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

[scooter]

Ok, bunch more pictures to post from this turn. Got a chance to chat with Dazed about the islands. First, I suggested we name the islands. It was mostly a chat necessity. It's not like I can say "oh it's the island without luxuries OH WAIT"... Dazed suggested a very simple way of naming them. So here you go - here's the 4 primary islands:



So how to settle these?

Irene is the hardest for others to reach, so it's the lowest priority. This is more likely to be contested by Yuris than Nakor, and neither will happen in the next 30 turns. Holmes is probably the best island, but it's also the hardest to reach. Because of the ocean blocking the way, we have to go through Moriarty and Watson just to get to Holmes. However, it's got food, forests, floodplains, rivers, and marble (hard to reach though), so it's the most valuable island out of the western 3. However, we've dismissed Holmes as being TOO isolated for our first city, so it's either Watson or Moriarty. So let's look at potential city spots. Note: these signs are highly subject to change, but they are rough guidelines:



Again, Watson on the left, Moriarty on the right. The southernmost spot on Moriarty will be a decent spot, but I believe it's a bad choice for our first city. The problem is it has no first ring food and no decent first ring tiles whatsoever. What we really want with these intitial cities is A) first-ring food and B) first-ring forest. We *need* one of those two, preferably both. We cannot afford to use barracks for culture, so we'll bring missionaries en masse. The reason for this is each of these cities need granary/TPs as is, so we can't afford to spend more time on barracks, especially with the general lack of forests.

So that leads us to our real debate here. I see 2 options here for our first island city (settler for it is completing EoT). Well, 2 1/2. The first is the western spot on Moriarty. It does NOT have first ring food sadly. However, it DOES have a first-ring forest, 2nd ring fish, and it'll have river tiles once the jungle is cleared.

Second option is across the pond on Watson - check out the 3 signs. Top one is a hut with a barb warrior on it - we're bring a Zerk too and we could clear it with that. 1S of the hut is the only spot in this area with both first ring forest and first ring food, excepting maybe the plains NW of the clams. However, it makes for a slightly awkward dotmap. Better would be 2S of the hut, but that's a slower start as it doesn't have first-ring forest. So if we settle Watson first, I think it has to be 1S of the hut and not 2S.

So our options in my mind is the west plains site on Moriarty or the 1S of hut site on Watson. The goal is to settle these spots and get them useful ASAP while bridging our way over to Holmes, which is the most crucial island. So that's the settling plan. Currently, we favor settling the 1S spot on Watson first. It's by far the fastest starting spot, and it helps us get a toe onto Watson before Nakor takes it all (that's the only island we know for sure Nakor has settled).

Also, we need to swap maps with Nakor to see if he's settled more. That'll happen either next turn or one of the couple turns after.

[scooter]

For reference, here's better screenshots of the other two islands. Also, these screenshots were taken before Dazed buzzed through and put down some tentative signs, so I apologize for lack of city suggestion signs. Anyways, first is Holmes:



Now you see why the Marble is just so hard to get to. Oh, one more comment on the map trade thing. I'd also like to see what Nakor lost to Krill, so that makes the map swap even more important. So I'm thinking offer it tonight. It'll help us plan. Here's Irene:



This island is pretty solid too - better than Watson and Moriarty anyways. A general lack of food in the middle, but we can hope there's some land-based foods there as it would seem unlikely to have that big of a section without food. This is the island that's well sheltered, so we'll sandbag this island just a bit. We'll have to settle the filler spot to give us a culture jump just to get here anyways.

Finally, the great unknown up north:



That's the north end of Irene in the bottom-right. So we have no real idea what's up here besides clams. We need to rectify that at some point, but competing priorities and all that. Best way is probably with the Caravel after it does the world tour collecting contacts - really just meeting Cyneheard and Commodore and then it's free to do whatever.

Anyways, you see why we really need to push now. We actually have a pretty significant amount of land available in the ocean, but Nakor is gunning for that same land, and he's a much bigger threat than Brick. So the Knights thing is shelved. I have ideas for finishing off Brick/Mist later, but for now we just have to contain them. Mist whipped them silly to survive and they're at just 4 cities (half of which kinda suck), so they're really in just an awful position, though they do have ridiculous numbers of EPs on us so they can leech techs off of us sadly.

[scooter]

Ok, you thought screenshots from this turn were over right? Nope! I haven't even shown any domestic things. These are fairly minor domestic things, I mostly just wanted to document them so Dazed knows what I did and why.



Diverted the chop into a barracks. Sucks to have to use it that way, but getting that border pop ASAP is crucial for the fish, and we can't afford to divert missionaries here as the ones we are building are earmarked for the north islands. Settler finishes EoT in our Moai city. That city will go straight onto a missionary because it needs to grow and it can do a 4T missionary while growing because it's an awesome Moai city. Remember, the wrinkle right now is our mainland cities want to grow because they get the ND boost while our island cities are closer to the happy cap as they don't get the benefit. Scarlet:



The plan in Scarlet is to sink 1T into a Harbor to grow, and then next turn swap to a settler which we can do in ~3 turns, maybe 4 if we hire some more specialists again. Double-whipped Granary in the "choke city" now known as Reigate Square:



Getting the granary and next a Trading Post is just so crucial here, so it was worth a double-whip which we generally try to otherwise avoid. Thankfully border is about to pop and that'll at least gain us access to the deer. Once the borders pop we can chop that forest into a Trading Post which is just perfect. After that we'll probably go ahead and build a Barracks as we'll take whatever cultural help we can get. I did focus EPs onto Yuri:



Once we get his charts we'll want to balance things a bit better.

And with that, we're finally done. How's that for an action-packed turn? A word on logistics. We have 4 galleys currently, able to do 4 moves and carry 2 people for each. Right now we have one galley by Moai city with a scout, and it'll also pick up a settler. A galley between Baskervilles and Reigate will pick up a Zerk and a worker. Those 2 galleys will make up our first city transport. The scout will actually hold off and detour elsewhere to pop a hut afterwards, but the other 3 units will be crucial for a Watson island plant if we go that route - which is our current preference. A strong unit on Watson will allow us to go looser on Moriarty. Anyways, that's MORE than enough for this turn. Just needed to spend extra time as lots of important decisions were made.

[scooter]

Turn rolled. I went ahead and played because tomorrow I'll be unavailable to play until kind of late. It won't be late enough for us to miss the turn if Dazed isn't able to play, but it'll be late enough to make it run down to the wire, and given the nice pace we've had lately that seemed unnecessary. Here's the two galleys en route now:



4 move galleys rock. Here's a worker/Zerk pair coming to support the city:



(archer is in city, not on boat)

Nice thing is they should show up just ahead of time which'll let me clear the barb hut safely. The scout is the only one which will not be dropped off - I'm going to use it to go and see if the other huts I'm aware of are defended - if not I'll use it to get a good result. Maybe we'll pop Education or something . Actually... I believe popping Astronomy from a hut is theoretically possible, and that would be completely disastrous. Yikes. The odds are just miniscule, but that would be just brutal. Let's not think about that. Scarlet:



Swapped to the settler as planned. Hired 2 specialists too. If I did 2 scientists instead of the engineer it would have slowed the settler, so I went with this. Also shut off tech on Paper, then 2 turns at 100% should do it. Our scientist will bulb Education, but honestly it may only bulb like a third of it because Education (already too expensive for a Sci) is more expensive in RB Mod sooo... We'll see how that goes. Oxford would be nice, but we'll see. One Yuris mystery I can't quite figure out:



Why does Aiur not have the "capital" star on it? It's clearly his starting city - 2 clams, cow, corn, copper. That's a fairly strong site. However, no capital thing. Strange.

Dazed and I decided to offer the map trade when Nakor finishes his next turn - this turn. Well as I was logging out, he was logging in. I see now that he's out, so I'll pop in and offer the map trade. It should just be a light update for both of us, but it's still worthwhile at the moment. He'll know I circumnavigated suggesting I've done more naval scouting, so he'll be curious enough to accept I think.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

How much commerce would you lose if you popped Astro anyway ?

[scooter]

How much commerce would you lose if you popped Astro anyway ?

You made me curious, so I logged in real fast to check. It would currently cost us 50 commerce per turn. That number is going to get bigger too as cities continue to grow and as we settle more island spots. If we were to theoretically hut Astronomy in 10 turns, we could be looking at closer to 60 commerce per turn.

That's not a back-breaking amount, but it's still very significant - especially considering we can probably get away with ignoring Astronomy for another 50 turns or so. Also, it means a several of our marginal cities go from profitable to really, really borderline. Would not be fun. Quite possibly the worst hut tech pop ever . Considering we spawned a start where there are 0 luxuries withing about 40 tiles (as the galley travels) of us, luck is not something we've been overly reliant on in this game.

[Partisan]

Great names for the islands! When I read the last report I thought about suggesting just that to identified them. Now you only need to put an in-game sign in every island with its name to make it official.

[scooter]

Great names for the islands! When I read the last report I thought about suggesting just that to identified them. Now you only need to put an in-game sign in every island with its name to make it official.

Glad you like them! Yeah, I forgot to put signs with names on the islands last time I logged in, but I'll do that at some point if Dazed doesn't beat me to it. I was having such a hard time describing them via chat - "the island just W of the NW island" - pretty sure that was an actual chat message I sent before we said enough is enough.

Welcome to RB by the way.

[Partisan]

Welcome to RB by the way.

woot, thanks! Been lurking a few years now, just recently registered due to boredom.

[dazedroyalty]

I'm pretty sure we can only pop a small list of early techs from a hut in RB mod.