RBP3 [Spoilers] Capac of Mali

[dsplaisted]

Hiring an Engineer won't speed up the MoM unless we can get another worker to chop the forest that would be chopped by the worker that is currently mining the plains hill.

I'm not sure it matters exactly when we get chops at Steel Wheels. I'd suggest we put 3 chops total into the Barracks/Heroic Epic, which should finish it pretty quickly. We could consider putting a 4th chop in but I'm not sure if we'd have the workers available, and if we do it might be better to spend those turns on other improvements anyway.

[dsplaisted]

Turn 119

I sent Music to Maya since they requested it.

As luck would have it, a barb Axe spawned on the fogged Oasis tile and moved towards Ruby Tuesday. Lucky Maya is way up by Sirian but should be able to come down and kill it next turn.

The Mint finished in Ruby Tuesday and I set production to a Barracks, but we could also build an economic building there.

Carla moved onto the tile 1E of Uberfish and should put 1 turn of an improvement onto that tile this turn, and move onto the forest for a chop next turn. I suggest a watermill, but a cottage is another possibility.

Jana moved onto the roaded grass forest hill at Steel Wheels and started a chop. Cyrinda moved onto the flat grass forest to chop. There are 4 plains forest tiles at Steel Wheels, and we are not that far from Replaceable Parts, so we might want to build lumbermills on them instead of chopping them. That would make Steel Wheels a pretty monstrous production city, and we don't have many good production cities. What do you think?

A floodplains cottage was finished at Paint it Brown, and I switched the tiles around so that Paint it Brown is working the new cottage, and Blake is working the river cottage that Paint it Brown was working. Feel free to switch it around to your liking.

[Swiss Pauli]

Moved Lucky down to Blake's horses, moved Poison back to her lookout tile, had the Mace by Babylon Bridge wander for a bit of fogbusting, and went for the windmill at Uberfish. Moved Wild into Paint It Brown's BFC, and I think he should move on our road network to provide zone defence (as Lucky did for one turn) and eventually garrison Babylon Bridge.

At Steel Wheels, we'll need to farm one of those plains tiles if we want to irrigate the rice, but we also have two more grass hills to chop-mine before we need to decide whether to chop or lumbermill. Given we want to shake things by attacking Inca, then my instinct says we'd be better off taking the hammers sooner by chopping rather than later.

I like the barracks at Ruby and the tile set-up at PiB/Blake so I ended turn

[Swiss Pauli]

I see Daniel didn't get a reply to his email, but I think the advantage to go first is only when you can do serious damage on T0 of the war. Otherwise, going second is better because you can DoW just before the roll-over, denying your opponent a chance to react to your move with emergency whips/drafts on T0 (and potentially all turns of the war if you consistently move very late in the turn).

[Swiss Pauli]

Seeing as we’re in a pause-enforced lull, here’s my thoughts on our strategy:

1. We’ve all but run out of good city sites, so it’s time to take some from a neighbour,
2. Build Wonders in Uberfish: we’re working on MoM, we’ll GE Taj, and I think we should also go for Sistene.

For point 1, Inca is the obvious target. Set back by their failed rush attempt against Azteca, they’ve only fairly recently started to employ their traits (EXP/IMP) to spam cities (and presumably workers). I’m sure they’re keeping a stack of decent units to the south of Kalin’s Burgers, and they’ll certainly up unit production once our power spikes, and finally go on a whip frenzy once we invade, so we can’t afford to be complacent when it comes to numbers & quality of units. We can expect Inca to have Engineering and Gunpowder as well as Guilds by the time we invade.

As to quality, I think our best policy is to spam Knights and mass-upgrade to Cuirassiers (Curries). Each upgrade costs 30g a shot, and we already generate 100g at max cash, and this will only increase with our Golden Age & discovery of Printing Press.

Unfortunately, production is our Achilles heel, so we’ll have to get busy. Sirian should be able to get to 20 hpt, so it can produce some cats and maybe a pike before switching to knights. Blake currently gets 3 from REP, but even without this bonus, we have +5 from resources, so we should whip it very regularly and stack unhappiness. Even if we go OTT with the whip, we have the option of starving 1 food per turn at size 2 and still generate 9 hpt. Ruby Tuesday is a commerce-production hybrid, but we should focus on production for now, and get a couple of pikes once the barracks completes then switch to Knights. Steel Wheels will be our HE city, but for now it has a granary and a soon-to-be-whipped Mint, so it will need to go directly to Curry production once the barrack and Heroic Epic are completed.



Turning to the unlikely conversion of Uberfish to wonder-spammer, we won’t have any competition for Taj, so we should put one turn of production into the Wonder in order to get lots of overflow into the next build, which I think should be Sistene: it’s the top wonder for culture victories, and we stand a better chance at CV than Space (at this early stage). With Carthage facing a fight with India & Ottomans, I don’t see them wanting their marble any time soon (and even if they do, I’m sure we can get Babylon’s).

Thoughts?

[Swiss Pauli]

Hi Guys: if the game should get unpaused in the next fwe hours, can you check that all is ok with our tile assignements, etc. I clicked on our Engineer at Sirian and I think the game may make that move once it gets unpaused. Ta.

[dsplaisted]

You can just unpause the game, fix the assignments if necessary, and then repause it.

[Swiss Pauli]

I could if I had a pause key on my keyboard which, bizarrely, I don't.

[dsplaisted]

I fixed the Engineer at Sirian, and set it to work all of the available cottages/hamlets/etc. This means it's only working one of the hill mines, but will grow one turn faster.

I also switched Blake to build its Knight before the Catapult.

[Swiss Pauli]

I think we'd actually be better off completing the catapult naturally then whipping the Knight, but it's not a big deal either way.