[spoilers] Commodore: Worse than Toku, it's Giggles of Siam!

[Thoth]

W00T!! :D :D :D

That's some awesome start potential.

(I'll post something more substantial in a bit....gotta go rally up the troops and get our turn played in EITB PB 1 first. )

[Thoth]

Wow. That's one sam hell of a capital we've got. My only (minor) beef is the double Crabs instead of Crabs/Fish or Crabs/Clam but I think we can make something out of this.

Marble is tempting....but we'll need to run some WB tests to see if the Beakers on Masonry can actually get us the Oracle faster than just heading to PHood.

Masonry does have some extra value if we go to Poly rather than Med as our pre-req for Priesthood: It opens up Mono for a possible religion if we don't get Hindu so we don't want to rule it out yet.

Marble doubles Oracle, ToA, Parthenon, MoM, Glib, Hindu Mandirs, Sistine Chapel, Taj Mahal, Hermitage, and both Epics.

That's a rather nice bucket load of hammers even if we only compete on 2 or 3 of those 7 World Wonders. The saved hammers on the Epics is very sweet. :D

Of those: MoM, Parthenon, ToA and Glib strike me as highly useful GP generating or boosting wonders. Any or all of which might be worth considering a run at .

From the looks of things, we've got some forests to the north to help fuel any plans (REX/Wonders/War Toys) we might want for the near term. :D

[Thoth]

I'm not sure where we're at with all the restarting talk that's been going on. Is it safe to assume we have 2 scouts? No 70 gp?

I won't be setting up any sandboxes tonight, but I should be in sandboxing mode tomorrow....just to confirm: Monarch diff with reported map size of "large"?

[Thoth]

Nice start What do you plan to do with research, I imagine Agri Fishing and BW are all priorities?

Nice start What do you plan to do with research, I imagine Agri Fishing and BW are all priorities?

Thanks Yuri, I'm pretty happy about it. Agriculture is a given, riverside corn is beautiful, and then BW is a must to improve...anything else. Once there, we'll probably stop and evaluate. With marble and all this riverside cottage land, Oracling Monarchy sounds very nice, but we need those crabs online to really shoot upward. We'll see where copper shows up, if it does, and that will inform a lot of what we do.

Yeah, Ag, Bronze seems like a no brainer.

So we should consider alternatives.

Ag/Fishing....Worker winds up standing idle for some turns while we tech to BW, but we can be dumping hammers into a wb in the meantime (instead of dumping some hammers into a warrior or barracks).
Probably worse hammerwise. but if we can get a wb out fast enough it might be worthwhile. But I doubt it.



Fishing before Priesthood. I really want to do some sims before this descision.

We can do +6 fpt with farmed wet corn. :love:

workboats are 30h apiece. 4f/2c is a nice tile, but is it worth the short term beaker and hammer cost? Not sure.

If we want to grab Oracle we want it *fast*.

Ag/BW/Myst/Poly/PH is our shortest reasonable tech path. Fishing adds to the cost by 64? beakers and only repays it's self if we also invest hammers into workboats or work 2f/2c tiles early. If we're going all out for Oracle we might want to skip fishing in favour of Worker/Worker/warrior/settler/Orcacle. With the chops going into 2nd worker, settler and Oracle.

[Thoth]

Thanks Yuri, I'm pretty happy about it.

Yeah after you put your if-then tree up a couple of days ago I checked and knew you'd be "rejoicing" Good luck!

We must have provided some entertainment for the spoiled lurkers over the last few days.

Thanks for the well wishes.

Sigh. So, got the scout, which is good, but I also now have 70 gold, which must be someone else's hut result.

Awesome news on the scout.....if we get to keep him.

Hopefully we'll be able to steal someone else's hut with that*. :D






















*assuming ofc that the lurkers aren't laughing at us because we're isolated until Astro.......

[Thoth]

Oh dear.

I was inclined to twit Scooter and Pindicator over their post count.

Until I realized I'd just pentuple posted.

oops.

[Commodore]

Okay, I guess the first question here is the most fundamental: Do we want the Oracle? Or rather, how much do we want the Oracle?

Pure speed-wise, with this many Ind around...if someone really wanted to, say, Serdoa, he could go Meditation->Priesthood and build it with mines. It's hard to say how valuable it will be to each player, but I'm reasonably sure that Catwalk, Pindicooter, Plako, and Serdoa at least will want it. Lewwyn has historically been less of a fan of the wonder, and while I'm sure Merovech/Adhoc would like it, their single big competative advantage pushes them more towards the Pyramids, plus wanting Stonehenge with Imp. We're loaded with forests, but I'm pretty sure at least some of the above are too.

Ignoring Fishing seems a bit off, thanks to those nice crabs. Fishing also saves beakers...into Pottery. The Wheel is a pretty big tech in its own right, but a long delay on Pottery for us strikes me as almost criminal. Pro's big advantage is the cheap granary, which makes everything faster. Then too, this sexy-fine capital is just aching for cottages, ideally helped along by a friendly grower-city...I'm thinking that plains hill east if it has any other food, or maybe north along the river. Our central advantages are in the REX.

Oracling Monarchy, while certainly worth it on hammers->beakers terms, might be a trifle bit inefficient in terms of growth, though. I like the thought of getting Monotheism for early happy, and whenever we have Sailing and 100 culture in Lakeside we have access to whales. HR is nice, but we're not going heavily vertical until we're nearing Civil Service...whips might be nerfed, but we're still going to be whipping out a big, horizontal empire here ASAP. (Map is large, Monarch, low-sea level, by the way, an implication of this is that we're looking at a good 7-8 cities possible before crashing the economy, assuming we settle that island to the west for +2 trade routes).

Masonry is attractive for that marble, certainly, but you're right that its not "fast enough" to compete with an Ind guy who just goes for the Oracle direct. Obviously, our two scouts give us a better shot at popping techs, and should we manage to pop Masonry or the Wheel, then maybe we can consider going for marble-boosted Oracle. I see zero reason to slow-build the sucker in that case, by the way...two chops and a whip->overflow ought to let us 1-turn it effortlessly.

[Thoth]

I'd *really* like Oracle. But as you say, there are Ind players about who can beat us to it if they try. However, if we can manage it early enough they won't have the time to grab BW/Phood and Wheel/Pottery for the MC sling.

I should have some time this evening to whump up a sandbox and sim out some options (Ag/Fishing/Bronze vs Ag/Bronze/Fishing vs Ag/Bronze/Myst/med or Poly/phood) If we are going for Oracle I think we'll have to skip fishing until after Priesthood. As nice as those Crabs are, they do cost the equivalent of a worker. And we'll want 2/3 workers to get our chops in line for the Oracle.

We certainly can put together a solid opening here by ignoring the monk line for the near term and focusing on econ techs (Ag, Bw, Fishing, wheel, pot, AH, Writing). Oracle is definitely a gamble, but if we can bag it we not only give ourselves a boost, we slow down an opponent.

Gotta run some sims. :D

BTW: next time you're in game could you grab a screenie of the city screen for me.

[Commodore]

While you read, some mood music.

Wandering in the parks southwest of the capital, you will occasionally come upon a grey stone, weather-beaten and marked with archaic signs. These are the boundary-stones of the lands of Lakeside Garden, and are more than five thousand years old.


This is one of the oldest sites of continuous human habitation in the world. Archaeologists have uncovered some ruins dating roughly 4000BC, confirming then almost legendary stories of the first Generican city. You can probably recall the old poem Arrival:
We knew at last it was time to halt,
When the cold mists lasted all day,
Maize, game, and the smell of salt,
Welcome us here to stay.


It seems our ancestors migrated south during the Great Upheaval from a semi-tropical homeland. Little is known about why the Proto-Genericans left the fertile lands north of us, but fragmented legends speak of a catastrophic unmaking of the world, probably some ancient worldwide climatic change. It cannot be a coincidence that all eleven of the Great Civilizations came about around the same era. Little is known of the world before.


In any case, the early settlement of Lakeside Garden was what finally brought our ancestors into the ranks of civilized peoples. In the long, dark, and cold winter months the Genericans developed primitive music, sculpture, and the beginnings of art and architecture.


The city was built upon the bend of the River Beautiful, and coastal access for the fertile crab banks was found both down the river and overland to the southwest, where you might also find the occasional boundary stone in advancing ocean. Nearby tribes, overawed by the thousand-strong city, allied themselves with the Proto-Genericans and provided the burgeoning civilization with valuable scouts and hunters.


No signs of either a lake or notable gardens in the region have ever been found.

[DaveV]

Oh! The most important thing! Theme! I've been wanting to do this one for a long time: Generic Suburb Neighborhood Names. It might just be an American thing, but I'm endlessly amused by the bland and inaccurate names in the suburbs. I have a list, but if you, dear lurker, live in one or drive by one I'll add it to the list:
Chase Acres
Hawk's Ridge
Pine Grove
Sandhurst
Willow Brook
The Hills
Oakmont
Woodview Lawn (BrianS)
Golden Meadows (Mardoc)
etc...

I'll add my own neighborhood to the list: Winding Creek. Lots more nearby, I can supply a huge list if you go crazy with city spam.