[SPOILERS]The Tyrant realizes that once the world burns it gets really boring....

[spacetyrantxenu]

T53 - Quick update, I played to roll over the turn. Thanks again, CF.

I made a pair of small micro errors because we hadn't post a good outline before leaving for the weekend. The settler in Mister Love this turn was at 40/100, so it was only a 2 pop whip now instead of a 3 pop whip. The chariot in Happy Face was at 29/30 this turn as well. The solution last turn would have been to move the grass hill mine from Mister Love to Happy Face to get the chariot out and keep the settler under 40 hammers so it could be 3 pop whipped this turn. I went ahead and 2 pop whipped the settler (zero overflow though ) and will let the chariot finish without whipping it. I thought about whipping the chariot and overflowing everything next turn for another 1T chariot, but that would have unnecessarily gimped Happy Face, down to size 1 again. Without a granary that kind of a whip would hurt right now.

The new chariot will be headed down to join Brick Hur as we being harassing the size 2 barbarian city, which we will hopefully take very soon. I think it will fit in with our dotmap well enough for a free city.




I don't see any food there, so hopefully there is some in the fog. But even if there isn't it's still a free city with a lot of grassland tiles. Those can eventually be farmed to make something useful here. And it's a cultural land grab which is never a bad thing.

We need to decide if we agree on the proposed city location, on the hill tile 2N of the warrior. Sisu has already built a city toward us so we need to close down that border soon. That location will put our borders in contact but with no overlap, so it's not too antagonistic. And the city will be settled on a hill, in case Sisu doesn't like it.

I've also marked a really nice city on the right side of the picture above, grabbing sugar, cows, and rice. We would need to have a defensive force in place to settle that one, though. Something to think about, that's a really nice spot. We may need to be a bit less aggressive with it and maybe skip the cows in that city, I don't know. That one is down the line, though. I guess it only matters now in so far as our placement over there would impact the city we're about to found now. As of now it looks like we'd settle our third city on T57, which seems kinda late. Unless we capture the barb city before then as our third.

T53 demographics:




No time to dig into it now, but this is after I whipped 2 pop off Mister Love into the settler. It does show that we're behind in expansion, though. Time to catch up!

After I rolled the turn I grabbed demos for the start of T54:




I think the rival worst in approval rate at 54% is Suttree. He's grown his capital to what I assume is his happy cap at size 6, but he has another city (or two?) to drive up happy cap space. I don't like our land area total, we're just 3 tiles above what Azza has now. But I'll take our crop yield over his any day...at 11 total food, Azza must have only 3 or 4 population at the most. I think 3 is more likely (even after he just rebuilt a second city).

[Cornflakes]

Sorry about the settler whip. I didn't even think to check number of hammers. I just hit Settler and chop.

With your next city towards the jungle and that barb city already in the middle, when are you planning to hit IW?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Slowzantium + IND's implicit desire to wonder whore makes for a tricky tech path. We really need Pottery after we finish Agriculture. Then there's the fact that no one has researched either Meditation or Polytheism 53 turns into the game (when does that happen?). So grabbing Poly and then trying for Priesthood in an Oracle --> Metal Casting gambit would be nice. All of that would require delaying Iron Working for a while. I see about six tiles in the BFC of the proposed city that we could use without having IW, and that's enough for a while. Farm what we can for now, that should get us to +4 food from what I see in that screen shot (could be wrong, I can't tell if some of those tiles are jungle or forest). Anyway, point is that I think even with the proposed site we can get by without IW for a little while, at least while pursuing wider goals.

We need more map info around the barb city though. If it's all jungle then it's going to be a real junk city until IW and worker labor spruce it up. We need to find out if that water tile by the city is a lake or part of our western coast. If it's a lake maybe there are some fogged tiles we can farm without IW. Hard to say for now, though.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T54 - Here we go, light on details. It took me forever to play this turn because I'm not sure exactly what to do with the dry rice and all that jungle with no Iron Working coming soon. I played our settler and chariot movements to give us two options for next turn. Regard, the signs on the map:




Plan A is the original settlement idea I threw onto the map when I played the pair of turns quickly on Friday night. Settler moves onto the jungle grass hill and settles on T57, establishing a border with Sisu's neighboring city (there is a bare sliver of red visible at the bottom of the screenshot showing his first ring -- there would be no overlap, just second ring touching second ring). The alternate location I've marked is on the tile the settler is on now, already inside the third ring of Mister Love. It's a short term city to incubate a few cottages (once they're built) and to share food from the capital. I don't love this location at all but with the scouting we've done so far I don't see a better choice yet. Settling this close to the capital and sharing tiles would mandate frequent use of the whip to keep these two cities down in size some, so as one is larger the other can be whipped down some to regrow.

Anyway I'd really like some input about where to send the settler, even a plan C. It seems like the western cow is on a peninsula and should be safely our territory, but without there being visible seafood along the coast it's hard to walk the settler over there -- I don't want to blindly settle and strand a fish or something. If we can grab the barb city soon maybe we can explore before the next settler, whenever that is. We need another worker soon, almost certainly before the next settler.

If you're wondering why I have two more chariots queued up (well just one now, that one in Mister Love is already on the board now), I want to make quick work of that barb city and grab it before Sisu sends axes after it. He has seen the borders now although he shouldn't know what is inside the city -- he has a scout outside the city's first ring so he can't see through the jungle into the city square where the three warriors are. Even one axe would clean that city out quickly. So I'm sending several chariots to do the job. If they encounter a stack of Sisu's axes in the wild, well all the better. That would make a light chariot snack and then presumably we could explore his cities in closer detail, at least until he sent spears after us.

Demographics - End of T54, start of T55:

End of T54



Start of T55



Someone has a robust military out there, 4k power more than we have, grew by 3k on the interturn. It isn't one of the teams we've met.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

General thoughts:

I hate not seeing a place to settle that I love. This will all be plenty serviceable once we get to Iron Working. In the meantime, we can build cottages here and there to make it pay, which means workers. I put one worker on building roads toward our new southern holdings and the other to chopping into a third worker. I found some money in the couch cushions where someone had left a work boat nearly finished, so I put the overflow from the settler into that and set it scouting to the west. This also allowed Mr. Love to regrow to size 5. We're short of good tiles, so the whip is our friend until we get a couple cottages up. 3T on Pottery. Probably 4, actually, because we're going to run out of gold due to unit costs. But, capture gold maybe? Anyway, our chariots are swarming the barb city. Two can attack next turn and the third the turn after. Is it better to wait the extra turn for the third chariot or just push ahead? I say we attack. We'll have better than 75% odds and the first chariot will promote/heal after its attack, assuming it wins, so we should be in good shape. But, a bad loss/warrior promo would be super annoying. No sign of Sisu troops around.

T55

T56

Really, I just need to spend some time rebuilding the sandbox and see if I can provide us some goals. I feel like we're blowing in the breeze right now and generally sucking at this. But, things will look/feel better in a couple turns with two new cities.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Unless Sisu has a unit nearby that could somehow swipe the city we should wait for the third chariot to arrive before attacking. That way in case we get a bad roll and lose a battle we'll have more opportunities to overcome it the next turn. I'm a bit worried that we're about to gain two cities that don't help much in the short term and it's going to sink our economy for a while until we can grow some cottages. But I don't see any better options. Unless our scouting plan was very unlucky and we've somehow missed a really nice spot nearby that we should be settling instead, we got screwed on the land for the early game and are going to have to dig out of this, probably the hard way (if you know what I mean).

Let's just hope Sisu neglects his military.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

T57

Settled our crappy third city. Welcome, Tyler!



Ehhh...



That pretty much sums up how I feel about Tyler right now. Need roads down there ASAP. What a piece of junk.



This is where we stand. Xenu wanted to wait another turn on the attack, so I did a little scouting of the city. This will be a decent little city when we can get some worker love down there with a dry corn and another dyes resource south of the city. The forest is helpful too. Need MOAR WORKERS!! Also, note the discovery of another dry rice on the peninsula. Stats time:

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

T58

Three ~78% fights, three wins. Byzantine horses, yo.



We need a name. I'm running thin on Toadies songs. I'll come up with something super lovey. <3



Islands. Seafood too. This could be fun. If there's lots of this on the map, someone's going to win on GLH (or did we ban it? I don't think we did). Anyway, Pottery finishes EoT. A chop finishes a worker in Mr. Love, overflow for a granary and a whip (2pop), overflow to another worker probably. A chariot finishes naturally in Happy Face, granary next. Tyler will swap from the placeholder barracks to a granary as well. I think just 1t of revolt for our new capture. That's about all, good turn for us. Oh, in case you're wondering, we're now -5g/t. I don't remember if that includes the revolt or not. Stats:

[spacetyrantxenu]

Nicely done. I'll log into the game tonight and have a look around if I have time. I think job #1 for now is getting a road into both of those cities immediately. That will temporarily solve the horrendous health problems they're both going to have. Iron Working is an absolute necessity as soon as we can get it, but...

T58 and NO RELIGIONS have gone off the board. I say we save cash for as long as it will take to make a push through one of Meditation or Polytheism (preferably Poly). That will give us a few more turns to avoid being beaten to the punch by someone else. But once we have the cash I say we rush headlong for Poly --> Priesthood, build the oracle, and sling Metal Casting. Then we can research IW. This definitely requires us to run some tests to see just how long all of that will take. If it means that two of our cities are completely gimped and total money pits for a long time we may have to reconsider and get IW sooner. But the oracle is a big prize for us if we can get our forges up quickly.

Something else to consider, though, we do need IW soon to find out where or if we have any metal. Horses are great but our military is one dimensional and will stay that way until we either find metal or are forced to build archers. I'd say our military position is precarious, except that three chariots and 3 warriors makes us the #2 rated military power. People are seriously farming away in this game. I need to check Sisu's power graph and make an estimate of his capabilities. If he is several units behind us then maybe we don't have to worry so much...although spears would destroy our chariots. So..yeah, we need IW or Archery soon too. But until I see some signs of a buildup by Sisu (or another neighbor if we locate the home area for Suttree or Oxy nearby) I think we can run a light military too, unless we have murder on our minds. But it's too early for that...I can't contemplate a campaign until we at least have horse archers, and preferably some kind of metal with which to build a defensible stack of combined arms.

The previous paragraph has been brought to you by the Committee for Warmonger Planning, a division of the We Love Lurkers Foundation. It may or may not have simply been pandering to the audience.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Azza's scout showed up at our borders. I swapped EP on to him.