[SPOILERS] JR4 tries his luck in PB 37

[JR4]

Also, it`s good news that Dark Savant doesn`t work a copper tile just yet. The longer it takes before that copper mine is built, the less likely is dtay to be able to successfully connect his copper (and rush us).

[RefSteel]

Wow, yeah - these next couple of turns are going to be nail-biters just from the way that lion moves. Here's hoping it lets us occupy the hill it's standing on right now!

I agree there's very little danger of getting warrior-rushed: It would have to be Dark Savant or Gavagai, it would have to be a straight bee-line, and it would mean they're seriously under-defended themselves, even from animals. And if you play before they do on the turn their warrior moves into sight, we're safe anyway because we can get our warrior back to the capital in time.

I'm definitely glad about Dark Savant's apparent lack of BFC copper too. The copper location may not be mirrored, but there's no way one player has it in their capital BFC and another does not; Mardoc and the lurkers wouldn't do anything that unbalancing. And I still don't think dtay will rush Muqa unless it's opportunistically - which just means we have to avoid giving him an easy opportunity.

More later....

[RefSteel]

In fact, correcting myself: It actually doesn't matter whether a theoretical rusher moves before or after us in the turn. We can protect Borte from a single warrior no matter when and where it comes at this point, as long as we pay attention to it. (Which is one reason there's no way someone is going to try it.)

[JR4]

That lion could be a nuisance in the next turns, but as long as it goes away for a turn we`ll have our chance to move towards that coveted grass forest hill. We could consider staying put for a turn or two if the lion goes back and forth.

We really should make a sentry net down south soon. I can see something like four different entry points there. I would really like to know who our second neighbour is. I just can`t believe that the RNG would be so cruel as to place us between Agg Zulu and Krill.

[RefSteel]

I definitely agree about exploring and wathching the south; it's another argument in favor of getting some more warriors onto the board, although copper is obviously important too. I'll try to post some international and/or lion-taming analysis later, but in the meantime, I've been wanting to post this for most of a week:


The Fate of the Üneg

The people of Tokugawa were terrifying, and their influence in the region profound. While the Üneg clan had made their camps and taken their surveys in the forests in sight of their palace, surveying the land where soft-furred leopards prowled, they met a steady stream of woodsmen from the neighboring hills and foragers from the rice fields nearby, all steadily migrating away from the enforcers of Tokugawa's will - Tokugawa's or d'tay's - who increasingly descended from Gobwin Knob, aggressively pursuing foreigners and anyone with ideas that differed from their own and setting up garrisons in every tribal camp they could find, always insisting to the cowering tribesfolk that everything was "for your protection," without specifying anything from which - apart from the implied threat of Tokugawa's wrath or that of the enforcers themselves - they might need to be "protected." There was fear in the air, and danger, from every corner of the lands over which Tokugawa ruled, and once their duty was complete, the Üneg were glad to leave those threatening lands behind.



As the Üneg crossed the floodplains below the leopard woods, their spirits - long oppressed by tales of the terrible Tokuzulu - began to lift. Food was plentiful, and though the rumors continued of the dread Gobwin Knob enforcers in the rice fields beyond the northern lake, no one in that fertile land felt personally threatened or oppressed by Tokugawa's following. For a generation, the Üneg led their nomadic existence between the northern lake and the riverbank, moving with the seasons and the floods that regularly overflowed the near bank and nourished the soil around it with sediment from upstream. They shared stories with all the tribes and families they met along the river, and followed it toward the sea, ultimately even crossing over it to the thick jungles beyond, as if driven away by the xenophobic fury of the Tokuzulu. By then, only the clan elders still remembered the sight of Gobwin Knob high upon its hill; younger Üneg clansfolk who knew only the richness of the upstream floodplains north of the river were reluctant to pass beneath the thick and tangled canopy of the hot, oppressive rainforest through which the river flowed on its way to the sea.



When they ultimately did travel there in search of good grazings for their remaining cattle, hunting grounds, and forage, the Üneg found precious little that they could use. There were trees and flowers in plenty, and brightly-colored birds, and some of the Üneg even took to marking their faces with a tincture prepared by the locals from the leaves of a local shrub, creating striking designs on their cheeks, a deep blue-violet in hue - but for all the colorful beauty around them, the Üneg struggled to gather food that was safe to eat; the delicious yellow fruit that their ancestors had found in a distant jungle more than a century and a half before were nowhere to be found - the nearest, by report, growing far off upstream, above the floodplains the Üneg had only recently left. So as the Üneg clan struggled to survive, still seeking such knowledge as they could, exploring all the way to the southern coast, taking note of the shape of the headlands, and eventually migrating to the estuary of the river among whose floodplains many of their elders had formed their happiest childhood memories.



Few of them survived the crossing and the long climbs through the highlands on the far side. The heat remained oppressive, and the highlands were exposed, without a hint of shade above their waving grasses except for the clan's temporary shelters and the shadowed side of hills, shifting with the passage of the sun. Food was scarce, as the hardy grasses that would once have provided fine grazing land for the Üneg's cattle were of no use to their people since the loss of their herds. They stuck to the coast as well as they could, trading what they could to fisherfolk for seafood - fish and crabmeat - but with less and less to barter and few prospects of gaining more, the clan couldn't long survive that way. They kept moving as they always had, now driven by hunger and desperation as much as by any sense of duty, but progress was painfully slow, and many of the Üneg lived and died among those highlands - still dispatching scouts and sentries to the high ground to survey the lands around them in accordance with long tradition, but growing ever wearier of the task - before they finally descended toward the next broad river valley, where at last they came across the plenty for which they had longed: Wide, lush fields growing wild with endless-seeming stalks of corn.



The traditions and the duty of the Üneg clan were uncompromising: They might tarry for a time in the corn-rich valley during growing seasons, but season by season and year by year, surveying the land around them and speaking with the locals, they must always move on: Wandering nomads seeking knowledge in ever-more-distant lands. They gathered all the corn they could, grinding it into flour and baking it into cakes or storing it with care so it might be preserved through their journeys and help to preserve them in difficult times like those they had faced among the grassy highlands not many years before. They tried to find cattle for which they might barter, but learned of none for miles around - only of the yellow fruit their ancestors had encountered long before - and of an enormous creature with wrinkled skin, with ears like tent flaps, and with a nose longer than a man stands tall.



Unquestionably, their quest and their duty lay in learning more about these long-nosed monsters and encountering them if possible, but that path lay across yet another estuary, into a jungle as thick and oppressive as those in which their great grandparents had suffered, trying and failing to preserve the last of their cattle. The clan pressed on regardless, fighting their way across the river, but it was a smaller, leaner clan: Many of its people remained behind among the cornfields, surrendering their heritage and slowly adopting local customs over the course of a generation or two, separated from the leaders, storytellers, and shamanistic intercessors of their clan. Some who live in the delta region still claim to trace their ancestry to the Üneg, but even these only tell the stories of their ancestors' bravery and perseverence common among all the lands that the Üneg visited. The Palace of Borte, the Eternal Empress, and even the Holy Spirits themselves were forgotten among these deserters and their descendants, or adapted to fit local stories and animistic pantheons. The true Üneg traditions, even in the state to which they had changed after hundreds of years of separation from the Khatunate, were preserved only among the clansfolk who remained together, holding to their duty as they made their way across the river and into the jungles where elephants roamed.



More of their once-proud numbers were lost in the crossing, and others to disease in the jungles, where biting insects preyed upon them and their strength was sapped by the heat and humidity. As their ancestors had found in another rainforest, far off, beyond two rivers, in spite of all the thick vegetation sprawling everywhere, it was a struggle to find food that they could safely eat: They soon ran through all their supplies of corn flour, and managed to survive mostly with the aid of fire to burn down patches of jungle and replant them with seed corn: One harvest in each spot to provide more flour and the seed corn for their next planting before the jungle began to reclaim their little farm. They did manage to find the gentle giants of which the legends spoke, and the elephants were awe-inspiring in their majesty, even when bathing in mud, but they were not cattle, and even if they knew any means of bringing one down, they had learned that locals venerated the mighty beasts and would not brook such a transgression. Already the Üneg traditions were crumbling even within the main tribe in the face of necessity, and the clan's shamanistic leader was desperate to find cattle beyond the jungle's edges to begin to renew the true ways - as best she could remember them - of her people. In fact, it might by then have been impossible; after generations out of practice, without any written records of the way their ancestors had lived, they might have found themselves incapable of resuming the old ways even were there cattle at hand. What they found instead beyond the jungles were coastal plains, infertile and dry, devoid of fresh water except when it fell from the sky - and monsters far less gentle than the elephants they were leaving behind.



Powerful and deadly though they might be on an individual basis, the bears of the peninsula were far less dangerous than the human tribes who dwelt there - the Üneg among them for a time. Had the bears contented themselves with trying to kill people who crossed into their territory, it is a great deal more likely that the Üneg would have driven them to extinction than that the clan could be wiped out by the bears themselves. The bears were not creatures of legend however, bloodthirsty, deadly, and cruel though such creatures might be; they were animals - omnivores seeking food in that dry land - and behaved accordingly. Üneg hunters killed at least one bear between the jungle and forest without any casualties, but one night when the clan left their supplies unguarded, they were horrified to find a bear in their midst, devouring their seed corn. The tribe's young shamanistic leader, who had lately buried her mentor - one of several in the tribe who had perished of malaria in their journey across the jungles - bravely charged the bear, shouting and raising her wooden spear, but she had reacted to aggressively, and the bear was too swift for her: Though hurt by her spear-thrust, it killed her with a single blow from its powerful paw. The rest of the clan brought it down easily, but leaderless and without the source of their recent livelihood, with no good prospects for finding food ahead of or behind them, the clan began to come apart, dividing behind different would-be leaders, turning to desperate measures for survival and slowly forgetting the traditions that no longer seemed to have a bearing on their lives as they actually led them. Within a few generations, the descendants of the Üneg, though numerous around the region, had all but forgotten their connection to the Khatunate, and they had ceased to be a tribe or clan, but only a scattered remnant of what had been.

Yet perhaps if her holy spirits truly brought word to her, Izabyella Khatun was content: The Üneg had fulfilled their duty long and well, until the moment when they no longer could, and perhaps one day their descendants would be re-introduced to the Khatunate.

Photo credits:

Leopard: Stu Porter
Indigo plant in the rainforest: Plants of the Elster Creek Area Indigenous Flora Guide
Estuary from the surface: Megan Dingwall
Cornstalks: "The Photographer" of wikipedia.org
Elephant: World Wildlife Federation
Estuary from above: Australian Wet Tropics Management Authority
Grizzly Bear: Robbie George for National Geographic

[JR4]

TURN 25

That lion backed off and our warrior was able to continue north to the plains tile. Our first warrior went NW as planned. This turn we got graphs on dtay! I post some of them here for demo-hacking. Most of this is known to us, but it`s always nice to be 100 % sure. The power graph screenshot didn`t take for soem reason, but we`re well ahead of him in power. The espionage graph is a straight line, meaning that dtay is yet to meet another neighbour (or has chosen to focus on us exclusively).

[RefSteel]

Excellent! As long as the lion doesn't move back to the same hill (and as long as there's not another animal lurking around) its disappearance is great news! If it does turn up on the forest hill, do we just move 1N and count on the 88.9% odds? I would actually vote yes, as we're getting close to the turn when the worker could be threatened if the lion is still around - but hopefully the lion lets us have the hill and either wanders off or suicides against the warrior there.

Power graph will be useful soon, but I'm not surprised we're well ahead for now. The Wheel counts for 4,000 soldier points (the same as two warriors) so it would be a shock if we weren't way out in front, but we also had one more warrior than dtay as of the last turn included on the graphs, so of course the difference is even more pronounced. (Graphs show information from prior to the previous turn, whereas demographics update in real time.) I'll try to get some more analysis in when I have a chance; for now, I'll note that someone built a warrior last turn and Gavagai grew his capital to size 4 this turn (all the other score increases were land points from turn 5 border pops). Also, Gav just popped third ring borders this turn, as expected.

[JR4]

If we have close to a 90 % chance of winning against that lion, I agree that we should take a (small) risk and move to the grass hill. I hope that it won`t be necessary though. We`ll probably be among the first to settle a second city, but at least some of the EXP civs can beat us if they want to (and build closer to their capitals).

[RefSteel]

Yeah. The 88.9% I quoted was from testing in my sandbox: Monarch speed, stick a warrior on a hill, drop a barb lion next to it, hit end turn and attack. Warrior gets +25% hill and +20% vs. animals on Monarch; combat log afterward showed the lion had 11.1% odds. Hopefully the question isn't relevant though!

Note Coeurva could also get a second city before us if he plants close, thanks to Imp and BW. Of all the civs with Exp or Imp though, only we and Gav have The Wheel, which is definitely an advantage for city placement! (Coeurva could get it soon if he wanted, but can't start on any roads until he gets there obviously.)

[JR4]

That went better than expected. No animals in sight actually. The warrior entered the grass forest hill and will have very good defensive cover, even if the lion should decide to make a return. We`re 4 turns away from producing that first settler of ours. It`s going to be a dozen or so nervy turns before we get to know if dtay is coming for us.