[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Old Harry]

Remember you can always offer Pindicator gold for the dyes; might be worth it.

Hmm, I'll try to work out what it's worth to us, but I would prefer not to pay... Although in a little while we'll be in a position to hawk a few resources around, so figuring the going rate would be a good idea .

Unrelatedly: A guess from Pitboss Portal - Mardoc is waiting until Azza has played to declare and pile on in the same half of the timer as us , while Azza is patiently waiting for Mardoc to play to continue the turn split they've mostly maintained for the last fifty turns or so .

As I understand it Mardoc should be able to just tell Azza he wants the second half and as the aggressor he would get it, but also he quite reasonably doesn't want to tip Azza off earlier than necessary. All of which means we'll probably get an hour to play at 10am on Saturday .

[TheHumanHydra]

Surely if your 'half' of the timer only ends up being one hour due to others' shenanigans you should be allowed to benefit from as much intra-turn pausing as necessary to play your turn in a non-rushed manner.

[Fintourist]

Surely if your 'half' of the timer only ends up being one hour due to others' shenanigans you should be allowed to benefit from as much intra-turn pausing as necessary to play your turn in a non-rushed manner.

No worries, Azza played, and OH will post report from our turn in a sec. We are just good with speculating..

[Old Harry]

Turn 131

It's well known that the Aztecs are the most spiritual and thoughtful race in the world. As part of our plan to spread our own special brand of religious fervour and joy our capital welcomes all the faiths of the world to increase our research rate and make use of our sacrificial altars... (well okay, it's only got Hindu, Buddhism and Taoism so far, but that's 30% more beakers already and we can get a Jewish missionary from Prove Me Wrong.)


On to the fighting - Azza added a bunch of Axes. We think we can take them . Our scout and EP spending should give us vision on any reinforcements he can bring to bear, so next turn we can decide whether to attack or wait for our catapults to catch up.


We only left one Axe in No Homers because Cynheard can't threaten it without warning. We've got some workers on some forests chopping into our new cities so that they can whip on their first turn out of revolt - will the hammers be processed so that they can be whipped or will we have to wait?


In other news we'll meet Yuris and Zanth soon. Xenu/Cornflakes and TBS haven't accepted our OBs request, so I turned the galley around . F4 is getting a wee bit crowded - only ten civs left to meet!


Demos and power

[Fintourist]

Couple of additional comments:

- You can see from our demos that this military build-up (whipping) and warfare with Azza is costing our economy a lot. Sure, our GNP ranking is still decent when we turn our tech on, but it's not too long ago when we had a very nice ranking even with 0 % slider. It's not like our economy would totally suck at the moment, but obviously it has not improved with the same pace as it could have if we had remained peaceful. Well, we are confident that once we manage to consolidate our gains from Azza and our own cities recover a bit, things will again look a lot brighter.
- How on earth do krill and novice actually have such a huge land area? Have all their neighbours just went when they met them and expanded in other direction? I mean I think I would have noticed if they had been in a hot ancient war with somebody and grabbed a ton of land that way. Well, maybe it's a novice-style aggressive horizontal expansion that has simply got them a lot of room. Anyways, whatever the reason is: With that land area I would expect them to have somewhat higher in-game score so it seems that they have luckily had to also make economical sacrifices a to get it.
- Our cities now have a maximum no. of cities maintenance cost at size 10. Still a good while until new cities won't have any city maintenance effect to existing cities.. Let's hope we get that far..
- As OH wrote, if Azza does not bring a good bunch of reinforcements into Boo-urns (or nearby) we probably will roll the dice next turn and attack the city. Our expected loss will be 2-3 knights, which is more costly than ~3 suicidal cats, which would be enough to give us clear odds in every battle after bombarding. However, getting the city immediately instead of in ~7 turns is valuable as well..

[TheHumanHydra]

I think you have to wait for the hammers, but that is only a vague recollection.

[Ceiliazul]

Hammers don't commit until EOT, a chop does not allow you to whip without the swapping penalty

[Fintourist]

Hammers don't commit until EOT, a chop does not allow you to whip without the swapping penalty

But at least those hammers won't be lost, right?

Btw, I think we might need to do something about Dhalphir. He played his last turn in 19 seconds..

I mean, the game is reaching the stage where more than half of players probably feel that they are way too far behind and that affects their motivation. That is completely normal, but I think that it's part of RB code that backward players don't completely shit on the game and at least put in 5 minutes of thinking and play their turn instead of just hitting enter.

[Ceiliazul]

Isn't dhal your neighbor? In his defense, he defended pretty doggedly in 13 even while playing short turns

[Old Harry]

Isn't dhal your neighbor? In his defense, he defended pretty doggedly in 13 even while playing short turns

He's just north of BGN and NW of Mardoc, so we hope he'll be our neighbour eventually . Dhal's empire is pretty small, so I presume he's just building longbows right now. That doesn't take long... This isn't supposed to be a super competitive game either, so I think that's much less of a problem than Novice and Krill choosing to declare on dtay to put themselves in a 4-way split. If Novice wasn't involved I'd swear it was Krill trying to kill the game through trolling .

Anyway the turn rolled (with Cynheard and Cornflakes/Xenu missing their turns) and Azza already played and

Azza razed a city of Mardoc's! I'm going to log in to find out where!

Edit: The capital! Friend Computer the Buddhist holy city is gone.