[Spoilers] Bacchus debuts on RB showing unmatched vision and slick dice-rolling

[Bacchus]

That, and so he goes on being a thorn in William's side, forcing him to maintain a large military. At least until retep is hopelessly outteched (Macemen).

[Bacchus]

Oh, crap, I didn't visit the General Civ thread for a while and totally missed that Ichabod is also subbing out. Looks like plako might be left as the only experienced player on the continent, and that's seriously not good for the Inca/Khmer/Greece situation. In fact, given Ichabod's initial reach and the investment he made into a fairly specific plan, which is always difficult for a subbing player to follow without knowing all the intricacies, this departure will probably be completely balance-breaking in favour of the Inca. Not that there was much balance in the first place.

Also, something happened across the pond to Commodore, dtay or Jowy/TBS judging by the lurker thread.

[Bacchus]

Five cities:


A little worker shortage in the newly founded Case of Conscience, but at the end of the day working a flood for 4 turns ain't so bad and still gets growth in 6, having two workers, rather than one, improving the corn would have given growth in 5, not really material. The important thing is that the second pop will have a nice flood cottage to grow onto. Production queues reveal a bit of optimism regarding my position. I have three chariots, an axe and two archers on the northern theatre, which together with emergency whip capacity should be enough to deal with any nonsense.

There's a Khmer spear guarding a worker about to chop an out of culture forest into Khmer's copper city:


Incidentally, the plains tile to the south of Yasodwhatever is the most proximate staging tile for any attack against me. Gives me 4 turns to muster a response and is a highly unlikely one to attack from. Everything else gives 6, which is part of the reason for my optimism. Retep basically hasn't built any roads towards me, and his lands are really easy to scout into from convenient hills. Note the unguarded grass hill next to the Khmer city and the continuing absence of a Monument. This might be too easy to pass up.

EDIT: Demos are 9-13-11 while saving gold thanks to CRE, but CY is above average, unlikely as that is. And set to grow with all these floods coming online. In international news, Ichabod's power spiked very impressively. Guess shouldn't worry about the Inca steamroller too much after all.

[Bacchus]

A micro report, unusual for this thread:

1. Set up a little trap for retep:


The scout has an amusingly high chance of getting at least one hit in — 72%; and 41% of getting two or more in. The second chariot, of course, has a near certain chance of winning. He has no spears in striking distance. There might be one sitting in the capital, which is the biggest risk for this whole venture, so I'm not yet sure, whether I will take the attacking option if it's given; but it's nice to have it there.

2. The previous turn put 25 hammers into a barracks, this turn I switched to axe and moved a pops from a grass mine onto a river cottage to speed up growth by a turn. After building the axe for two turns, I will switch back into the barracks and double whip it, getting all of the second pop OF into a unit. This, of course is nowhere near as neat in Krillmod as in plain BTS, but still worth doing, I think.

3. Finished the chop into a worker on Double Star on the turn he completed anyway, so next turn I will 1-turn the Granary off the queue.

4. After getting 10 hammers into the Granary, Big Time switched to building a Work Boat — this is needed for the newly built C of Conscience, and will be completed off FLOOR[(5+1)*1.35] = 8hpt — in 4 turns, just as many as needed for the city to grow to 4. Big Time will then immediately whip the Granary. Getting the Granary on an empty bin is not fantastic, but there you are.

Wow, this was boring; onto other stuff. I forgot to write about wonders — simply because we are not chasing any, and I'm not spending much time thinking about them. So, Oracle fell before Stonehenge (which is American), and the third wonder to be built is... the Great Wall. Judging by score increases it was Old Harry. I'm not sure how good it is with the current EP costs, but in an 18-player, being able to EP-bomb the economic leader and steal off him, especially if you happen to be nearby or have a holy city sounds like fun. Invisible indestructible scout is pretty hot too. I mean, you don't build the thing for the anti-barb effect on an 18-player B&S map, right?

Plako still hasn't noticed I'm spying against him, we are 0/22. Will get to see graphs and tremble in fear soon enough.

[Bacchus]

Mid-term "strategy": risky southward expansion with barely sufficient northern garrison using the ridiculous geopolitics on our border, resulting hopefully in a decent enough economic position for a major shock horse archer build/whip cycle across the empire and merry conquest of neighbours succumbing to attrition.

Long-term "strategy": bolster southern garrison and don't get conquered by Plako. Then get conquered by Galleons bearing Riflemen.

[Atlarge]

Love the optimism!

[Ceiliazul]

good reports, even the micro stuff is interesting to me. I think wartime build swapping is slick when well done, but granary/wb swapping is usually not as beneficial.

keep up the good work!

[Bacchus]

Thanks Celiiazul! With the granary/WB swap there is no cleverness, it's just that I have to build a WB, and only the Big Time has the hammers to do this. I guess the only point is that it makes sense to not start on the WB, until the city grows onto the copper mine, as then I have 6hpt base, enough to get 2 bonus hammers and completion in 4, so I might as well work on the granary for a while and have it ready for whipping. But mostly, I just realised that I almost never describe in this this thread what's going on in my production queue, and decided to do so for a change. I should say, the two cities unmentioned above are just building granaries -- one will whip it for 2 after growth to 4, the other I don't know yet. Probably two chops plus a single whip.

[Bacchus]

A question to lurkers about overflow -- as you see from the picture above, I'm a couple of beakers away from IW and crawling towards it on the natural 1bpt. I am currently thinking about when to switch science back on, but for that I need to understand how overflow carries and I'm not sure — can anyone point me to or provde with an up-do-date explanation of how this works? Specifically, a) does anything affect the amolunt of base beakers which are carried over and b) are beakers cleared to base and are the TechKnown and prerequisites modifiers then re-applied to the overflown beakers in line with the new tech?

[flugauto]

If you mean an overflow limit, then there is no limit. The overflow is divided by the researched tech's modifier, then multiplied by the new tech's modifier.