Mooooooo.... wait, wrong animal. Neeeigghhh

[uberfish]

The duration of the Illians-Clan NAP. Initially Serdoa offered us T170 as the expiry date of the NAP, refused my T140 offer and agreed to T150. Assuming he wanted to avoid both NAPs ending at the nearly same time it's possible the Illians-Clan NAP expires around T140. A wild guess, but my point is different. I think that when we'll make contact with Krill, he's going to lie to us about the duration of their NAP. He'll exaggerate its length to force us to deal with the wannabe ToM-winner Illians while he keeps growing.

A good illustration of why the NAP metagame is stupid.

[Iskender]

I think it's more an issue of a 2-vs-1 dynamics than of NAPs. NAPs are OK as long as one party doesn't get LordParkin'd (I hope we've managed to avoid it).

[Iskender]

T108 played.

We got the spider event. I paid 23gp to get rid of it. I sent a worker to chop a grassland forest near Ascot - with the chop and a little micro we get FotT in 4 turns. I sent free workers to built new mines/lumbermills (1 worker per improvement. I try to avoid sending more than 1 on a tile to get max worker turns).

Research set to 70%. HBR in two turns.

Serdoa doesn't have Fire Mana in the diplomacy screen. Either he hasn't built the node yet or maybe he's getting Fire from the Clan? It'd be hilarious if us and Krill just pooled our resoruces for Illian towers.

And then killed them.

[Iskender]

Serdoa doesn't have Fire Mana in the diplomacy screen.

OK, disregard that. He's had Fire since T107.

[Square Leg]

FotT next turn hopefully!

Stirrups in 3t... = lets start raiding...

[Iskender]

FotT next turn hopefully!

I'll make a live sacrifice to RNG if needed.

You sure we need Stirrups that early? For effective raiding we'll need the whole package - Stirrups + FotT + Conquest and I believe we'll be better off if we stay in Agraranism for a little bit longer considering the NAP situation. We can further improve eco by going Writing -> Trade and eventually Honor. If we grab Honor in a dozen or so turns we can adopt Empy w/o a turn of anarchy if we use the GP for a golden age. GA increased tile yields and a free religion switch will probably gain us more net resources (commerce + hammers) than using the GP for trade mission or Academy. We could even switch to Conquest near the end of the GA, but that might be still premature.

[Square Leg]

Just playing the turn if you are about on gmail

[Square Leg]

Turn 111

Please stand on one leg for the duration of the turn.... (I think Twinkletoes and Ruff are likely to be the only ones to understand that and they don't read this thread I'm guessing! - anyone else going to prove me wrong? )

We got a free religion spread:

+2 culture in York - the city in the farmost NW corner of the map that needs none!

Another stack of barbs is approaching from the east but we have ninja's so it's ok:

Wasn't there something else happening this turn? Oh yeah:

:blob: :hat: : :2dance:

Not only that but as you may have noticed from the barb shots above, we got a GS! Woot. I wonder if we could land the bone palace once our marble is up...

[Rowain]

I wonder who loves whom in that ninja-stack under the heart

[Square Leg]

So we got a Sage as our first GP.

Options are:

- Bulb KotE

- Settle him

- Start a GA

- Create an acadamy


Obviously I'm not keen on 1 or 2 and niether should you But I can see benefit in both 3 and 4. A GA is what we had planned all along. It would enable us to make some anarchy free civic swaps and a flip in Empyrean once we get there - I'd certainly not set off the GA straight away since we won't have the tech ready for the swaps for a few turns. The extra beakers would help us get to Honor for the end of the GA and a swap into Empy and we could run another sage/merchant pair somewhere to get the +100% gpp bonus too. Extra hammers will be invested in libraries/PB's/Stables etc.

An acadamy isn't as bad a option as it first sounded 10t ago. If we are going to be teching further down the tree than originally planned the +50% beakers will definitely be handy. I am throwing down some more cottages at Ascot as we speak and with natural growth, an acadamy and a library, it will increase to over 100bpt within about 10t... A pretty significant difference imo.......

What are your thoughts Iskender?

I'm erring on the side of an acadamy followed by building a temple and running priest/sage/merchant somewhere to get us another GP in ~14-15t.