RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[BobRoberts]

Thanks for the cottage/military answers! Sated my curiousity nicely.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Pottery 3/119 beakers, 5g in bank

100% 16 beakers/turn [TRUE: 20/turn] @ -2gpt
90% 14 beakers/turn [TRUE: 17/turn] @ -1gpt
80% 12 beakers/turn [TRUE: 15/turn] @ +1gpt
70% 11 beakers/turn [TRUE: 14/turn] @ +2gpt
60% 9 beakers/turn [TRUE: 11/turn] @ +4gpt
50% 6 beakers/turn [TRUE: 8/turn] @ +8gpt
0% 0 beakers/turn [TRUE: 1/turn] @ +14gpt

1t 0%, then 6t 100% gets us 121 beakers for +2g cost
1t 50%, then 6t 100% gets us 128 beakers for -4g cost [not as good]

I think you've goofed your math here - the magic bonus beaker comes BEFORE the prerequisite multiplier, not after. So 60% is TRUE: 12/ and 90% is TRUE 18/.

It doesn't seem to hurt your conclusion, though.

[antisocialmunky]

Basically, just trying to stay on friendly terms with Dantski here, because as Speaker said earlier, skirmishers pretty much mean "do not fight with these guys until the medieval era." I'd be willing to promise a lot in exchange for Dantski sending his next settler or two in another direction. Heck, we're planning on sending our next TWO settlers north, so a promise like that costs us nothing.

I wonder if that's what he intended with his odd civ/leader combo... It makes some sense now if he wanted to use early defensive UB + Imperialistic to try and push settlers out fast while not having to worry about being vulnerable. I'm not sure how exactly he'll support that economically though, mints aren't exactly all that great.

He certainly has some leverage on you since there's not exactly a whole lot you can do right now about him if he decides to settles towards you instead. Though I don't think that pissing off a neighbor would be the best diplomatic move unless Nakor is a bigger threat to him which is harder to imagine.

So if he does intend to get some leverage out of pushing settlers out with impunity, maybe you should drop some careful hints about what might happen if Nakor gets those cheap, fast super courthouses and he still has land around to settle in. Maybe something along the lines of a playful "You don't want to lose out on the land grab to some Rathauses do you? "

What do you think?

[Sullla]

Thanks for the correction on the beaker formula. I should have known that I was slightly off, because the numbers didn't add up correctly in one case. OK, let's start the next turn, T43:



- Chamberlain moved NE and found a sheep resource, but little else. Not really worth a picture.

- Jubal moved N and gained visibility into Djenne as expected. That allows us to run the formula for the city's production:

Formula: (Sabotage Production * (Their EP + 100)) / (Investigate City * 3)

Djenne: (7 * (43 + 100)) / (3 * 337) = 1 shield

The new city of Djenne has exactly one shield invested into something. Yes, not exactly a great relevation, I know. But... we can track what it builds on every single turn of the game from here on out! Plus, we can see any city improvements that go into the city, so this is really quite an advantage. We used this to great effect in the Apolyton Demogame, where it gave Realms Beyond a huge advantage over Imperio.

Now all you lurkers out there - you *CANNOT* mention this to the other teams. It's one of our major advantages. If they discover it on their own, that's fine, but no spilling the beans, ok?

- We have a new warrior in Gettysburg. Name suggestions? Preferably looking for another American Civil War commander here.

- Workers A and B completed the farm at Antietam. Worker C (who has received his full name of Cuidad Rodrigo) started chopping the new forest at Gettysburg.

- Pottery is due in 6t, but we needed to run a turn of min science to make that happen, and I figured now was as good a turn as any.

- Jowy's scout also popped up at the top of the screen.

I also decided that we should really send something out to our neighbors, so I went ahead and sent the proposed messages to Dantski and Jowy. I did make one or two slight changes, so I'll repost them in the following post.

Also, because I like beating a dead horse, we should really stick to the plan I proposed, which we're kinda in the middle of already.

[Sullla]

Dantski:

Dear Romalinese friends,

Welcome to the neighborhood! :D I hope you didn't mind Jubal Early dropping by to say hello to the lovely new city of Djenne. While I'd be lying if I said we were completely pleased to see you settle in our direction, we understand that there's going to be some competition for land, and our teams were pretty close together to start. So as I said before, we'd like to welcome you to the neighborhood, and ask if you'd be interested in maybe partnering on a Gettysburg/Djenne road sometime down the road, so that we can set up some of those profitable international trade routes.

At the same time, is there any way we can work out an agreement not to settle on one another's borders for at least a little while? I don't think it benefits either of us to have a huge rush to settle that no man's land between us. We'd be willing to promise you that we'll send our next settler towards Jowy, if you'll promise us in return to send your next settler towards Nakor. Can we make a gentleman's agrement to that effect? Or something along those lines? There's got to be some really juicy territory to your southeast, and I'm sure you don't want Organized rathauses going up all over the place... :)

Keep in touch and let us know what's on your mind. Cheers.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

Thanks for the line about the Rathauses, which I added into the message! Now for Jowy:

Dear Greek friends,

We hadn't heard from you in a little while, so we thought we'd say hi and see how things are going. We saw your scout arrive near our territory this turn; please be aware that there is a lion moving around directly north of our capital, so you may want to send him around to the east for safety. I know that this is minimal information, but we'd like to help keep your scout alive if possible as he ventures off into the wilderness.

Is there anything else we can help your team with? Please let us know, and keep the lines of communication open. Best wishes.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

Had to change the wording slightly because of their scout moving, but the message remains essentially identical.

[Sullla]

It seems Jowy beat us to the punch on a chasing-up message:

Hi once again!

Thought I'd catch up on what's going on. I saw your warrior south of our capital a while ago. Have you got a good idea of our lands yet? I'm still really interested to settle a border deal so we can actually plan our future city sites :)

I have a scout south now and I'm wondering could you now ask Dantski to come near your borders to meet up with me? It would be a great help if you could do that for me.
~ Jowy

So I replied:

Hi Jowy, we were just about to contact you. Let me send you this slightly outdated message, and we'll get back to you again in a day or two.

And then sent off the message in the previous post. Thoughts on how to respond to this new message?

[antisocialmunky]

Whenever you finally build the warrior that will just sit in your capitol, name him McClellan pretty please

If you want to keep everyone guessing go with someone weird sounding like Beauregard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.G.T._Beauregard for those who are curious.


As to messages, well he seems to really want that border agreement. I hope he's not going to get mad when their team sees blue dot or Sullla paving his GREAT NORTHERN HIGHWAY towards Greece. I think that you could try and convince them that Dantski started quite close compared to Jowy and has that really early UU or something to that effect and that you won't plant your next city close to them(its going on the lake anyways). You could also mention that your road is the beginning of an interciv trade route like what you mentioned to Dantski. As for a border agreement proper, you could say something along the lines of:

"Well we have not thought about that as much as we would have liked. However, we would be willing to discuss this. Do you have any ideas on where to begin?"

That should give you at least a little bit more time to think about it. If he likes that, he might provide some useful information such as where he wants to expand and such. While not that particularly useful, it might be able to clue you in on how good of a team Greece is depending on whether their proposal semi-realistic or completely ridiculous. You can always say that you and Speaker are going to talk about it further in private to stall for more time or wait for map trading, etc. It's not going to really cost you anything until they get really antzy about land but you might be able to get information out of it.

[Speaker]

Tell him we'll tell Dantski to send a scout up toward Greece. Once our borders pop at Antietam, it will take a *long* time for a one-move unit to get around our borders, and I'm not sure that Dantski even has a scouting unit at the moment.

As for the border agreement, can we just say we haven't yet uncovered all the territory, but we'll speak more about it once we are finished exploring? My gut tell me that our "core" territory will consist of the following:

1) Gettysburg
2) Antietam
3) Blue Dot (Chancellorsville?)
4) Pink Dot
5) Black Dot
6) A city S-S-S of Gettysburg for the Deer, which which will form our border with Dantski
7) A city SW-S-S of Antietam, for the 4 spices

Cities 6 and 7 will put a lot of cultural pressure on Djenne, but what can we do? Dantski has tied our hands by planting so close to us. There is no other way to plant a city south of our capital that won't have contested cultural borders with Djenne. Pretty plant by Dantski really. A much smarter city would have been due west of his capital, like our Antietam. Does he just have the 1 worker? Or do you think he put the overflow after whipping his settler into a worker? That would have been a good decision, but I'm guessing he put it into another Skirmisher.

I just noticed that Dantski's skirmisher next to Djenne has a blue tint, meaning it has an unused promotion. Could he have actually built a barracks? Or killed 2 barb animals on defense? Or attacked a barb animal and won? I'm guessing the third is most likely?

[Sullla]

McClellan is perfect for a military police warrior who never moves. We can even call him "Young Napoleon". But this guy will probably go cover city #3, so I think we'll go with Beauregard, which is a wonderful sounding name. (And unlike McClellan, Beauregard actually won at Bull Run!)

Speaker, I like your idea about how to deal with Jowy's border agreement request. I could type something up tonight, but I'll wait until tomorrow to stall a little longer. If the turn rolls over tonight, I'll be able to get to it in about 3-4 hours.

My guess is that Dantski attacked and killed a barb animal to get that promotion. He only built the skirmisher on T35, and Timbuktu does not have a barracks, so that's by far the most likely situation.

[Dr. Nomadic]

Whoops on the specialist economy! The financial trait seems to combine poorly with the philosophical trait, BTW. I usually hear about financial/philosophical being a "dangerous builder's combo," but it seems to me that the traits don't go well together.

Sorry, I have to be asking questions. At least I'm on topic, right?