to get smaller. That LP settling party is really an irritant, but nothing we can really do since he's already in position. Probably means we should make getting the second city on that landmass with the gems settled reasonably quickly to ensure no competition for it. We actually still have a good 4 or 5 backfill locations after the stretch settling, so we can probably expand to a decent capacity, we're just going to be pushed for making them productive enough until we start getting a good bit of commerce flowing in. All the Libraries going up will help, of course.

I think we've made the right sorts of moves since we decided to expand hard, its just a little jarring looking at how far behind the curve we are with tech.

[Nakor]

Completely true, but we don't have much land due to no border expansions to put down a lot of cottages.
That will get better with more Libraries.

Crossing settled. LP settled the gold/pigs site and an ivory site up north...

Meditation in next turn.

[Nakor]

Another fast turn. Meditation in, Priesthood next (2T). After that we have to decide on either Monarchy or CoL.

City number 9 will be founded next turn, so we're competing in that area at least. I'm hopefull that will help us to close the gap later on.

[Nakor]

And another turn. We really need those Libraries....

Fishfood founded this turn, making us level pegging 2nd with 9 cities. LP has 10, a lot have 8. Adlain and Rego are really far behind.

Priesthood is in next turn, but we'll have to drop science again.
Confu founded last turn, so I suggest we go for Monarchy to get more happy or go for the Currency - CoL route.

[Gaspar]

Not surprised we missed out on Confucianism with our poor teching. So it goes, didn't hurt to try.

I think Currency -> CoL makes more sense than Monarchy right now, at least until we have the worker-force necessary to get enough improve tiles to take advantage of the increased happy cap. Currency will be a passive improvement on the economy, while CoL will help by letting us get cheap courthouses in play. Afterwards we can go towards Monarchy and/or seeing if we want to take a shot at Theology again. I suspect it will fall sooner here though, with all the players. If we can't get that, we'll have to think about maybe getting a Buddhist missionary from Adlain, who seems relatively harmless, since having Religion is pretty necessary to take full advantage of Spiritual. I don't precisely know who's founded what, but if we have to get someone else's, I'd rather get it from someone who is in even worse shape than we are. Be nice to get our own of course, but beggars can't be choosers.

In the interim, I'd think we just need to prioritize getting workers out. Once we have managed that and start to get the likes of Currency and CoL in, we can start settling some of the more backfill locations.

[Gaspar]

Popped into the game. Going to do a little stream of consciousness on what I see. I still want to leave the turn-playing to you, since I think games like this work better with one primary turn-player, but from here on out I'll make sure I check at least once a day. God knows I have enough free time.

I set research to Maths since I got hit with a pop-up, though you certainly can change that later.

Let's skip the mountain-pass city. LP's settling party basically chokes us off from the only good site. By the by, it seems awful convenient that LP pushed a city down that far then, no? Any chance plako mayhap tipped him off? Basically we'd just be extending ourselves maintenance-wise for a basically indefensible site that grabs nothing useful. We have 7-ish additional city sites available to us in land that could basically be called ours. That would take us to 16, which is enough of a production base to take others by force down the road.

We have no plan. We need a plan. We have 3 neighbors. Plako, who's been the leader in the game forever now. LP, who's right behind him, generally. And Locke, who just founded Confucianism (he adopted Caste same turn Confucianism was founded, so had to be him) got a GSci, and is basically playing the game we should be playing. I don't have an idea for that plan right now - we got boxed out of the central region, we basically have all the territory we're going to get without war. But we're basically going to have to pick one of our 3 strong neighbors, ally with them, and then go to war with one of the others sooner than later. Fortunately, the only 2 people conceivably in obviously worse shape than us are Adlain and WK. So Locke would logically go after Adlain before us, and plako will certainly finish eating Greece before looking to us.

One other diplo thing - we should think about making an ally on the other side of the world as well. luddite or rego probably. Maybe we can work out some information sharing-type agreement.

Right now, we need to fix the economy. We don't have anywhere near enough workers, which will become apparent when we increase the happy cap and when our borders start popping. Workers, Cottages and Libraries are all going to be the short-term focus. Currency and CoL are great economy techs, so they really have to be the next two in. Then Monarchy, and probably a run towards CS and then our UU.

So to sum:

• Let's make a long term friend near us.
  
• Let's try and cultivate a diplomatic partnership across the water.
  
• Let's start thinking about who our enemy is going to be.
  
• Let's get more workers out, and work all possible cottages.
  
• Let's skip the site on the other side of the mountains.
  

Those are just my thoughts, obviously. But I think some conversation would help us here. Well, that and tanks. Tanks would really help us here. Why don't we have tanks?

[Nakor]

I agree, Gaspar!
Let's skip the mountain pass city and focus on elsewhere. There might be interesting sites visible through our WB scouting.

I think going for MC should help as well after the CoL run, with forges and all 3 happy resources connected it's a no-brainer to me.

I think we should stay friends with Plako and LP and focus on Locke if we want an enemy.

More later, back to work...

[Nakor]

Okay, decided to go for CoL instead of Math - Curr.
Math - Curr takes us about 35t while going CoL costs 21t all at currenct tech crawl of 30%. Feel free to change it again if you disagree.
Cheap Organized Courthouses can help a lot, I think, and we can go Math - Currency - MC afterwards.

Put 2 signs for T90 in place.