GeneralKilCavalry and thestick talk it out

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Currency next, hopefully we will have more islands to settle. We should be fine on happy for now.

City plan is correct.

[thestick]

T68 Pre-Report

Eight cities. SD has eight cities. I can't even.

TBW has Alphabet, probably traded with Gav. He has Math already. Hope we can pull off that trade with Gav/TBW to get Alphabet/Math. 

I queued up a praet in Lodi as a placeholder and Barracks in Abukir as previously mentioned. I have no idea if that's the right move. Give me a second...

-Toulon is going to run out of happiness in 2 turns. Its current praet finishes in 3 turns. The Galley will finish in 7 turns, but that will probably go down if we go to Size 6 and work the plains mine that we share with Lodi.
-Lodi should crank military or units. We still have growth headroom, and we need to deal with barbs and get back our Sheep.
-Arcole needs to swap over to a Settler next turn after the praet finishes, we're running out of happy and we need to wait for the whips to cool off.
-Ney needs to road at Abukir to get some happiness. Then... I don't know. Whip Workers? This is the only city with the happy to whip, and Expansive means whip Workers.

All in all, think Galley in Toulon, units in Lodi, Settler in Arcole, and Worker in Abukir is the way to go.

If we have time, we should also consider cottaging 2E1N of Arcole, to share with Toulon.

All in all, assuming that we don't provoke a counter-reaction, we're in a good position to grow wide. Crank out Settlers and praets, landgrab, and tech to currency. Then Monarchy/HBR/Construction to consolidate.

SD asked me about our settling plans, since he was wondering if the previous settling agreement with the mountain is still in play. I told him to take it up with you, since I don't know what I'm allowed to reveal.

Is the Green city by Arcole within our sphere of influence? I still think we keep at least cordial relations with SD, and hope that he crashes his economy without a means of quick access to Currency. He doesn't even have Writing.

EDIT: Are we considering OB with anyone for trade routes? Maybe with SD? He has Sailing too, so he can profit from it.

EDIT 2: I really hope we can crank more Workers from somewhere. If we can clear out the barbs from Lodi this turn, I tentatively think we should overflow into a Worker, which will finish in only 3 turns.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

I'll talk to SD about it. His expansion is seriously whack...

I got a message from TBW/gav about the tech trade, this will be complete soon.

I swapped to a settler in Toulon immediately. It's necessary, Cairo is expanding fast as well. We're being way too cautious.

Arcole will do one next as well.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Post-turn.

We lost an axe, 2 tile improvments, but cleared out the barbs. Not very happy about the results.

Sending workers to repair the damage.

Arcole got hinduism, so it can make another praet and then make a settler. Not fond of it making one slowly at size 3, when it'll get a juicy PH mine to work next turn at size 4.

[thestick]

Yes, we're being cautious, but considering that we just lost tiles to pillaging, I think some of that caution is warranted.

I'm cautiously optimistic about our chances vis a vis SD and Cairo. SD and Cairo picked leaders that are all about early game rapid expansion, with only residual strength outside of that. Unless they have island resources that I'm not aware of, Monarch tech costs are lower than I expect, or are much further along the tech tree than I expect, they're going to run into problems limping to Monarchy, Currency, or Code of Laws. They only have Ivory for early happy, meaning that they're stuck at happy cap 5. If I'm reading the trade screen correctly, Cairo somehow doesn't even have Ivory hooked up yet! If their land is anything like our land, their rapid expansion is picking up copies of old resources, and not new happy resources. I think they are going to crash, and they are going to crash hard, before they can reach the key classical economic techs.

Meanwhile, we have religion for we're on the doorstep of Currency and Calendar, and are within reasonable distance to Monarchy. With praets and possibly HAs, we're in a fine position to landgrab without crashing the economy.

Of course, if we get Alphabet, we can see how their tech is doing. Really looking forward to the trades. Or we can push on Gavagai to leak the info. Can we somehow get info on Raskol's city and tech status? His score is skyrocketing like nuts.

[thestick]

Where are we hoping to squeeze out a Galley? Lodi? We'll also have to squeeze a Work Boat somewhere to hook up Green city's Crabs... or we could 3-turn it out of Arcole. I think we should to that, then go for the Settler, otherwise our Settler will just be sitting around waiting for the Galley.

I assume the next city is the Green? We don't have the Galley for the island yet.

Think we should whip a Worker in Abukir instead of Settler, for the previously discussed reasons. Slowbuild Settlers, whip Workers.

Also, if I'm foggazing correctly, there's more land via that little peninsula south of Lodi. Maybe we can squeeze some scouts somewhere. Also, if we're really ambitious, we can try to snipe the Gold from under Cairo's nose. Probably not, but hey.

Are the Pyramids built faster with Stone in this mod? The Civpedia says yes, but that might be a bug.

[thestick]

T70 Pre-Report

...insert your favorite curse word here, Cairo has Alphabet and SD has HBR. Reinsert your favorite curse word, they just swapped HBR for Alphabet. They're closer than I thought to Currency and working together, and one short Archery research later will have Horse Archers.

We are going to get dogpiled eventually, and I don't trust Gavagai to come to our rescue. When convenient, I think we should get HBR and Construction ourselves. Jumbos will shut down HAs very nicely, especially since we're the only ones with IW so they can't field jumbos themselves.

Unfortunately, TBW was offering to swap Math for IW, and I accidentally hit 'Escape' to get out of it... for future reference how do I quit the game while a diplo window is open without closing the diplo window?

EDIT: Though now that the panic has subsided, here's hoping that HBR is a defensive/opportunistic move.

[thestick]

Though realistically, I know that they're making the right moves. If they didn't work together, they know that we'd eat one of them, then turn around and eat the other once we have double their cities. So they have to work together to contain us.

Now that the kneejerk panic has subsided, hopefully we can have a Cold War type of mutual distrust going here. The era of praet rushing is about to end with us having Construction and them having HBR, so hopefully we can have an uneasy MAD type situation. EDIT: By this I mean that massed HAs and cats on their side are all the defense they need to existentially defend until the Renaissance, while massed praets and cats on our side are all we need to existentially defend until the Renaissance. Besides opportunistic strikes, full-on conquest warfare is about to become unproductive for a long time.

Though frankly, if SD/Cairo know what they're doing and don't overstretch, they can basically defend with HAs and catapults until muskets. EDIT: Also, they still have to come up with Math before construction, and no one has traded with Raskol yet.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Big update!

First, we founded our fifth city, Marengo, the site of Bonaparte's crushing victory over the Austrians, which helped end the war of the second coalition and secure the First Consul's political power despite failure in Egypt.



In other news, I sent out key tech trades to gavagai and TBW, which should help us out quite a bit.

Sending a worker (Murat) to repair the damage done in the south.




HBR is unfortunate, but we will have combat 2 spears.



This here, is how we get 8 cities in 10 turns. We capture that barb city with a praet and axe combo, build a galley in Lodi to ferry over Abukir's settler coming in ~6-7 turns to the island along with a praet for temporary security if the island is bigger than expected, and of course we settle Toulon's settler somewhere.



For Toulon, we have ~5 options:

[GeneralKilCavalry]

I think we should either settle towards SD and rethink our dotmap in that area to grab more resources with one city and be a bit less efficient, or take incense dot.