Astronaut without sin confounds press, invites trio to control civilization

[SevenSpirits]

Novice and I conversed earlier over management of the new iceball cities and how to get them up without slavery since we'll presumably want to stay in caste. I looked through the save just now and I think we can probably afford to go to slavery for the next 5t with state property. We're only using more specialists than we have in a couple cities right now, and artists in a few of course. It would delay our great person out of Io 3-4 turns but that's not such a big deal. If we want it, that's an option anyway.

Another potential option is swapping to slavery 5t after that, i.e. t112-116. Build Kremlin somewhere that can finish it in just 9 turns (e.g. Titan under Bureau) and we can get two turns of Kremlin-whipping in before we swap into other civics. Which should tide us over for quite a while if we set it up right with hammers in all the things we want to whip.

[novice]

Now that it's over, what effect do you think the war had on your chances of winning?

We're still at war, you know.

Anyway, I think we've fought two real wars which are both over. First, we declared on Mackoti to slow him down. Second, Mackoti whipped his cities to the ground to get back at us and slow us down.

It's hard to predict how the alternate reality would have played out, but I don't think these wars have hurt our chances of winning. Mackoti is effectively out of the running, whereas Yuri and Luddicator have caught second winds. Our victory doesn't seem any less likely, although the timeline may have changed. Without warring with Mackoti we could possibly have won faster, but less inevitably, due to a stronger contender. Who knows.

[SevenSpirits]

I'm a bit less confident than Novice that we'll win. We've already spent a crazy amount of our one-time abilities, namely the first 10 great people births and first golden age. And we have invested very little into cottages and buildings.

We may be ahead, but part of the reason we're ahead is that other players have made weak investments which are, nevertheless, investments that are now paying back, however feebly. So we have to be careful and I'd like to attack someone fairly soon.

That said, yeah, let's win, shall we?

[novice]

I'm a bit less confident than Novice that we'll win. We've already spent a crazy amount of our one-time abilities, namely the first 10 great people births and first golden age. And we have invested very little into cottages and buildings.

We may be ahead, but part of the reason we're ahead is that other players have made weak investments which are, nevertheless, investments that are now paying back, however feebly. So we have to be careful and I'd like to attack someone fairly soon.

That said, yeah, let's win, shall we?

I think if we make it to State Property, Kremlin and Rifles things will look pretty good. We might not have too much of a tech edge but we'll hopefully have a production edge.

[SevenSpirits]

We have about 7k beakers worth of techs on the best of everyone else right now. The completion of Lib/SM/Communism will add another 7k on top of that, while all I expect to see others gaining in the meantime is about 2k (Mackoti, Astronomy).

So we'll be up 12k beakers on the closest opponent. Someone getting 100bpt more than us every turn would take a hundred turns to catch up. So it's OK if our tech rate isn't perfect, as long as we get to some nice military techs soon enough. And our tech rate is about to go up by a hundred a turn due to State Property. Still the fact that we have to build wealth concerns me. And corps aren't banned, so I guess we shouldn't let anyone get those.

[SevenSpirits]

Played. Report tomorrow. Bed.

[novice]

That said, yeah, let's win, shall we?

Starting on the west coast would certainly have helped, though.

[spacemanmf]

Starting on the west coast would certainly have helped, though.

Why? What's there?

[SevenSpirits]

So t103 Luddicator had accepted OB and offered us a map trade. We declined of course, since our map is way better than anyone else's. But we did offer them iron for iron, as a gesture of solidarity vis-a-vis Mackoti's knights.
Luddicator did not accept and countered our offer with iron + map for iron + map, which I naturally declined. I countered with our map for about $500 worth of gold and gpt. Hopefully this gets the message across without seeming too hostile.

The "war":

This knight + worker were here last turn too. Now the worker's building a fort. I see. Well, if he's going to put a knight out there by itself we might as well do something about it. I moved a pike, spear and mace into range, though out of his vision. So we'll have the option of attacking the knight+worker next turn if nothing's changed. By the way, I checked the tiles just out of our sight by moving in an axe onto the plains hill and then deleting it, and by moving nearby with our new sentry chariot. Nothing to see, just roads. So our 3 units can't even be attacked by more than that one knight.

But the big news of the turn: Mackoti finally finished astronomy. He doesn't seem to have whipped any galleys into EOT galleons though, from what I could see. Anyway I started pulling back most of our navy. I left these two galleons in the south there. Next turn we can pillage one more fish and then run away. We have so many galleons that it's ok if a few become sort-of-trapped in faraway waters.


Speaking of which, here's west atlantis, a much posher place than seedy east atlantis. And bigger, too. See the sheep? Our side of the map doesn't even go that far! The main continent is east of the center of the map, so there's less room for islands in the ocean on our side. A tile that far away literally doesn't exist on our side. I know we don't have the whole picture yet, but that's pretty annoying. (Not just the quantity but the quality of land seems to be quite unfair.)


Here's a snapshot of Yuri's campaign vs Sian. He's healing up this turn.


Demos.


As you can see below, we dipped into second place in food a couple turns ago. That turn was the culmination of a long string of being in nationhood with some slavery thrown in too, and we drafted right up the edge of unhappiness and a bit across it. So that turn (first of caste), we basically avoided growth by running lots of specs. But now that joy is returning to the land, I've swapped a bunch of specialists back to coast, trying to immediately grow into every point of happiness. Unlike our first golden age, here I feel the tile yield boosts are more relevant than the gpp bonus in most of our cities, since most of them won't produce another GP for a long time if ever.


Finally here's our capital, I thought I'd throw out some planned micro. I wrote down that it would make two settlers (and queued them up), but I forgot that some of the hammers this turn were overflow and the base rate is lower. So I think what we should actually do is switch to a worker next turn, overflowing 7h, then back to the settler on the turn we get liberalism. This allows us to overflow 32h into the Kremlin. We'll be able to get it done in only 6 more turns!! Which means we should stay in caste at the state property switch, but then take 5 turns of slavery immediately after, most of which will be under the Kremlin's influence.

[SevenSpirits]

Oh also, I had a realization last night. I don't think Mackoti knows we have iron. He can't see our resources in the trade screen and I don't think we've shown him a pike.