Mooooooo.... wait, wrong animal. Neeeigghhh

[Square Leg]

Kick ass!!!

What we know:

What we don't know:

And what Iskender is going to figure out:

[Iskender]

The warrior moved south and:

Gold, Marble and Pigs. The site is so good for the 2nd city that we've decided to switch research to Crafting and then Mining.

[Square Leg]

After having popped calendar and now having such a nice 2nd city site, going to Education no longer made sense. We don't need a border pop straight away at the 2nd city as it can have 1 gl river farm, the oasis and the grassland river gold mine to work at size 3.

Something we will need to consider is when to build the settler for the 2nd city. Ideally it should be founded a few turns before Mining finishes. That way we can farm the GL and grow to size 2 just in time for the gold mine to finish...

Will need to sandbox it - I don't have a good grip on if that means building the settler at size 3 or 4 or 5 yet.

Edit - and we don't want to be caught with our pants down when Stasis happens

[Iskender]

Size 4 seems reasonable in terms of tiles worked by the capital - Wheat, FP, FP and Silk. The rest will be junk for a while.

Woot, just noticed it - we've got [SIZE="4"]Broken Sepulcher[/SIZE]

[Iskender]

Map observations:

There's no cylindrical world wrap as well. Otherwise we'd have seen many repetitions of ourselves looking east or west in Free Camera:

Ctrl+b + F11 trick:

Theres also Letum Frigus further east. Distribution of unique features suggests we're in the NW corner. Let's see how far west our warrior can move:

Yep. The edge of the world is 8 tiles W of the warrior and 5 tiles W of the capital.

The same for east and south:

The above, along with low sea level, and the number of land tiles (1473) suggest Inland Sea. I generated a few maps and the number of tiles oscillated around 1430. Missing 40 tiles are possibly an island with Patria and Dragon Bones.

There's plenty of land, 50% more than in pbem5. It's going to be a paradise for the Clan.

If starting locations are symmetrical (3 civs north and 3 civs south) we have one neighbour to the south, with the capital 20-25 tiles away (height 32) and one 18-20 tiles east (width 52).

[Square Leg]

Excellent work Iskender!

Knowing our map location is the first part of the equation! - I'd much rather be in a corner than on one the straight edges, that is for sure. It makes our two borders much closer - man - I love trig.

It is easy to get carried away thinking about the long term when starting a new PBEM so I must remember to keep the near-term goals in the forefront of my mind. The first "mission" will be to scout out around our capital. I'd rather know what land we have than meet potential enemies. So, the scout should go SE-SW and then pop the hut. After that he can circle over to near the Broken Sepulcher. Iskender and I have discussed this and we see little need for the mana it provides. The only use we could think of it would be to give the Sidar free xp in some kind of training deal. We therefore think that it would be better to pop it. Having said that, not just yet, a bad result will kill us and that would be lame, so we shall wait for a bit until we can surround it with units before popping it. There is a chance that some knob will come along and pop it before we can so we have to be a little careful how long we wait. Again - this is something that we will just have to wait and see, not a lot we can do right now about it and in any case, our opponent in the south will have quite a trek to make it that far without being eaten by an animal on the way.

The next part of the equation will be getting defences up for Stasis. There are 2 times when I can see Serdoa pulling the trigger:

* T7 or T8 hoping for a head start and someone to get munched by barbs

* When he completes the White Hand and his Priests of Winter are in position to attack.

If we make it to T12 and he hasn't triggered it, I think it will be fairly safe to say that he will wait for the PoW.

Whilst we talk about Serdoa and the Iliians, Iskender and I were trying to figure out what tech he popped. We think we know. He strats with Exploration and someone started the game with an extra 2k soldier points (7k). We therefore think it was Hunting. This is both good and bad news really - at least it didn't speed him on his way to the PoW however, a Hunter/Hawk pair with his PoW will give him a massive advantage when he launches his attack. Lets face it, he wouldn't have teched Hunting otherwise! meh - so be it!

Finally we will be looking to settle city 2 and get that grassland gold online as soon as we can but not foregoing the previous steps! We do have Warcry up our sleeves in a pinch but I would rather use that to mess someone up rather than as a last ditch measure to survive. At the moment I am leaning on settling on the plains hill where our warrior is stood currently but lets see what is around before setting it in stone. Distance wise it needs to be close to the capital (4 tiles is about the most really) so there isn't that much more to explore before we can set it in stone and place a SIGN on the map!

[Brian Shanahan]

I'm back again (well officially Monday), so I'll read through the full of the thread and see if I can spot anything.

[Square Leg]

Be good to have you around Brian! How is the comp?

Not got much time so just some pics. not done the xls yet

err - we won't be popping the Sepulcher!

[Iskender]

We've advanced a tech level!



I didn't switch to Education figuring that +9 commerce from the Gold beats +2 commerce from a river cottage.

Warrior moved NW, he's two tiles away from the capital.

[Square Leg]

Thanks for playing the save again iskender; I was playing cricket. For those that understand I got figures of 12-3-34-6 - my best ever so I'm pretty chipper!

Definitely stay on course for mining. It is worth considering mysticism after that though... We shall see.

We should perhaps not get too carried away with the scout, after all if serdoa casts stasis in the next 4t or so, which he might well do, 2 units in our capital are certainly better than 1!