T122-T124.
News of the World in Brief (like I actually be brief )
Started writing this T122 btw, so if some turn numbers sound off its because of that. (Assume that for the last few pages of posts, plus the rest of this thread too, for what it's worth.)
In no particular order:
Haram
The biggest news recently is that Haram is apparently too busy to keep playing and has recruited a replacement, flagauto. This is really disappointing, as I felt we were both redeeming ourselves here for our PB20 disaster and gearing up to have an epic showdown. There, we (well, the blame should fall on me moreso than him) wrecked ourselves from early conflict and we fell behind the rest of the world. Here, we are neck-and-neck and yet leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the world. Well, alas. flauauto is a decent player but nowhere even close to Haram's level, so I feel like our chances to win the game have increased, not that the Sumerian civ is out of the game by any means. Edit: and the even more recent news is that flagauto might have gone AWOL, immediately after signing up? Realmsbeyond.net, ladies and gents.
A few other bits of Haram news:
1.) It seems he has actually completed Nationalism, one turn ahead what I expected! Taj ETA should thus be about 5-6 turns from now.
2.) He's planted two fillers, bringing him up to 18 cities. We're still up on him by about ~30 pop though, according to the victory screen. 3.) Strangely, Haram built the Hagia Sophia - for apparently *NO* failgold, from what I've monitored of his economy - which was a big shock to me. This honestly feels like not only a big waste of hammers (well, only 200 raw hammers, but still that's a lot - a whole turn of total empire production), but a big waste of failgold potential. I can understand his desire for more worker-turnage, to convert like half his land to workshops, but even still man, you're Productive, why not just build another couple of workers or whatever? And neither Guilds nor Chemistry will come in that immediately for him. Seems like a mistake.
4.) We've been dumping a lot of EP on each other, to the tune of about ~22 per turn. This is my full output, but not all of his:
So, he's probably splitting some on TBS to get his research vis too. IMHO it's best for both of us if we keep dumping EP on each other until we get research vis; we're each making too much eppt for not research vis to be realistic, but neither of us would want the other to have a significant lead.
Dreylin
Dreylin is falling behind in cities, but not CY or MFG, and, more importantly, he is building power, as seen both in his increasingly frequent small-whips and this bump in the power graph:
In addition, I've seen, directly, with my scout, several Praets pop up in his cities, only to disappear from view the next turn. He has but one galley in the north, so I think these sneaky guys are slinking into galleys in the south. An attack on Tsargon thus seems imminent; I have scaled back our infrastructure wishlish a bit in response, and I think its smart to bump Machinery up a bit higher in the tech queue too. We don't want to finish Education right away anyways, don't want anyone else to get KTB on it from us. (KTB is worth over 100 beakers per player on that tech; would be over 200 beakers if this were RtR!)
So, what kind of invasion force could he have, as of what we can see from his power last turn? He's got HBR and Alphabet (14k tech), but I have at least 30 pop on him, so we'll call that a wash. So 57k is what, 3 additional full galleys of Praets? So he could potentially have about 8-9 galleys full of Stuff in total? He'll need more than that to seriously conquer Tsargon, but if he has that in addition to some Knights... he could have a pretty goddamn serious army in as soon as 10 turns.
TBS
TBS is now knee-deep into his first GA. He's already popped a GE, but since he hasnt been running a gold surplus I have been unable to offer him a loan, ugh. If this was an AI-signalling game, I bet I could have figured out some way to commmunicate that I was willing to throw interest-free money at him. Alas. He has still not landed the SP, although I really am expecting it any turn now. The SP is a quite underrated wonder and I'd be really really surprised if TBS did not try to snag it. (Edit: He lasted the SP T124!!! Totally called it! 282 failgold, hurray! Might have been able to beat him there, but we have other, more important priorities right now)
On the war front, TBS has taken two of Scipio's 6 pre-war cities, leaving him just 3 on the mainland and the one on his island, which Fennbandit will surely take. Two of the 3 mainland cities seem to be near Haram's island's south coast, from what I can see with my Chariot, although I can't see into them directly, while the last is his capital. Scipio has been whipping like a fucking madman in the last dozen turns. I don't understand why people will putz around forever but then whip themselves into oblivion right before they die. It's a pretty common pattern in these pitbosses. Like, you obviously know how the whip works, so where was this enthusiasm 20 turns ago? Poor TBS. Well, at least he got some land outta the deal; he's also settled 2 more cities in the last few turns, bringing him up to 19, same as us.
Interestingly, it appears that TBS is keeping up with tech fairly well, at least what I can read from the score. A lot of that is the Mids and some of it is his very nice capital, but it can't be all of it. Thus, I'm pretty sure he's used a few of his many great people for their special effects - bulbs, trade missions, etc.
Tsargon
He asked for a 400g for 45gpt loan; I sent it back to him, and then I guess he slammed accept while the game was paused for him? Because suddenly we had 3 loans on the table. We resolved it by him sending me 800g for my 90gpt. Anyways, I don't know what he needs this for but I hope its Feudalism so he doesnt get completely chumped by Dreylin.
Borsche
Swapped into Bureaucracy without a GA; I'm sure he'll have Machinery very soon (and in fact may have just gotten it this turn, now that I look at score jumps), and then I have to get psycho-paranoid about our Moai. If it looks like we need to lib Astro, we should def get Optics earlier rather than later to scout out any BUllshit from this noted psychogamer.
Fennbandit
I'm not sure what's happening over here, but these guys are falling behind. On one hand, they've managed to settle 2 more cities, bringing them up to 18, and look to be in 3rd place CY, just behind Haram. So, all that is good. However, their economy has completely stagnated and their MFG is in the fucking dumpster. IIRC, on T100, right before their GA, they were gaining like 140gpt or so, which was the best in the world. 24 turns later, they are gaining... just 160gpt. For reference, we're gaining about 430gpt, not including Tsargon's loan repayment. Not saying that they should be as high as us, especially since we have a lot of gold multipliers, but surely their economy should have grown more than this! I think one of their bigger problems was throwing their first GA too early to swap into Bureau; the other is that they're probably behind on hammers, both in raw hpt and from whips, and thus haven't put up many courthouses.
Well, they'll probably snag some more easy land from Scipio; maybe without a pressing need for a Real War they'll be able to catch back up when the rest of us are spamming troops. They probably should figure out what they're gonna do about Fin vs Pro lategame, how to divide their cities between hammers and commerce or whatever; what I've seen so far is mostly a bias towards commerce, which will destroy them unless they're able to make up some serious ground on tech.
Jowy
Completely quiet! Very low power, lowest power in the world I think. Hasn't thrown a GA yet!
Domestic Update
Well, our empire still looks pretty much exactly the same except with different numbers, so there's no point in showing a global shot. Instead, I'll show city queues from this turn, from before we whipped away 12 pop:
CITIES-SCREENSHOT
Woops I forgot to hit save again, XD. Anyways, we had 152 pop.
Our Infra plan is going well:
(I converted all hammer numbers shown into "base" hammers, which means forges and bureau are factored out.)
Since the last time I showed this, I increased the total hammers to build from 5500 to 5800, then to about 6400. That includes our National Epic, which should be done in, IIRC, T132ish. So, we've actually built about 3900 hammers in 13 turns, for an output of about 300hpt just into infrastructure, not including wealth builds or military units. (built a lotta that stuff too). Going forward, I felt that pushing some of the AP buildings further into the future was a good idea so that we can support more military buildup. The logistics of actually shuffling monks around ended up being slower than my original optimistic estimate anyways.
We've been whipping hard, but I think that the next 2-3 turns will be the last really hard whipping - into buildings, at least - that we'll need to do for quite a long time. I'd rather that we grow into our beautiful tiles... speaking of, by the way, the Fin wharf is a funny creature, at least in fishing villages. It's expensive enough where you want to whip it, but if you whip it there's no point to it. So, it's more like a "capstone" building that absorbs whip overflow from bigger pop whips of other buildings, so that its ready to "coast" () to completion at high fpt and low hpt when all other desired buildings are complete.
At T132, we'll add grocers, universities, observatories, and banks to this list. I think we'll want at most 3-4 groc/uni/obs in our 4 bigtime commerce cities, and then maybe 8? 9? banks at most, plus Wall Street? I don't think we'll have a reason to build Oxford unless we lose out on the Kremlin, but we'll see. So, that's... 2700 total hammers for the fancy commerce buildings, added to 1700 hammers in the "future" column of our wishlist and 600 leftover hammers we won't finish before T132. That's only 5000 hammers in buildings over the next 50 turns in our original 19 cities, about 2/3 of which will be done by the end of our GA. (so, in 20 turns or so) Everything else will be units... lots and lots and lots of units...
Tech wise, we have Monotheism and Paper complete, and 1/3 of Education. T124 we get 3/4 of Machinery, then we go back to pick up Alphabet at 100%, overflowing into Machinery at 100%, overflowing into Education; that should put us around 5/6 complete, with 3 100% turns of tech needed to lib Printing Press(and enough money to get there), at which point we evaluate what tech we should actually use Lib on. We'll monitor people's gold levels pretty closely for the next half dozen turns or so, and by people, I specifically mean Haram and TBS.
We pop our Great Merchant in 2 turns; I'll put him into position to pop a trade mission if we need it. Our GA should be coming T137/T138 or so... maybe T136, not sure if its worth gimping the city pre-GA to fire it 1T sooner. Not soon enough to matter for Lib, at any rate, but maybe for the Economics merchant, if we can finangle that. We shall see...
Demos, Graphs, Counts:
Demos:
Not much to say here. We swap between 3rd and 4th in soldiers with Haram every other turn or so.
CY is still looking very good, considering how much we've been whipping. (which is a lot!)
MFG is still inching up... we'll look very good in 4-5 turns from now, once we regrow onto a bunch of mines and at least a half dozen additional AP buildings finish. And then Haram throws his GA and we again look like garbage.
City counts:
19: Us (T98), TBS (T121)
18: Haram (T118), Fennbandit (T122)
16: Borsche (T118)
15: Dreylin (T101)
13: Jowy (T103)
11: Tsargon (T96)
4: Scipio (T121)
Note that Haram, Fennbandit, TBS, and Borsche have each founded a couple more spots recently. We'll also throw down 1 last filler in about 5T, because why the hell not?
Whip Counts:
The Blues Brothers: 140 pop total; 6 triplepop whip, 39 doublepop whips, 43 singlepop whips
TBS: 117 pop total; 7 triplepop whips, 39 doublepop whips, 15 singlepop whips
Dreylin: 80 pop total; 1 quadruplepop whip, 4 triplepop whips, 15 doublepop whip, 34 singlepop whips
Fennbandit: 68 pop total; 1 quadruplepop whip, 8 triplepop whips, 13 doublepop whips, 14 singlepop whips
Haram: 65 pop total; 6 triplepop whips, 19 doublepop whips, 11 singlepop whips
Borsche: 46 pop total; 1 quadruplepop whip, 2 triplepop whips, 10 doublepop whips, 16 singlepop whips
Scipio: 43 pop total; 4 triplepop whip, 9 doublepop whip, 12 singlepop whips
Jowy: 39 pop total; 4 triplepop whips, 8 doublepop whip, 11 singlepop whips
Tsargon: 25 pop total; 1 quadruple pop whip, 1 triplepop whip, 7 doublepop whips, 4 singlepop whips
We're back to a pretty commanding lead in self-genocide, heh. We've whipped 33 pop more than Haram in the last 13 turns, worth about ~1150 extra hammers in total, or 89hpt. However, been making up around 50ish hpt of that in raw MFG, and then some more via OR and cheaper courthouses. So, I think we're about even.
News of the World in Brief (like I actually be brief )
Started writing this T122 btw, so if some turn numbers sound off its because of that. (Assume that for the last few pages of posts, plus the rest of this thread too, for what it's worth.)
In no particular order:
Haram
The biggest news recently is that Haram is apparently too busy to keep playing and has recruited a replacement, flagauto. This is really disappointing, as I felt we were both redeeming ourselves here for our PB20 disaster and gearing up to have an epic showdown. There, we (well, the blame should fall on me moreso than him) wrecked ourselves from early conflict and we fell behind the rest of the world. Here, we are neck-and-neck and yet leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the world. Well, alas. flauauto is a decent player but nowhere even close to Haram's level, so I feel like our chances to win the game have increased, not that the Sumerian civ is out of the game by any means. Edit: and the even more recent news is that flagauto might have gone AWOL, immediately after signing up? Realmsbeyond.net, ladies and gents.
A few other bits of Haram news:
1.) It seems he has actually completed Nationalism, one turn ahead what I expected! Taj ETA should thus be about 5-6 turns from now.
2.) He's planted two fillers, bringing him up to 18 cities. We're still up on him by about ~30 pop though, according to the victory screen. 3.) Strangely, Haram built the Hagia Sophia - for apparently *NO* failgold, from what I've monitored of his economy - which was a big shock to me. This honestly feels like not only a big waste of hammers (well, only 200 raw hammers, but still that's a lot - a whole turn of total empire production), but a big waste of failgold potential. I can understand his desire for more worker-turnage, to convert like half his land to workshops, but even still man, you're Productive, why not just build another couple of workers or whatever? And neither Guilds nor Chemistry will come in that immediately for him. Seems like a mistake.
4.) We've been dumping a lot of EP on each other, to the tune of about ~22 per turn. This is my full output, but not all of his:
So, he's probably splitting some on TBS to get his research vis too. IMHO it's best for both of us if we keep dumping EP on each other until we get research vis; we're each making too much eppt for not research vis to be realistic, but neither of us would want the other to have a significant lead.
Dreylin
Dreylin is falling behind in cities, but not CY or MFG, and, more importantly, he is building power, as seen both in his increasingly frequent small-whips and this bump in the power graph:
In addition, I've seen, directly, with my scout, several Praets pop up in his cities, only to disappear from view the next turn. He has but one galley in the north, so I think these sneaky guys are slinking into galleys in the south. An attack on Tsargon thus seems imminent; I have scaled back our infrastructure wishlish a bit in response, and I think its smart to bump Machinery up a bit higher in the tech queue too. We don't want to finish Education right away anyways, don't want anyone else to get KTB on it from us. (KTB is worth over 100 beakers per player on that tech; would be over 200 beakers if this were RtR!)
So, what kind of invasion force could he have, as of what we can see from his power last turn? He's got HBR and Alphabet (14k tech), but I have at least 30 pop on him, so we'll call that a wash. So 57k is what, 3 additional full galleys of Praets? So he could potentially have about 8-9 galleys full of Stuff in total? He'll need more than that to seriously conquer Tsargon, but if he has that in addition to some Knights... he could have a pretty goddamn serious army in as soon as 10 turns.
TBS
TBS is now knee-deep into his first GA. He's already popped a GE, but since he hasnt been running a gold surplus I have been unable to offer him a loan, ugh. If this was an AI-signalling game, I bet I could have figured out some way to commmunicate that I was willing to throw interest-free money at him. Alas. He has still not landed the SP, although I really am expecting it any turn now. The SP is a quite underrated wonder and I'd be really really surprised if TBS did not try to snag it. (Edit: He lasted the SP T124!!! Totally called it! 282 failgold, hurray! Might have been able to beat him there, but we have other, more important priorities right now)
On the war front, TBS has taken two of Scipio's 6 pre-war cities, leaving him just 3 on the mainland and the one on his island, which Fennbandit will surely take. Two of the 3 mainland cities seem to be near Haram's island's south coast, from what I can see with my Chariot, although I can't see into them directly, while the last is his capital. Scipio has been whipping like a fucking madman in the last dozen turns. I don't understand why people will putz around forever but then whip themselves into oblivion right before they die. It's a pretty common pattern in these pitbosses. Like, you obviously know how the whip works, so where was this enthusiasm 20 turns ago? Poor TBS. Well, at least he got some land outta the deal; he's also settled 2 more cities in the last few turns, bringing him up to 19, same as us.
Interestingly, it appears that TBS is keeping up with tech fairly well, at least what I can read from the score. A lot of that is the Mids and some of it is his very nice capital, but it can't be all of it. Thus, I'm pretty sure he's used a few of his many great people for their special effects - bulbs, trade missions, etc.
Tsargon
He asked for a 400g for 45gpt loan; I sent it back to him, and then I guess he slammed accept while the game was paused for him? Because suddenly we had 3 loans on the table. We resolved it by him sending me 800g for my 90gpt. Anyways, I don't know what he needs this for but I hope its Feudalism so he doesnt get completely chumped by Dreylin.
Borsche
Swapped into Bureaucracy without a GA; I'm sure he'll have Machinery very soon (and in fact may have just gotten it this turn, now that I look at score jumps), and then I have to get psycho-paranoid about our Moai. If it looks like we need to lib Astro, we should def get Optics earlier rather than later to scout out any BUllshit from this noted psychogamer.
Fennbandit
I'm not sure what's happening over here, but these guys are falling behind. On one hand, they've managed to settle 2 more cities, bringing them up to 18, and look to be in 3rd place CY, just behind Haram. So, all that is good. However, their economy has completely stagnated and their MFG is in the fucking dumpster. IIRC, on T100, right before their GA, they were gaining like 140gpt or so, which was the best in the world. 24 turns later, they are gaining... just 160gpt. For reference, we're gaining about 430gpt, not including Tsargon's loan repayment. Not saying that they should be as high as us, especially since we have a lot of gold multipliers, but surely their economy should have grown more than this! I think one of their bigger problems was throwing their first GA too early to swap into Bureau; the other is that they're probably behind on hammers, both in raw hpt and from whips, and thus haven't put up many courthouses.
Well, they'll probably snag some more easy land from Scipio; maybe without a pressing need for a Real War they'll be able to catch back up when the rest of us are spamming troops. They probably should figure out what they're gonna do about Fin vs Pro lategame, how to divide their cities between hammers and commerce or whatever; what I've seen so far is mostly a bias towards commerce, which will destroy them unless they're able to make up some serious ground on tech.
Jowy
Completely quiet! Very low power, lowest power in the world I think. Hasn't thrown a GA yet!
Domestic Update
Well, our empire still looks pretty much exactly the same except with different numbers, so there's no point in showing a global shot. Instead, I'll show city queues from this turn, from before we whipped away 12 pop:
CITIES-SCREENSHOT
Woops I forgot to hit save again, XD. Anyways, we had 152 pop.
Our Infra plan is going well:
(I converted all hammer numbers shown into "base" hammers, which means forges and bureau are factored out.)
Since the last time I showed this, I increased the total hammers to build from 5500 to 5800, then to about 6400. That includes our National Epic, which should be done in, IIRC, T132ish. So, we've actually built about 3900 hammers in 13 turns, for an output of about 300hpt just into infrastructure, not including wealth builds or military units. (built a lotta that stuff too). Going forward, I felt that pushing some of the AP buildings further into the future was a good idea so that we can support more military buildup. The logistics of actually shuffling monks around ended up being slower than my original optimistic estimate anyways.
We've been whipping hard, but I think that the next 2-3 turns will be the last really hard whipping - into buildings, at least - that we'll need to do for quite a long time. I'd rather that we grow into our beautiful tiles... speaking of, by the way, the Fin wharf is a funny creature, at least in fishing villages. It's expensive enough where you want to whip it, but if you whip it there's no point to it. So, it's more like a "capstone" building that absorbs whip overflow from bigger pop whips of other buildings, so that its ready to "coast" () to completion at high fpt and low hpt when all other desired buildings are complete.
At T132, we'll add grocers, universities, observatories, and banks to this list. I think we'll want at most 3-4 groc/uni/obs in our 4 bigtime commerce cities, and then maybe 8? 9? banks at most, plus Wall Street? I don't think we'll have a reason to build Oxford unless we lose out on the Kremlin, but we'll see. So, that's... 2700 total hammers for the fancy commerce buildings, added to 1700 hammers in the "future" column of our wishlist and 600 leftover hammers we won't finish before T132. That's only 5000 hammers in buildings over the next 50 turns in our original 19 cities, about 2/3 of which will be done by the end of our GA. (so, in 20 turns or so) Everything else will be units... lots and lots and lots of units...
Tech wise, we have Monotheism and Paper complete, and 1/3 of Education. T124 we get 3/4 of Machinery, then we go back to pick up Alphabet at 100%, overflowing into Machinery at 100%, overflowing into Education; that should put us around 5/6 complete, with 3 100% turns of tech needed to lib Printing Press(and enough money to get there), at which point we evaluate what tech we should actually use Lib on. We'll monitor people's gold levels pretty closely for the next half dozen turns or so, and by people, I specifically mean Haram and TBS.
We pop our Great Merchant in 2 turns; I'll put him into position to pop a trade mission if we need it. Our GA should be coming T137/T138 or so... maybe T136, not sure if its worth gimping the city pre-GA to fire it 1T sooner. Not soon enough to matter for Lib, at any rate, but maybe for the Economics merchant, if we can finangle that. We shall see...
Demos, Graphs, Counts:
Demos:
Not much to say here. We swap between 3rd and 4th in soldiers with Haram every other turn or so.
CY is still looking very good, considering how much we've been whipping. (which is a lot!)
MFG is still inching up... we'll look very good in 4-5 turns from now, once we regrow onto a bunch of mines and at least a half dozen additional AP buildings finish. And then Haram throws his GA and we again look like garbage.
City counts:
19: Us (T98), TBS (T121)
18: Haram (T118), Fennbandit (T122)
16: Borsche (T118)
15: Dreylin (T101)
13: Jowy (T103)
11: Tsargon (T96)
4: Scipio (T121)
Note that Haram, Fennbandit, TBS, and Borsche have each founded a couple more spots recently. We'll also throw down 1 last filler in about 5T, because why the hell not?
Whip Counts:
The Blues Brothers: 140 pop total; 6 triplepop whip, 39 doublepop whips, 43 singlepop whips
TBS: 117 pop total; 7 triplepop whips, 39 doublepop whips, 15 singlepop whips
Dreylin: 80 pop total; 1 quadruplepop whip, 4 triplepop whips, 15 doublepop whip, 34 singlepop whips
Fennbandit: 68 pop total; 1 quadruplepop whip, 8 triplepop whips, 13 doublepop whips, 14 singlepop whips
Haram: 65 pop total; 6 triplepop whips, 19 doublepop whips, 11 singlepop whips
Borsche: 46 pop total; 1 quadruplepop whip, 2 triplepop whips, 10 doublepop whips, 16 singlepop whips
Scipio: 43 pop total; 4 triplepop whip, 9 doublepop whip, 12 singlepop whips
Jowy: 39 pop total; 4 triplepop whips, 8 doublepop whip, 11 singlepop whips
Tsargon: 25 pop total; 1 quadruple pop whip, 1 triplepop whip, 7 doublepop whips, 4 singlepop whips
We're back to a pretty commanding lead in self-genocide, heh. We've whipped 33 pop more than Haram in the last 13 turns, worth about ~1150 extra hammers in total, or 89hpt. However, been making up around 50ish hpt of that in raw MFG, and then some more via OR and cheaper courthouses. So, I think we're about even.