[SPOILERS] Bismarck of Mali (NobleHelium and Lewwyn)

[NobleHelium]

Played the turn, quick notes.

Market in Helium is showing 5 turns with or without the engineer, so I think we definitely want to work a coast and grow in 6 turns. We'll need to figure out the tile configuration for Lithium and Beryllium, and whether they want to take a mine from Helium (would obviously delay the market but cause Helium to grow sooner).

There's a missionary in the middle near Oxygen, I think next turn we want to load it onto the inner coast galley that can go back up to Neon. We load a worker the turn after that before the galley moves away, one of the ones that just finished the wheat farm (they can road this turn, and one can road for the other to get onto the boat next turn). We got a Confucian spread in Silicon, so it definitely needs a missionary but it can wait.

I went with the settler in Fluorine, so that needs to be whipped next turn. #1 priority. We probably want to start moving south with the spearman that's now in Sodium, since we won't have the capacity to ship him. I'm not sure what to build in Oxygen since we're not doing the settler, the chop will come in in 2 turns. Either we do a worker, market, or library. Market's not so bad with a chop, we could 3-pop whip it since it has religion now.

We need to turn tech up enough to finish Calendar, either 30% or 40%. We have enough gold for 50%, probably, but no real reason to get more overflow. After Calendar it's up in the air what to get next - we could get Compass for really cheap harbors (2c per coastal city), we can get Aesthetics-Literature for more wonders that are pretty cheap (Helium is pretty occupied though...), or we can get CoL for CS (but we can't afford courthouses in the farther cities which are the ones that need it right now), or possibly even Construction for...bridges! There are a lot of rivers on this map and it would not be an insignificant benefit. But an actual economic tech is probably better.

Oh and last thing, EMC is going to plant on the coastal border spot rather than the center one. That means the contested forest tile recently mentioned will be seriously contested. If EMC's settler moves as predicted next turn NE-NW onto the forest tile 2N of the border grass hill it's currently on, then we should move the idle worker nearby onto the forest west of our future city site (there are signs for this). If they don't do that and you see that they'd see us move the worker there, don't move there with the worker and do something else instead. I don't want them to see that we're planting our border city until we've actually planted it. I've timed a missionary out of Nitrogen for the same turn that we plant the city, and we can go granary-mint-library in it quickly with a bunch of chops. This is from the settler just finished in Hydrogen.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn, not going to say much. Signs are pretty explanatory. Keep the work boat inside borders to avoid supply costs. We finished Calendar. I think we do Compass next, CoL is useless for now and we're too busy to build more wonders at the moment. Compass should take about 6 turns.

[NobleHelium]

So yeah, we're up to turn 109.





Jkaen moved a scout nearby and found our sentry skirmisher, so he might suspect we're planting a city there soon. In any event, you can see the distance between the settler and the city site. They could conceivably plant two tiles away and screw us, in which case we'd have to declare war on them soon. Or maybe we just plant on the open plains tile, now that I know it's not an iron tile. It's really crappy until a border pop and we don't have a missionary around though. I am actually pretty tempted to plant there anyway, it avoids wasting those two grassland tiles (one hill) and I don't think the placement is really a big deal in the long or even medium term. And we could probably plant it one turn sooner. I could swap the worker overflow build in Fluorine to a missionary...hum ho.



If you guys want better reports then tell Kuro that "I can play at any time" does not mean "I can only play at random times."

[NobleHelium]

Yeah, I think the plains tile is better. Some of the turns wasted waiting for a border pop can be spent clearing the jungle from the rice, which doesn't require it being within borders. So we're not losing much.

[NobleHelium]

Played turns 110 and 111.



Apparently Ellimist is going to rush-chop this forest as well. He did in fact wait for the border pop in the south before finishing his chop there. He's also hoarding a lot of gold (up to 536 now...), not really sure why. I think he's afraid of his economy crashing once he's finished building all his cities, but I think it might also mean that he hasn't teched Calendar yet. He's built roads on several plantation tiles but no sign of actual plantations. He's gaining about 63 gpt, which is about the same as us at 0% science, but I believe we have more libraries.

There have also been no GPs born, so with each passing turn the chance of them getting a GE diminishes. They might build the Confucian shrine with a prophet, but it won't be a great use of a GP either way - they don't even have Hinduism in several of their older cities. Not sure what they'd do with a merchant - I wouldn't be surprised if they just shipped it over to us for a trade mission without saying anything though. We do have a NAP through the end of turn 136, so I suppose we can't really stop them either way.

Oh and we're going to get some Great Wall fail gold as you can see.



We can finally see the barbarian city. Ellimist led me to believe there are multiple archers in the city, and clearly there aren't. I think we would only need one swordsman then, just to knock down the archer to a killable range (or to win if he's lucky...), and then axes for the rest. I'm not sure we can unlock the HE, but I figure we'll go to war soon enough this game either way. The galley north of the work boat has a missionary and a worker in it. I was originally going to dump the missionary in Aluminum, but I think we should dump him in Magnesium now and compete for the silk tile. There is a trailing galley with two workers, and next turn the workers will be unloaded on the hill south of Sodium as indicated. There's no point in continuing on the galley because they can get to an improvable tile (the gems and/or the spices next to it) sooner this way. The optimal worker setup is probably to road both tiles separately and then combine the workforce on each tile in succession.



Jkioan is obviously setting up Johnny English to become their GP farm, and they are PHI, but two bare farms when the city already has four food resources is rather overkill...and it also has a lake which is already better than a farm. They don't have a lighthouse in here yet though. And yeah, they have copper here too. It seems they have 3 copper and 1 iron. There's also one iron at the southern tip of the donut, between both Kuro and Jkioan. I've only seen one other iron in Kuro's borders so far.



Our research isn't as good as it looks (we have the most culture for sure), but I think we're the highest by a small amount above EMC.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 112.

EMC is putting 6 EP/turn on us. Next turn we need to swap all 4 of our EP to him. I do not think they have research visibility yet, but they're close. We should do CoL next, even closer cities like Helium and Carbon have significant maintenance (~8 gpt) due to sheer size. I think CoL before Compass would have been better, I didn't realize the maintenance in the closer cities was getting so high.

I decided it was stupid to slowly move the newly disembarked workers south from Sodium to Aluminum, so one of them stopped to help with the sugar plantation at Sodium. Plantations take 5 turns, so next turn the worker that just finished roading the deer can help and finish the plantation with the current two workers. The fourth worker moved onto the jungle this turn and it can then road it, just in time for the other three workers to use the road after the plantation finishes. We can then move one guy onto the spices south of the roaded jungle tile (to build another road), and have everyone else busy themselves with chopping the jungle. Basically the roads get built by a leading worker, while the trailing workers will chop/improve the tiles afterwards.



Also you can see that EMC does in fact have Calendar, as they have a plantation now. They also turned tech back on it seems, their gold dropped to the 300s.



Similar scenario over by Sulfur. There are three workers currently on the hill, we want them to fan out into the jungle and chop separate tiles to avoid loss of worker turns. It might be better to stack them, but I really don't know and this doesn't seem so bad either way. After chops or roads are up depending on the situation, we can stack some of them together.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn, not much to say.

Next turn we need to turn tech back on and finish Compass. We need to give the village back to Hydrogen from Beryllium, since Beryllium doesn't have a library and Hydrogen does. Beryllium can take the other mine from Hydrogen for now. That should be enough to finish Compass, if we're slightly short I'm sure some tile juggling somewhere will push us over.

In the Sodium area, there are currently three workers on the sugar plantation as mentioned. After the road in the jungle finishes, one worker needs to run down to the spices, while the other two workers move onto the newly roaded jungle and start chopping. We should not road the sugar right now, we can do that later at our leisure. Worker turns are too scarce right now.

Watch for Jkioan's scout near Sulfur, we should try to hide the chariots from them. Need to check for possible moves as well as current sight.

I decided to finish the trireme in Lithium, the Beryllium one is abandoned. We might want to do a quick harbor in Helium while growing to 12 before starting on MoM.

I'm working from home tomorrow, so I'll likely play the next turn if it comes in during (my) day.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn, quick notes.

Could not finish Compass. Boo, hiss. Tech is currently at 80%, the max for this turn. Next turn we dial it down to 10% and finish Compass with minimal overflow. No Compass obviously means no harbor in Helium, so I've given it every hammer tile plus an engineer, to finish MoM in 10 turns with deficit food. A GP will pop in 6 turns, should be 55-60% odds for a GE.

New Boron worker needs to move onto the remaining forest in range of Phosphorus and start chopping it. That'll finish most of the library, which we could then whip if we want. Galley heading south needs to go into Sodium next turn and unload both units, most notably the missionary who needs to go to Aluminum. Jkaen has netted the clams there which we need to steal.

EMC is catching up in CY and MFG. We're currently ahead by about 20%.

[NobleHelium]

Played a turn, and it was before midnight!

We're up to turn 115. It is now 1 AD.

Our economy seems to have grown considerably recently. I think the market in Helium helped quite a bit. We're now making at least 10 gpt at 30%, and should be even at 40% soon. Compass finished and we should be able to do Code of Laws in 3 turns. EMC is now spending 8 EP/turn, most likely their entire amount.

EMC has built not only a Hindu temple in Arcturus, but also a monument. But I see no sign of a library. They add up to roughly the same cost as a library, so I'm not sure why you'd build them instead...in any event, we'll be getting our third ring in Nitrogen in 4 turns, which will give us 24 cpt into the important tiles.



You can see the Hindu temple, monument (hard to see behind the leftmost archer), granary, courthouse, forge.

I finished our last batch of missionaries (for now). The one in Neon needs to go to Silicon, and the one in Boron needs to go to Sodium. The Neon one is nominally very close to Sodium, but the galleys are not available next turn so we might as well get him started over to Silicon and move the other one into the galley. We still need to build one more to give to EMC as part of our missionary trade clause, and obviously we're still going to plant a few more cities that will likely need missionaries. But they're mostly filler sites that we can hold off on settling for now. We may or may not want to settle the other Jkioan border city soon - it would be obviously aggressive if we do. They settled another city recently, but it's not anywhere near the border. It's either near their other copper or on their island.



I had planned a bit of interesting micro in the middle here, but looking at this I've just realized there's another way to do it. Originally I had planned for the galley currently in Sodium to move back into Neon and pick up two workers on turn 118 (it would dock on turn 117, and pick them up only on turn 118, since it can't drop them off that quickly anyway). But now I've just realized that two workers (not quite the same ones) can get onto the galley next turn via a different route, marked in the cinnabar color. The unfortunate part about this is that Oxygen will obviously not get another cottage when it grows, so I think it will just take one from Carbon (who will naturally have trouble growing to 12 as a result) until it can pump out a quick worker after the library. Either way I'm pretty sure getting the two workers into the center sooner is more useful. And actually we can do this with the southern galley, if we want a galley in Neon as soon as possible.

LURKER QUESTION: Does building a road on a partially cottaged tile reset the completion counter on the cottage?

Everywhere else we're basically just building infrastructure, chopping jungle, building improvements. Started on the Mausoleum, 9 more turns after the current. I realized that we really want to switch to Representation soon, because in cities like Lithium and Beryllium we're running out of coast tiles to grow onto and will soon have the choice between ocean tiles or normal specialists. We don't have so many wonders (or the NE) in Helium that we can't get a GP from any other city, and either way ocean is absolutely terrible, so I think it's definitely worthwhile to run some Representation specialists. I am tempted to say we should pop a GA with the next GP even if it's a GE (which I am tempted to settle, and Lewwyn suggested we bulb Machinery with (I'm sure nobody's surprised at that)), assuming we land the Mausoleum. I'm sure we can tech CS before the GA is over and swap to Bureaucracy. Depending on things we might be able to tech most or all of CS before we start the GA. In a way I'm kind of hoping to get a prophet so that I'm not tempted to settle the GE.

[regoarrarr]

LURKER QUESTION: Does building a road on a partially cottaged tile reset the completion counter on the cottage?

I'm pretty sure not. One interesting but related note. Say you are trying to chop-cottage a tile (normal speed). That would be 3 + 4 = 7 turns.

So you cottage 1 turn, then cancel and decide to chop the 3 turns. When the forest is chopped, you only need 3 more turns to cottage.