[SPOILERS] Commodore, Mist and the Weed. A Farce in three acts.

[Gaspar]

Perhaps Professor Lidenbrock can replace Sam here?

Get on with it, good lads. Let us kill us some Norsemen!

[Commodore]

Wooly island mammoths shiver in the cold trees,
While in the well-watered plains, forests cover corn.
Viking scouts waddled aimless, gormless, toothless,
Seeking more to fight, Byzantine scout pushes on.



In good news, the first Bronte plops down on the tail-end of Long Lake, starting on a work boat. In the end, the current Dickens has all of its good tiles first-ring, that's hard to beat. Here's the little empire, now grown a little bigger.



And from the demos, we're growing the fastest of anyone at the moment. My C&D-fu is weak, but it seems like we're either second or third to two cities, hopefully something that will snowball further as we grow.



Bronte is a very nice little city, which will focus on getting the workboat out first a formost, then growing to size three for settler-pumping. It occurs to me by the same logic that feels the pasture to the west holds horses, this eastern mine might well be copper, which would make BW a bit smarter earlier. I'm also a bit concerned about security, there is a Lewwyn lurking out there somewhere in the fog.



For Verne, we'll go ahead and finish the warrior and then sink the extra five hammers or so into a barracks while growing up to size five. Then it's worker, worker, settler, or worker, settler, worker...barring emergencies.



I say, lads, we need a good deal more exploration done! Merely because you started with The Wheel doesn't mean you should be immitating the cautious young Axel.

[Ilios]

You know you can improve that Deer, right?

[Commodore]

You know you can improve that Deer, right?

Jah, but we're in the weird spot where mining is better than camping this second, with the railroaded mine worth 0/5/0, while the jungle deer is only 4/0/0 until iron working. That is where the worker is heading next though.

[Commodore]

Thar's gold in them thar [strike]hills[/strike] river plains! In most games I'd burble inanely about how the plains 1NW of gold makes a nice city site, figure it as a reach location, and settle towards it. This time, I'm thinking: Mining that gold will support nine cataphracts once they move out of our borders.



It's been a while since I've shown an overview. Here's natural Byzantium in all its glory. Purty enough, and we're starting to get a grasp on its general shape. Kipling will most likely be moved, and soon. We need AH, BW, and Pottery stat before denuding the capital's forests (sans preserve) into the Oracle. Six chops will net 78 hammers, so only 22 more to get, or a whip overflow. Now realistically we're not going to have six workers on hand to chop it at once, but still, a four turn build should be doable.



Somewhere in the northern forests we need to be looking at being able to chop out a forge and then The Colossus in rapid succession if we can get the MC bulb going in a reasonable time frame. Merchants will be working full time once MacDonald is online, so we don't have too much longer.

[pindicator]

Wooly island mammoths shiver in the cold trees,
While in the well-watered plains, forests cover corn.
Viking scouts waddled aimless, gormless, toothless,
Seeking more to fight, Byzantine scout pushes on.

+1

[SevenSpirits]

Thar's gold in them thar [strike]hills[/strike] river plains! In most games I'd burble inanely about how the plains 1NW of gold makes a nice city site, figure it as a reach location, and settle towards it. This time, I'm thinking: Mining that gold will support nine cataphracts once they move out of our borders.

18, in fact. Supply is only 0.5g per unit past the limit, rounded down.

[Commodore]

18, in fact. Supply is only 0.5g per unit past the limit, rounded down.

We don't need your elitist maths, we have cataphracts*.

[SIZE="1"]*hopefully soon[/SIZE]

[Commodore]

Another day, another turn or two. The Awesome Mine[SIZE="1"]tm[/SIZE] finished, dropping the worker to an awesome 3-turn build. Definitely glad we didn't opt for a Mining start. Looking at things I think we can kick off a settler once the worker finishes, and we'll be able to bring that down to a three turn build too if we really want that. Economy crash? Nah. Might force us into the briar patch of working merchants though.



At the end of turn, we snagged Buddhism in Bronte, and now we'll have the siren call of a shrine staring at us for the next fifty turns. In all seriousness, I kind of wish we'd have found Bronte a little further afeild to take advantage of the free border pop(s), but I'm still happy. With religion secure, now we are free of ever building those nasty monuments.



Looking swell, gang. Now let's work on the "don't die" portion of the plan.

[Commodore]

This was a neat turn. For the first event of this turn, see the last event of the last turn.



An unfortunate side effect of this is that now our score and GNP are both inflated. Below the radar, then bam cataphracts would be the best scenario. CY is looking good, although expect it to plummet and MFG to rise in two turns when we swap to settler mode.



About that...how does a 2-turn settler sound? With the swap to the work-shopped flood plain, we'll have the overflow for it. This, in the parlance, is pretty frickin' sweet. Imp isn't the best trait in the game, but Imp + Grocer? Yeah, we're in a good place. Thanks for talking me out of Willie, Mist.



Meanwhile, we're still on a quest to find more good spots to plunk down those cheap settlers. The warriors have found some nice spots, as well as marble-to-far-for-Oracle. Kipling is going to get split and shifted, although we need to know a bit more to finalize things.



On the far side of the world, our scout has found the green borders of Brian, favored victim #1. We'll make contact next turn and we can play the swap tech/examine GNP game to see what his tech situation is. Serdoa is still going to get the brunt of our EP spending though.



Hum. Do you notice something very interesting in the above picture. Brian is Creative, so his capital has already hit third-ring borders. It almost looks like...



Yep! Nice, thar be our gold. I still favor MacDonald > Dickens > Kipling in order just to get the AH food online at the right time, but that plains hill is looking very tempting to me. Shares capital deer, gets gold/pigs...might shift 1W to get lighthouse lakes in play but that's a plus, not a must.



We'll be needing automated worker prompts pretty sternly on this one, the temptation to Kuro out all the settlers is strong.