[SPOILERS] Back to Basic - Mardoc plays Augustus of China

[HidingKneel]

So what is a ChoKoNu?

[Commodore]

Machine-gun crossbow!

[Mardoc]

So what is a ChoKoNu?

Machine-gun crossbow!

And, in BtS terms, it's a Str 6 archery unit with 2 first strikes, +50% vs melee and inflicts collateral. Change from a normal Crossbow is one extra first strike, and collateral. Or to emphasize the important bit: collateral

That means it'll absolutely wreck axes and spears and chariots, do fairly well against archers and horse archers and even maces, and a stack of them can beat nearly anything. Collateral means they stay relevant all the way into the Rifling era. They're also the only unit that can inflict collateral from a ship and the only collateral that can also kill. I see them filling a similar role to Pyre Zombies, really - generally strong unit that is relevant for a long time.

I don't think they do quite as much collateral as catapults (it's complicated and I'm oversimplifying), and they can't lower city walls like cats can, but they're still quite good. Main restriction on using them is that they need to do the attacking for full effect, and they're only move 1. So to use them on offense we need either to cover the stack, or to go before our target gets a reasonable counterattack unit (probably horse archers or catapults). But on defense, with roads, they're relevant for a long long time.

From my current position, we need merely Archery, Iron, and Machinery to unlock them. Machinery's the expensive one, but it's also top of the Engineer bulb list. A little luck with popping an Engineer, and we'll be set. Don't get lucky - well, a Prophet can still become a shrine, giving us lots of gold to potentially hand research Machinery. Or we can keep working the Engineer for another shot in ~30 turns.

Currently planning to research Currency next, and then follow it with Iron Working; hopefully we have iron to hook somewhere in our empire by then. Elsewhere, planning to keep exploring and founding more cities, and hopefully keep peace with TT long enough to get Pyramids and Great Wall and a nice border with walls in the border cities. We'll need to keep building units to manage that, Durkon at least is a quite aggressive settlement, but I really want that stone.

Haley is probably going to be set on Collossus for a while once the Forge comes in, and Roy will be the future home of the stone wonders if they don't fall before we get stone hooked, but that still leaves about half our 'while growing' hammers to dump into units. Of course all the above cities will continue to be whipped for workers and settlers and overflow hammers, only balancing that with my desire to grow to use the Forge enabled happy caps.

[NobleHelium]

A Chu-ko-nu is a repeating crossbow. It is named after Zhuge Liang which is also the name of a Great General.

[Mardoc]

A Chu-ko-nu is a repeating crossbow. It is named after Zhuge Liang which is also the name of a Great General.

Maybe I'm really ignorant about China, but Zhuge Liang =/= Chu-ko-nu. They're not even close. Not even if the transliteration is wacky for one or both.

How is that 'naming after'?

[NobleHelium]

Canton is another name for Guangzhou, and they're even less close. Chinese has gone through several romanization systems (and many of them are corruptions anyway) and thus many proper nouns are known by names derived from older systems, with many of them previously based on Cantonese while all modern romanization is based on Mandarin.

The ch sound is similar to the zh sound. ko is actually a deviation from the Wade-Giles ke, which is close to ge. nu just means crossbow. So yes, it means Zhuge Liang's crossbow. His first name is omitted.

[Mardoc]

Ok, ChoKo = ChuKo = ZhuKo = ZhuKe = Zhuge is plausible, especially since they're all 'as heard by an englishman'. It was Nu = Liang that threw me

How close are Cantonese and Mandarin, anyway? Are we talking like Australian to American, or Italian to Spanish, or more like English to Spanish? If you know one, do you know the other, it just sounds funny? Or are they basically different languages?

[NobleHelium]

English to German perhaps? A romance language comparison like Italian to Spanish might be better. Chinese dialects are not mutually intelligible and the sounds are a lot different, but there's often an intuitive way to translate one sound to the other. Everyone uses the same written language with Mandarin grammar.

[Commodore]

Which is another rant of mine. If you hadn't gone for the OotS theme, I'd recommend Civ 1 China as the name list. Beijing and Peking are both pretty far from the real word, so why not Peking?

[Mardoc]

Which is another rant of mine. If you hadn't gone for the OotS theme, I'd recommend Civ 1 China as the name list. Beijing and Peking are both pretty far from the real word, so why not Peking?

Because Peking gets Firaxis yelled at and Beijing doesn't, and they really don't care, they just want to sell games?

Anyway...I thought my scouting was bad, but:


Maybe that'll turn into Machinery next turn . Or a bunch of gold to speed up Currency.

The core is pretty boring, but I've a bit of a dilemma with Belkar here. Do I whip it next turn, to finish the granary while there's still a bit of room in the food bar and take some overflow into something useful like a lighthouse? Or do I hold off...and if I do, should I work the silver or the forest?

My current thinking is that whipping it won't save enough food to be worthwhile, but getting the granary in sooner will be worth quite a bit, even ignoring the 5 commerce. So I should probably swap to the silver tile and just hand complete the granary, saving my whip hand for the next bit of infra. Or simply saving it for another worker, even.