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

[SleepingMoogle]

Hmm, good point about the Hinduism happiness. But temples are a complete waste of hammers, even if they come cheap for us. If happiness is an issue, we should just tech Monarchy instead (after Currency perhaps?) and get some more MP units.

[Ellimist]

Here are some overview images from T74. Commentary is on the images.

Overview stuff:

Demographics:[SPOILER]

Top 5 cities:

Victories screen:

Science adviser at 100%:

Military adviser:

[/SPOILER]Graphs for 3 players:

Score:[SPOILER]

GNP:

Food:

Production:

Power:

Culture:

Espionage:

[/SPOILER]Lists of opponent cities and resources:

Kuro:[SPOILER]

Noble:

Jkaen:

[/SPOILER]

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Awesome analysis, good to know our donut cities are much better improved even though we have fewer overall. Keep pumping out workers and settlers, I don't think we'll need archery until we have Hereditary Rule. I'd be fine defending our plant with axes and spears.

I think we should leave the double-clams site as a filler city. It's very backfill and doesn't claim any novel land or resources.

[Ellimist]

Thanks. I also added some relevant images to my post from earlier today.

Hopefully Ioan will play the turn soon and we'll get another one in.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

About the stone city, it depends on how aggressive you want to be. The good thing is that NH's cities are underdeveloped, attacking it is going to be as hard as it's so far from his core. Therefore, the hill plant is better for claiming and defending land, while the double dry corn city gets us quicker development. That warrior is going to be a pain, he could potentially snipe workers trying to move forward.

[Ellimist]

"WTF?" of the turn:

I double checked the settings to be sure... I'm not sure how it got there.

[SevenSpirits]

Are huts supposed to be off according to the voted-on settings?

[SleepingMoogle]

Well, that is interesting hehe.. huts are off (should be off) as far as I know. Is there any way it can be fixed, or..?

Anyway, if we're going for the Stone city, it makes sense to get Archery at some point to get some solid defense there. We cannot realistically defend it by assuming that, just because NH doesn't have Horses or Copper hooked up yet, he won't Chariot or Axe rush it later. So we should get at least a Spear and an Archer or two, and preferably an Axe as well, to defend the city before planting it.

Also, I would again argue for the double clams site. It's low maintenance due to its proximity to the capital, and none of our current cities would be able to get out a quick Scientiest without sacrificing much growth. I'm not saying it should be planted asap, but we shouldn't wait too long with it either.

[Ellimist]

Noble should have gotten routes with us already but are claiming they haven't. I don't believe them, tbh. I think they're just looking to get visibility on more of our cities. So far in chat, I've tried to be open and straightforward and they've never volunteered even a snippet of useful information. Nor have they even considered deals that were not biased toward them.

Given the relative unimportance of the WB and the (PB2 Sullla-like) diplo I've seen from them, I'm considering closing borders. We have routes defogged to both Jkaen and Kuro, so we don't need their trade routes. If they ever defog a route to jkaen/kuro, we can probably convince at least one of them to embargo them as well.

The downside to something like this is that we make an enemy, but right now it seems hard to believe they will ever be a friend. So far, we've done nothing but give them one-sided exchanges, and Noble still seems cagey in chat. Add Lewwyn to the mix, who is considered to be super aggressive, and they're likely to cause us trouble. I got the impression from Noble that they're planning some super landgrab at our expense, and if they use skirmishers it will be hard to stop them militarily. Perhaps we can simply make rapid expansion too costly for them.

A lot of this has to do with the map. The player who seems the weakest by far is diagonal from us, so we miss the opportunity to expand at his expense. The map is also set up so that there is less N-S competition for land due to the wide strip of jungle at the equator. Kuro has not been as stingy with information, and it sounds like he's pushing eastward HARD. (I've teased him a bit about a NAP he got with Jkaen, but he felt he would be vulnerable when Jkaen discovered how much of their land he was swiping.)

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Okay, in that case, go for the plains hill plant, pop borders with an Artist, and get the wet rice hooked up. I totally forgot about the skirmishers, but they won't help grab land that has already been claimed.

And tell NH to donate this turn. The only reason he hasn't gotten trade routes is because they only update the next turn. Another way to force it to get recalculated is to sign open borders with a 3rd party, no need to let them know that.

We're the Explorers. We dumped 90 hammers into scouts and workboats. We made the investment, they didn't.