RBP3 [SPOILERS] Hannibal of Byzantium (Bobchillingworth, ManiaMuse & SleepingMoogle)

[SleepingMoogle]

Assuming nothing odd happens, we'll have 2 workers and 2 cities when BW comes in. Ideally, we'll also have hooked up either Horses or Copper within a few turns of that.

If we have horses, we should probably get our a Chariot or two quickly. We could chop out the first, and train the second while growing the capital to size 4.

Even if we have copper, it's unlikely that it'll be next to our cities, and even then we need a few turns hooking it up.. say turn 50 or so. We can train a Warrior at the capital, and then follow up with an Axemen while growing. Depending on the need, we could chop these as well.

In the event we have neither, getting Archery will become a priority. But until we get there, we can pump out some more Warriors while growing to size 4.

I'm fairly confident we'll have at least one strategic resource nearby.. we have a lot hill and open flatland tiles around our capital. We just have to hope we can get it hooked up soon.

[SleepingMoogle]

Turn 20:

A lot of score increases this turn. The Civs that planted their capital on the first turn got their controlled tiles added to their score. Ours is just a bit lower than most since we have that lake tile:



Unfortunately the Wolf hasn't attacked Jenkins, and instead moved to onto the hill to his west. As the Citadel is safe now (we can rush the second warrior to completion before anyone can threaten it), I moved him SW onto the forested hill, rather than S onto the spices. An extra 25% always helps, plus it revealed some interesting tiles as well:



More grassland river tiles and a Stone resource! And even more floodplains to the north.

Anoleis has finished the farm, and I changed the Citadel to start working the improved rice. He will spend the next 3 turns building roads, before starting on a Pasture for the sheep once we finish researching Animal Husbandry.

[ManiaMuse]

If the map is quite cramped I suspect that the stone resource has probably been placed in quite a contested place (ie roughly mid distance between our civ and another, the stone is 7 tiles from our capital so 14 or so tiles between starts seems quite reasonable for a cramped map). Might be worth rushing a settler over there relatively early and the grassland rivers are always nice as well.

[Bobchillingworth]

Stone! While it's tempting to consider settling 1N of the stone or on it and trying to chop stonehenge, I think that there's just going to be too much competition for the wonder.

We may want to consider attacking the wolf if we still can. That messes up our scouting some, but we've already revealed some good city sites, and I think we get double exp if we attack rather than defend.

[ManiaMuse]

Edit: Logged into the game and saw that Jenkins had been attacked but only lost 0.2 hp so he's at 1.8hp at the moment. In my opinion we should continue along our scouting path as scouting knowledge is more valuable than the slightly increased risk that an animal will be able to kill him.

I wasn't sure of our micro plan for the worker so left the worker and warrior unmoved.

Settling on stone still requires masonary for it to be hooked up which isn't really on our tech path at the moment.

[SleepingMoogle]

Keeping Jenkins moving sounds like the better option, yes. He will be back inside our borders at T30 in our current scouting plan and will be on tiles granting defensive bonuses pretty much every turn until then. Healing him up then would be more efficient.

Anoleis should spend this turn building a road on the rice, and move 1N onto the sheep next turn. It's a little different from the original plan, but I updated the second post in this thread to reflect the change already. If he's still unmoved once I get home, I'll take care of that.

Masonry is still a while away, yes. But it could be a nice location for our third city (assuming the first to are planted S and NW of the Citadel). Given the amount of techs we already want to research first (Hunting, Archery, Pottery, Iron Working and Writing), there's lots of time to think it over. Getting Stonehenge is a bit of a pipe dream for now.

[SleepingMoogle]

Turn 22:

Scouting continues in the SW, although the recently revealed tiles are much less desirable:



That new body of water is another lake, so no sign of an actual coast yet. I wonder if Dantski and Mukha are regretting their Civ pick by this point..

Anyway, Anoleis interrupted his building a road on the rice, and is now roading the sheep. He'll finish this one just in time for AH, Pasture the sheep, and then return to finish the road.

We'll reach size 2 next turn, which will catch us up a bit with the other Civs. It's rather amusing that the single lake tile near the Citadel means we're currently last in score! Water is a scarce resource indeed. A number of other teams increased in score this turn, most of them are appear to be from researching a tech.

Ruff_hi: 46
Meatbalz, dazedroyalty & Ilios: 46
Krill: 46
Exploit: 46
Cull, RefSteel & Maniac Marshall: 40
Kyan, Twinkletoes89 & Whosit: 40
Morgan: 38

If I'm not mistaken, we'll increase to 39 next turn due to our Capital size increase, and to 45 the turn after from researching AH.

[Wyrmsbane]

Are you still intending to keep the first warrior near home for extra security or are you just looking for city sites for now? Let others find you so to speak.

[ManiaMuse]

Well at the moment it doesn't look like we're actively searching for other teams but I think the intention was to scout mostly with chariots given the size of the map. We might end up regretting that if we end up missing out on getting in on deals with other teams but we'll see. Given that we haven't met anyone yet I think it unlikely that anyone could have met more than 2 other civs by this point. The hunting teams will probably have their scouts killed pretty soon if not already given that there are animals about.

Actually just thinking about it, we aren't going to be doing much barb spawn busting with only 3 warriors (assuming they all are still alive) by the time we have our first warrior. With such a thin defence we can't really spare any units to go charting far regions of the world. Hopefully someone will find us soon though.

Oh and hurray, another lurker!

[SleepingMoogle]

Much as we'd like to scout further away and contact other Civs, it just doesn't seem safe to do so (yet). The lack of starting Worker techs means we won't be able to chop until ~T45. Most other Civs will probably get it earlier than that, and would potentially be able to chop out an army to choke us before we can get a proper defense.

Hopefully we'll find that there are horses within reach once AH finishes in 2 turns. A chariot or two would work wonders for scouting, contacting other Civs and getting an idea of what our neighbors are doing. Until then though, keeping our forces close will prevent what happened to Mortius in RBP2 and presumably Lobo.Thibron in this game.

It could be as big a gamble as to boldly go where no one has gone before, but we think it will work out for us.