February 27th, 2010, 13:36
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Sorry for the lack of commentary lately, work has been eating my life. 
Avalon sounds good to me for our empire.
Richard following TD to the meeting should be very good -- if we manage to meet 3 civs (Carthage plus the mentioned two more) that would be excellent. Or maybe Mali is one of those two more? Still gets us 2 new civs.
Nice overview shots of our empire just past T50. Should be fun some months from now to check out what everyone else was doing at this point in the game.
Barb warriors showing up...ick. They should not enter borders for a little bit longer, though, enough time for us to get some chariots out. We are going to need to spend some worker turns on roads very soon, so our zone defense chariots can respond to intrusions anywhere in our lands. Rivers are good for trade routes, but we need mobility as well.
What is our free unit support cap at Emperor level? With 6 warriors and soon some chariots, we may start getting hit by unit maintenance. 
ASM, keeping our diplo state in one of the early posts of the thread would be great. Problem is that maintaining it can become a lot of work. But this is a very good idea. Maybe we should also occasionally update our development plans there?
Nice screenshot from Mali -- corn, pigs, marble will make a very nice city for them. Grassland marble...bit of an edit there, I think.  And that 3-c tile is presumably their sheep with FIN bonus, so not really anything we don't have.
On the two trading blocks...hmmm. We will have to see who offers what deals. If we could benefit from both sets of trades that would be fantastic. I wonder who is going to be the Alpha-enabler for the HRE grouping? We have to be fronted Alpha from either group in order to trade, but hopefully we can get something worked out.
February 27th, 2010, 13:41
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Cross-posted with Cyneheard.
Fourth civ officially met, nice. And our demos look quite strong. Although without any metal that production number is not as helpful as it might be for future strength.
Two more cities by T75...if we can get a bunch of cottages built, this should be good. Otherwise we will wreck our tech rate. Costs continuing to climb as civics costs kick in, ick. Let's hope Gulliver finds something nice (and unclaimed) in the south and southwest. Drunken Pigs is an excellent name.
February 27th, 2010, 13:43
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On unit support:
We get free support for 8 units. We have 9. However, that -1gpt is multiplied by our handicap rate (either 0.9 or 0.95), and then rounded down to -0gpt. So those costs are going to start the moment we build our next two workers + a warrior + a chariot.  . If I get time, I'll try to formalize the devel plan a little better.
February 27th, 2010, 14:24
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If I remember correctly, population is a factor in the free unit limit. So as our cities grow, we get a little more cap room. But only a little.
Good thing we are finishing Pottery soon, we need a bunch of cottages as quickly as we can get them built.
February 27th, 2010, 15:17
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5 Cities by Turn 75. We better have some metal to back that up :-p.
February 27th, 2010, 18:31
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An alpha-version development plan is up on the first page. I'm still trying to figure out whether or not the whips (of all 3 cities) make sense.
Beaver Rock:
Almost definitely a good idea to whip the granary
(Again, both of these whips are 2-pop whips for a barracks):
Animal Farm:
I think so, otherwise we're going to bust the happy cap pretty quickly.
London:
Getting 2 3XP chariots = nice. I really want to have a Sentry chariot or two, and with early chariots we can go barb-hunting. Or, we can slow-build a barracks + chariot, probably finishing it around the late 60s. But we'd be size 5 or 6, working lots of mines and cottages.
February 27th, 2010, 19:35
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Cyneheard Wrote:An alpha-version development plan is up on the first page. I'm still trying to figure out whether or not the whips (of all 3 cities) make sense.
Nice work on the dev plan, Cyneheard. 
Cyneheard Wrote:Beaver Rock:
Almost definitely a good idea to whip the granary
Agree with the granary whip on T58 here. Until we can get the furs improved, Beaver Rock has almost nothing but food. This will make the most of it. I think we should plan another whip upon reaching size 4 -- 2-pop a barracks and overflow into a chariot. It can be either defense or more exploration, either would be useful.
Cyneheard Wrote:(Again, both of these whips are 2-pop whips for a barracks):
Animal Farm:
I think so, otherwise we're going to bust the happy cap pretty quickly.
If we are going to exceed the happy cap, then maybe AF should switch one turn before growth to a worker, or even a settler? Normally we want to grow rather than stagnate just short, but useless mouths cost maintenance. If Hunting and the furs come in on schedule, we can always swap to something for 1 turn to grow and then resume the worker/settler.
Cyneheard Wrote:London:
Getting 2 3XP chariots = nice. I really want to have a Sentry chariot or two, and with early chariots we can go barb-hunting. Or, we can slow-build a barracks + chariot, probably finishing it around the late 60s. But we'd be size 5 or 6, working lots of mines and cottages.
For London I would prefer not to whip. We have good tiles to work at the capital, and as cottages go up we will have even more. We will need the commerce from those cottages to keep our tech rate up so we can finish whatever we are going to trade for Alpha and whatever we can get. Also, if I am reading the plan right the no-whip option actually gets us a chariot 4 turns earlier. Yes, it is a 0 XP chariot. But for the first one that hardly matters. We just need something that can take care of any threats which happen to appear.
Sentry chariots -- are these intended for exploration?
February 27th, 2010, 19:40
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Well, sentry chariots can be:
Exploration
Spawnbusting barbs
Defense/sentry net for incoming attacks. Put one on a hill, and we get up to 3 tiles of visibility.
Useful scouts if we ever drop the  on anybody.
So, I hadn't really thought about it, other than "these are nice to have". Of course, getting to 5XP for Sentry means killing some barbs.
February 27th, 2010, 19:45
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Heroic Epic. I wouldn't mind just sending one extra out into hte wilds to meet every and murder stuff.
February 27th, 2010, 20:34
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I am not sure how much fogbusting we will need to do to keep barbs from spawning. With other civs settling all around us, there may not be enough empty room after a while.
We will need to determine our priorities, since additional units are going to start costing us gold to support. One or two chariots for zone defense of our lands, maybe a couple sent out for exploration and meeting new civs? We need to continue learning about the land near us to see if there is any metal or other highly desirable site we should race a settler to claim.
Not in any particular order, we have:
Drunken Pigs gives us a fourth city.
Something to claim the silks SW of London will be five.
Something east of Beaver Rock to share the two food tiles, and hopefully get some nice river tiles? Or maybe a bit further north to claim that spice?
Something further west of Animal Farm along the river?
The last three are all vague, so we need to explore more and firm up our plans. Knowing just how far aware Mali and HRE are will also help us negotiate a reasonable land agreement. So far both Mali and HRE have apparently settled towards us, as has Babylon. That is three neighbors pushing towards us, rather than in other directions. We could get short-changed on land longer-term. Also, if my meta-game guess about valuable resources being between civs is right, that means three such sites have already been taken. We know HRE got gold and copper -- what did Mali get with Uberfish and what did Babylon get with Exodus? What is still out there?
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