Ranamar and Lewwyn, ministers for Bismarck of Mali

[NobleHelium]

What is the double culture handy for, exactly?

[SevenSpirits]

We are vying for cultural control of some strong tiles (villages/windmills) in former france, as well as some coast tiles in the middle area by Numenor.

[NobleHelium]

I was looking at your map and your cities are planted pretty sparsely. How many cities does everyone have?

[SevenSpirits]

I was looking at your map and your cities are planted pretty sparsely. How many cities does everyone have?

Us: 21

GES: 12 (14 until just now)

Commodore: 15

Yuris: 19 (17 until just now)


We have 33% of the world population which is 233 pop. Next highest is Yuris with 23.x%, which is therefore 162-169 pop.

Our cities aren't particularly sparse for their current sizes. We've been working all our good tiles except a grass river hill and a grass for a long time. Those two tiles just weren't worth screwing up the positioning of everything else for. In fact it turns out we would have had to move our capital to get that last grass. There is a strip of bad tiles (desert/plains) north of our capital that no city is working. We could found a city there but it's not worth it.

[Ranamar]

That construction there is pretty ridiculous.
Also, 3-hammer and 4-hammer towns just make me want to go wtf? Thanks, Universal Suffrage and a Levy, with the occasional plains thrown in...

I'm also inclined to joke, "Dogpile incoming in 5... 4... 3..."

Yeah, I know it's a golden age... but we'll still be at the head of the pack afterwards. I'd love to see if we can get Electricity in sometime soon. The question is whether we go for it ASAP so we can start building the wonders or try to mask the GNP increase from all of our windmills gaining a coin by having it come in the turn the GA ends. Meh; GNP increase isn't going to get people too much more bent out of shape... and the wonders are all at Radio anyway.

So, let's see... that's:
1) Railroad
2) Physics
3) Theology
4) Electricity
5) Radio? (Christo Redentor, etc.)

We're probably going to have to turn science down sometime soon anyway...

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I'm more amused by the 4-hammer city tile.

[SevenSpirits]

I think

Railroad
Physics
Combustion (assuming there's Uranium...)

This will give machine guns and a modern navy which will be sufficient defense for a long while. I would have suggested going for Flight afterward but the lack of oil before plastics simply disables planes. So probably electricity-radio, and then straight up to plastics: Nationalism - Constitution - Corporation - Assembly Line - Industrialism - Plastics. Oh I guess we should throw Rifling in too so we can draft anything. Also, maybe you're right and we can delay combustion a bit until after Electricity and maybe Radio.

We don't need Theology though, not when we can build Shwedagon Paya in one turn after the Kremlin.

[SevenSpirits]

I'm more amused by the 4-hammer city tile.

Oh, Levees!

It's too bad we only have enough rivers between two empires for four of them.

[Ranamar]

I think

Railroad
Physics
Combustion (assuming there's Uranium...)

This will give machine guns and a modern navy which will be sufficient defense for a long while. I would have suggested going for Flight afterward but the lack of oil before plastics simply disables planes. So probably electricity-radio, and then straight up to plastics: Nationalism - Constitution - Corporation - Assembly Line - Industrialism - Plastics. Oh I guess we should throw Rifling in too so we can draft anything. Also, maybe you're right and we can delay combustion a bit until after Electricity and maybe Radio.

We don't need Theology though, not when we can build Shwedagon Paya in one turn after the Kremlin.

You know, that "can't get oil before Plastics" comment gave me a momentary "waitaminute, what?" reaction. Then I looked it up. Indeed, offshore platforms don't appear until somewhat later than Combustion. (at plastics, as you said) Well, it looks like nobody's going to be trying to rule the world with tanks for awhile, then, and Uranium is going to be quite valuable... I wonder if they commented on that while making the map. This makes having a modern navy even more important, though, because the only way to have fast-moving units on this map is on boats, it seems.

I still think we should go for Electricity soon, though, because of all the windmills we've built. (... and the one watermill, but really, it's for the windmills.) Rifling can probably wait until Artillery (I think requires it?) or a threat materializes, because, for some reason, machine guns don't require it. (Gogo Gadget Smoothbore Machine Gun! Man, what?)

Also, the wonder-building capacity of Barad-Dur, especially right now, is truly mind-boggling.
indeed.
Set mind = blown.

I'm not sure we can build anything but wonders (and maybe more normal buildings) without maxing overflow every turn, though...

[SevenSpirits]

Well a good amount of that is overflow, you know (from the Ironworks build). We're only making 291h/turn into wonders.

Anyway, t122:



Bingo! That's why I didn't consider switching us into Free Religion for the golden age duration despite OR not being important. Of course, we're going to become the pope - we have about 500 out of the 800 votes. Note that since we have a majority, the diplo victory vote will never come up. But the other votes can be handy.

With railroad in, I sent our workers to RR as many of our resource mines as possible for the hammer bonus. I also started a lot of machine guns.



I bulbed Physics for ~1500 beakers and we could barely research the rest of it this turn. Done!

Uranium is thankfully available on everyone's home continent. Here are ours:




Under a workshop and our one unworkable grassland. Cute.

So also, I'd started Shwedagon Paya in Edoras. Reason being that with the multipliers we get, it's actually PROFITABLE to spend hammers on wonder fail-gold and then spend the gold post-kremlin to rush hammers. Since we're building Paya soon anyway this seemed like an easy choice!

Note though: it caused the governor to act all crazy. After ending turn it saw it could complete the rest of the wonder in 1t if it only switched from the farm to an engineer, which is terrible. (We want to work the farm and grow and not finish SP!) So next turn let's manually remove the engineer and put the farm back.



Finally, since it's turn 2 of the golden age, we get to see graphs from turn 1. Here's MFG:



You can tell where we had our previous golden ages, but this one puts them to shame in terms of hammers.