[SPOILERS] WillPlunder as Mehmed of Arabia: Noobs meet world

[Plunder]

Also, maybe we can build a ship or two in noodle-lake. To at least add some troop mobility, walking around the noodle lake can costs us a lot of valuable turns in case of a surprise attack.

Also, knights and maces would reduce any threat from an overly aggressive Rome in the south.

[WilliamLP]

The biggest problem with taking out Kuro is that it puts us in the same position as RB in the CFC game.

I guess we have to be a little careful talking about that game since there could be someone reading this thread playing on another team. (I'm not sure how likely that is, though.) But the general situation certainly isn't a spoiler to anyone.

I think we're a long way from that! (Not to mention below the skill level of the micro players in that game.) But it would be a consideration - if were able to completely take over Kuro extremely soon and quickly with no losses it might set other teams into thinking they must stop us at all costs.

In our favour: 1. AI diplo means a dogpile would be near impossible to coordiate. 2. We're not in danger of falling behind an era in tech. 3. Taking over Kuro wouldn't be that extreme an economic burden, since he's really close to our capital.

It's all about perception I guess. It matters less where we stand than where other players think we do. We still have a GLH player who can lead in GNP if he wants to, and another player with more power and land than us.

For boats in Noodle Lake, I've thought about it too and I find it hard to justify the cost of a galley there over say a catapult or longbow. The mobility isn't that bad with roads on either side, and engineering and 3-move roads isn't all that far away. The best case right now is moving a unit with move->board, move->move the galley. Then move-move-unboard the next turn, for 7 moves in 2 turns. 7 moves in 2 turns is good, but not a big deal after eng.

And yeah, Knights and Maces are great obviously, and useful for a long time. I do think this is the rare ideal case for some crossbows too. Cheaper than maces, they actually do better vs axes per unit and still destroy spears. They don't do as well against archery units or horses but Kuro has almost none of either.

We can actually 1-turn Metal Casting now with overflow, which is nice! After that the next move is to get forges in key cities.

In game, I spotted a Chariot from Kuro now, who has been horseless for the whole game.




Retep is now gifting him horse! Presumably the reason is for him to be a thorn in our sides. I'm looking forward to seeing what the east part of the world really looks like, if Retep is off in isolation or what.

We now have a complete set of graphs except for Sisub (whose seem pretty irrelevant to get).




Retep has led us in GNP for most of the game. But we know where he is, basically: he has Philosophy (he's actually running Pacifism!) and Theocracy. I'd be surprised if he wasn't going for Paper -> Education -> Lib soon.




Maybe the most important graph, food is virtual 4-way tie.




I guess Retep's spike upward in prod must be from the AP. It's a little scary. I wonder if it's worth it or possible to try and get U of Sankore and/or Spiral Minaret just for the denial value. It seems a waste though since religious buildings aren't something we want many of.

[WilliamLP]

The big news right now is the demo screen!




Suttree has been ground down by Oxy, to the tune of over 100k power points! And we immediately jumped from number 3 to number one. Oxy birthed a great general. I think he also took a city - the CivStats outage doesn't give the exact timing of Suttree's score drop. What is Oxy doing? It almost seems like a personal move. Guess who's the big winner here?

Other than that I'm just doing peaceful micro, especially spreading irrigation. MC is in and forges are started in several cities.

Boldly has shown a crossbow, so he has machinery now.

In a questionable play, I've been trying to sneak out the Great Library marbleless. It's 4 turns away and I'm pretty sure we will have it. Heck, I'm tempted to try the same thing for Parthenon.




Kuro is building a cottage out of any city's BFC, and roading down the other side? What the heck? He could be just bored and looking for worker actions I guess? If he wants to road our cow for us that would be swell. He has a scout seeing horse archers and catapults stream into our capital, so he may suspect what's up by now.

[WilliamLP]

I bet lurkers have seen this on other threads, but man did Sutt take a beating.







He renamed a city as an editorial comment I guess. I can appreciate now how emotional people can get over these games and I bet he didn't have a nice day after seeing this result.

Disaster now has only a spear and a HA. I'm kind of tempted to probe him with the southern mini-army shown above. Razing Disaster and planting a city NW-NW would be nice - defended by the desert. But I don't know, there are some good things about not doing this:
- That city is keeping BoldlyTyrant on their toes.
- Sutt may feel like the game is lost and go for a desperation strike. I really would not like it aimed at us.
- The new city would be a useful production city but by no means fantastic.
- There's a chance we may need that stack to defend against Molach / Bandit / Oxy at some point.
- My plan is to be occupied in the north, and complicating things in the south isn't great.

One project during the golden age:




I'm not sure how good my management of Cannelloni has been. I know some of the micro experts on this site could have done a lot better. The problem is that this city wants to do three things: grow, build the HE (and more buildings for great people), and work specialists to get the golden age bonus. But all three of these are at cross purposes. I'm having it work only one specialist right now, and my idea is that working them after NE is at least as good or better than working them now, so the city should be configured to get NE out quickly while growing.

I wonder if Kuro can spot any suspicious unit movements gradually taking place:




It's hard to be discreet when he has scouts and we have open borders. But I'm quite interested in seeing his unit movements. He just seems to be massing units now, and his bored workers are doing stuff like building more cottages he can't use.

Ravioli really needs a couple of dedicated ferries to get units to the south without going the long way.

I don't have a screenshot of it, but I founded Kraft Dinner as a filler city on the west island. Fine cuisine, it is not.

[WilliamLP]

Oxy took another bite out of Suttree and razed another city, which global lurkers probably know more about than I do. I think the international situation is working pretty well for us.

I thought pretty hard again on whether to take a stab at him, but didn't. The main concern is that it's too dangerous right now to be raising more red flags that we're the clear favorite to win that must be dealt with.

The score won't help: Great Library finishes this turn, and we'll get Compass too. Optics and circumnavigation is the next target. I think Bandit is the only one who could be me there. But... with a marble monopoly he's very likely to run up the top of the tree with Aesthetics and Lit, and would probably like to run to Nationalism and Taj.




Now why did Sutt research Alphabet? He's really that interested in seeing techs that he'd postpone a couple of the most key military techs in the game? He could have had longbows to defend with! With hindsight I don't think there will be much controversy in calling his tech choices an extreme mistake. He did cash in a merchant a few turns ago, but all that gold isn't doing him much good right now.




Next turn we'll plant another city, and with Suttree's losses we may be #1 in land area.

If we get through this golden age with no conflicts, with forges and all key cities, and longbows all along the border, I think we'll be pretty clearly in front of this game now. And Retep is the wildcard. I'm not sure how much land he has but maybe there's a danger of him becoming Plako in PB8, isolated off to the side.

[TheHumanHydra]

Wait, do you guys have tech trading on? Why are they showing up in the trade screen?

[WilliamLP]

Wait, do you guys have tech trading on? Why are they showing up in the trade screen?

It's in the IT thread that we agreed to a no tech trading game, so we just have to follow the rules I guess.

[WilliamLP]

This is the second turn in a row Oxy has begged for stone. I gave it to him this time! I can do without it for 10 turns. The things I could conceivably want are Notre Dame or Castles. (Perhaps UoS, but it's only good for denial value.) And in an emergency I could always declare and offer peace to get it back.




I was very surprised to see Oxy take this city! Boldy and Tyrant logged in for a looooong time and delayed the turn overnight, and now I see why. If they have designs on this city, there are two G2 longbows right there which I don't think they know about yet.

I actually really like Oxy controlling this. He's not a late game threat at all, and he's a perfect barrier to us against Sutt and (to some extent) BoldlyTyrant.




We got GLib, which admittedly could be a gratuitous build without marble. But it's still free research and great scientist points. A great person pops next turn. It will probably be reserved for the next GA, but if it's a scientist I'd consider an academy in Frutti.

It might be a strategic mistake that I'm not taking advantage of the GA to work more specialists for the double points, I'm not sure. It's another area where I need to learn more about the game. I'm leaning heavily on cottages in an empire that isn't FIN and doesn't have many rivers in the core, which feels like it may be suboptimal.




I think it's time to reassess the grand strategy. What I wasn't expecting was to be the clear leader right now, opening up a score gap. (Flawed though score is, it stares everyone in the face.) I think I need to make absolutely sure the south can be defended against anything that could come at it, and postpone any attack against Kuro for this, for quite a while. Maybe even as long away as riflemen. Kuro has obsolete units, but he has a ton of them. And as soon as we'd declare we'd be in danger of a dogpile. So military needs to be the main focus now, empire wide. And we've done enough wonder-whoring.

Bandit is now a primary long term threat. And he's perhaps in at least third place, maybe even second with all his cities and land once he gets his economy fully rolling.




Fortunately Bandit's empire is not well shaped to go after us by land. The force in Belvedere looks like a defensive one, still, and there's nothing to speak of in Breakfast Tail or Clammy.

Our biggest threat in the short term might be Molach. He's at least code yellow for someone who could make a desperate play, having declined out of contention. He's starting to build up macemen and cats, though he's not showing signs of assembling in force yet.

Suttree's city loss dropped him 22 points, and Oxy only rose by 2, so it may have had a National Wonder in it! I have no idea what that could have been. (I think Oxy's score would have increased for a normal wonder.) Suttree finished Paper! Wow, talk about a storm of the wrong techs at the wrong time. I offered to exchange maps with him. I've never given him open borders and maybe he'll be as interested in the west as I am in the east?

Optics is due in 2. The sea area between us and bandit is going to be crucial. And it's unintentionally awesome to have a HE city on the sea. Also I realize we have an advantage for circumnavigation, that we can send caravels in 2 directions easily.

What should the next tech be? Guilds is the obvious choice for the unique unit. But Engineering has a lot going for it too, with faster road moves and possible emergency castles. Those will probably be the next 2. We can't really afford to race Retep for the economic stuff.

Another big weakness in my game: I've never done drafting, except as an afterthought vs the CPU in an already won game. Apparently it's pretty good... (1 pop rifles are apparently one of the things OP enough to nerf in RBMod.) So Nationalism has to be a priority eventually.

[WilliamLP]

We got a scientist pop at 20-25% odds, interesting! I'm going to use it for an Bureaucademy in Frutti. Doing this game over again, I may have planned to move the capital to a site purely optimized for commerce on a river, but right now the capital is by far the best science city with a lot of maturing cottages. It will delay the second golden age but we don't need it immediately - it will still be available later, and perhaps even more valuable.

So next turn we get Optics, an Academy, and also the National Epic, for another score increase which could be alarming to the world. I plan to build 2 caravels to spread both ways, which should finish in one turn.

I have an evil idea to run a troll sea-war against Retep someday, pillaging his seafood.

Oh I realize a lot of the world must have research visibility on me. At least Kuro, Retep, and Bandit do, I'm pretty sure.




Kuro's situation. He has a galley ready to scout (I assume?) I debate whether to bother pillaging the connecting road. On one hand it signals we don't want to come for him soon, on the other it's kind of an act of aggression. He's spreading his military evenly, so we'd have many turns to prepare when he starts mobilizing.

For the next tech, I'm leaning toward Engineering now.

Engineering:
+ Road movement gets nice defensive flexibility, and even better worker micro.
+ It gives castles, which seem fairly broken before gunpowder. And we're not going to see gunpowder units on the border for quite a while!
+ We can start pikes. BoldyTyrant are Byzantium so Cataphracts are kind of scary when they get them. They must be a long way away though.

Guilds:
+ Grocer in Spaghetti for the large shrine bonus. But it has plenty to do for a few turns anyway - pumping caravels if nothing else.
+ Camel Archers. I think these can way a few turns right now. The HE city has plenty to pump before this: caravels or maces, and use overflow for infrastructure like a force.

Indication of just how badly Suttree got wounded:

[Commodore]

I have an evil idea to run a troll sea-war against Retep someday, pillaging his seafood.

Kuro, cleverly, is prepared!