Dare you enter the Whizzard's Realm? Magic and Mysteries abide.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Basically - not be a target. Getting the Dutch and actually no one else it seems to have cities on that NE sea was a huge boost to us.

I'm not sure exactly how to do that without Making an arms race (although our superior MFG/CY makes that a win for us)

Our risk areas currently is pretty much just Hogwarts and Bubaxtons. The plant to lock off misltoin will also be a risk area, along with that southern sea these plants should cover our core though. Those 4 cities will be our only risks on the west side.

To the north, nothing is currently threatened. We will eventually have 1, possibly 2 cities that might be at risk long term, but we are 20ish turns from them probably.

NE Scooter will have a city out there eventually, and possibly RMOG in a weak area in the future.

SE regardless of whether we take the copper island it will all be at risk from the turn settled from galleons. However we should get a good view if we get copper island.

Astro doesn't help his much. Gunpowder would but it is purely military, and muskets are hugely outclassed by rifles defending from mounted units especially (but jans...)

Or we keep going on with the eco techs and make a stack of knights I saw a plako knight or 2 with my explorer

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Not sure faking an arms race is a good idea, knowing Scooter, he'd probably call our bluff and stay on eco. He'd probably be more worried about his horizontal neighbours, if they start militarising. Thanks Plako!

Does RMOG have astro? If both our horizontal neighbours have it, then I think we'll have no choice but to respond lest our coastal cities get cut off.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Not sure faking an arms race is a good idea, knowing Scooter, he'd probably call our bluff and stay on eco. He'd probably be more worried about his horizontal neighbours, if they start militarising. Thanks Plako!

Does RMOG have astro? If both our horizontal neighbours have it, then I think we'll have no choice but to respond lest our coastal cities get cut off.

No astro for RMOG. Settled the banana city. He will see the borders when he logs in next turn with his explorer. Also he settled somewhere else this turn. 

One thing we need to do is decide whether to push the Misltoin border out. I think the current x is a good tile. I whipped the settler. He can board next turn. He can land with 2 longbows from UU the turn after, and a further unit from Hogwarts if we want to reduce the garrison in there to 2 units rather than the 3 it currently is. That is the biggest decision this turn. If so I shall go in and finish and do a full post.

[El Grillo]

I like the current site, it also has the can-be-covered-by-ironclads factor going for it. Getting culture onto the jungle hill to the southwest would help protect the copper island, too. Have the Ottomans settled any new cities since those two 3-pop whips a few turns ago?

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Forgot the demos this turn.

Settled the banana city without a hitch. It packs a huge food punch at a low size. It then doesn't really have too many interesting tiles. This city could be a great secondary GP farm perhaps. Lots of high food tiles and then just coast after like 4/5 land tiles. Religion landed there straight away - it is actually only Hogwarts now which currently has no religion, and he has a missionary in already. 

Bad news - WK has settled one of the copper islands. I don't know which. Looking at the map I realised that only the copper islands have crabs around them, and he has a crab source hooked. Shall have to wait and see which side he went. It could easily be the other side, as I don't think he settled this side until recently. 

Plan for hooking the stone is tower can grow to 7 this turn, 8 next then do another 8-4 whip. I know we are keeping the beuro cap lowish on pop, but it is really the best way to get a settler out in a decent time IMO. The other cities nearby are just too small and will take too long to grow. Getting stone and Sankore up will be a big boost. We currently have 17 hindu buildings, and are adding them fairly rapidly. With bonuses, thats around 45 sci/turn. Essentially a payback on about 10 turns of having the wonder currently. There are 3 workers down there currently hooking the wines, and another 2 near TOR. I will probably start it after the library build in there to get a headstart. Only cash the chops with stone though.

Will get a further round of 8-4 whipped cities for settlers in a bit. 

We need to identify 5 or 6 cities for universities with education to be able to build oxford also. 180 hammers a pop probably not everywhere. I'm thinking tower/Hogwarts/TOR/Waverly/UU and either SM or Isen. They all should be able to whip/build universities fairly fast. Maybe MB might be quicker actually. I'll set it up so the settler whip goes into a university in tower, and then won't whip it again after. We can save gold whilst Oxford is building too.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Does RMOG have well-developed coastal city on the southeastern sea?

Also, agree with that western site, controlling north-south access can let us designate our southwestern copper city and UU as backlines. Also, removes any risk of UU from being boated from the west inside that small sea.

When is the next great person? Are we going to be finishing off Education the old-fashioned way?

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Does RMOG have well-developed coastal city on the southeastern sea?

Also, agree with that western site, controlling north-south access can let us designate our southwestern copper city and UU as backlines. Also, removes any risk of UU from being boated from the west inside that small sea.

When is the next great person? Are we going to be finishing off Education the old-fashioned way?

I'm not entirely sure. I thought he did until recently in the UU area. However one of the bananas is still undeveloped. I now think his only city on that coast is the recent one using the jungled fish. 


Managed to only get half the turn done before getting called out. Good news is that with the galley movement, there is no RMOG culture on that copper island. Get in! Other thing is I have pulled a lot of the workers from the new banana city south - I'm mulling getting the stone forted so as soon as the city is settled it can be used.

No GP in sight for a while. UU has 225/450, tower about 280/450 GPP. Depends how many we run. I think the next GP should probably be for a GA, and maybe after some universities with the OR bonus go caste/paci to speed the GA and get tall for it. We can generate a few in the GA, and it should put us in a good position. It will also help as the tower GP pool is all over the place, I think third each engineer/artist/priest, and the UU one is mixed all over of engineer/priest/scientist. I can get shots when I finish the turn. Big update with the weekend.

[El Grillo]

Ah, I always forget about being able to pre-fort resources. If the settler and worker turns line up, that seems like it could save one or two turns on Sankore, which has to be pretty strong after all of the recent Hindu building whips.

If RMOG have copper but not that city, then it seems like Alhazard really got the short end of the stick there. I've been thinking on what they could be planning from here, and even if their next GS bulbs Scientific Method, there's no great way to bulb past that to Communism/Biology/Physics (either too expensive, or with other techs to clear). I thought that they might have wanted to leverage the window where they had galleons/janissaries, but they never actually got Gunpowder, and their start was slow enough to render any aggression impractical. I'm curious to see where they're planning to go from here.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

So 2 turns to update. I'm quite busy this weekend unexpectedly so it is difficult to update well.

I was more positive last turn... This turn I found out we lost the race to the other copper island  

I moved the galley into range to unload our settler/longbow pair next turn and RMOG has already got a settler/longbow pair on the hill. Damn. Beaten by 1 turn (and turn order I suppose) Annoying that he didn't beat us by 2 turns as then the culture would have been showing and I would not have wasted turns with the settler boarding the galley.

Still. They can offload onto the tundra forest next turn, settler the turn after. We will get stone access rather fast this way at least.

Looking better in the west. Mistolin cannot really respond to that planned isthmus city. He has a sole longbow on the jungle hill with fort bonus of 10% and an explorer to the west of that. After seeing that with the first longbow, I unloaded the other 2 and the settler on that tile. We have essentially now grabbed 1 more silver island than we should of, and a second (weaker because of no lake clam sadly) isthmus location over what we should have. Luckily we also managed a copper island and a gold island.

Now I went down a different tack here with builds. Firstly we didn't need to worry about a settler from tower so I decided to keep it larger currently. I think that is a better idea. Also we don't really *NEED* any more settlers soon. All the contested areas have been taken. There are no more strong locations are now accounted for, and we have a settler spare for the stone.

We have a jungled fish site, that northern wine/silk spot, the southern crabs and then some filler/iceball locations left. So what to do now? I decided to go down the library route as we are in OR/slavery, and for oxford we need 6 university sites. We do not have that many libraries yet. Perhaps it will take a little longer than planned... Whoops.

We have 2 in Tower and UU. One EoT from TOR, but this will then be taken up building Sankore soon. Building in SM/Isen/Bara/Dumrstrang too. I think the strongest play here is to have 6 universities whipped as fast as possible for tower to get Oxford ASAP. 180 hammer builds, but 50% bonus given. 4 pop whips with some hammers invested.

I chose those cities as they all have courthouses/temples/monasteries. The other choice is actually down in MB, but this has high hammer low whip potential, and is probably better sticking size 4 for a while pumping settlers/workers. Maybe some other sites could do it slightly better, I'm not sure.

demos at the moment are awesome. Admittedly on a tech with a fair amount of KTB, but still wow. At 0% we had GNP cicra 360

Estimating getting OU up in about 12-15 turns... Might be optomistic. Planning to use some whipping overflow to help it, but it will also be a 360 hammer build with 200% prod bonuses.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Aw, that's a shame about the other copper island. Oh well, you take some, you lose some. If this assuages RMOG's anger at losing any chance at an isthmuth city, I'm okay with conceding that.

What are our expenses at 100% research? Because if they're as low as I think they are, it might not be worth running pure binary research and waiting the full 15 turns for Oxford before turning back on research, as we'd build up a massive stockpile of gold that we wouldn't be able to burn through fast enough. We might need to play it touch and go, see what tech's important at any particular timepoint.