[SPOILERS] Catherine of China

[plako]

I don't think WK will violate his NAP. After consideration I decided that Barracks are best things to build while growing. We are #1 in power so Building more military seems waste and building pretty useless wonders without Stone or Marble didn't appeal me much either.

Big cities except Noms are in growth mode. Noms is producing Great Scientist that should finish in 6 turns or 1-2 later, if I decide to raise population there after worker. Not totally sure what to do with the Scientist. Academy isn't no-brainer since I suspect our slider will be quite low in foreseeable future. One alternative is to collect gold after Sailing and build the Academy. We could also settle the scientist and focus on getting fast 2nd one for Academy.

[plako]

T81

Sailing gave immediate 8 commerce more, that enabled us to raise slider to 40% although I think I'll log in again and collect gold until we get our Scientists in 5T. I decided to go towards Mathematics. If we want Monastery, we can get Meditation in 2 turns. OR would cost us 4 gold now. WK has 2 Phalanxes on Corinth and he got Judaism spread to Athens.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Haha, what a lovely farewell gift from tyvm to WK. And props for the excellent demonumbers, that one early axe really secured a ton of easily improved easily defensible land.

[antisocialmunky]

Congrats man, I don't think I've seen such a dominant early game in any of the PBs.

We also stole WarriorKnight's deer.

Still, we haven't decided whether or not to destroy WarriorKnight now or later from our discussions in chat. There's a case that can be made for either:

1) Kill WarriorKnight - We get rid of our immediate neighbor and have free reign on 2x the land we should have as well as all the chokes to our core. We can basically turtle, win the high seas, and continue filling out the north. However, it may trigger some sort fo dogpile/rush at us sooner than later(zomg, there is no way to control these guys anymore). Also it requires a fairly heavy investment of hammers compared to the alternative - especially if we want to take Athens.

2)Kill WarriorKnight Later - The land to our north is actually quite good if not as good as WarriorKnight's land. It will take much less hammers to populate all of that. We'll end up pulling far ahead in tech and then killing him only after we have both a major tech advantage (ala Spulla vs Jowy round 2) and don't have any other land to populate. Problem is that our unchecked expansion may overstretch us and it may not be a WarriorKnight vs us, it may be a World vs us.

[plako]

Thx. Since we've several good spots left in the north I think we should try to settle those 1st and then evaluate after we've closed the access in both choke points in the north. This won't be that far after growing our cities to new happy cap we could build another patch of settlers and fill those ~5 cities.

[plako]

T82

Normal internal affairs shots:

Lord Parkin has a settling party heading to south.

SleepingMoogle let us go through his land.

[plako]

Yesterday I also had a small chat with Lord Parkin. Main point is probably that he'll be shooting for 10 cities within next 10T.

Settler is currently on its way to c1. However I think we could postpone horse city for a bit and instead found the 3 food city north from Afaik with our settler coming from Asl. After growing our cities for few turns I think it is time for a bigger batch of ~4 setttlers to fill up the choke points in the north, found Moai city and calim horses. I'll probably also moce c2 to hill 1S of the current positioning. Since it doesn't have any food resources 1 additional farm by the river is significant to get even some kind of growth rate.

[spacemanmf]

Are you not working the copper in Nom? Have you got specialists employed?

[plako]

Are you not working the copper in Nom? Have you got specialists employed?

I Emphasized faster growth/commerce i.e. working cottage. I'm not hurry to get Barracks finished, but its hammers are starting to decay so I had to finish it next. 4 turns is needed to produce Great Scientist and it can start to work some better tiles again.

[antisocialmunky]

Are we still going for binary science?