Gavagai manages his personal GULAG

[Gavagai]

OK, I usually do micro for this game while going to and from my office. Unfortunately it doesn't leave me much possibility to write it down. That's why we have situations like this

(Yeah, I suck at teamwork. I think anyone who ever played in a team with me will tell you that much.)

Anyway...



Gulag will be growing to 6 after the worker is finished. At size 6 it aims to work a cottage in north-western area and a corn in addition to tiles already worked. While growing it should make itself an MP skirm and put the rest of the hammers into a Mint.
Northern workers should 1) finish mine on gold, 2) put 2 turns into cottage on a tile directly south, 3) finish cottage at the estuary. After that they will split up to chop forests on the plains hill and to the south of it. Southern worker will keep building cottages in the area after that; the northern one will finish the cottage 1S from gold and go north after this.
The worker which is going to complete in the capital will build a road on the forest 1SE fron Ivory. After that it should chop the forest while putting any extra turns he happens to end up with into a mine.
All the chops mentioned should go into the settler which the capital will buld at size 6. This settler will go to a spot marked as "ToA city". It is important that south-eastern worker chops his forest as soon as possible because it should go east to build a road for the settler.

Kolyma. Will regrow to size 5 and will stagnate for a while at 3 cottages / gold mine / copper mine. The corn will be given away to the capital. Production is going to be Mint - Library. The worker which is about to complete should go 1S next turn, put a turn into the road; 1SE, to the Horses, after this, finishing the road; then to jungled gold. This way it should be able to chop it just in time for the border pop.

(to be cont, I hope)

Actually, as I think of this, we may be better off growing the capital to size 7 and finishing both cottages. It is going to grow really fast...

[Gavagai]

Also, observe that we have religion spread into Astrakhan ITL. I think, the city where it is LEAST needed. Well, at least we know that spontaneous religion spread is a thing in this game and we wasn't caught by some weird bug. Just got very unlucky.

[Gavagai]

OK, AT had a score decrease when Barteq was online, accompanied by score increase/decrease of Barteq. That's interesting!

[Gavagai]

If Barteq is truly attacking into a different direction, it may change our plans quite a lot. In partucular, we may afford ourselves building less HAs and more settlers and also expand eastward more aggressively, with less fear of a conflict with Tsargon. Really, a lot more options to choose from is Grimace's land won't be immediately contested.

[Gavagai]

It appears that Granary in Norilsk will just barely pay for itself: we are going to invest 60 base hammers (48 with Forge) to gain 40 base hammers (50 with Forge). Bacchus, care to check my math when/if you have spare time? Norilsk will swap from Copper mine to Pigs when they are available, then grow on a cow, then on a deer, then on a plain forest and at size 7 will swap back from Pigs to Copper and add a plains hill to stagnate for, like, forever (so no point in factoring for food saved when growing from S6 to S7). Basically, we need a straightforward comparison between hammer cost of granary and hammers forgone due to a slower growth without a granary.

[Bacchus]

So, this seems to be the schedule for both options, no granary on the right:



It does pay back for itself, we get 84 hammers back after the forge bonus. The question is does it pay back quickly enough? Most of that gain is racked up in the last turns.

I do think we should build it though, as Segezhlag has too much food -- we will occasionally want to whip Norilsk and use the pig to regrow there.

Also, of course, there is the opportunity cost of holding the pig in Norilsk for longer under the second plan.

[Gavagai]

The Deer should be assumed to be improved when Norilsk starts working it. So, we will have +8 food, not +6 (+3 from Pigs, +1 from Cows, +2 from Deer, +2 from city center).

[Gavagai]

However, good point about the opportunity cost of withholding Pigs from Segezhlag. Probably that will be a tiebreaker for me.

[Gavagai]

[Bacchus]

Barteq took the barb city and razed it. I assume he will re-settle in a more defensible location, maybe 1NE or 2NNE. He lost a little power taking AT's city, but frankly not enough. In any case, we are now first in power by quite a bit, and we caught back up on MFG second place with 60/59. With a mint getting finished in Norilsk, our double-plains-hill-copper city, I am sure we will be world leaders in MFG for a while yet. Too bad the copper hills in Norilsk aren't grass, that would be nuts