[SPOILERS] Bismarck of Mali (NobleHelium and Lewwyn)

[NobleHelium]

So I opened the save and scrolled down over to the southeast. The city was founded as expected, but the workers are nowhere to be seen. Then I moved southwest...



That's interesting. The galley definitely went directly south. The question is whether the workers went onto the galley to evacuate. I'm inclined to think so, unless the galley went back to the island to pick up more units. The other locations that the workers may be are 2W or 1W-1NW of the warrior's current location. Either way we slowed them down by stopping them from pasturing the cows without any overt hostile actions. Unless they weren't planning to pasture the cows to begin with, which is possible. I see a flood plain west of the city, can't tell what the other tiles are. We'll find out soon.



Warrior in the middle found something interesting. There's copper on the other side of the mountains. So maybe we'll shift the city spot to catch it.



I've whipped the mint in Lithium. After further contemplation, we don't think there's a huge rush to get out another settler. An attack at this point is not likely to be all that useful. We can scout around and see where Jkioan's copper is (I expect to the southwest on the shore somewhere), and then find Kuro's cities which are supposedly planted pretty close by and lightly defended. Ideally our presence makes them cautious and build more defenses, which is good. We're really too far away to make any productive gains right now.

Lewwyn and I also talked about delaying mint whips for OR, but really OR isn't all that useful for mints. The main reason is that the IND bonus dwarfs it by a large amount, and while we'd save some hammers we would have the mints later and be unable to get additional gold and possible hammers (if get 4 hpt or more) during those turns. If in theory we were doing 4-pop whips instead of 2-pop ones for mints, then the OR bonus would save twice as many hammers and be a lot more useful.

We need to whip the mint in Carbon and Beryllium next turn. Beryllium needs to whip before the chop comes in, otherwise the whip becomes 1-pop. Then we funnel the chop's hammers as overflow into the lighthouse. When Boron grows to 4 we whip that mint too, and give the Corn back to Carbon. Carbon should probably finish its barracks and start pumping out some land units. I'm tempted to settle the next city in the forward horse spot and dump a missionary in it immediately, which will make its border pop in 5 turns. And we'll get more of a forward base to launch attacks and plant more aggressively.

Turn 83 demos:



Turn 84.



We need to remember to turn off tech next turn.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 85 this morning. Hopefully I didn't make any mistakes.



Some interesting events recently. After 50 turns of waiting we finally got our Prophet from Stonehenge. Soon we'll be spewing random GPs from Helium most likely. EMC got their GP, which was sped up by Colossus as well as the forge engineer. Ellimist told me that they would have used a GE on the Pyramids unless we gave them some sort of deal not to, which we probably wouldn't have.

Let's see some other screenshots.



Oxygen will be founded here next turn. We need to make sure that the forest tile is owned by it, as well as the cottage. It'll work the cottage until the pasture is up. Pasture takes 4 turns, we need 2 more turns to finish the chop. So the pasture will take 3 turns (2 real turns) to complete, with one worker contributing 3 worker turns and one contributing 1. So two turns of working the cottage and then onto the cow. Workers then move onto the rice tile and farm it up in preparation for size 2. Then we'll probably have one cottage the northeast flood plains while the other starts building a road to Fluorine, or perhaps to the south. Something like that.



Two of EMC's cities. I'm sure his horse one is to the west. Regulus is size 6 and is working a forest. I'm sure it's working a cottage on that flood plain to the southwest though. Denebola has many hills but not much food. I think I'd probably farm those river tiles, or plant another city to work the gold.



So yeah, Jkioan's workers didn't evacuate after all. I guess it was rather silly to think they would do that. Still, cottaging the flood plains has to be less efficient than pasturing the cows, and they wasted a turn moving onto the forest. Whereas they could have gone pasture -> road -> cottage with no loss of turns. That city has six flood plains...(insert Lewwyn land quality rant here)



Helium's now size 8. It's great right now but I worry about it long term due to the lack of food as well as the lack of other hammer tiles. I wish it was inland, or that those peaks weren't there. And it's not on a river either, a levee would be awesome otherwise. That's the nice thing about dikes, you can build them anywhere on the coast and they activate the levee function for you when otherwise you'd need to plant on the river. Still, those things are silly to think about, since the game may very well be over before that. At any rate, we can now do 2-turn workers here (exactly 30 adjusted hpt), which is awesome. Unfortunately it's way off in a corner and will thus spend most of its time building wonders. :neenernee We're not going to finish that work boat for a while. It's for Fluorine. I think we'll do a worker, then a missionary and then finish the work boat. Or maybe two workers before the missionary. We should be able to whip out the next settler in Hydrogen or Lithium soon around that time. And then we'll get Stone. I'm sure Lewwyn is grumbling about us not building a second galley, but I'd rather not pay the maintenance yet and I think we can make do with one for a while longer.

And I just realized I made a mistake. Can't 2-pop whip the worker in Lithium since it has too many hammers due to the forge. Should've dumped the overflow into the library first...probably should've grown to 5 first as well. Hum. I think we'll just have to swap back to the library and whip a settler at size 6 and overflow back into the worker. That means we'll have to work coast for a turn, nothing we can do about that I guess. A one-pop whip would be too costly and we can't afford to spend four turns slow building the worker.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 86.



Next turn we finish Monarchy. We could dial research back down to 0%, but then we'd delay Monarchy and thus civic switches for another turn, which isn't worth it.

The shrine gives us 4 gpt base, and that's roughly what founding Oxygen cost us.



The 4 maintenance isn't all of the costs it gave us, of course. Every other city's maintenance also went up. But we also saved a couple gold in unit maintenance, so that roughly evens out. Founding Oxygen gives us 5 commerce immediately, which is nice. We're still at roughly 50% breakeven (currently slightly higher).



Once the Helium worker completes, we'll move it to Lithium and then load it onto the galley on the same turn. The galley moves south and deposits the worker next to the back horse, and it starts roading that tile. Then it roads the sheep, and if possible it'll road the next hill. Lots of roading and then we'll hook up all those resources, and get out work boats for those fish. I expect Fluorine to be a fantastic city that gets out of the gate very quickly with three food resources. We'll need to make sure to chop that forest nearby to avoid the painful 2->1 granary whip, which is particularly bad in this case since the city will grow faster as it grows onto more food resources.



Jkioan researched Currency, and then their GNP went up a lot. I'm going to say there's no way it could have gone up that much even from an extra 15 commerce on trade routes. Their GNP went up by 30, so that should be researching Code of Laws with two prereqs.

[NobleHelium]

Kuro: too busy spamming up the Pitboss forum to play during his supposed time slot.

[NobleHelium]

Anyway, played turn 87.



[strike]Looks like they're building a second cottage right after the first. No real other place for the other worker to have gone to, anyway.[/strike] Or not. Apparently it's on the city tile with the warrior, I didn't notice the two dots before. That's why I hate playing turns past midnight. *cough* They also got a lucky religion spread (their capital is the holy city, which makes it considerably closer to the mainland than ours), which means they'll be able to claim the horse tile with ease.

We finished Monarchy at breakeven, and so we need to remember to revolt next turn. OR will cost us 3 gpt in civic maintenance. Mathematics is showing 5 turns at breakeven, which isn't bad. We'll want to turn off tech for at least two turns.

I said in the signs that we should build one more worker in Helium before doing the missionary, but it looks like we should go right into the missionary. Lithium currently shows growth in 3, but that drops down to 2 if we work a coast for one turn instead of the grass mine. So we work the grass mine for one turn, and then give it back to Hydrogen when it grows and work a coast for the other turn. That grows it and lets us get out the settler in 4 turns, which means we need to do the missionary in 3 turns in order to save a galley movement point (the settler can load onto the galley, whereas the missionary can only reach the city tile). So Fluorine should be founded on turn 94.

Main thing to remember next turn in addition to the civic switch is to load up the worker that just finished in Helium onto the galley in Lithium. And we need to keep moving the warriors in the Oxygen area. One warrior goes to explore the western half of the area between Jkioan and us, another goes to the Fluorine area to watch over the worker, and the last one fortifies in Oxygen.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 88. Some interesting events happened this turn despite the fact that we got no production done whatsoever. First we got this of course:



Interesting stuff here. Jkioan has already built an archer, although it was recent (10% fortify on it). There's also a settler and galley in the city, and it was whipped just last turn I think. So this turn it'll be on the galley and shipping to the mainland, presumably to claim the copper. Our warrior is in the area obviously, so they might very well ship the archer with it. I wouldn't be surprised if they found where the warrior is right now.

The main news of course is the revolt...



But we also got another natural spread...in the farthest city! Go shrine! I raised a concern with EMC recently that we might take over the Stone tile TOO fast, before they can at least use it for half a turn. Their original ETA for hooking it up was turn 91, which they say is now turn 90 due to the help of an additional worker. I originally guessed that we'd take the tile over on our turn 92, which was too close for my liking. I forgot about the anarchy though so it would have been turn 93 now, but we got the religion spread which speeds it up to turn 91 most likely. Either way, we should be okay here. We will of course get lots of overflow hammers when we whip the mint in Nitrogen at size 4, but that's a while off. Focusing on putting cottages down as it grows right now.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 89 this morning. Nothing really interesting from what I remember. I did find an archer in EMC's horse city on the west, so they have Archery too. Jkioan's archer and settler disappeared into the galley, which went 2N. I expect it'll turn west this turn and deposit the pair somewhere near the copper.

Not much else, turned off tech; we're getting 50 gpt at 100% gold right now. Pondering what to build in Hydrogen after the library. Could whip another settler, but I'm not sure if we have enough worker support. If we founded another city at this point it would likely be the one on the inner coast. Still not decided on that location, but we haven't found any other food within range of the copper there so far. There's one remaining tile that could potentially be a good city location to get the copper though, on the inner coast 2S1E of the copper. The tiles around it are all fogged, so no idea how much food is available.

Not sure what to build in Boron either. I was thinking of whipping a worker but I don't think we can get a 2-pop whip for it, and a 1-pop whip isn't that great. Basically we don't really have any cities that can efficiently crank out workers right now. Maybe it's best to whip one out in Boron for now anyway, otherwise it'll grow onto unimproved tiles. Or maybe whipping the library and then regrowing on a galley is better. I think I should have dumped the mint overflow into a worker instead of the library; it would have completed in 2t. I did consider it, but I figured whipping one at size 4 would be better.

Oh and Kuro keeps asking if we're interesting in "giving him something" for him not to push hard for the HG. If you want something then ask for it, don't give me vague "make an offer" statements. I don't care much if he chops ten forests in his newest city to get it as he threatens to do. It'll cost him a lot of worker power and a hammam in a new city will be useless for a long time.

[NobleHelium]

Bored waiting for Kuro to play his turn again. Apparently he's busy with some real life stuff as well. So I looked over the save again and was happy to see that it seems we can still double-whip workers in Boron:



We've got 8 food surplus and 4 base hammers, which means 8+6=14 hpt on a worker, leaving it just shy of the 15h threshold when it becomes a 1-pop whip (30 * 1.5 = 45h). Hurray for that. I was thinking of intentionally not working the mine for a turn in order to get that second pop to whip for overflow, but no need now.

Apparently another GS was born. It has to be Jkioan's since the date is still from last turn.



Also, apparently Jkioan's city of Johnny English got a spread of...Hinduism! Oookay. Hindu evangelists from the other side of the world?

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 90.

Kuro told me that he can finish the HG by turn 98 to turn 105, depending on whether he uses 4 or up to 8 workers. Eight workers for a noncritical wonder? Okay dude. I'm not even sure if he has eight workers.

Other than that, not much else to talk about. I see a Hindu missionary heading south from EMC's lands. So that sounds like they worked out some sort of religion deal, or maybe EMC is just converting Kuro's cities on their own accord.



Still can't really find food in the jungle area. This is getting depressing. I want those dyes. Also there probably isn't marble to the west of that sign, since nobody else has found stone or marble yet supposedly. Jkioan's archer/settler pair hasn't reappeared, so they might very well be settling towards us. I'm not happy about that, since Kuro has settled towards them much more, and they haven't even claimed their copper. Not much we can do about it right now though. Once Carbon finishes its barracks I'll probably crank out some units. Thinking of even building swords (LOL) since they'd do better against archers than axes, and Jkioan still don't have copper yet. Obviously we'd need Iron Working first. Probably want a library in Carbon sometime though, after we get religion in there maybe?



Also, according to the anarchy cost formula, the most cities we can plant without increasing our anarchy costs is eleven. After that, a two-civic switch will use two turns of anarchy. So we need to keep this in mind and potentially delay a twelfth city until after we revolt to say Bureaucracy and Representation.

[Lewwyn]

Nuuuuu! No military, don't have time for it anymore and he's got archers. You'll just be all day especially with 1 move swords. We just need more settlers.

Also a a trireme. Build a trireme send it down there. Build a chariot send it down there too. Snipe workers and pillage fishing nets. Kill a galley if you can. But no Swords. Maybe 1 or 2 skirmishers for our newer cities. We need to focus on expanding, infrastructure and Wonders at this point.

Jkioan isn't really a threat. Harrass them slow their growth and later we'll conquer em.