RBP3 [Spoilers] Capac of Mali

[Swiss Pauli]

Incoming email:

Emperor Capac,

How are the proud Malinese on this blustery morning? You may have noticed Novice moving around your border. He got a bit confused by the brown haze before him that seemed to mysteriously mark your border. He will soon be on his merry way to try and find more civilizations. We will keep you updated with his progress.

Thank you for your recent screenshot. We have thoroughly scouted the land between our two fine civilizations and our cartographers have worked extremely hard to map the land so as to provide you with this information. We have located four key resources between us so far. There are two areas where pigs are fairly prevelant, there is some ore that our miners insist will be later useful and there is naturally developing corn farm just outside of your current territory.

Our proposal, therefore, is to split these in half judging by proximity to capital. The best spot for us to found would be on the plains hill 1W of the pigs. That site would offer a substantially better site, especially in the long term. However, in the nature of being fair-spirited and trying to be diplomatically amenable with yourselves, we have come to the following compromise:


(As you can see, even our greatest artists are not yet tidy with paint! )

This is the best we have come up with. It is worth pointing out that our proposed location is two tiles nearer our capital than that of the splendid Malinese nation. We are not aiming for a 'pink dot-esque' maneuver here and this spot generates minimal culture towards any of your key resources. This layout gives minimal overlap with any other cities. Our respective capitals would have no overlap, nor would we with one another. We would also like to stress that we would make no effort to fight a culture battle at this location. If we truly wish to become allies than i'm sure "our close borders spark tensions" will not become an issue allowing the Kysit and Malinese people to live long and prosperous lives.

Your Friends,

Kyan
Kysit's Periwinkles

[Swiss Pauli]

Turn 34 played: Keef defeated the bear, and still has 1.6 health, so he'll be healed in two turns. The odds were in our favour but a win's a win

As a result, Mick moved SW to (I hope) get scouting. Worker started another road, and it's Settler in 2 and BW in three.

[Swiss Pauli]

Regarding Babylon's letter, I think we should stake our claim to settling 1 or 2 N of the corn should we so desire. Against a CRE civ, we're not likely to win the marble but that doesn't bother me much, and if we don't mind 'losing' 3 tiles of our BFC, then I can't see them having any serious objections.

Thoughts?

PS: we're only waiting for India to play T34, so feel free to move Mick while I get some sleep

[dsplaisted]

I pretty much agree with you. I think we should agree to let them have their proposed city location, but that we may want two cities in the area, one for the corn and one for the pigs. We can point out that we aren't creative, and that we won't be settling our second city there so they'll have a head start on the culture to keep control of the marble and any other overlapping tiles.

[Swiss Pauli]

Turn 35 played. Mick moved SW, but otherwise nothing new to report.

We should also decided the actions for next turn. I propose:

- Worker: move to river forest to chop

- Keef: head back 1SE to unfog tiles in prep for Settler

- Mick: SW

- Sirian: either start a worker or a warrior. I probably favour the former option, but I've no strong objection to putting some hammers into a warrior.

[Swiss Pauli]

Made the unit moves, and discovered horses and, unfortunately, a lion:




I've tentatively set the build to a warrior, and switched to grass forest instead of a mine to grow more rapidly. If we want to go with a worker instead, then switch then citizen back to the mine.

[dsplaisted]

I think we should go with the Warrior build, especially since we may lose to the Lion.

I think we only need to work the grass forest for one turn, then we can resume work on the mine and still only take 4 turns to grow.

We probably want the chop to go into a Worker or Settler, not the Warrior. So I think we should build a road on that tile before chopping the forest.

[Swiss Pauli]

Quite an eventful turn, most of it good We survived the lion attack with 1.2 health, founded our 2nd city (which I named Uberfish for now at least), and discovered some food by the horses. We completed BW, but no copper in sight




If you look carefully at the south of the map, there's a river coming to an abrupt end on a desert hill, which may be a sign of map editing, so perhaps there's a civ along this river.

In domestic matters, I reset Sirian's tiles per Daniel's instructions (good spot!) and the warrior will be done in two turns. Because of this I set the worker to chop, but then cancelled the action in case we wish to start another warrior to allow us to grow to size 4 before starting the worker/settler. The alternative is to switch to the worker/settler at size 3, let the chop come in, then switch to warrior and grow.

With our 2nd city now founded, we lose 2gpt at 100%, -1 at 90%, and +1 at 80%. 0% gives us 16 gold, which should be enough to complete pottery at 100%, so we're set to binary research for now. Slavery not adopted.

I did not end turn in case we should decide to switch the builds.

In foreign news, I noted that Babylon settled their 2nd city (Exodus) and not in the contested area (as far as I can tell). They are yet to discover any other civs. I'll send them the letter about this area shortly.

[Swiss Pauli]

Email sent to Babylon:

Dear Kyan,

Thanks for your email, and congratulations on founding your second city!

Whilst we would like to claim the entire corn-marble-pigs region for ourselves, we are more than willing to compromise in the spirit of co-operation between our two civs. We are therefore happy for you to settle in the spot indicated on your screenshot.

That said, we're not so keen on your proposal for the location of our border city. As far as we can see, it lacks a single hill, and given the relative lack of food we've found so far, having two specials in one city is a luxury we may not be able to afford. We therefore reserve the right to settle one or two tiles directly north of the corn: this would give us use of grassland tiles that would otherwise go to waste for lack of food. What about the close borders and a fight for the marble, you may ask? Given the great Bablyonian Empire is Creative, we are well aware that this is a 'battle' we will surely lose, and we are comfortable with this fact. As an IND civ, we have less desire for marble than most civs, and we would only lose 3 tiles from our BFC, so this seems quite reasonable to us.

We hope that you find this to be an equitable solution, but we would like to repeat the fact that we're only reserving the right to settle on the tiles mentioned above. We'd be happy to co-ordinate the actual settling of this area with you to avoid unwanted misunderstandings.

In other news, our scouts have discovered some more floodplains, rice, and a bear (now a fetching over-the-shoulder number to keep Keef, our warrior, warm) to our north, and horses to our SW. We also happened across a lion, and our warrior, Mick, has clearly learned some tricks from Novice in dealing with fearsome felines, as he dispatched him without much trouble!

Best Wishes

Emperor Capac

[dsplaisted]

We don't have 4 improved tiles to work yet. So growing to size 4 won't help us too much. So I think we should just start a Worker now, and finish the chop into that worker. When after chopping, our worker should move to the hill 1S of the capital and start a mine. When the second worker finishes it will also go to the hill and help mine, while Sirian grows to size 4. When it does grow to size 4, we switch to a Settler, and the mine will complete along with it the chop.

If I've calculated this correctly, we will finish our second Worker on turn 41, and grow to size 4 and finish the chop/mine on turn 44. We "waste" a worker turn by moving our second worker onto the unroaded hill/forest tile. We could avoid the wasted worker turn by building a road first. This would delay the completion of the mine/chop by 1 turn, and allow us to use the saved worker turn to build half of a road on the corn or the sheep, or to start a farm.