RB Pitboss #3 [SPOILERS]- Suryavarman II of England

[antisocialmunky]

I think its more of GGs and denial and because we can :-D

I think 1.5 horse archers is well worth a few GGs, a few hundred beakers, and a neat little graphic.

[haphazard1]

Some thoughts on military preparedness

After yesterday's posts and a chat last night with Cyneheard, I have a few thoughts on our military plans.

1) We want enough military to be secure. With several wars already and now the cartel/non-cartel groups officially forming up, the odds of a conflict involving us is rising rapidly.
2) We need to be able to produce more units quickly in case of emergencies.
3) We will want quite a few more units once we reach HR, to garrison our cities and grow them larger.
4) More units will be expensive; we are already paying several gpt in unit costs.
5) We do not really want to build more warriors -- they give the same HR happiness and cost the same maintenance as a stronger unit, without providing any real military strength. They are cheap in hammers, but we are not really short of hammers right now.

To me, this all points to a military pre-building program as the answer to our needs. We build military up to within a turn of completion, then hold them in the queue while working on a different type of unit or a building/worker/settler. We have to time things carefully to avoid hammer decay (10 turns on units). But depending on what else we need in our cities (libraries, settler for city #4, maybe another worker or two, etc.) we could have 6 units (chariot and archer for each of London, AF, BR) sitting in the queues ready to be turned out as soon as we hit Monarchy.

Depending on the timing of HBR, we could even hold the chariots in the queue and let them convert into HAs. Maybe even whip stables and then use the overflow to finish the HAs as 5 XP units.

If we get invaded, we have some units available instantly. If we make it to Monarchy peacefully, we have HR happiness units ready immediately without having to pay maintenance on some of them for multiple turns each.

If we had some units which required more than a 1-pop whip, we could pre-build them for a single turn each to allow emergency whipping without the hammer penalty. But that will take metal or HBR.

Once we have Monarchy, I think we will want enough units to grow our core cities another 3-5 pop each. This will allow for an archer, axe, and spear for each city, plus the warriors we already have garrisoned. Four extra happiness == four more pop, which should be enough for each of London, AF, and BR to work all their good food and hammers tiles plus about 3 cottages apiece. With London and AF cottages on rivers and BR not, that is at least 15 commerce per turn -- enough to pay for those extra units and the increased city maintenance which will come with larger pop sizes.

[antisocialmunky]

Since most of our infrastructure is finishing, that may be a good thing to do. After all Operation French Toast will take about 20 and we can start spitting units out a few turns before hand.

[Cyneheard]

I'm still not sure we're going after France at all, so don't jump the gun on that. Building an army keeps our options open, though.

Hopefully we'll get a good response from Mali + Babylon. Once we get one, we should respond to Carthage's email about sorting things out with them, but waiting a turn or so to respond to their question about NAPs will do us some good. The border between our 2 civs shouldn't be too difficult to negotiate; it's all crap between us.

Micro note: no forests not currently being chopped are going to be chopped over the next few turns, until Math comes in.

Units:
So, London's going to whip its library next turn, and overflow through the barracks into a finished chariot. That chariot is needed as escort for BR's upcoming settler. London's next chariot (+ an archer if we've met the Aztec by then) can be held 1t shy of completion, although building an archer to spell the chariot garrison @ Gibraltar might be worthwhile.
Animal Farm can work on the chariot a little longer, then let the upcoming chop go into a library, finish the library, and then go back to the chariot. A 2-pop whip for an HA and to get the chariot done sooner might happen.
BR's production is so low until we get the stone improved that it's just going to slow-build a library, and use the settler overflow to accelerate that (20 hammers of overflow?).

We'll be able to build as many as 5 different units once Iron comes online:
Archer
Spear
Chariot (Chariots won't auto-upgrade; they can still be built)
HA
Axeman

Realistically, no more than ~3 units can be done simultaneously without hitting the 10t delay problem. This means that for every-turn updates, I should start keeping track of "turns a unit is delayed". Buildings aren't an issue; the 50t delay there is forever.

[haphazard1]

Looks pretty good to me, Cyneheard. An archer for garrison at Gibraltar is a good idea. We do not have to delay all new units, we just don't want to start really spamming them out until we are at (or almost at) Monarchy.

I have no problem with making a land agreement with Carthage, at least for the area we know about. There is still some of the border we do not have visible, though -- SW of AF. (At least last time I logged in.) Carthage suddenly being very interested in a land deal has me wondering if there is something there worth having. We have had essentially every neighbor settle towards us -- do we have a big sign saying "excellent land 10 tiles out" or something?

Iron...well, we will see. Do we have a target date for IW becoming available? There is certainly plenty of land around us with sizable areas with no visible resources. Let us hope iron is in one of these, and not the world's entire supply of uranium, coal, aluminum, and oil.

[Cyneheard]

Iron Working should be early 70s, we'll ask Ottomans when we meet them.

Let's see, who's settled where:
Exodus was basically parallel to Genesis, so Babylon hasn't really settled towards us (Leviticus is east). Uberfish was towards us, Blake was not, so Mali's about 50/50.
France: Orleans, no. Their next city, yes.
HRE: Midas and their next city are towards us.
Carthage: Boring is towards us, Lakewood is not.

I think it's more likely that lots of civs have Iron at their capital. We'll see.

[Cyneheard]

T64

Units in queue:
Chariot @ Animal Farm, going to be skipped this turn, and a while longer until the library finishes. Turns on clock: 0.
Settler @ Beaver Rock will get whipped @ size 4, so no worries there.
London just whipped its library for 2 pop, will regrow to size 4 next turn. In order to avoid having an unhappy citizen @ AF, I switched off of the pigs and onto a cottage. This will have us be @ 4 pop on T67, which is the turn the roads will complete from the furs to BR.

Well, that was an unexpected surprise:



Inca. We should write a "hello" e-mail to them, even if there isn't much to say.



Demogs look a lot worse now, we've whipped away a fair amount of our pop. But we grow 2 pop (London & BR) next turn, and finish a cottage @ London, as well. The furs will be built next turn, so that will be great timing for BR. Sleepy will then begin roading towards Gibraltar.

[Cyneheard]

Also, note the copper. That's not accessible to either side at the moment. Let's hope it stays that way. Now we'll know when the copper is online, as well.

FYI: Babylon is likely to close borders with us, when we get Sailing, because of trade routes. Anyone know if OBs has a minimum 10t duration?

To the Ottomans:

To the leaders of Hyboria,

Greetings from the Lords of Avalon. At last we meet, and in a case of ironic timing, we met the Inca this turn as well. Hope the war is going well, although it seems that the Aztec are no longer a party to the conflict (or are all three teams declaring peace?). Our team was not blessed by the all-powerful Sullla with an accessible source of copper, and so were wondering when we could expect Iron Working to be available. Our team has been assigned Monarchy, and are expecting to finish it around T80.

Within CAN, we have met:
Carthage
You (Obviously)
HRE
Egypt
France

We still need to meet:
India
Aztec
Portugal, but Portugal has a warrior in HRE territory, and will meet us soon.

Do you know where we should go to meet any of these three teams?

*Salutation follows*

To the Inca: (I really don't know what to say here, basically a somewhat formal hello would do)

To The Mexican Apple Thieves,

Greetings from the Lords of Avalon. Our Gulliver has traveled far and wide, and stumbled across your Quechua near the borders of our Babylonian neighbors. While at the moment our teams have little to discuss, [what else?]

*Salutation follows*

[antisocialmunky]

Dear Lords of Avalon,

Having discussed your propositions in depth, and in light of the fact that we will not be permitted to join your Grand Alliance, Mali is happy to accept the following conditions:

- 1) An auto-renewing NAP with a 10t cooldown. The earliest the NAP could be canceled is T100. If the NAP is canceled on turn X by one team, then on turn X+10 the other team may declare war. On turn X+11, any team may declare war.

We would like further elaboration on this point:

'3) No ROP of units for any civ at war with any of us.'

As worded it would allow RoP for an army about to declare war which would render it useless in our eyes (though we're sure that wasn't your intention with the wording). Also, is it null and void if we find ourselves at war with each other? And does it have a 10/11 turn 'cooldown and cancel' agreement?

We politely decline all of the other proposals: EP limit, OBs, and settling agreement.

Whilst we're disappointed to end up on opposite sides, we look forward to pitting our wits against you, and competing in the best spirit of the Realms Beyond community.

Kind Regards

Emperor Capac

We have our NAP. I was wondering about hte AF micro. Do we really need that extra hammer? Can we not grow back faster with the pigs? Also I switched the the city to the closer cottage rather than the far away one.

[Cyneheard]

Re: AF: Happy cap. It's not the hammer, it's more "why grow before the furs are online", since AF is already at 4 unhappy (3 pop + 1 whip).

We should figure out how to go over the ROP thing. One reason why I didn't want to include a specific "if they're coming to attack" clause was difficulty in wording it.

I disagree on switching to the nearer cottage. The farther cottage has more turns worked, so let's keep on working it to get it growing sooner.