GeneralKilCavalry and thestick talk it out

[thestick]

Off the cuff first look, I generally agree with you that we should either go pink with the Crabs/Fish on that peninsula, or the Incense. That Fish is the first new resource we've seen for a while, and we'll need to have Workers building roads towards the barb city anyway, so might as well get a 2 for 1 deal.

Will rethink dotmap towards SD later. Do we have a settling agreement with SD?

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Abukir is turning out to be a pretty great city.


Marengo has food connected, will get some juicy math-boosted chops coming in later.



Troops are marching south to take out the barbs.

Empire overview.

With screenies out of the way, let me discuss a bit. Toulon is completing its settler turn 74, the same turn Abukir 2-pop whips its own settler. We're going to increase our city count from 5 to a whopping 9, here's the plan. Toulon's settler should go west to SD, though I am not sure where, and would like to discuss dotmapping of that area.

Next, Abukir's settler, with a road going thru the mine the worker just built, will go claim incense in a bold move. (As of writing this, i moved a praet from arcole to support that move).

Finally, Arcole's future settler will go to the island, giving a much-needed 10 GPT boost.

Therefore, we'll have 9 cities with an option to build around 4 or 5 more without running into seriously contested territory - (one between Lodi and barbs, two near abukir, probably another one near SD, and maybe another island city?)

Lodi, after a galley, will build a worker - the happy cap is still low. Abukir will do something similar, while Toulon slow-builds a praet to reach size 7 (or switches temporarily to a work boat to provide clams for future city that is going @SD).

Not sure what Arcole does here - library? more praets?

Worker-wise, send the three in the east to help the new incense city, while keeping the one near Arcole on horse+connection duty, and the one near Marengo on chopping duty.

Comments? Questions? Concerns?

[thestick]

Wow, we got a free spread in Abukir. Nice.

Re: barb city, here's hoping the city is in a decent place, and doesn't orphan seafood or miss all the food resources or something. And the usual concern over lack of Workers to road to the site.

Re: strategy, I think we shouldn't get too fancy over the next 10-15 turns. Since we're hoping to double our empire size in a stroke, we need three things: Workers, praets, and Currency. I still have bad memories of the intrasite demogame, where we tried a bold (and in retrospect stupid) plant and got predictably Axe rushed. So I'm a big believer in proper defense with real units and reinforcement lines and such.

Diplomatically, I think we should try to get Gavagai to pull the Alphabet trade. We are going to crash, and I think that being able to build research to limp to Currency (plus the 20% prereq boost) will help a lot. After that, the world is basically our oyster. We crank praets, missionaries, Workers, and the like until the map is full, then snowball to a commanding lead.

I think we should make a play for the Hanging Gardens in ~10 turns, after we settle/capture all those cities. TBW is probably working on them right now, since he researched Math and is the only person with Masonry, but if he daddles, I think the rewards are worth the risk. We have the 100% bonus on Aqueducts due to Expansive, and 240/270 free pop for whipping fodder is amazing.

If we choose to try this, we'll need to immediately chop a forest (thanks, Math) into a Barracks in Marengo to pop borders for the Stone, crank a couple Workers for chopping, and pop out Masonry. We should probably build the thing in Arcole, as it has food for whipping, hammer tiles for working, and three forests for chopping. Lodi lacks the food, Toulon lacks the hammers/forests, and Abukir lacks the forests, so that leaves us with Arcole.

(I am not looking forward to Raskol getting the Pyramids, though. Ugh. That's going to be ugly.)

Re: diplo: How's the setlling agreement with SD? Do we actually have that or are we just spinning in circles to stall for time?

---------------------------
Breakeven is a 60%, high for the current stage of the game (or maybe I'm too used to playing with Immortal level maintanence. Or I'm not used to Aggressive's free -25% maintanence). Currency will take 16 turns at 100%, and cost ~210 gold at current expenses. We are getting 21 gold at 0%.

Dotmap discussion to come in the next post.

[thestick]

Here's the West with SD, with what I think the dotmap should be:

   

The big advantage of this dotmap is that we settle on hills, protect Arcole, all while not encroaching on SD's current sphere of influence. We have large borders and enemies on all sides, especially since we're about to aggressively settle towards Cairo. I think a bit of caution in the west is in order. These cities are easily forkable, but frankly, these cities are more of speedbumps and shields for Arcole. I think we just whip junk out of here for a while, and try to seriously develop them only if we get good relations with SD.

Here's the East with Cairo. I don't really know what to do in the east.

   

Blue Dot is insanely exposed. We need to pop its borders ASAP to pick up the Horses, otherwise Cairo will road onto the Horses and one-turn HAs onto the Wine, cutting off the supply lines.

I'm really tempted to move Blue Dot 1W to settle on the Iron. Yes, that makes the city weaker, but it makes it much more defensible, and for a frontline city that exists on a tense border, I'm starting to think that defensible is best. As a silver lining, we get to immediately steal Lodi's Sheep, and pick up Fish. For once, that's not a copy of a resource.

We're lucky that Lodi is shielded from 1-turn HAs by that line of hills.

That city by Cairo is a real eyesore. That salient makes everything so much more difficult... seeing why you're trying to reorient against Cairo. The East will always be tense with this city preventing us from adequately shielding Lodi and Abukir.

Generally, this is the paranoia talking, but we'll need more defense. Our units are slow, and our fronts are big. I think that when we get the horses in Arcole, we should built a few Chariots for fogbusting/MP duty/scouting, to free up the 'real' units for frontline duty.

(Also, that's another benefit of Stone: cheap walls.)

[thestick]

No real comment on the micro, because a. it seems reasonable and b. I think we should stop and think of the macro situation before we optimize the micro.

EDIT: I retract my previous statement saying that the East will always be tense. Lodi be shielded by its Holy City culture for a good, long time. Not being able to properly shield Abukir is a bit annoying, but it can be dealt with via culture.

If we think of Blue Dot as a whipping post that we just whip down from Size 4 to Size 3, going Barracks->Granary and cranking units until the end of time or good relations appear, and as a shield for Pink Dot and the peninsula, then it's a good city. I apologize for getting confused and thinking of it as a 'real' city.

[thestick]

Actually, on further reflection, this dotmap stinks militarily. That Hills Wine is the lynchpin of our defense. Cairo is Creative, so he can culturally control the third-ring tile 1N of the Horses. That tile is key. He can then one-turn HAs (and Morale Axes?) onto the Wines and fork Pink and Blue dots.

So we could just build a fort on the Wines and fortify Spears/Axes there at great military cost... the lack of hills to settle on really stinks in this area.

Furthermore, we need to keep the one-tile wide chokepoint under our control, so that Cairo doesn't cut us off from our (soon to be) colonies on the peninsula. Letting Cairo cut off 2 cities (Pink and the barb city) by planting a stack on the Wines is just too risky.

Here's the new proposal:

   

Now Cairo can't cut off reinforcements to the Barb city by putting a stack on Pink Dot's spot.This way, Pink Dot protects the peninsula that the Barb city is on, Blue Dut protects Lodi from the northeast, and a city east of Abukir will protect Lodi from the northeast.

Definitely let me know what you think. I'm paranoid, I'm always paranoid, and PB 49:

Miguellito is betting on Cairo's recent eye surgery and general passiveness to protect him from vulturing. It seems like Miguiellito will be wrong - or at least, Cairo is considering an attack strongly enough to show that Miguiellito's reasoning is suspect. 

[thestick]

I don't think we should do the two-pop settler whip in Abukir. On the micro side, we have juicy tiles at Size 3 in the Ivory and Iron that will be painful not to work. On the macro side, Incense is simply too exposed and our presence too weak for an aggressive plant. Cairo whips out 6 HAs, we are finished in the Incense. It'll take our praets too long to respond, and our Workers too long to road. I think we should settle Pink as an intermediate step to the Barb city and Incense, and only settle Incense after our Workers have time to build roads and we bring in real defenders.

Plus, do we even know if the Barb city is Size 2?

I also suspect we should build a road south from Abukir, to speed up reinforcements to the area.

EDIT: Are we shipping a Worker to the island after the initial Settler/praet pair?

[thestick]

Skimming the postmortem of the 2013 demogame, think Gavagai made the best metagame play by picking 'defensive' weapons (or at least the appearance of defensive weapons). That way he has a solid alliance with his neighbor (TBW), since both sides (think) they won't attack each other. Meanwhile, even if we play a good game we'll be like the Germans and always have the possibility of a French/Russian, er, I mean SD/Cairo alliance hanging over our heads.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Quite a bit to catch up on. I've been busy map-making for PB52, so now its time to focus on this.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

HG play sounds good. SD seems to be busy and there's nothing more than an implicit agreement from that one time in game.

Not doing abkuir 2-pop whip

I disagree on pink dot. It's bad to settle right next to a hill when you want to be able to potentially counterattack out of a city. If cairo moves onto your pink dot, we could hit from the north. That being said, I agree that pink dot should be settled first.

>>> Are we shipping a Worker to the island after the initial Settler/praet pair?

yes