[SPOILERS] Churchill of Portugal: Gallipoli Part II

[spacetyrantxenu]

T104 - The barb galley sighted earlier made its way closer to my territory. I'll get the galley finished in Red Fish before the barb can interfere with the clams tile.




Otherwise not much happening for now. I got graphs back on Brick, so here's another set of graphs, showing Serdoa, Nakor, and Brick:

Score:


GNP:


MFG:


Food:


Power:


Culture:


Espionage:

Demographcs are still awful. Is that GNP number still shrinking?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Loving the new reporting style. I'd volunteer for the fishboat exploration crew too.

I don't know how much storytelling I'll do, I'm sure it will depend on just how badly the game is going at any given time. I'm mostly just burning through all my screenshots for now with the reports I'm spamming in over the last few days, I got really behind on keeping this thread up to date. I'm only five turns behind now, I'll try to knock those out soon and then keep current with reporting as I play the turns. The trouble is that I play before going to work in the mornings and I usually don't have time to do a decent writeup after I play.

I should recruit someone who isn't even following this game to do my reports. I can take the screen shots when I play and get the files over to the ghost writer to do something fun with. Maybe I'll do that when someone overruns me with galleons and rifles.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T105 - I made contact with Scooter/Pindicator, and as I saw from the T98 map trade they've had a terrible time in the war against Commodore. The trade screen confirms, only three cities:



But we can get open borders, which means they've teched Alphabet already. My economy is a wreck so even adding 3gpt in additional trade route income would be nice. They accepted the trade, so I got that small boost starting on T106.




My galley is in position to ferry workers over to New Fish but it will wait a turn until the final cottage finishes at Two Fish. When that is done every land tile in the BFC of both One Fish and Two Fish will be improved. In terms of cottage development I'll finish my first town next turn, with more coming very soon. It's too bad I don't have more land, or I would have spammed cottages all over the place with as much food as I have in these two mega cities. With HR I could have grown them very large, stuffing in archers for happiness, and spread out on cottages. Health would be a problem but who knows, if I had had more land tiles I probably would have had more health resources available as well. What ifs aren't helpful, though, just have to roll with what I have here.

While I'm thinking about it, it won't be long until I'll have to decide what to do with the crummy strip of land to the west of my capital. There are zero food resources, no way to irrigate farms, basically nothing I can do with those sites other than let them grow very slowly into fishing villages. The only spot I can plant over there (on this landmass) with any food would be if I put one on the tile already inside my culture W,W,NW of Two Fish. It could borrow the fish and rice to grow quickly, but what would it add to the empire? Not much. Seven coast tiles, a grassland hill, and a jungled grassland. It could be worthwhile but there has to be a better place to expand (beyond the marked cities already on the map). Once I can build my UB, the Feitoria, it will add commerce to those coastal tiles, but that isn't a great UB to start with, even if the cost is now only 120. Under RB Mod's whip paradigm it would still take approximately forever to build that, after putting in a lighthouse and a granary. I think it would be worth it in Two Fish and Red Fish, cities that have constant coastal tile use (lakes and clams in Red Fish), but I'm not so sure if it's worth it elsewhere. If I do end up plunking down fishing villages on the western coast I could build them in those cities eventually, but I could just as easily use them to build wealth since that would help right away. Maybe workshop the land tiles and just use those odd hammers for wealth. If nothing else those cities would serve as decent sentries to let me know when an attack is coming toward cities that matter.



Geometric population is large. I'm not sure about my real population stat, though, because this is a one man team and I don't possess a C&D department. I could probably make a half accurate guess from the T98 map trades, but that's chancy because who knows how old some of those maps were? I'll guess that from the Food number I'm more toward the top than the bottom in true population, but it would be great if more of those pop points could be working special tiles, like someone with a larger land area would be doing. I think I'm squeezing decent efficiency out of the land I have, but it's much better to be the guy running at a lower efficiency over a much wider area of land. Once that guy gets his efficiency up (working tiles as improved as what I'm doing), he's going to be working a lot more of those tiles and will zoom by me. I mean, it isn't like I've managed to keep my costs down to compensate for not working choice tiles everywhere. Somehow I've built an economy that is both low output and high cost.

On the bright side if I ever make it to Currency the additional routes will be worth +7gpt empire wide, and if I ever do get to build that island city for horses the ICTRs would be helpful, too. Hopefully that city won't soak up the routes with Scooticator, or whoever else I can get OBs with. I may need to target Alphabet myself, after Currency, and try to set up enough trade partners to fill out my trade slots with foreign, preferably intercontinental routes. And preferably not with Nakor, since he would benefit greatly with even his nerfed Lighthouse.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T106 - Workers on the move toward New Fish, workers chopping jungle, workers building cottages and farms all over the place.




I whipped the library in Two Fish this turn, burning 2 population to do it. I'm slow building it in One Fish, which seems wasteful, but I want the city to grow out to max size and then run science specialists as soon as possible. One Fish gets good hammer production so it won't take forever to finish the library, but I'm not sure it was the right call to not just whip it. I guess burning whip efficiency is annoying, and I can't get my head around the RB Mod way of thinking, it just feels like I'm wasting hammers when I do multipop whips now.

I whipped the archer in Blue Fish to overflow into a worker, he'll get busy chopping jungle around Black Fish.

Here is my current production screen:



Libraries, hurry up! It sucks that I got the Judaism spread in Black Fish, that will force me to build a missionary for that city. I want it done soon so I can get the OR bonus when I whip and chop out that library. I could have gone with yet another crappy monument to pop borders there, but I'm going to need a library there eventually, may as well not waste hammers on the monument if it can be helped.

At the bottom of that screen shot you can see my completed galley parked on the clams. There's no point in attacking the barb galley and giving it the 10% coastal bonus, I'll keep that for myself. Will I get a good roll of the dice or will I need a second galley? I started the second galley just in case I had to whip it in poor Red Fish, the one city that still has significant whip anger problems....

No need for a full set of graphs, but have a look at the power graph:



Serdoa is building up a bit, in retrospect it was easy to see what he was after....but that will wait for next turn's report. Nakor's buildup isn't comforting either, but it's very doubtful he's going to be coming after me at this point. He's probably just trying to keep pace and discourage anyone from coming after him. But his immediate neighbors are....well, me. Scooticator isn't exactly nearby, and Serdoa has expanded every direction except toward Nakor. So maybe he'll cause me trouble, who knows.

Demographics:

[spacetyrantxenu]

T107 - I logged into the game finding a peace offer from Serdoa. Uh huh. We weren't at war last time I checked, so let's see what this is about. I declined the offer to find out.

It's stupid that you can't minimize the trade window to look at the map, what would have been the harm in that? Is there some way we could fix that in a future update to RB Mod? I'm not a programmer, but do you call that a modal window, when something pops up and you can't minimize it, and it blocks out the rest of the application? Seems it could be changed, but then again lots of things about the game UI could stand changing, and it's probably a lot of work to do it correctly.

I checked the event log because at first I couldn't figure out what had happened.




Reading from bottom to top it turns out that Serdoa declared war and attacked New Fish with his woodsman II axe. He probably declared war with the scout, moving in to have a look (the scout is visible exiting my land after spending his movement points), then attacked with the woody II axe. Opportunistic much? Optimistic, too, that was a 29.7% chance to win that he took, with no unit available to back up the attack. My city was properly defended -- sure, I had an axe and spear covering the worker on the pig, maybe I should have left one of them inside the city instead...but not really. Then the worker would be exposed to an attack by a unit right ouside my borders. If Serdoa was going to attack he should have sent more than one unit to do the job. Apparently he wasn't really outraged by my city being there or he'd have gone all in. It was just an opportunistic move, if he could burn the city great, if not, he'd just seek peace. Not a bad plan, except that he isn't playing against an AI. This attack will have a consequence eventually.

I'm not blind to the similarity about my attack earlier against Brick. He may feel the same way about my attack against him earlier, annoyed by the aggression and having to defend against it. But I'll take my chances -- in my situation attacking Brick I felt justified in attacking by being bottled in. Here, Serdoa has plenty of land to expand into, other than taking a lucky pot shot at me what was the goal? To grab another bit of land, maybe one that fits his dotmap better? There's no resource in New Fish that he couldn't have got elsewhere, to my knowledge. He should have stayed on the peaceful route to expansion rather than unnecessarily annoying a player who probably can't win the game, but who could probably play spoiler at some point. Better to not piss in someone's cornflakes just because you can, eh?

Anyway, after his attack the area around New Fish looked like this:




He doesn't have a lot to attack with, but it's enough to be problematic. Two axes and a holkan are nearby. They're mostly on worker protection duty, as Serdoa has a swarm of them building a fort to connect the lake to his city (1W of the southern axe, 3W, 1NW of New Fish). However, I don't have immediate reinforcements en route yet so I can't go crazy on a counterattack right now. The best outcome for me right now is just get out of this situation while New Fish is new and weak and grind my axe into these Mayan cities later when I can do it properly.

Elsewhere, the other news for the turn was really annoying. The barbarian galley off the coast of Red Fish attacked my galley at low odds and won:



Then he pillaged my clams, if there was any doubt of that happening. Yay, now I get to whip another galley, build another work boat, and suffer a bit more unhealthiness in my big cities. Super.



I left the galley shown in the overview map below unmoved and logged out, not ending turn. I had offered peace back to Serdoa but without knowing if he'd take it or not I decided it would be better to not unload more workers to potentially lose. Or maybe he'd think it's reinforcements. Anyway the idea was to help get peace.




Mid turn power numbers:



Demographics:



After holding up the turn for a good several hours, I saw that Serdoa had taken my peace offer once I got home from work and logged in. So the total cost of this war is one axe to Serdoa, nominally nothing to me (probably trade route income with him later, but I'm not interested in opening borders with him now). But I'll hold a grudge over this one, he had other places to expand into, there was no reason to take a shot at me.

With the outbreak of peace I changed the build for Two Fish over to a Buddhist missionary. I need some culture in New Fish ASAP, and if I can get the OR bonus there that will help with producing walls and cultural buildings. I'm sure Serdoa will win the battle for the overlapping row of BFC tiles, but I need to try to win those tiles.

Speaking of Two Fish:



It's really time to get my Academy built. I'll change the tile selection as needed, but I'm growing this turn anyway so I ran two specialists. The plan is to grow back onto both cottages and then run the pair of specialists at size 10. And finally, since I have one more photo taken from the turn, here it is:



I moved up the spear after getting peace, I have 10 turns, let's scout a little. You may have noticed the Buddhist missionary Serdoa sent to the north of the lake in one of the screen shots above, he must have a city up there, or will have one soon. Let's go find it.

[Ceiliazul]

Whoa, reporting overload!

To see real pop, you can check yourself against the leader on the victory screen. That's real numbers, not exponential. Also worth knowing, once you have cities defogged, their real pop and buildings inside continue to update even if you haven't re-scouted.

Your crop yield looks good, I'm sure you're still in this even with some gnp gaps. You mentioned circumnav, are you close to it?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Whoa, reporting overload!

To see real pop, you can check yourself against the leader on the victory screen. That's real numbers, not exponential. Also worth knowing, once you have cities defogged, their real pop and buildings inside continue to update even if you haven't re-scouted.

Your crop yield looks good, I'm sure you're still in this even with some gnp gaps. You mentioned circumnav, are you close to it?

Yeah sorry for dumping so much info at one time, it seems I'm able to crank out more reports on the weekend when the little tyrant is napping. If I can get caught up tonight I'll try to do at least a small report when I play my turns and be more regular about it. You know, for the post count war. (It's obviously unwinnable but I can make this respectable, right? At least in the category of civs NOT having 4 players. )

What if you are the leader in geometric population and the players you can see on the F8 screen have less pop listed than you? Until I meet everyone how can I use that to help figure out real population totals? (preview, on the current turn, T110 F9 shows my population at over one million serfs greater than second place, who is surely Commodore at just over a million. Isn't that silly? I bet he has more real pop than I do, though).

I'm only one map trade away from circumnav if I can meet Plako/Slowcheetah I guess. But if I make the trade and they get my map at the same time I get theirs (and for the sake of argument it completes the circumnavigation requirements by revealing all longitudes), who gets the circumnavigation bonus? Me for offering the trade? Them? Whoever logs in first to accept the trade? Randomly decided like wonder coin flips? Anyway someone with a second intrepid work boat will probably finish circumnav before I meet one of the guys I haven't met yet, but I'm still curious about how the interturn processing would handle a circumnavigation race via map trade.

Oh, and with the crop yield, you mean as long as I can militarize that population and steamroll someone to even out the land discrepancy between me and everyone else who is still in the running?

[Krill]

That was a good update.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Thanks guys.

T108 - I'm going to guess that Merohoc have their hands full with fending off Plako, but this has to be a disaster for them:



Referring back to the map I posted from six turns ago, the city they lost was providing their only source of iron. I don't see horses in their territory so they probably just lost the ability to build any decent units against Plako. Assuming they have Archery by now (and I have to assume they do at this point), are they down to archer spam? Hopefully I'm missing something and they've secured some other strategic resource, otherwise they're probably toast. I thought about making a trade for iron but I can't really afford to be without my own source for at least 10 turns, not with Serdoa obviously showing aggression, and Brick probably still not too happy about my earlier adventure. If I could help prop them up somehow that wouldn't be a bad move in terms of slowing Plako's inevitable expansion, but then again, if I meet Plako and he sees me providing iron to his enemy that won't be a great way to start off our relations. I seem to recall there was a bit of a kerfuffle in PB5 about some resource trades like this, and in an AI diplo game there's always room for misunderstanding. Think I'll sit this one out.

Back in safer lands the most interesting thing going on is naval movements, and they aren't particularly exciting.




In the bay my galley is making the return trip to pick up more units to pack into New Fish. I don't know if Serdoa plans to try attacking the city again when the enforce peace expires but I have nine turns to pack in units and build walls to make it pointless to try. He has most of his military visible in that area, axes and holkans, so I'm not worried about holding the city with PRO archers and cheap (quick) city walls. One of these days Two Fish will even finish the Buddhist missionary so I can get the borders expanding.

Red Fish finished the replacement galley. He had decent odds to attack the wounded barbarian galley, but why risk it? Surely it's better to pick up the defensive advantage and let the barb attack me, right? What could possibly go wrong? I think it was something like ~60% odds if I attacked, against ~20% for the barb if he attacked me. So I blocked the path to the clams and will wait for the dice roll.

Elsewhere, workers did worker things and I ended turn.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T109 - I had a trade screen waiting on my when I logged into the game:



Can anyone explain what benefit this would bring to either side? If one of our iron resources got pillaged does that invalidate the deal or does one side get something for nothing? I'm pretty sure I declined this offer because I just didn't understand it.

The headline from this turn is that Serdoa continues to play as if this is SP and is trying to seal off land from both me and Brick.




I don't know about the timings involved, whether they were both in place to settle and Serdoa logged in first, or what. But I bet Brick is pissed about that city placement. Not only did Serdoa burn the barb city that Brick would have likely kept (I mean, that's probably where his settler would have gone, never mind what my sign on the map said), but just when Brick was in place to resettle it Serdoa invalidated it with a very optimistic land grab. He is settling in a line toward his two closest opponents -- what's the point of that? He could have settled the gold in a much less antagonistic way if he wanted to. I think Serdoa doesn't respect his opponents here, he assumes he can settle however he wants to and he'll get away with it. I don't see another explanation for settling so aggressively. Good luck with that. He's a better player than either Brick or me, but it's foolish to assume you can antagonize both neighbors and get away with it. I hope Brick gets aggressive here. If I can see signs that he'll take action against this new city I would be happy to move on Oxhuitza, if only to burn it off my border.

In other international news, Azza had a chariot exploring north of Oxhuitza and my spear made contact. Can you guess which of us has more land?



Not bad. Now if it weren't for the business of a hot war with Lewwyn maybe Azza would be in good shape. He can't get a break, in every one of his games that I've followed he gets entangled in a war with a savvy opponent who usually grinds him down after a while. I don't think I've read all of Azza's games, though, so maybe he's had success in some of them. But I'm happy to be far away from Lewwyn, not that Serdoa is much better to be near, it seems.

One more trade screen, this one is Nakor/Jester.



I'm in the habit of checking trade screens each turn to see what's going on in the fog and I came across a new entry in their city list. FG (Liberate) -- does that mean it's on my landmass or that it's merely closer to my capital than theirs? I'm worried that they've taken my horse city location but there isn't a lot I can do about it at the moment. I'm not positioned to settle it and I can't afford another useless city until Currency comes in. I guess I could send some units down there to stake a claim. But I really don't want to stir up trouble on my southern border right now, I need one secure flank, right? Well, it isn't so much secure right now as it is that I consider aggression by Nakor to be unlikely. But I don't know what their team dynamic is like and I definitely don't know anything about Jester. For all I know he's a hawk and is pushing for an excursion of some sort. I need to get sentry boats/units on all my borders. I just don't know where the units are going to come from.




My four largest cities are all set to grow this turn, making the population numbers look even more ridiculous for next turn. I'm struggling to keep up on improved tiles, mostly because there aren't enough tiles to go around. I'm thinking Caste would be really good for me with all this food and not enough tiles to work. I could run specialists all over the place. I'll keep whipping when I need to, but at these sizes whip efficiency isn't that good. Well, I guess that's debatable, if the city grows back quickly then maybe it isn't that bad, even if seems like I'm wasting a lot of food. I assume there are better ways to run this empire than the way I'm doing it now, I'll look forward to hearing from other voices in the postgame.

In unit moves, the barb galley badly mauled my galley at Red Fish, taking me down to 0.2 strength before sinking. What is it with my navy? I'm PORTUGAL, we're supposed to know how to use these boats. I'm afraid if I ever try a naval invasion of someone my captains will scuttle the boats with my army below deck.



That's me, leading in one category that doesn't even accurately describe anything. Look for that meaningless number to be bigger next turn. Actual leader in population count -- TBD. I still don't know if I can find out from looking at F8 since my percentage is higher than everyone else I've met. I guess I can place myself as no worse than 5th place then, as I only have Commodore, Lewwyn, Plako, and Slowcheetah left to meet. Then again, those guys are probably the ones ahead of me in many of these statistics, so who knows.