RBP3 [SPOILERS] Hannibal of Byzantium (Bobchillingworth, ManiaMuse & SleepingMoogle)

[Bobchillingworth]

Okay, so this game has taken a turn for the surreal as of a couple hours ago.



India came to us with same bad diplo news, courtesy of Portugal. Apparently Krill is putting together a new alliance of doom. Members are said to be England, Egypt, Mali, Carthage (who earlier today expressed an interest in trading with us), Babylon (!) and Maya (!!!) But no HRE, who told us that England was their bestest friend. Portugal was apparently invited in, but was rejected after they demanded that India be allowed in as well.

Portugal in chat gave us some sort of charter that was apparently emailed to them. I would post it here, but it looks like groupchats aren't saved in G-talk, so it all got lost It had subsections, and everything!


Oh, and England is offering us Monarchy for 200 gold. Despite I guess being part of the enemy. Do we want to take this offer? I lean toward "yes", assuming that it won't be quicker to get the tech ourselves

And Portugal fears _another_ alliance is forming of HRE, Ottoman, and Rome (!!!!) Now, I knew that Ottos and HRE were forming a tiny bloc, I thought also with England but apparently not. Portugal is going to try to bring these guys to "our" side.

Also Portugal is afraid that my civ will run off and join Krill's group, although he noted that we strangely hadn't come up in membership discussions I assured him that we were not. Portugal wants to give us money so we can make a run to guilds ASAP. I'm working on other plans that will get us to that tech much more quickly than brute-force teching the whole damn path ourselves, but if he does give us gold, we could use that to pay for Monarchy... except he doesn't have currency yet. Hopefully pillaging France's left-over improvements will give us some money.


Aaaand India is begging us to broker peace between Portugal and Rome, I guess we're supposed to need them both alive.

Portugal seems to have a really poor understanding of world relationships- they keep talking about how great friends they became with Kyan after he left Heracles for them, and are obviously unaware that Babylon has continued to feed us tech.



None of this makes any sense. I'm going to send query emails to Kyan and Maya and find out what the hell is going on.

[SleepingMoogle]

200 gold for Monarchy should be doable, especially if Portugal is going to pay us tribute (heh). We need Incan's current tech project to be able to make the trade though, so we should holler them and ask how long until they finish it.

As for that new alliance, the whole thing sounds mostly confusing to me. Let's wait until we hear back from Babylon and the Mayans before we make any hurried decisions.

In the meantime, here is a picture of where city 5 might go:



The original suggestion was 1 tile further north, but that would overlap a lot with Eden. In this position, we grab the Incense in addition to the Gold and more flood plains, and seal off that southern mountain pass. The city marker to the east might be city 6, depending on what we agree on with the Friendly Kittens. Here's a picture of the area:



The red dot is the city site they proposed, and the green dot something we could place to secure the border. It gets us the gems and a bunch of floodplains, as well as another rice resource to the south. Unfortunately I don't really see any good sites that grab the bananas resource. Any thoughts on that?

[Bobchillingworth]

I totally agree on needing to hear back from Maya and Babylon first before we make any snap judgments. Portugal and I think India wanted to run off and start forming a counter-alliance ASAP; I urged them to use discretion and wait for more intel, as I really don't want to get involved in an us vs. them situation that pits us against our own allies who might not even be working with "the enemy".


Thankfully both Kyan and Maniac responded to my chat invitations, so hopefully I can get some answers out of them tonight.


Your new city 5 location is way better than the one I placed as a single city- the two main issues I see are

1. settling on a FP kind of sucks

2. more importantly, our settling arrangement with India allows us to settle 1 or 2 rows of FP under your proposed site- but what city would we place that can use them?


For some reason most screencaps get blocked at my office, so I can comment more when I get back home.

[Bobchillingworth]

Goddamit Portugal is moving way too fast with this counter alliance BS.

He already sent out an email to several other civs full of bad intel trying to set this thing up.



Yuck.

[Bobchillingworth]

After almost 5 hours of chatting, we have a choice. We go PAT or Anti-PAT.



Moogle, I sent you a chat noting rationales for the options as I saw them before I logged off my personal account; read it if you can, and let me know what you think.



I really wish we didn't have to choose anything but I just don't know if that's possible. My game-instinct leans toward PAT, because they have the best organization and we're already friends with India and PAT allows us to get close to the other strong players in the game. My personal instinct is to go with Anti-PAT, because we're already friends with Maya and Babylon no matter what, and so we have the most diplomatic allies if we position ourselves against PAT.


I wish that we could get Babylon and Maya to just leave the PAT, and we just join up with India, and together we form a 4-member alliance, but that doesn't seem to be happening, partially because Kyan and Darrell don't like each other. But I guess we could suggest it anyway.




Lurkers, my team is in a tough spot; this could be our most important moment in the game, two giant alliances competing for us, both clamoring to get our UU active first. I know you can't say in this thread, but perhaps in the lurker one: what would you do?

[SleepingMoogle]

The one problem I see with joining anti-PAT is that we'll be sandwiched in between PAT members. I don't expect Babylon or the Mayans to attack us, but other PAT civs make us the first target because of it.

I really hate to have to make a choice like this (would rather stay freelance), but from a mail sent by the Mayans, they may have been removed from PAT already. If we can get them to join anti-PAT, we may be able to convince Babylon as well and get everyone under the same Umbrella. Besides, it looks like Rome and the Incans are likely to join anti-Pat so we'd not be directly opposing anyone we have had past dealings with.

[Bobchillingworth]

Yeah, I've thought about it, and anti-PAT seems to be the way to go. England said they'd still sell us Monarchy, so that's nice, at least. We need to let them know after we get priesthood.


I'll try to write a nice email to the anti-PAT crowd later today so they know we're in, but I'm going to busy with some RL stuff for a lot of today; if you want to send a message to Maya trying to bring them in, go for it :P

[ManiaMuse]

Yeah I tentatively say go with the anti-PAT group but also to not go about automatically making enemies with the PAT members.

Is the England 200g for monarchy deal still on the table? That seems quite good value to me although obviously it will go to fund their group's research.

In the meantime we need to make sure we are well defended. What's our military situation at the moment?

We may also want to try and get some good hammer sites down before we get Guilds if we are going to want to sell cataprachts. All these commerce sites are good and that but we really need some cities with decent production as well.

[Bobchillingworth]

Hey Mania!


See my post above regarding England; they say that they will still sell us the tech (offered to gift it for free if we joined PAT).


Right now I think we have 2 spears and a chariot for zone defense, with Feros on constant military builds from now until like forever. We can move a shock chariot into zone defense mode this turn, right now it's healing near Babylon- but we might want to explore some of the land N of us with it first. We got a Heroic Epic level unit last turn, so once we get lit that will help a lot (do we want the epic in Feros, perhaps?) We should be getting catapults from Babylon for our horse once he consults with his teammates about how many they can get us & when. We also have non-official mutual protection arrangements with both Babylon and Maya (which is one reason why Anti-PAT is going to be awkward; need to convince our allies to not fight each other without giving away our secret arrangements).


I totally agree on the need for production sites, we're going to want to start building 'pharcts non-stop once we unlock them, gifting the excess. City 6 is a definite hammer city, ideas after that? We could reverse the orders of 5 & 6 if we have allies giving us gold, I suppose...

[SleepingMoogle]

Turn 87 rolled around.



Workers have now finished mining the Copper near Therum, finally giving us access to the Copper/Iron/Horse trinity. The city will be better off for now working it's farm though, as it will grow in two turns and can then work the mine if needed. The Workers should build another farm to further help the city grow.

The other cities are continuing on their builds as well. The Citadel will grow to size 7 next turn. We should 1-pop whip it just before it reaches size 8 and have the surplus of the library go into a Settler. Feros is still churning out military units, and Eden is regrowing after whipping the Granary to completion.

Up north, the Agincourt has started escorting it's, err, liberated citizens towards our lands. *cough* I don't think any enemy units saw the exchange, or know exactly where the chariot is now. Jenkins stayed behind and ransacked a mine for 11 gold. The remaining military units have been left unmoved for now.

Running 0% science should get us to 200 gold on T90, right around the time the Incans finish Priesthood research. If the deal is still on the table, we should probably let England know we're ready to make the trade in 3 turns. We haven't heard back from Babylon yet about the horse deal. Hopefully they won't delay for too much longer.

What do you guys think we should go for next? I'm thinking we should start on a Forge in the Citadel after the Settler finishes, but haven't really thought beyond that yet.