[SPOILERS] Dazed and scooter play Stalin of Vikings and make a big mess

[NobleHelium]

Yeah, what mackoti said.

[scooter]

Yep, I thought that's what I said..? But yeah, Paper is required so the real options is straight to Guilds or tech Paper and trade my way to it.

[novice]

What they mean is, only techs after Paper on the tech tree are tradable.

[scooter]

So, Caravel is out:



But more important, I think we just circumnavigated?



But we got no message. I'm assuming circumnav is calculated at EoT though, so it sure looks like we got it . I've been checking the event log obsessively for it and it's not shown up.

Speaking of events, Krill whipped five times and then revolted into Vassalage, Theocracy, and Serfdom. All we can do is hope his war goes terribly.

[scooter]

What they mean is, only techs after Paper on the tech tree are tradable.

Oh right, now that you say it this might be true. Annoying. Anyways, I turned off tech for the moment. Swapping to rush for Guilds before Paper may actually be worthwhile, though of course teching Paper first would net us some known tech bonuses on Monarchy/Feudalism so that'll still have an impact.

[scooter]

One thing. GUilds still gets us +1H on workshops... So our plains workshops would be 0/4/0. I'm thinking we need to change paths and get that before Paper.

[scooter]

Ok, T155 played. I was greeted by this:



My first thought was we don't need Iron so I rejected this. Later it occurred to me that it actually IS necessary for Knights. The only problem is I don't want to pay a flat sum like that to Nakor because that only gives us 10T and then he's free to cancel it. The only other reachable iron is, of course, at Brick's capital. Anyways, our caravel survived a barbarian attack:



It was wounded to 1.6 health, but Yuri's borders were in reach, so I went for it:



First I offered OB. Then I offered for dye:



He's got 3 dyes and 3 incense, so please please just trade us one . Also, Notre Dame due at EOT156, so that'll help all the mainland cities. One sucky thing was Dazed got a dustbowl (dead farm) event last turn, and I logged in to see more of the same:



I paid to get it to go away. By the way, funny but annoying side effect of last turn's dustbowl:



Screwed with our farm yields .

More later, as we need to think some things over.

[scooter]

Well, working the phones is paying off. As I said earlier, Yuris offered us this deal last turn:



This was an instant no because it would have delayed Notre Dame, but the general idea was intriguing. So end of turn and:



Got Notre Dame! Very big boost for us . So here's the thing - we don't need stone anytime soon. But I'd like to get more than just dyes, so here was my attempt:



Throw in our map with the stone and ask for two happies. I also threw this at Mist:



We're up against the health cap everywhere (this will go away when we gradually build Harbors). I didn't actually finish the turn Dazed - so you or I can do that later. But right after logging out I noticed Yuris and Mist logged in immediately after. To my delight:





Both accepted . We now have, gasp, room to grow! I fired nearly all our specialists temporarily and pushed growth. Scarlet will grow end of this turn. Once we grow a couple cities up a few levels we'll rehire all our scientists (and other assorted specialists) and continue teching away, but for now the opportunity to grow onto more Colossus coast seemed worthwhile. It is funny, we're not really a true SE right now at all. Working just 1 specialist still nets us over 400 beakers this turn at 100% science. We've got a little bit of everything... Colossus coast, GLH routes, cottages, and specialists. I don't think this is generally what people mean when they say "hybrid economy" but it works for us.

One caveat to the Yuri trade - Yuris probably only wants this stone for Moai. So he could very well cancel this thing in 10T. We'll see. In the meantime though, in the last 24 hours:

1) We got OB with Yuris - a significant commerce boost as many of our cities had no foreign routes despite OB with Nakor/Azza
2) We got NOtre Dame
3) We got 2 happiness from Yuri for 2 things that are not currently valuable to us

Oh one more thing. I went back and re-aimed tech at Paper. We'll still want Guilds for the workshop bonus and horse flexibility, but Paper is now better. I hate how much we've flip-flopped here, but I haven't seen much choice. The main problem is we need horse AND iron. We could buy Iron from Nakor, but I see how far behind we've slipped in cities and I'm coming to the conclusion that it'll be FAR easier to take cities from Brick in 40 turns than it will be to take sites Nakor snipes from us in 40 turns. When I compare it that way, let's claim the contested land first and then come back and sweep through Brick's land with amphibious Rifles or Cuirassers.

[scooter]

Took these screenshots two turns ago, but here are our island expansion prospects:



Ok, let's discuss these 4 islands. I'm going to reference them as if they're on a traditional clock as that seems like the least confusing way. Also do remember we have 4-move galleys available to us, so colonizing is twice as fast as usual. This is why we need to leverage this now before Nakor gets it all.

(One note - Krill has taken multiple cities from Nakor in the last few turns. SO for those keeping score, Krill has now netted cities from Azza, Nakor, and Regopin. Seriously. So Krill is literally begging for a dogpile and he's still winning on all 3 fronts. Unreal. We are playing for 2nd place, no dobut about it. Anyways, the relevant point here is Nakor will be even more apt to take to the islands, so we have to "get ours" so to speak)

The only one directly reachable by galley is 12:00. This one "unlocks" the other islands. The problem is, where do you put a city on that thing? You don't really want to put a city up on the north side of it immediately as that's just TOO isolated. Also, out of all those seafood, it's not possible to settle a city in the south half that gets 2 seafood. So you'd be settling a jungle spot with just one seafood. And remember, nerfed whipping. So to be useful, you'd need a workboat, Trading Post (for coast), granary, and serious worker labor. So that translates to a lousy city site short-term, but it might just be a necessity to get the ball rolling up in the north. Though this also underscores why we should hurry and get it developing. We're really going to be delaying Astronomy in this game probably. Get as much juice out of Colossus as we can.

Next you have 10:00. Nakor has placed a city on this island as you can see. It's again a useful island. It has the same problem though - bunch of jungle.

Next there's 8:00. This is the island with Marble that I've shown shots of lately. Again, Nakor has a free shot at this island and we don't. The marble would be useful, but I'm not sure we can get to it aside from conquering it. Again, another solid enough island. Best way to get to it though is traveling a LONG ways - gotta go through 12 and 10 first just to get ti it via galley. From the little 2-tile island in the middle of this water is 4 turn travel, which actually is better than you'd expect, but still quite bad. Logistics will be a nightmare, but we REALLY want a foothold on that island IMO. This means pumping settlers, defenders, and occasional workers from our cities right now. We have enough 4-move galleys to make the logistics possible. In general we'll want to drop off a settler/archer or settler/zerk pair and then have follow-up galleys behind with 2 workers on them. We have 4 galleys, so we could do 2 of these at a time.

To address the final island at 2:00... Well here's the logistics:



You have to go WAY up north to get to it. Good news is, this is the hardest for Nakor to reach and it's the one island that's pretty much guaranteed ours. My one fear is Yuri getting Galleons and trying to colonize, but he has lots of islands closer to him so I'm less concerned. However, there's a trick here to make this simple. We settle the "filler" city marked, and then we pop the borders. That would let us move directly to this island, which would be much quicker. So this island is easy to colonize.

So going back to this picture:



I'm thinking we need to figure out a dotmap and settling order. I think the 2:00 island is last priority since it's the most likely to be exclusively "ours"... But we do want to get to each of the other 3 islands. But I'm having a hard time prioritizing how hard to push to get over to 8:00. Maybe one city on 12:00 and 10:00 and then straight to 8:00? Hard to say. So that's what I'm working on right now. Dazed, if you have any thoughts on all this let me know.

[scooter]

Couple more comments:

1) Bringing along a few Zerks will be valuable up here. It'll give us flexibility in case Nakor takes something crucial. So at this point I favor simply playing general defense against Brick/Mist while pushing up here.

2) Worth noting that the 2:00 island is the biggest I believe. I should probably get a better individual screenshot of each one for reference. Maybe tonight.