So good I used Restricted Leaders - Gandhi of India

[TheMeInTeam]

Moves for the turn I start in this pitboss:





Nothing groundbreaking. Getting a pair of workers for chops + tile improvements. We'll have bur soon so I'm going to cottage the capitol and grow up to the cap on it (sugar will help that further). Current worker moves are obviously enough; improve copper this turn (did it) and plantations said sugar (inbound), giving the city SE 3 good tiles to work after merchant is out. Currently running 2 merchants. I can run an artist turn after plantation is finished to get horse/2nd sugar in culture. I'm going to farm this city, but that's a lower priority than working the specials. In short term city might be a worker/settler pump as its total yield ~ pop 4 is pretty good. By the way, that worker in city 2 will finish much faster once I fire the merchants, so it won't take anything near 19 turns in practice.

I want the iron city fairly soon. This city won't be good for much other than production and I'm going to use it as such. The faster I see a minor power jump in the demos the faster i'll be inclined towards units rather than forge in the iron city. Idea here is to stay reasonably up in soldiers, capable of defending. Settlement plan after iron city is going to look to secure hilly chokes with decent back-line resources, if possible. In light of that, I'm stopping scouting the land north of my empire, instead sending scout SW, archer SE then S, and looping 2nd archer around the south through the jungle near the lake. What I'm most interested in is settling cities to consume land away from other teams, with the only caveat being a requirement of holding them.

Turn ends!

Note on demo: land area bothers me. This suggests a civ settled far enough away from capitol that it gets its full BFC already. Civs making a habit of this are at risk.

[yuris125]

Note on demo: land area bothers me. This suggests a civ settled far enough away from capitol that it gets its full BFC already. Civs making a habit of this are at risk.

Can't it be because a team already expanded borders in the 2nd city? If we had full BFC in both cities, our land area would've been 38k

[Jkaen]

I have both BFCs already just ran a turn and a half of culture slider

[TheMeInTeam]

^

Ok, though I'm not sure that beats alternatives right now #'s making sense.

[TheMeInTeam]

Played next turn. I did movements as I had highlighted in-game, and have updated my next intended scout moves for you guys (not much to show for lurkers just yet, jungle + lakes but will highlight my thoughts on choke/war implications in a few turns!)

After ending turn I found I can push our GP up a turn by running starvation during my next turn. Tentatively, I have done that, but I need to confirm that we can, in fact, insta-bulb it with our research output...otherwise i'll remove starvation and run 2 merchants next turn 1 the following and we'll get our GM a turn later.

[TheMeInTeam]

I was just about to say we had an uneventful turn when...



Hostile contact! Merchant farmed. If the others went to use it this way, we are going to do so also I suppose, as I didn't get any confirmation one way or another in terms of the team bulbing mechanics.

Once that's taken care of, we can now get worker #4 in very few turns:



The other thing I'm going to do here is camp that position with the archer. No way speaker attacks there, and it will deny scouting. :neenernee back at you, speaker .

This is both good and bad. Their team won't run away on us, because they're right there. We get to influence the probable favored team w/o it pulling a pitboss #4 lord parkin.

The bad part is, of course, that we have to fight with speaker/sunrise over the strategic positioning to the east for me and south for Jkaen. City #3 iron for me just went from valuable to absolutely critical...but we're going to want hill choke cities in that direction for sure, also.

Jkaen, it didn't last long. You and I both need sentry units out, and to watch flanks. Speaker/Sulla/Sunrise are too good to commit an all-out early attack on us and throw the game, but if they see a vulnerability they'll nail us for a razed city, etc.

[TheMeInTeam]

Some updates here:

Somebody found us, but I can't see their unit. Turn log suggests that they found us on their turn. If I had to guess, they met us with a scout and pulled back.

Here's the empire situation:



Cities still building workers. I'm putting an archer in the queue in capitol after worker to let it grow onto the plains mine. Will also start some chops.

City 2 will run an artist after it grows to 4, chopping in the meantime. I intend to get at least another 1-2 archer + explorer in the queue while working up to a reasonable pop to crank settlers. I don't want to go full-bore on specs until I do something about the empire cap.

City 2 put out a great merchant this turn and I bulbed it as planned. Bulbs are def weaker in this format as we got no bonus to beakers for it (690) but it lets us hit civil service pretty soon (3t). We're unquestionably behind a bit here. Let's hope the fortunes of war focus bounce our way.

Holding SE archer in place to block speaker from scouting me for 4+ turns. Big win there.

I'm keeping the other archer near my cities to guard against any nasty surprises.

Scout plan in SW is to figure out some city site locations that are both viable and defensible:



Jungle hell. Some quality tiles in there but I have to clear it and that's going to take time. Fortunate for our team that I'm the one near the jungle as my UU is better suited for it than anybody else's.

Demographics:



The main thing to note here is that there have been no major power increases; top team got a 1k boost since last turn (another warrior?). We're not under major military threat (yet!) but still have to watch for the usual choke threat coming off the guerrilla 2 archers. Unless I confirm a team to my S/SW that is close I'm considering taking city #4 for its hill-ness and the difficulty in getting around it and into my empire for any easy shenanigans.

[Kuro]

1k soldiers can also be from an increase to pop 4 from pop 3 in one city.

[TheMeInTeam]

1k soldiers can also be from an increase to pop 4 from pop 3 in one city.

Ah. This is probably more likely.

In other words, other teams aren't building military units just yet. I don't think we should either then, because econ is going to be huge as a determinant of the eventual winner. We want to show just enough of a deterrent to attack while still teching...and of course be ready to backstab any serious war progress by opposing civs.

[spacemanmf]

A warrior is 2k anyway.