[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Fintourist]

Top news:

• Ichabod accepted OB. We have now 3 commerce trade routes everywhere
  
• We got AH. We have horses everywhere
  
• Bad news: M_H has archer+settler approching our iron spot. It seems he is about to settle something that does not fit our plans. We need to decide how to respond.. Screenshots tomorrow..
  

[Old Harry]

Turn 107

Okay, here is a stitch of the new land plako has shown us. I think the plan to land lunch in Ichabod's road network and go make some new friends is still good. WilliamLP, retep and Bacchus are all over there. By the way m_h took the incense for open borders deal with plako.


I think we still have a chance of settling our iron city with m_h. If we move our settler to the iron this turn his only choice is to settle in place, and he can only do that if he moves the archer to "another x" first and spots what we're doing. If he doesn't notice or he moves 1E to the plains hill we can settle on iron. If he does settle in place we can settle the hill next to the sugar and contest the iron and rice. Or we go to the coastal site to try to steal the corn (perhaps a really dumb move?) I haven't moved anything yet as you may have other opinions here.


Our friend dtay has a galley here, I was planning to move the worker by Issy to road the forest this turn, but we don't have cover for him. How about chopping that forest into the settler for France instead? Issy pops borders in five turns. Down south should G pasture the horse instead of starting on the next jungle?


And I think I know Suttree's sinister plan now. If he'd left the galley 1S he could have hit our worker out of the fog. As it is we have a choice. Cover the worker, cover the rice or cover both. Presumably there are two Axes on board, so on the hill one bowman gets 80-90% odds of defending, but that means the second axe will likely kill him. If we put units on the rice all the defensive battles are coin flips. I'd suggest putting thestick and yossarianlives on the hill to make them land on the rice, bringing THH and Viqsi to Jamestown, giving Hykephalos CI to bring him back up to 77 HP, then moving him to one of the two hills from where he'd get 65% against a CI axe. We then give Thestick Shock and he gets 73% against a CI axe. Actually Thestick might be more expendable than Hykephalos Any thoughts?


Up here it looks like dtay is keeping an eye on this region, not sure why, but I didn't move Matt this turn as I don't want to tip our hand just yet (and unit costs). He'll have to move to the forest next turn with the worker.


Overall I barely moved any units at all, things still to do:
- whip worker in Gallipoli
- whip granary in Hastings (also what are we doing with the worker and the forest chop?)
- decide on worker moves near France and Issy
- decide on settler move near m_h
- decide on defensive moves near Suttree

power


demos

[Fintourist]

FYI, I'm back now and will be able to comment on everything pretty soon! This game is simply a collection of annoying challenges!

[Old Harry]

Plako accepted our offer. It seems that we only ended up demanding 3 gpt?

I told you he always gets the better of me at diplo.

[Old Harry]

A little lunchbreak analysis:

I think (hope) the graphs are only one turn behind the game. If so Suttree's power went up 8000 on the turn he got the classical tech. That could be a galley and an axe or it could be two galleys and Construction (or alphabet or compass or metal casting).

It's been 14 turns since his last tech, so it could really be anything, but I think he got construction. If so he's going to take a while to build 50-hammer catapults, but once he does we're in trouble. Let's get Myst then Masonry ASAP to see what GNP analysis says (we might be able to do that in the next two turns with a couple more wealth builds). If he did I think we need to:
- chop one of those two jungles by Hastings (I'd rather chop the one SE of the city, although the other will be easier)
- build another road to the NE of the city
That's it. We can station our early reaction force on the unchopped jungle (it'll need a road) then if Suttree moves a cat stack up to Hastings our Shock Axes will just get odds on the catapults. If he goes for Jamestown the plan is as before. BTW It's now only four turns until Hastings' borders pop.

I did the GNP analysis and I think 2 or 3 people know HBR (GNP for Compass is 138, for Aesthetics is 140 HBR is 141).

[TheHumanHydra]

Just remember he can hit Jamestown by boat too, and that he can still road out to the tile 1SE of Hastings simultaneously.

[Fintourist]

Two things that I forgot to report! When I logged in at the night:
1. dtay offered world map trade
2. Jowy/TBS offered OB deal.
I declined both, but maybe this has an impact on how we plan to deal with them..

I think we still have a chance of settling our iron city with m_h. If we move our settler to the iron this turn his only choice is to settle in place, and he can only do that if he moves the archer to "another x" first and spots what we're doing. If he doesn't notice or he moves 1E to the plains hill we can settle on iron. If he does settle in place we can settle the hill next to the sugar and contest the iron and rice. Or we go to the coastal site to try to steal the corn (perhaps a really dumb move?) I haven't moved anything yet as you may have other opinions here.

I think we have two options. I'm pretty sure he is heading to that plains hill W of rice.
1. Settle the iron city next turn. It sucks, because we probably give up rice and definitely 2nd dyes resource and can't work iron. But it's still better than giving the whole area to m_h. At least we can share bananas, get 1 dyes resource, defensible border and bunch of grassland tiles
2. We declare war to m_h, move our bowman to that plains hill and our spear to "another x". This way we might get our preferred site, but it's a bit bold..

It's really annoying that if we would take our preffered spot and m_h would go to that plains hill, we would only lose the settling race because of turn order.. This would be a perfect time to double-move, but I guess we have to just

How's your feeling? Let's continue our aggressive expansion policy or suck it and settle on that iron..? I trust your judgement here, but at this point I would accept both options. 2nd option is just super-high-risk-ok-reward type of thing..

Our friend dtay has a galley here, I was planning to move the worker by Issy to road the forest this turn, but we don't have cover for him. How about chopping that forest into the settler for France instead? Issy pops borders in five turns. Down south should G pasture the horse instead of starting on the next jungle?

Yeah, chop into settler sounds good. And I guess we could start pasturing that horse, the worker can help with the new riverside cottage once the other worker has cleared the jungle.

And I think I know Suttree's sinister plan now. If he'd left the galley 1S he could have hit our worker out of the fog. As it is we have a choice. Cover the worker, cover the rice or cover both. Presumably there are two Axes on board, so on the hill one bowman gets 80-90% odds of defending, but that means the second axe will likely kill him. If we put units on the rice all the defensive battles are coin flips. I'd suggest putting thestick and yossarianlives on the hill to make them land on the rice, bringing THH and Viqsi to Jamestown, giving Hykephalos CI to bring him back up to 77 HP, then moving him to one of the two hills from where he'd get 65% against a CI axe. We then give Thestick Shock and he gets 73% against a CI axe. Actually Thestick might be more expendable than Hykephalos Any thoughts?

I like your thinking here! But I think the defending odds are better than you state because of amphibitious attack penalty! Let's put stick and Yossarian on that hill! I think it's enough to only bring Viqsi or Hydra into Jamestown so that our units are less out of position though. But since suttree does not have anything on the staging tile, I'm fine with bringing both if you want. So let's have at least 1 bowman(oxy) + spear(krill) + axe(viqsi?) in Jamestown.

I think we should promote Hykephalos, but let him heal for 1 turn in Hastings. He can still attack rice tile if needed and higher HP kind of compensates for the river attack penalty. We have a chance to heal him so let's use it! It would be a pity if we move him onto hill and suttree moves next turn to staging tile with axes and our killer is not in shape!

Up here it looks like dtay is keeping an eye on this region, not sure why, but I didn't move Matt this turn as I don't want to tip our hand just yet (and unit costs). He'll have to move to the forest next turn with the worker.

Not moving Matt is good. Maybe we are in settling race here as well? I think we could move the spear in Endor already towards site K. I would feel better if we would have spear+bowman to show dtay that he won't get an easy raze chance. Endor can still do an emergency whip if needed and after the settler is produced it should build a defender for itself.

So what I'm suggesting is keeping the spear in range to defend Endor, but already put it closer to city K.

whip worker in Gallipoli

go ahead!

whip granary in Hastings (also what are we doing with the worker and the forest chop?)

Hmm.. It's slightly risky, but I say, let's whip the granary. But at the same time let's be conservative in the sense that we move 1 worker onto forest N-NW of Hastings. Suttree's power graph looks so depressing that we probably want to get an extra axe out of the city in 4 turns.. I have no strong opinion here though so feel free to disagree and play it differently!

[Fintourist]

Just remember he can hit Jamestown by boat too, and that he can still road out to the tile 1SE of Hastings simultaneously.

Yeah, we want to have 3 defenders in Jamestown and I think we leave Brick still in place to guard that tile SE of Hastings.

Btw, you asked at some point about culture in our cities. Hastings gets border pop eot109 IIRC and Jamestown does not produce culture yet.

EDIT: The border pop in Hastings will be pretty nice also because that mountain SE-S of the city provides a nice visibility over the area.

[TheHumanHydra]

How many units will be left in Hastings or able to reach it in one turn?

We should get culture in Jamestown so it can see the gems tile over the water. With the Hastings mountain, that would make us fairly safe in terms of vision of incoming attacks.

[Old Harry]

Turn 107 finishing off

No pics as work blocks dropbox.

YuriMack offered open borders. I declined.

I planned to move the settler to the Iron and cover him with the archer but instead of roading the hill forest I chopped so that leaves no chance of settling the city before m_h. Not sure what to do instead so left the other worker, bowman and settler unmoved. Why does this keep happening.

Chopped the forest at France, whipped the granary in Hastings and moved the worker to chop the forest (borders pop eot109) and whipped the worker in Gallipoli.

At Hastings you're right - the chariot stands a better chance attacking over the river with another turn of healing, but at Jamestown you're wrong, I included the amphibious bonus in the calculations, it's just not as good as you'd hope for some reason. I've put TheStick and YossarianLives on the hill with the worker and moved Viqsi into Jamestown. That leaves 3 bowmen, a spear, a chariot and two shock axes in or next to Hastings and a spear, an axe and a bowman in Jamestown with two bowmen on the hill.