[SPOILERS]The Tyrant realizes that once the world burns it gets really boring....

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

T59

Interesting turn. The biggest news of the turn I didn't even screen capture, so I'll either leave that for Xenu or I'll post a picture tomorrow. Short version is that I convinced Xenu to take the work boat out to sea and explore the islands. Lurkers with map knowledge can guess what we found. Brick, you can just wait for the next update.

I've spent some time tonight getting our sandbox up to date. I'm not super good with it, and we didn't have a lot of well-documented turns, so it was a bit of a trial. Known tech bonus is becoming a problem, so I just stuck a couple cottages under cities for now until I can figure out how to solve for that accurately. Anyway, so I can tidy up some loose ends in the sandbox tomorrow (and, of course, for your lurking enjoyment, because nothing says fun like size 1 in revolt city screen shots):



Set to whip in 2t at 15/30 food. Need to swap off the grass forest to the grass river next turn to keep it a 2pop whip. Worker after. Xenu, if you play next turn, make sure that I'm right on that hammer total. I think it's good though, but I reconfigured so much stuff tonight I can't say for certain.



Same deal here. Set to whip in 2t at 14/28. I don't think we have to swap tiles here. Worker after again, I think.



Total kick in the nuts city. Xenu reminded me that this isn't CivIII, so the city won't starve out of existence. So, an extra hammer into the granary and two free food.



Revolting. See what I did there? #badpun.





Edit: Xenu has a screenshot.

MIDSMIDSMIDSMIDSMIDS

[spacetyrantxenu]

Talk about burying the lead.




So Boldly now wants to totally revise the tech plan and ignore Polytheism / Priesthood-Oracle --> Metal Casting and go Sailing / Masonry, build a settler/galley and then midsmidsmids. I'm not so sure. 'Mids means representation, which is great, but requires food to pull it off. Until we have IW and later on Civil Service, we won't have a ton of food to run big specialist farms. I still see a lot of grass tiles that can use cottages. But I guess that's the thing with 'mids and representation, you still need a lot of cottages right? You just take a few cities that you otherwise may have cottaged and farm them up and run a bunch of specialists.

The other thing we could do with Sailing / Masonry would be to build the Great Lighthouse. Unmodded BTS, that's a godly wonder to have and we have a lot of coastal cities to settle. It would mean we could spam cities with near impunity in terms of city costs. Each city would basically pay for itself immediately. We could sprawl out across the map and grab a lot of tiles quickly. If we go mids we're going to go taller (CHA + Rep, that's a lot of happiness) and while you're going taller you aren't spreading out and grabbing land. And we're Byzantium, I assume we're going to want a wide production base when it comes time to kill someone come Guilds. I don't know, I think CHA + a religion (which I'm sure we'll get if we had down the oracle path) will leave us a lot of headroom to grow without representation. So it's more about the science bonus I guess? I'm not very comfortable with the SE game, so that's where my hesitancy comes from. I haven't really run it properly before and certainly haven't tried it in a competitive MP game.

Edit to the photo above, the caption should read "Buddhism T59 - Kuro, Suttree, or Sisu" since all three got a big enough score increase (6 points or more) to be candidates for researching Meditation. I don't know where the holy city is, but without visibility on Sisu's border city or any others he may have at this point, he could still be the founder. If we see him or Suttree adopt a religion soon we'll have confirmation.

Anyway, enough for now, I really need to play my turn in PB8.

Edit: So BGN edited in the screenshot after I read his post, making this post unnecessary I guess. Sorry, you don't get that minute back.

[BRickAstley]

GLH'ing the stone into REX REX REX sounds good to me. I can agree with the Byz trend to aim for wide over tall.

[BRickAstley]

That stone city better have some seafood though, it'd suck to plant a dump city just for stone, even though it would help out everywhere else.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Stone doesn't help build GLH any faster, it's just that Masonry + Sailing allows the GLH build. Our being IND is what speeds it along though, obviously.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Yeah I hope there is seafood but even if there isn't it's still worth planting. ICTRs will be profitable even if they're domestic routes, and will be really useful once we get to Currency. Besides, can a stone city even without seafood be immediately less productive than Tyler?

[Bigger]

clearly the best stone site is one east of the stone, to claim the clams. can you build a sea colony pod?

[spacetyrantxenu]

We could settle on the 1 tile grass island, wait 10 turns for borders to pop to get the stone in culture, put a quarry on it, and then worry about how we'd connect it to our trade group if it would even be possible (guess that would depend on the size of the island?) Or we can settle on the stone and not waste time with a quarry, and probably realize we're just going to have another bad city. That's a lot faster and since we're likely to be in a race with other IND civs around, I'll roll the dice on taking a worse city and improving odds of landing the wonder before someone else does.

Alas that we don't have the tech to build a sea colony pod. If we could do that, though, I think I'd just put the colony on the stone.

[Bigger]

well at least settling on the stone isn't all sea tiles, you pick up 3 additional desert tiles too! (and one grassland)

[spacetyrantxenu]

I know, it's just a shame we miss that lonely plains island. Would have been the best BFC ever.