[SPOILERS] Dazed and scooter play Stalin of Vikings and make a big mess

[scooter]

Oh - one thing I forgot. I've queued up 2 galleys since we need them for things. They're kinda slow building though - Scarlet and FInal Problem as you saw. Scarlet because we aren't building land military there (no barracks) and Final Problem because well it made sense.

[dazedroyalty]

A few new city names to consider:

Reigate Square
Musgrave
Twisted Lip
Noble Bachelor
Copper Beeches

I think that small island, while technically allowing Mist to invade us, is much better for us so we can invade him. Seriously, one galley with one beserker razes that city! We can have one more avenue of surprise. Mist putting the vultures on the forest is actually kinda foolish becuase it means we can just boat right around them. We could attack from three fronts at once and Raze/capture Goosegrass, Crabgrass and Foxtail via galley. Meanwhile his vultures sit uselessly on a forest!

[scooter]

I think that small island, while technically allowing Mist to invade us, is much better for us so we can invade him. Seriously, one galley with one beserker razes that city! We can have one more avenue of surprise. Mist putting the vultures on the forest is actually kinda foolish becuase it means we can just boat right around them. We could attack from three fronts at once and Raze/capture Goosegrass, Crabgrass and Foxtail via galley. Meanwhile his vultures sit uselessly on a forest!

Definitely - I like the array of aquatic options we have at our disposal .

I do think that any sort of invasion needs to have that plan in mind - 3 cities out of commission on T0 of the war. With 3-move galleys, Berserkers, and cities defended by a warrior - very doable IMO. We are delaying Machinery slightly to fill in some of these important techs, so in the meantime we can get ourselves a decent galley force. IMO we need 1 galley for the south as a raiding force and probably 3 in the north (1 coming from that 1-tile island, the other 2 coming from a double-galley move on the chokepoint city). 2 Berserkers per galley, so 8 minimum. Speaking of which, remind me to test the upgrade cost from Axe -> Berserker.

[scooter]

Well we revolted to Bureaucracy and Organized Religion. It gave us a nice boost, but nothing massive. Some scouting update:



Again, no land resources here whatsoever, but still better land than the other island. Yep, we're finally teching Agriculture! Updated demos:



We now have graphs for Nakorazul (now we're working on getting Azza's), so here's the major graphs:



Keeping pace pretty well considering Hanging Gardens. MFG:



He's probably the leader here, though we just spiked a bit the last few turns. GNP:



Pretty solid. We haven't been running scientists the last few turns so it'll get better again. Power:



Nothing out of the ordinary.

In foreign news, Azza rejected our gold and open borders offers. Now the extra gold is no longer on his trade screen so no dice there. I'd still like to get OB with him. One thing that occurred to me is he probably rejected them because he figured it wouldn't benefit him as he probably already has OB with someone else. However, what he may not realize is we're not on the continent - we're on an island - therefore he'd get IC routes to us which would be pretty lucrative for his cities - especially since he has currency. So I decided to offer a map trade. He should accept that, and that would show him where we are, and maybe he'd be more apt to accept our OB offer. We'll see.

[scooter]

Ok, Azza accepted a map trade, so it's picture dump time. I'll try to carefully do this step by step so you don't get lost. First, Azza's land which is slightly updated from our last dump:



Argh argh double gold argh. Just north of him is interesting:



Hm, Krill has really pushed into this jungle. That's actually remarkable - "Opportunism" is WAY WAY closer to Azza than Krill. I hope Azza punishes him for that. Wait, way off to the west that's actually Pindirrarr. So moving further north - Azza doesn't see much more of Krill's land than we did already:



West of this is Pindirarr's land:



Here you can see the battlefield between Rego and Commodore. Odd - pretty sure Commodore lifted a city off Rego earlier, but not seeing it now. Rego's site across the body of water here may have been a major factor. Hard to say. Either way, Commodore seems badly stunted from it. West of Commodore you see Cyneheard:



Further south:



Really vast jungle and then you see the tips of Yuris. FInally, Yuris himself:



Sorry, should have taken one more picture here, but there's not much more down there. Then there's an island south of Yuris's land that you can see in the bottom-right portion of this screenshot.


The most interesting note here is there's actually TWO CONTINENTS. This is strange since we're on Big and Small - where you have one big one with 90% of the players. In this case, we have a west continent with 3 players (Comm, Cyne, Yuri), a slightly larger east continent with 5 players (Rego, Azza, Krill, Ceil, Plako [dead]), and a craphole island way east of that with 2 players (Brick, us). Another thing - it sure looks to me that galley circumnav is not possible. This means if we can get Optics rather early-ish, circumnav would be really great. Something to keep in mind after Machinery. We should probably talk about that soon. I'd really like to get circumnavigation given how far we are away from the key players.

[scooter]

Ok, after getting the map swap with Azza I actually played T123. Not much of note, but a few city management notes. Chop at Copper Beeches into a Trading Post:



Trading Post is crucial here. Granary next. I'm chain-irrigating the grasslands and we can use those as "food". Border pop is not critical here so I might wait a tad to see if we get an auto-spread which would be great. At some point we'll slot in a Hindu missionary which we can use if we don't get the free spread. Scarlet re-hired specialists:



This was possible with it still hitting size 10. Would really be nice if we could get another specialist here actually. Great Person coming pretty soon. Scientist or Engineer would be beautiful. Merchant wouldn't be bad. I'm going to suggest we don't rush into Machinery until after this GP generates - shut off tech until then. So for instance, if we get a scientist, we can plop an Academy in here and THEN turn tech on. Academy is my preference here. Engineer would be nice too - we could choose between bulbing Machinery or getting a free wonder (not that there's any awesome choices right now). So either way, no starting Machinery until after this GP generates. We also need to finish Alphabet at minimum science so we don't spill too many beakers into it in case we bulb it or something. ANyways, made a decision at SoF:



Yep, growing into unhappy. Reason being - I think double-whipping this library makes sense, as it allows us to hire a couple scientists while waiting for unhappy to wear off. This city is great for specialists (especially if we take the clams back from Scarlet), so getting a library here quickly would be awesome. So that's the plan here. With Scarlet at size 10, I'd suggest giving the clams back to SoF after the whip and then running 4 specialists (2 scientists, 2 priests) while waiting for whip anger to die down. At some point we can squeeze a great person out of here rather than Scarlet.

[novice]

Why TP before granary? Won't you be working horse and farms?

[scooter]

Why TP before granary? Won't you be working horse and farms?

I've been thinking about this. I've been frequently doing TP before granary in cities where I've been relying on seafood to get cities started. I think that's largely been the right choice, though it's close. However, here it was much closer. The main thing is the farms JUST started on the plains, and I have to finish that just to farm the grass. Basically, the grass farms are several turrns away. On top of that, this city will take some time to get to size 2 working the horse. I can get the TP build on the horse before I can get any grassland tiles farmed. At that point I can grow to size 2, work coast + horse, and 1-pop whip granary once it's halfway done, at which point I can swap over to some grassland farms to get some growth going. That felt like it at least broke even in terms of TP before Granary. Though I'm actually not 100% sure without simming it out. I'm guessing you feel Granary would have been better?

[novice]

I haven't simmed it out either, but granary first is a pretty solid rule of thumb even in cities with seafood. Here, the TP doesn't let you grow any faster, so you are guaranteed to be able to build granary->tp at least as fast as tp->granary.

[scooter]

I haven't simmed it out either, but granary first is a pretty solid rule of thumb even in cities with seafood. Here, the TP doesn't let you grow any faster, so you are guaranteed to be able to build granary->tp at least as fast as tp->granary.

I tend to think you may be right on this particular city, but here's an example of a spot where I feel a little better about TP before granary, curious what you think. This was from earlier in the game:



I elected to get the TP done here first, whipping it to completion. The land tiles here are garbage, so I'm pretty much working coast exclusively. Also, this was keeping in mind that I was about to pop borders and net those clams, so I was able to work 2 TP-enhanced seafood. At that point, double-whipping the granary was actually worth it, so we did it. In retrospect I still feel pretty OK about this decision. You agree or no?

I'm asking as I've spent a lot of time this game thinking over the TP vs Granary in new cities. I've largely chosen Granary first, but I've made a few exceptions like the above. Part of the reason is the decreased desire to whip with the nerf. We've still done some whipping, but probably only done 2 double-whips all game. Combine that with A) crap land tiles and B) Colossus-boosted coast - that's resulted in us having a ton of new cities that start out on water tiles, increasing our desire to get a TP up quickly. I think I've done TP before granary about 3 times max including these two, and granary first in all the rest. It's been a fun thought exercise throughout the game.