[SPOILERS] Isabella of Carthage, starring Ellimist, SleepingMoogle, and Nicolae

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Haha, got that impression too. Luckily, we have vision on their first 2 cities. Thanks to the magic of the Top 5 cities screen, we should be able to get a close-up on Kuro's capital if he's building a forge there. Not sure if we'll get vision on the buildings in Kuro's 2nd city. I say start a forge in Canopus, and the next city goes to the copper site. Luckily we should have vision on resources that Kuro and NH have hooked up.

[Ellimist]

Should we say something about our suspicions? It may be possible to talk him out of it before he commits strongly to it. If he's already planning on racing us for it, it probably isn't possible to get him to go faster than he already plans on going. Of course, the best scenario for us is that he goes for it and loses.

If that is what he's planning, his questions implied he could get it in 11-15 turns, but this was before he spent 6 hours playing the turn.
I don't know how he could get it that fast. The only possibility I can think of is that he's planning something like what Moogle did in Pitboss 4.

Let's make sure we have our southbound scout find any mainland cities he might have.

We may want to consider writing a carefully worded email.

[Ellimist]

Found stone:

Had a short chat with Kuro. I'll post it tomorrow. (Though I briefly lost electricity and the first little bit was not logged.)

Basically I told him we found stone and asked if he had found any. He said he hasn't. I asked if he'd be interested in it to build the pyramids with, and he did express interest. I said we might get back to him with a proposal.

What I'm considering is telling him flat out that we suspect he's trying for the colossus. We'll tell him that we'll settle the copper city and beat him to it if necessary, or we'll settle the stone city and trade it to him for something. If he goes for this, we'll be able to build the colossus without messing up our snowball, we'll claim a pretty good "pink dot" against noble, and he'll be basically guaranteed a wonder that works much better with his philo civ.

Now, I mentioned earlier(before playing the turn and finding stone) that we were working an engineer specialist in Sirius and might use him for the pyramids. Obviously this is not true, but it establishes that we already have a forge in a city, even if it's not the city we intend to build the colossus in. We can use this to strengthen our bluff for how soon we can get it.

I don't intend to delay the colossus for too long, but we're in a decent expansion phase right now and I don't want to start sacrificing too much going for it if we can avoid it.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Try and shadow that warrior as it gets closer, until we can get a warrior of our own as a sentry.

You know what would be fun? Planting on that plains hill and popping out to 3rd ring borders.

[Ellimist]

Nicolae, I edited my post. Sorry, I do that a lot.

I'd love to put a city on that plains hill. The previous post involves a plan to do just that.

Kuro says he's planning on getting currency soon. Perhaps we can lend him the stone for the pyramids in exchange for a lump sum of gold and not messing with our colossus plans.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I wouldn't settle Pink Dot without some meatier units and a willingness to duke it out with NH for life. Hell, if we're going there, then we want to put a cheap wall up before we sell the stone to Kuro, he'll probably want it for the 'mids (cheap libraries and PHI).

How is NH's city situation? I know his city #3 was on his home island and is a huge production drain (needs 2 workboats and does not claim hills). Has he moved to settle the mainland yet?

And Kuro can easily call us out on the lie when he gets vision on our capital in a few dozen turns

[Ellimist]

Well the stone city would be on the center line that divides the donut. We have just as much claim to it as Noble does. Noble has done almost zero exploration, so he doesn't know how far away we even are.

We spent hammers toward exploration and I think it's paying off. Noble spent those hammers toward his 3rd city.

I chatted with Noble a bit tonight. He was also curious of Kuro's six and a half hour turn, so I tried to stir up some paranoia.

Good point on the capital vision thing, but that's something Kuro may not even check for. Or we may convince him to back off first.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Actually less than a dozen turns surely he has a workboat or galley heading north? And NH have likely figured out the mainland is a donut already.

And I have no qualms about grabbing land, if anything I have a bit of an entitlement complex, it's just that (a) we need to claim it, (b), we need to defend it, and © we need to leverage the extra land our borders have grabbed. It's © I'm worried about, the north seems unusually resource-poor, the only food for the plains hil/stone city is on NH's side of the borders.

[SleepingMoogle]

Ehm.. don't tell Kuro anything about our Colossus plans? If he's actually going for it himself, we are only giving him more information to refine his plans.

We should have started the Forge-Colossus combination in Canopus a good amount of turns ago already, and regardless of how long we delay hooking up our own Copper, we should not wait for it anymore. No sense in delaying it even a turn longer with these warning signs.

[Ellimist]

I'm not sure how much more refined his plans can get after 6.5 hours of planning. If he's trying to beat us to it, he'll already be trying to land it as quickly as possible.