[SPOILERS] Yossarian blames Caledorn

[Caledorn]

I hadn't spotted those costs - crazy! Is this a torroid?

Guess the next three cities should all be minimum-distance from Server Problems

I believe it is toroidal yes, but thankfully I also believe we managed to keep the difficulty at Monarch. Several teams wanted Emperor which would have been crushing...

[YossarianLives]

Turn 48:

I think we're going to run into someone to our west very soon. It looks like we're passing another snaky salt lake just like the ones GG and we settled next to. Diplomacy against this team is going to be vital. Do we explain that we have a mute Agg Roman team to our east, or keep that little tidbit of information quiet, for example? Maybe we should start bouncing ideas about a possible message to our western neighbors.

Speaking of silent neighbors, Silent Neighbor will grow next turn. It could steal the unimproved 3-0-0 cow tile and keep growing, or work the grass mine to finish the quechua quick. I don't really have a long-term strategy for this city. Any ideas what I should do with it in general?

Bad Econ is working the forest tile to bang out the terrace in 4 turns, giving us a border pop 9 turns in. Exp terraces are better than SH I'm thinking we might stagnate on improved gold waiting for the corn to become available, but is that a really bad idea? We kind of need the commerce boost desperately.

Demos and graphs:

The power graph looks scary, but I think (hope) we're ok. The 4k increase that I first thought was an axe, then a chariot, I now realize was much more likely Animal Husbandry + 1 warrior. They have spammed out a total of 5 warriors, but with our distance from them, we should be ok. Our copper will be connected soon enough, and a single axe will make easy work out of the whole warrior army.

The food stat is horrible. I'm still only working 2 improved food resources. The corn farm would be done by now if I had been able to settle next to it... AH can't come fast enough. That's why I'm thinking about hurting food even more by working the gold, so we can finish AH faster and start pasturing sooner. AH will take 2 turns at 0% and 6 turns at 100%. At least, that's how it stands right now. Might fluctuate depending on how bad maintenance gets, and whether we work the gold.

[YossarianLives]

I hadn't spotted those costs - crazy! Is this a torroid?

Toroidal indeed. I saw an early suggestion in our thread (I think by Krill?) saying that we should play prince on a toirodal map. Oh well, at least we got monarch.

Guess the next three cities should all be minimum-distance from Server Problems

Yeah, I think the next city should get the corn west of SP, probably 3w or 4w. But both those locations invalidate the really good FP/Corn/Cow spot. I can't really find a good location for our next city close to the capital that would keep that spot intact.

[YossarianLives]

Breaking news!

[YossarianLives]

The rest of Turn 49:

We finished our first cottage! Switching over to that means we grow a turn faster in Server Problems and save up 15 gold this turn instead of 13. In the south, my original plan was to move one worker to the copper to start pre-roading it in anticipation of the border pop. Then I realized it might not be a good idea to leave the worker unprotected outside of our borders, so I moved him down on top of the gold instead. He'll help us finish the gold mine one turn faster, then they can both move over to improve the copper once it's in our borders.

But the big news this turn is that we are about to meet Bowsling / Aivoturso's team! These guys are Mansa of Zulu, for an interesting combo of peaceful traits with an aggressive civ. I anticipate we should have pretty good rapport with this team from playing with them in the ISDG. We should start talking about a greeting message. I think to start we want to keep it simple with some fluff about us being happy to meet them, and then go straight into a NAP offer. Let's try not to spill too much before securing that NAP. Then we should start working towards longer-term cooperation with them. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm already working on defogging a coastal route to them for when we get Sailing and OB.

Demos and whatnot:

Power looks a little bit better. We'll get vision on GG's tech next turn, just in time to switch espy over to BowAivo. I'm thinking we should keep it on a 3:1 ratio to maintain vision on GG tech, but maybe we want to go 100% on BowAivo until we get their graphs.

Also, thinking about GG power again, it's even more likely that their full T35 power increase was from The Wheel, not AH + Warrior, so they would only have 4 warriors total, not five.

[YossarianLives]

Caledorn, where's our diplomat at? How about this for an initial message:

Bonjour Aivoturso and Bowsling,

We are very happy that our intrepid scout Moiraine has found your borders! It's nice to meet fellow CFC'ers, and hope that our future can be one of friendship and cooperation in this game. We'd like to start by offering a NAP to Turn 80, although we can go with a longer NAP if you prefer. If that sounds good to you, we can also start discussing other ways that we can cooperate together.

Looking forward to you reply,

Blame Caledorn

I'm going to change the name of "Silent Neighbor", since I don't want them to think it's about them, and also, I don't want them to know right away that we're getting the silent treatment from GG. I think I'll just go "Thunderstorms" for now, but we can always change it back (or to something else) once communications start rolling with BowAivo. I'll also send them an in-game message when we meet that we're working on an official greeting and they should keep an eye on their mailbox.

[YossarianLives]

You have got to be kidding me. Care Bears just settled their fifth city.

I don't know how they could possible be keeping their maintenance costs down. Plus, they can't have any Fast Workers with all this focus on settlers. Hmm...

Anyways, I'm going in to play the turn. We're last to play and I don't want to hold things up any.

[YossarianLives]

Well I was greeted with this when I logged in.

Wouldn't you know the capital border pop at T50 gave them vision on our scout. So much for my plan to change the name of our second city. I went ahead and replied to their message, then moved in.

We can see that they're working both those mines, plus the forest for lots of mfg. My guess is the mines are in the capital's bfc, and the forest is being worked by their second city. Interestingly, they kept the capital's default name (Ulundi), but changed the name of their second city to a mafia theme (Cosa Nostra).

As for the rest of the turn, we finished the gold mine and started working it, decreasing the time to research AH from 6 to 4 turns at 100%. I think that's worth it. We grew in SP and started a worker there. It'll be chopped to completion in a few turns. We have a quechua playing zone defense between Silent Neighbor and Bad Econ, but I decided to move him south to uncover the fogged coast down there. We got vision on GG tech, and it looks like they're saving gold on Masonry. Interesting.

So with that I hit end turn and pulled up T51.

First thing I noticed was that I let Silent Neighbor grow into unhappiness, right after moving the quechua out of range to garrison it. I reacted too quickly and pulled the healing quechua out of the forest to garrison the city next turn. Then I realized I could just road the gold with our two workers to solve the problem, so I did that. Copper came into our borders this turn, but I don't think we need to rush to go hook it up. I think the first priority will be pasturing the cow and sheep as soon as AH comes online in a few more turns, then I'll get copper connected. BowAivo did set all their espy against us, so either they haven't met anyone else yet, or the consciously set us at 100%. Not good, but I guess we can't complain since I did the same thing to them. We probably will lose research visibility on GG next turn if we don't move the ratio to 3:1, so we should probably do that. I didn't end turn because I wanted to get feedback on espy as well as where our scout should go next. Do we want to go north or south from here?

[Old Harry]

1S might reveal a city?

I thought there was a worry about gg chariots, hence the urgency for copper. Has that receded?

I wouldn't worry about espy behavior until they have graphs.

[YossarianLives]

Yeah, it's actually not possible for gg to have a chariot yet. The 4k power increase was probably The Wheel, otherwise it was AH + warrior, but there is no way they had AH and The Wheel already for it to have been a chariot.