[Spoilers] Shallow Old Human Tourist Hit the beach!

[Old Harry]

Turn 105

News just in - Toku declared on Elkad, presumably to get peace, because Elkad has Construction and built a Hwacha. Hopefully Elkad isn't feeling peaceful.
In other news TBS builds the confucian shrine and Civ and AC seem to be permanently happy.


We know we're not getting known tech bonus on Calendar from any of our contacts, Mackoti just built the Great Library, TBS just researched Code of Laws, so really the competition for MoM is likely to be Rusten, Dreylin, Commodore and Gavagai. The others seem to be too far behind in score to have the necessary techs. Fingers are crossed. Our workers are doing their jobs - note that one worker chopping outside our borders - and will chop half the forests next turn and the rest t107. We're getting Calendar by about 3 beakers.


OT took another city from Joey after I played last turn, from the diplo screen it looks like he gained 18 war weariness in the fighting - 6 is capturing the city, and he probably won 3 and lost 3 battles. (He could have lost 2 and won 6, but that seems less likely.) Presumably it was a coastal city as we've lost our trade connection icon for Joey (and oddly for Donovan, who we still seem to have trade routes with - hopefully they'll persist as they're getting us 6 commerce per turn).


Demos and power. OT4E isn't letting up here.

[Old Harry]

Turn 106

No-one got the MoM just yet! And we've got ten more turns of peace with Toku, so we can just concentrate on getting the techs that let us kill him. Joey isn't slacking on the defence now - but is it too late? OT took a size 4 city from him this turn and gained 25 war weariness - so either 4 wins and 5 losses or 7 wins and 4 losses to take the city. Either way it's nice that he's finally losing some units.

Down the bottom of the turn tracker that GG appeared while Plako was logged in last turn. Finally, note the yield of the selected tile. The Wildlands was one of his later-settled cities, so there's a chance that iron won't be easily accessible for us.


We have two reasons for tension at this turn roll. No. 1 - if someone doesn't complete it this turn we get a coinflip next turn for the MoM, if they complete it this turn we might not even get failgold.


No. 2 - we have a 40% chance for a great engineer to bulb Machinery and let us really hurt Toku in ten turns time (a scientist just goes to make a boring academy ).


Demos and power. Our economy looks a lot more "normal" now with only a few wealth builds going on, so this is a more realistic appraisal of how we're doing.

[Krill]

Why don't you queue something behind MoM?

[Old Harry]

I put a granary there after taking the picture. I think the production rolls over though, doesn't it?

[Krill]

Depends on if your turn resolves before the player who builds the wonder, or after.

[Old Harry]

I've only been able to check this in SP, so MP could behave different, but if your production resolves first that's great, you get failgold, if it resolves second then the hammers seem to be preserved as if in a wealth build.

Anyway, a Library or Market wouldn't waste the ~30 hammers that the Granary will, but this isn't a commerce city so neither of those builds will be particularly useful. We could always put all the hammers into a wealth build and rush for the next available wonder. Or even, if we get that GE, start producing Trebuchets to avoid losing overflow, but the Granary seems solid too.

[Fintourist]

I don't think we have talked about this MoM attempt too much in general, so here are couple of thoughts:

• The wonder is definitely nerfed in the latest version of the mod: Harder to build without marble bonus, no more synergy with Taj
  
• That being said, it's still a bit surprising that it has not fallen yet. You can still calculate that you are going to get at least 8 additional turns of GA, which is still a decent payoff for the effort
  
• Being IND, we of course get even better payoff for our hammer investment be it in the form of MoM or failgold (techs are quite expensive on this map, which increases the snowball value of extra gold).
  
• The city that is putting in the MoM effort might not even exist without this attempt. "KotoR" brought in a total of zero new resources, but it has nice forest surroundings. Thanks to our halted expansion our worker force was not busy with too many important tasks. Add in an IMP settler and I feel that this attempt has cost us close to nothing.
  
• Now that we are getting quite close to actually landing the wonder (although the theme of this game has been missing every target by a turn or even less), I'm actually starting to get my hopes up. Apart from the direct effect of the wonder, the fact that we will have a border city producing 10 culture per turn will be really useful. Of course this means we also need to protect the city from our maniac neighbors..
  

In the big picture we are finishing our economic push and shifting the focus more into military (and afterwards hopefully Astro adventures and Golden Age optimization). In a perfect scenario we have made some ground against OT4E or Toku by T125. That probably requires some sort of geopolitical help. Say Elkad fighting one of our neighbors or GJ keeping OT4E busy for a longer period (damn I hope he is not just king-making there and gifting cities).

In comparison to other civs we are doing way better than we should be considering our 2v1 war in the early game. There are only couple of civs that are running away from us, but after that it seems like we pretty much come in the 2nd tier. Of course if one looks at the amount of land tiles in our demos, one can see that we are quite screwed unless something positive happens real soon. And with all being said, damn I wish we would have been the ones starting next to the already eliminated guys instead of our madness corner as in the end there will only be one winner and the rest are losers..

[Old Harry]

Turn 107

Bad news - we got a scientist, not the engineer that the warmongers among us really wanted. On the bright side Joey has two Iron resources hooked, so we're probably going to be good for the metal once we get the tech.


If he adds another spear Joey should have enough to hold out against these attackers - OT won't take the capital, but might head NE to snipe The Wildlands.


This lot, on the other hand, pose a much bigger threat. Those CR axes are just deadly! Should we give Joey stone after we finish Moai?


Our final chops go into the MoM build. We have at least a coinflip now, and we can't just keep losing coinflips all game. Right?

Oh well, we'll get 250ish gold even if we lose out so that should be enough to make someone pay. We're still unsure about the shape of the next 30 turns. If we win this race (is it a race?) then there are a couple of options.

1. Build an Academy, get Iron Working and Machinery asap, build trebuchets and crossbows and hurt Toku in ten turns time.
2. Tech Code of Laws, throw a golden age, revolt to Caste and then try to do the military stuff while trying to get our astro bulb before the end of the GA. Probably half-assing both enough to mean we need to throw a second golden age straight away afterwards.

If we lose the consensus seems to be that we kill Toku.

Any votes from the lurkers?


I realised we haven't looked at the mini-map that Calendar gives us - I'll guess that we've got eight of the starting civs on our continent (there doesn't seem to be space to have another four that we haven't met so far). Assuming similar continents for the 24 civs in the game the worrying thing is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of space for the astro-islands that we've been assuming exist. Have we been given a particularly cramped start, while Joey gets endless (useless before Iron Working) lush terrain to inhabit? FT points out that only 3480/5720 tiles have been settled, so we're still confident there are islands out there. But where will they be?


One last thing - OT4E is going to start scouting us next turn. We should complete the spear in time for him to see it.


Demos and power. I'm feeling pretty secure in spite of being 13th in military power. Famous last words as we complete MoM and OT turns his ridiculous horsey army in our direction...

[Mardoc]

Any votes from the lurkers?

It sounds like all paths involve blood, so I'm good. Not clear to me which route maximizes blood, so I have no vote.

[Old Harry]

Turn 108

When civstats updated this morning we collectively breathed a sigh of relief. Then we spent the day trying to work out if launching a golden age straight away beats building an academy and counter-intuitively decided that it doesn't. Our first GA will therefore start on t123/4 and by the end of it we expect to be in Bureau with Astro in our grasp along with several of Tokugawa's cities...

Hopefully OT's scout won't give him any ideas about gaining an MoM - he's still sending his new Numids south to the GJ battlefield and it'd take about 15 turns to get his city raider axes up here to cause trouble, so I'm not tooo concerned (we will be adding two spears here very soon).


Speaking of trouble, we need to keep an eye on this guy.


Our trade routes with OT finally recover and we're now rolling in commerce!


Here's a victory screen. They're nice every now and then, right? If the average land area is 3% (seems likely given that we're slightly below average and have 2.4%) then that means 66% of the land is settled. That's a lot left over for someone...


Demos and power. The academy pushes our GNP from 5th to 2nd.