[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Old Harry]

Turn 74

I think we want to move Lunch here to uncover this city (if it's on a hill), then come back SW-NW onto the hill next turn. What do you think?


I've adjusted the tiles and the builds, but the workers look like they are doing something slightly different to the save stack you wrote - I think this mine should be ready already? What should they do?


Power is looking better.


Demos

I didn't end turn, but I need to get to work in about an hour...

[Old Harry]

I checked the save stack and I was mis-remembering about the worker - I've moved him to chop the forest next to Agincourt. Should Endor have completed the barracks with that chop last turn? There will be another next turn that can finish the barracks or the granary... I renamed our workers to match the micro spreadsheet - hope that doesn't confuse you.

Also moved Lunch but didn't uncover the city (which is one tile further north than I thought and not on a hill). I think next turn we want to go SW-NW or SW-W.



Finally I switched research back on - IW in 7 turns at -10 gpt - and ended turn.

[Fintourist]

The current micro is completely aligned with my latest save stack.. Which I haven't sent to you.. As you know, I have tried a bit different approaches with our workers in the files that I have actually sent to you and I guess now it's time to lock down a more focused plan for the next ~8 turns.

I'll try to comment on everything later today! Btw, 4th in GNP with tech on is quite OK, not stellar.

[Fintourist]

Ok, let's make one further post concerning micro...

I like chaining that irrigation to the corn, but that would mean we can't cottage the grass between Dunkirk and Agincourt. So the question is does +2 food eventually outweigh the value of the cottage? If so we need something else for our workers to do on t78.

Yeah, this is annoying as that tile would be a very useful location for a shared cottage. We are really suffering for food as well so I guess the farm wins, but..

Just playing it out roughly Settler-Settler in Agincourt gets city G by t83 and Calender eot93 (although it's close)

If Agincourt goes Settler-worker-settler we get city G about t88 and Calender eot93 easily.

If it goes Settler-wb-worker-finish wb-settler city G is t90 and we're a couple of beakers from getting Calender eot92.

So that kind of knackers my argument that we should expand slower to let us tech faster I think a work boat in between the settlers might be handy though.

Based on your test I still really want to get the city G settled immediately. Sure it, decreases our tech speed at first, but getting that city up and running is a prerequisite for being able to support cities no. ~10 and 11.. My core philosophy for this game includes couple of basic assumptions/thoughts:

• 10 cities won't be enough to win this game. Neither is 15, or 20, or 25.. We need to get big and do it faster than our opponents
  
• I think we should be pushing new cities as fast as possible.. As long as our economy can take it. We should aim at constantly maintaining our slider above 40 %.. If we can break-even at 60+ % we are expanding too slow. It's all about balancing new cities with simultanious economic improvements
  
• We want to get 15-20 cities through peaceful expansion and then take out the weakest neighbor unless we have been attacked first..
  

Back to the original topic: I think the real question is whether we want to 1-whip the 2nd settler in Agincourt. It only speeds up the city by 1 turn (T82 vs T83), but of course we get a faster worker/WB out the city afterwards. Note that our capital won't really have much food for growing back as BoP and Endor are constantly borrowing its fish tiles..


As already said, your worker movements and everything were great this turn. And Endor should get granary first I think. And the scout movement for next turn is good as well

Ok, I'll be doing now the final round of sandboxing and I will post you my best suggestion later today. After that you can show me how we reach 15 cities by 1 AD...

[Fintourist]

Ok,

This is my suggestion. I think it's a fair bit better than my previous runs. Again the most focus is with the next ~8 turns. Turns 83-90 are again played fairly unoptimized, but they show that we could plant the city H e.g. on T90. We really need to get some cottages/dyes/etc. going in order to support our expansion further..

I think I'll log in to move our scout, but let's leave some time for discussion and play the actual turn later in the evening or tomorrow..

[Fintourist]

Could not help myself so I tweaked the micro a bit further.. So here you go!

EDIT: I promise that I won't change it further..

[Fintourist]

Turn 75

Lunch revealed jungled Bananas:



I think I still prefer the "x" location despite the fact that it doesn't bring any new food resources and "only" 2 out of 4 dyes. It simply is a stronger tactical location than some other options (bowmen on a hill are costly to kill and our culture would make in uncomfortable for suttree to settle towards corn + rice).

What do we do next with "Lunch"? It probably moves first inside our borders and continues then north? Or should we transport it to the "island"? Or leave it there to fog-bust/guard the area?

At home we finish stuff and protect ourselves against a lonely barb visitor:



Next turn we load the new settler+bowman onto the galley and head west. Btw, you might perhaps wonder a bit about the tile allocations of Cannae (and BoP), but they are not random. Cannae needs to work once grassland hill in order to complete the worker 1 turn earlier and this is that one turn.. BoP can afford to work the grass hamlet while still finishing the worker (that will be started next turn) in time. Endor sacrifices itself and works grassland forest this turn so that we just manage to finish the settler with 100/100 hammers in Agincourt.

Our demos suffer a bit from whipping, but our real challenges are our low happy cap and even more the lack of food, which also makes it harder to go vertical. Well, our game plan is to go aggressively horizontal instead, grind towards Calendar and then start growing supported by sugar, dyes and banana tiles..



Btw, our land area is pretty damn low. It is surely partly due to our tight dotmap, but maybe some other teams do not have a coastal start or are at least expanding mainly towards inland.. Or are there many teams with 6 ciities already?

[Old Harry]

I like the plan, please never stop tweaking! I'd like another bowman to ferry over to the island early and do some exploring, but the worker build in BoP just seems to fit so well that it probably shouldn't be done... Maybe the guy facing the warrior this turn should head there with Lunch? Lunch should either sit on the jungle to our south and fog-bust or go explore the island, I think we want to scout north and west with bowmen from Endor and Dunkirk. In fact is the galley going to do exploring? Lets stick Lunch on it in the hope of finding more huts!

Does granary-first in F beat the value we'd get from claiming the whale tile earlier? Happy and 2/1/3? By the way no-one suggested names for the F-city, so I think we just have to call it France.

Roading the plains hill and banana are both good moves to let us be flexible with the workers and our internal communications.

On t81-4 we could grow Agincourt on a work boat to get another couple of hammers a turn or an extra pop point to be whipped for the settler...

So the big question is: Do we settle G in the south or the east? I wonder if the hill by the dye will still be available on t90? I wish we knew a bit more about Suttree's land - does he have space to expand east? Can we afford to wait? Where do we settle if he snipes that spot? All pretty pointless questions I'm sure you'll agree...

[Old Harry]

Turn 76

First up our bowman has a 99.7% fight which he wins taking one hit. Our settler and other bowman are on the galley and will land on the forest next turn. Domestically I shuffled the tiles back so everyone is working something good and moved two workers to start building mines. We could 3-turn a bowman in BoP getting the food box to 22/26 before starting the worker? It would cost three beakers by working the gold instead of Cannae (and might delay that worker too), but with the other bowman out of place I'm feeling exposed. I'd like to change this before the turn flips tomorrow afternoon, what do you think?


Lunch is a conundrum. I don't think we need to fog bust because we'll have lots of bowmen soon who will welcome warriors with open arms. So I move him NW-NW so we can put him on the galley on t80 and go find some adventure! This uncovers Sutree's Axe, which can reach Dunkirk in three turns - it can only attack the turn after we build the bowman, but it would still be advisable to get the other bowman over here. Moving onto the forest gets us a coin flip on defense, which if it hits two or three times means 70% or 97% odds for our other bowman to kill the axe and get to five XP...


We'll have Sutree's graphs next turn, at which point we can go back to spying on m_h. I ended turn, but we can still rearrange BoP and Cannae if that won't screw the micro up too badly.

Demos - we aren't last on soldiers, but we're not far off.

[Fintourist]

Ok, I'm back (with a headache), which means that it's all about micro again..

Just making sure: Which save stack Harry are you looking? In the latest version, the worker that is mining the grassland hill S of Endor would have moved onto the banana tile S of Dunkirk. I believe this is a conscious micro improvement from your side and completely fine though Just to make sure that we know what we are doing: After this change 1 single worker won't have time to road both the tiles (S and SE/E of Dunkirk) before the borders pop and improving the cow starts. Consequently this is what we probably should be doing now with our 4 workers in the area:
T77: Plains hill road 1/2, Grassland mine 2/4 and 3/4, forest chop finishes.
T78: Plains hill road 2/2, the worker, which finished the chop finishes the grassland mine 4/4, 2 workers that were mining that grassland hill now start mining the plains hill 1/4 and 2/4
T79: Workers that started mining the plains hill move onto the tiles S and SE of Dunkirk, where they build roads T80-81 and start improving cows on T82.

We could 3-turn a bowman in BoP getting the food box to 22/26 before starting the worker? It would cost three beakers by working the gold instead of Cannae (and might delay that worker too), but with the other bowman out of place I'm feeling exposed. I'd like to change this before the turn flips tomorrow afternoon, what do you think?

Mixed feelings! I think that we can still afford to gamble with a low military because:
M_H: When we had graphs his power was even lower than ours. And there's still a good bunch of jungle between us so I highly doubt that it would make sense for m_h to send units our way
Yurimack: They are simply too far. They are basically neighbors of our neighbors
dtay: Dtay has more power than us, but it's not like he is the rival best or something like that. We believe that he is located to N/NE of us. If you look at the land quality in that direction... Well, it's crap. Therefore I highly doubt that there will be tensions between us in the near future..
Barbs: It's still a warrior era. Our few bowmen can take care of visitors..
Unknown neighbors in the west: I have a good feeling about the island that we are going to settle. I would bet money that it is a small piece of land with no opponents yet. I base this guess partly on the fact that we have had the visibility of that coast for a good while and we haven't made contact with anybody over that water. I might be wrong, but it's reasonable to believe that it's peaceful out there..
Suttree: Suttree is the only opponent that I believe we are going to have to worry about in the near-term. We have now seen 5 axes of him, but 3 of them were located in the extreme south were suttree has tensions with yurimack. I highly doubt that he will be sending some kind of invasion force towards us until we settle that "x"-site where his axe currently is..

Consequently: Building an extra bowman in BoP is not a huge deal. It will delay our worker couple of turns (it will have work to do but we will manage) and probably costs us some beakers, so if you really want we can do it! We will of course need more bowmen eventually However, I'm not feeling the pressure yet and would be willing to continue with a low military still for a while. Our demos and victory screen show the depressive reality: I think we have a competitive amount of pop points, but the tiles we are working are not good enough to earn us top demos.. I'm totally not interested of finishing 2nd so that affects my gamble mentality a bit... Anyways, I will honestly be fine with whatever you decide!

So I move him NW-NW so we can put him on the galley on t80 and go find some adventure!

Agreed!

This uncovers Sutree's Axe, which can reach Dunkirk in three turns - it can only attack the turn after we build the bowman, but it would still be advisable to get the other bowman over here. Moving onto the forest gets us a coin flip on defense, which if it hits two or three times means 70% or 97% odds for our other bowman to kill the axe and get to five XP...

Yeah let's keep our barb killer nearby and see what suttree does. I don't have a bad feeling about this yet..

Does granary-first in F beat the value we'd get from claiming the whale tile earlier? Happy and 2/1/3?

A very good question. In practice it would allow Cannae and BoP grow +1 size probably ~5 turns before our first calendar luxury resource comes in. I check this later today, so that we have something more concrete to base our decision on.

On t81-4 we could grow Agincourt on a work boat to get another couple of hammers a turn or an extra pop point to be whipped for the settler...

Yeah, this will probably make sense.

So the big question is: Do we settle G in the south or the east? I wonder if the hill by the dye will still be available on t90? I wish we knew a bit more about Suttree's land - does he have space to expand east? Can we afford to wait?

I think I'm willing to wait and risk us losing that site. The southern G spot is also valuable to us and it keeps our civ compact and works nicely for our expansion. I think that streching east already would be just a bit too much as I see it as an invitation for trouble. Who knows, maybe we would get away with it and waiting here is totally the wrong move, but I'm still crossing our fingers that T90 will be fast enough. IIRC suttree is still at 3 cities and making a 4-city line from north to west must seem for him as well.

And yeah, let's hope that there is something east of suttree's current city sites and we can live peacefully without border tensions still for a while..

By the way no-one suggested names for the F-city, so I think we just have to call it France.