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

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I'm pretty sure no one really cares much about this game. Eight teams alive, four yet to play, five hours on the clock. Uh huh. I'll play later, I'd rather work on the map for PB17.

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T218 - Missionaries doing their thing.




More in progress. We have enough Jews and Buddhists, need lots more Hindus and Confucians, and more Taoists (Daoists?). So keep building religion stuff for a while until nasty metal things come to kill us.




What kinds of nasty metal things?




Lots and lots of nasty metal things, when they feel like it.




But not from this guy.




That's just. Stop. Suttree and Retep are still spending EPs against us, I guess having the #1 power for a long time makes a habit. Oh well, just keep graphs on them, I don't care if they see everything. If they're looking at the power graph and our gradual slope and looking at the event log and seeing the sudden expansion in religious fervor in our empire, they know what is going on. Would be a perfect time to kill us, right? DO IT!!!!

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The turn rolled twelve hours ago and so far two of eight people have played. Just sayin'.

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T219 - Finished the map for PB17. Did precious little for this game, playing a near record 15 minute turn.




Lawd 'a mussy there's revival sweepin' our land!




Late to the Rifling party, as we knew. Blah. And demographics.




Put a stamp on it, it's in the mail. NEXT TURN PLEASE.

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T220 - More of the same. Suttree missed his turn, as well -- I was still logged in when the turn rolled. 100% checked out. Not a terrible thing for a neighbor when you're making an unsuccessful bid for a CV. I went ahead and ran max science on Drama, will finish Music next turn with overflow and a bit of research. It will delay Rifling a bit, but does it really matter? Until we get through Philosophy and Nationhood, Rifling doesn't do us a ton of good. Rifle whips are expensive (better than nothing, obviously, but expensive) and won't save us against masses of drafted infantry anyway, which is what we'd be facing if invaded. So let's go on down the culture line and finish Rifling while saving cash. That way when we do get to Nationalism we can more efficiently burn off our population while we die, if needed.

More missionary spreads. The pair of Confucians are on a boat from I Burn now and will be back in the empire in a few turns. This is where we surely regret sending the faster galley off on the wild mission to deliver a settler to the ice, it would have saved us a few turns getting Confucianism spread. Meh, we have plenty of other missionaries and temples to build for now anyway.




I cancelled a long standing deal we had with Wetbandit, I think it was dyes to him for gold. We still have a gold from Oxy so we're OK there. Anyway I reoffered to Wetbandit dyes and spice (our only source) for marble. We'll see if he goes for it. If he isn't using it he may as well right? I imagine his giant capital can actually use the happy resources. The down side of the trade for us is that we do need the spice for health purposes in our larger cities, so it isn't perfect, but we need marble badly so we can burn through Sistine quickly and start cranking out the marble boosted cathedrals soon. We still have stone courtesy of William, and copper, so we can get the other cathedrals we need at the reduced hammer cost, but it will still take forever. Building cathedrals is obviously the bottleneck in the CV plan so it has to start soon if we're to have any shot at all. Which we don't anyway, but we may as well try to optimize for it anyway.




If anyone has city visibility (Retep!) these production queues are just begging for an invasion. Bless I Burn and its one turn cataphract.




It's kind of unbelievable how no one is building military at all. William has flattened out his power growth since he presumably has enough on hand to kill Kuro if he wants to. Retep isn't powering up, he's staying on course for his spaceship victory and that means not wasting hammers or cash on more military than he needs. My only question is why, since it's so obvious, why aren't Wetbandit and William gearing up for an all out war on Retep? The only answer is the game settings, the AI diplo. This is a game that could have been way more interesting if we had the PB9 additional AI diplo options, like "Declare war on X". Those guys aren't catching Retep right now but if they coordinated to first destroy Retep's island holdings (which they could do with combined naval power) and then, if they were still behind, to burn some of his core, they could be right back in the game and would have only each other to contend with. Even if they were slowed by a war I don't see anyone else catching up to them while they were fighting. Molach is the only possibility, since he's the only player near them in technology, and he'd have to fight a successful war of his own to grab more land to be a credible threat to them, but he's 100-150 turns too late on that count. Molach's fatal play was not crushing Oxy's rear while Oxy was heavily engaged with Suttree. Maybe Oxy had so much military he was able to truly cover both fronts, but I doubt it. Anyway, the point is I don't see Molach being competitive with either William or Wetbandit, even if those two were slowed down by a successful dogpile against Retep. So in that case the #2 and #3 powers really should be finding a way to take down Retep.

Not entirely on an unrelated topic I offered a MPP with Wetbandit, for what it's worth. On the one hand it gives Retep something to think about if he were to try attacking us again in the future. He'd have a war declaration from Wetbandt. Whether any fighting would take place as a result, who could say, but it's a thought. On the other hand if Retep declared on Wetbandit to snipe any island cities our war declaration would (theoretically) force him to spend more power at home on defense, although in reality all it would amount to would be getting our seafood industry decimated for a while again. In any case if William ever gets around to researching Military Tradition (right?) I'll offer him the same deal. Why not, I don't see a condition where I'd want to fight with either William or Wetbandit in this game, even if they're somehow about to win it. Grudge mode and all that, if I'm not winning I'm OK with both of them, they've played solid enough. Not that Retep hasn't, but he owns islands that belong to me so I'm not voluntarily coronating him.

So enough on all that, here's the tech screen from T220 and then one from T221 as the turn rolled. I haven't analyzed because it's all immaterial to us at this point, but as usual in case anyone is following along at home, this is for you.

T220



T221 start of turn



Another thought just occurred to me. Divine Right and Islam are still out there to be taken. We're building gobs of religious buildings anyway, how about we go 1/3 monk economy? I'm sure the investment would never pay off before the game ends but nothing we're doing now is rational anyway. Sure, why not build one more wonder, found a religion of our own, and have an option for a third palace? What's that you say? Oh we need Rifling? Psshhhhpht. Nonsense!

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How much culture is the Spiral Minaret worth? Obviously build it in a culture city, unless it slows down a cathedral/hermitage.

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T221 - Wetbandit accepted our trade for marble, so time to blaze through Music and get Sistine started. We'll finish it this turn while saving cash on the overflow from running max science last turn, plus the rep specialist beakers. Next turn I'll start on Sistine wherever seems best, probably in the capital although that city is seriously exposed on the coast. ML is at 38/40 on a missionary this turn so it will finish that with a lot of overflow into Sistine next turn.

It's going to be interesting to see if we make it through Music, Divine Right (!!), Philosophy, and Nationalism before Rifling....Probably Rifling should come right after DR since Philo does nothing useful for us and we don't want to draft until we have Rifling anyway. I mean, how much help are drafted muskets in the face of infantry anyway? Oh, and Boldly, Spiral Minaret is worth 8 cpt, but we probably won't build it in one of the CV cities as they'll be busy on cathedrals for the forseeable future.

With Drama in we need to figure out where we'll build the Globe Theater for our draft camp. I'm suggesting Biscuits, which is a middling newish city, centrally located, with corn, cows, and lots of farms. It should be able to handle a draft per turn and has enough mined hills to allow it to build the Globe quickly.

Out in the islands we've run into a snag with our planned settling spot, courtesy of another map trade with Wetbandit.




I think I'll explore the island southeast of Bols and hope there's food down there, otherwise it will be settling on the one tile island with fish due south of Bols. Worthless? Yup, except for the second ICTR. But Survival Island will again be in efffect, should the worst come to pass. In spite of the enormous maintenance cost the city will be immediately profitable, and will increase in profitability once we get a courthouse in and grow the city. But yeah total garbage time island settlement -- hey maybe the map WAS fair, we could have been doing this all along!

In the south we spotted Suttree unloading a cavalry coming over from his island Moai city. This isn't the first time he's shown us a new unit, he showed us a cuirassier a while back when he was first able to build those. I'm still receiving mental peace vibes, and his power growth doesn't belie the idea.




I lined up city builds so that we'll finish two Buddhist temples this turn. That will give us three across the empire, enough to start a stupa. We also have seven Jewish temples so we can start two Jewish synagogues next turn in our CV cities. We have stone and copper to speed these along, and a bit of whip overflow in Tyler (yeah, Tyler got whipped to finish its Buddhist temple...whip anger is back up to 57 turns there! ) Elsewhere we're still cranking out missionaries and building temples, lots of work left to do on that front.

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T222 - Began Sistine Chapel in our capital, a seven turn build.




Molach's golden age ended over on another part of the map that doesn't matter to us.




Techs.




Retep researched Divine Right as the turn rolled and landed Islam in one of his billion island cities. I assume he researched it so he can build the Spiral Minaret, since he has a bazillion hammers with all his factories. What will be annoying is if he decides to research Music just for the hell of it to take Sistine because then we won't even have the fun of playing the culture game. By the way, William and Suttree are both using the free speech civic, so they're pushing +100% culture on our border cities. Silly. I'm guessing William did it for the economic bonus though. Suttree, probably for culture, because his bureaucap was probably better for economy.

Demographics - if you only looked at the rank in these categories you might think we were in the game. But 3rd in MFG is about one third the leader. Yup, that's not competitive. I'll post graphs in a moment.

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T233 Graphs







Retep isn't in a golden age....That's all the factories he whipped (yay Kremlin!)

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Oooo I made it into thestick's signature again!