RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Sullla]

So we're back and running again, slaze having decided not to quit. Good to hear, none of us really wanted to replace another player, and I don't think that would have been fair to Kathlete. Better yet, slaze has done the whipping we were hoping he would do:



That's 19 population whipped in 7 different cities, likely for a bunch of longbows. slaze remains in Vassalage civic, so everything will be double-promoted if it comes out of a city with a barracks. We're really hoping to see slaze and Kathlete grind each other down in a long, unproductive war... opening the door for us to come in and destroy Kathlete from the opposite direction later.



Not too much going on in our territory right now. Workers finished the mine at Vicksburg, and thus we could expand borders this turn by building Culture and working the plains hill mine. But expanding borders doesn't do anything for the city immediately, so we'll work the clams for one more turn, grow to size 2, and then pull the plains hill tile in "for free" with the extra population next turn, using one more turn of Build Culture to expand borders. Workers chop out a granary in time to fill up the food box while growing to size 2, and then Vicksburg will be up and running with granary, clams, and fish resources. This should be a very strong city for us in time.

I bumped up science spending to get Education in 2 turns so we can get started on universities, at a fair loss. Gettysburg is set up to have massive overflow into university, almost building a monastery next turn. I was trying to think about what cities should get universities for our fast six, and here's what I came up with:

1) Gettysburg
2) Antietam (will probably have to whip 1 or 2 pop)
3) Fredericksburg
4) Fort Henry (completely whipped for 3 pop)
5) Bull Run
6) The Wilderness

These last two don't even have libraries yet, heh. But they will both be getting multiple forest chops in the next few turns, and that along with a crack of the whip can get us universities here as fast as in Antietam and Fredericksburg. And as border cities, the extra culture will be helpful in pushing back foreign culture too. Basically, we want to start on Oxford within ~5 turns of discovering Education. Oxford is probably worth about 50 beakers/turn all by itself in Gettysburg.

In foreign techs, plako discovered Compass this turn (very logical research choice for them) and slaze surprisingly discovered Horseback Riding, one turn after he finished Civil Service. HBR is an extremely cheap tech at this stage of the game, of course.... Horse archers to flank catapults pretty well, so hopefully slaze will be able to take advantage of that.

Nakor continues to research at 100% towards Liberalism, and is now only 1 turn away from the tech. Worse news, Whosit appears to be feeding his gold each turn to Nakor! While I can't say that with absolute certainty, Nakor is only losing about 100 gpt (when we know full research costs him about 180 gpt) and Whosit is running max cash without his treasury increasing. Seems like a logical guess where that money is going, although why Whosit would be supporting someone who did nothing to support their Mutal Protection Pact is beyond us....

As such, Speaker and I think that Whosit needs to be removed from the game ASAP. We're going to try and go raze those cities on the center island with some knights, which we don't expect to be too heavily defended. Let's have some fun and find out!

Nakor wants us to sign an NAP with him, but we don't plan to do it. The way I see it, we want Nakor to be unsure of himself and feel the need to build units. If we sign an NAP (along with the ones that Dantski and plako are signing), he'll just go back to builder heaven again. We want him scared and completely unsure what we're going to do! And seriously, do we need protection from Nakor? Is he going to attack us? By himself?!? Yeah, right! Not anytime soon.

I'm hoping we'll be able to trade for an updated slaze map, so today I'll focus on Dantski as we go through the other teams.

[Sullla]

Dantski's core:



Timbuktu (13): Palace, Granary, Barracks, Library, Lighthouse, Harbor, Market, Academy
Capital has been decently managed, although 9 water tiles and only 3 cottages mean that this will never be a commercial powerhouse. Dantski was smart to build the harbor here for extra commerce. He did get an Academy to help out, although I don't think it's really doing that much in this city.

Djenne (13): Monument, Granary, Barracks, Library, Lighthouse, Moai Statues
This is Dantski's best city, hands down. It has double food bonues, four hill tiles for production, beautiful grassland river cottages for commerce, and best of all Moai Statues for even more production. This is darned good city management, to be honest. Nice work, Dantski!


Kumbi Saleh (13): Monument, Granary, Barracks, Library, Courthouse, Market, Bud. Temple
Dantski's early commercial center, and looking much better with all that jungle cut down. Rice and sugar for food (kudos to Dantski for irrigating over to the rice), gold and silks for commerce, and a whole lot of cottages. This is another solid city.



Gao (12): Monument, Granary, Barracks, Library, Market, Walls, Temple of Artemis
Needed a separate picture to fit this city in. Gao is squeezed culturally by Krondor and Crydee, which is a shame because it misses out on two food bonuses. I guess Dantski built Temple of Artemis here for the culture alone, because he sure didn't built it for the trade route income! Walls were a smart build here. Impressed that Dantski got this city to size 12 with so few workable tiles.

Walata (13): Granary, Barracks, Library, Lighthouse, Market
Commercial city mostly working the sea coastal tiles, due to overlap with capital and Gao. Not bad, but nothing special. Good maximization of tight spaces.

Niani (10): Monument, Granary, Library, Lighthouse
First city on the western island, which Dantski has heavily built up. Given its size, it should probably have more infrastructure, and those forests probably should have been chopped.

Awdaghost (8 ): Granary, Library, Courthouse, Statue of Zeus
Production city, with three hills and copper. Very odd location for the Statue of Zeus though, on an offshore island! Weird.

Tadmekka (5): Monument, Granary, Lighthouse
Culturally crushed by Shiloh, and making due with the few resources it has, which aren't much. Has to borrow the rice tile from Kumbi Saleh to be able to grow at any decent pace. But it does get Dantski a port city on the inner sea, which he definitely needed.

Tekkeda (3): none
This city is really a stretch. Not sure this city was worth building, even with the sugar resource.

Awlil (3): none
Wadan (1): none
Just getting started. We don't know where Wadan is, because Dantski founded it after trading maps. Probably on another offshore island (?)

Overall Stuff
Total Population: 94 (#3) -> 148 (us)
Food: 219 (#4) -> 371 (us)
Production: 93 (#5) -> 165 (us)
Total Beakers: 6075 (#5) -> 10,522 (us)
Soldier Count: 400k (#6) -> 656k (us)

Soldier Count Breakdown
Population: 47k
Technology: 72k
City Improvements: 28k
Units: 253k

To my surprise, Dantski actually has more overall popualtion than Nakor! Yeah, wasn't expecting that. He doesn't have much territory or population, but the cities he does have are pretty well built up. The tradeoff is that Dantski is fairly weak in Production, not least because he has no Forges built (more on this in a bit). Beaker count is more or less middle of the pack, roughly even with Kathlete, a bit behind Korea, and far far behind Nakor and our team. Dantski's been doing much better on the research end in the past 25 turns, however. He was really sad for ages on end after he rushed the giant Ancient Age army of axes to attack our team.

Militarily, Dantski is very very weak. He is trailing by a wide margin; only Whosit has less Soldier Count than Dantski, and that's only because Whosit's army was decimated during the past two dozen turns. From our unit moving through Dantski's territory, we can see that his army is composed mostly of ridiculously outdated axes, intermixed with catapults. Nakor could sweep through Dantski pretty quickly, if he wasn't terrified of our team entering the war. I don't see Dantski turning on our team any time soon; given his military situation, he needs our protection of he'll be dead meat in a hurry.

City Improvements Breakdown [our team]
8 Granaries [14]
7 Libraries [7]
5 Monuments [5]
5 Lighthouse [4]
5 Barracks [7]
4 Markets [5]
2 Courthouses [6]
1 Walls [5]
1 Harbor [0]
1 Buddhist Temple [0]
1 Academy [1]
0 Forges [9]
0 Theatres [6]
0 Stables [4]
0 Grocers [3]
0 Aqueducts [1]
0 Castles [1]

2 National Wonders (Palace, Moai Statues)
2 World Wonders (Temple of Artemis, Statue of Zeus)

While we've often been pretty rough on Dantski's decision-making in this game, I have to say that his civ is generally well run. Considering the techs he has, the city builds have been pretty good overall. (Certainly way better than Nakor, whose management has mostly squandered his tech position.) Dantski has a nice assortment of granaries, libraries, lighthouses, and markets. He's got less of all of these, but Dantski also only has 11 cities to our 16, so factor that in mind. Among our respective core cities, Dantski is quite competitive in comparisons.

There's just one glaring omission: no forges. That's especially silly because Mali's unique building is the Mint, an upgraded forge! This has put Dantski far behind the curve in Production, and since he never adopted a state religion, Dantski's been unable to get anything out of Organized Religion either. Thus our core cities are getting 50% more shields on their infrastructure now, and that's a major edge which is snowballing over time.

But aside from that glaring omission, yeah, Dantski's not doing too badly. He just needs more cities, after being sadly cramped on both sides by neighbors. The Imperialistic trait more or less went to waste on this map (Dantski's never gotten a single Great General from the other half of the trait!) Dantski is making good use of what he has, he simply doesn't have enough to work with. Really, REALLY should have gone to war with Nakor earlier in the game.

Anyway, I apologize for some of the bad things I said earlier about Dantski. He's doing a very solid job here.

[Dr. Nomadic]

Dantski's play is probably the definition of good sportsmanship.

He probably didn't have the Mint in mind, seeing how he didn't choose Augustus Caesar. Personally I never understand why somebody would want to skip on lighthouses and forges, I make those essential builds in every city, and then AFTER that I decide on what to specialize.

Guys, I felt like asking, what's the longest you've went without Iron Working? Longest I've went without Iron Working is up to 1160 in a Noble Level game where I Immortal-rushed the AI civ that built Stonehenge and then there was no jungle nearby. I think I even built the Sistine Chapel without discovering the tech.

[Selrahc]

There's just one glaring omission: no forges. That's especially silly because Mali's unique building is the Mint, an upgraded forge! This has put Dantski far behind the curve in Production, and since he never adopted a state religion, Dantski's been unable to get anything out of Organized Religion either. Thus our core cities are getting 50% more shields on their infrastructure now, and that's a major edge which is snowballing over time.

Have you considered telling him this?

[Sullla]

Nope. Dantski is an ally - for now - but he's still competition. Low city production from him is good for us.

Update for this morning: slaze whipped 10 additional times, for a total of 18 more pop. Way to go, crack that whip! He has not replied to our former message, so I'm sending him another chase-up message:

Dear slaze of IKZ,

Glad to have you back with us in the game. As we said before, feel free to request resources as you need them from our team. We would also be willing to trade world maps, if you're interested. Because our team has Paper tech, we can exchange screenshots too if the situation comes up.

Good luck,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

I have no idea if he'll say anything back to us though. slaze's diplomacy has just been strange all through this game.

We want to let Nakor know that we aren't signing Open Borders with his team:

Dear Nakor and DMOC of Holy Rome,

Our apologies for the previous message, we were indeed wrong on the Open Borders game mechanic. (That's what I get for listening to Speaker without checking in the Worldbuilder!) However, I'm afraid that we must decline the offer of Open Borders at this time. We appreciate your good sentiment, but we are satisfied with our current trade route income.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

I realize that we were the ones who proposed the no-scouting OB in the first place, so I feel kind of bad about rejecting them. However, the fact is that Nakor will simply get more value out of OB trade routes than we will (because we have more and larger cities), so we feel that we have to decline here.

One last message explaining to our allies what's going on:

Dear friends,

Congratulations on securing your recent NAPs with Nakor. We are not going to sign one, because we want Nakor completely uncertain of what we are going to do next. If our team signs one too, Nakor will just go into teching and builder heaven, which doesn't seem like a good thing.

Whosit appears to be gifting his gold each turn to Nakor (I guess he realizes that he's finished in this game), so we're going to try and raze his cities on the central island in the upcoming turns. The sooner Rome is eliminated, the better.

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

We're just waiting on one team to end their turn. Take a guess who that is... it's not like there's always one team who never ends their turn during wars...

[Sullla]

New turn up and running, Kathlete has declared war on slaze, and everyone else is sitting around watching the fireworks. Here's a couple of pictures from our corner of the world:



Forge whipped last turn here (as soon as we successfully spread religion into the city) and overflowed into Globe Theatre. Two forest chops completed in Chikamauga this turn, although one was outside the city's borders and only produced 13 shields. It's still better to grab those chops now, while we can, because Chikamauga has little shield production and Kathlete's borders will expand to grab those forest tiles soon.

We've got one more chop outside the city's borders, which should produce ~25 more shields after multipliers, and then we have to account for the final 200 shields of Globe Theatre the hard way. I'll probably build one grassland workshop here, and use that plus the grassland hill mine and an Engineer specialist for 1+2+3+2 = 8 shields/turn, which becomes 12/turn with forge and Organized Religion. We need to knock out about 100 shields through normal building, and then we can whip the rest to completion. Would all be much easier if wonders didn't have that double population cost whipping penalty!

Then we whip a barracks, and start doing endless whipping/drafting of units.



This isn't super important (so far), but take a look at how Speaker is posting naval ships up here in the north. Nothing can slip past this large channel of water without us seeing it, so no more Jack Sparrow incidents at Hampton Roads! To the east, Athens is shielded by Korea's borders; they'll see anything incoming in that direction (although we'll probably want more ships over here eventually). To the southwest, we have a Sentry horse archer and two triremes guarding the naval approaches by the Kathlete city of Alderaan.

Now none of this matters so long as no one tries to invade by sea. But in the event that someone would... well, we're covered decently. At least we'll have warning ahead of time. Don't want to have any "Banana" episodes in this game!


St. Albans produces a Great Person next turn, with 83% Engineer odds. Spartansburg has been managed to follow immediately thereafter; you can see it "almost" producing a Great Person, and the grabbag collection of possible results. Anything other than an Artist would be useful there, and even an Artist can probably find some use. (Capture that Whosit city in the dead center of the Donut, and then fire a Culture Bomb in there? That would flip a Nakor city for sure, and would just be awesome to boot! )

We are one turn from discovering Education, and a lot of cities have been set up to overflow into universities next turn. Nakor has discovered Liberalism (so no sitting 1t away to save up for a better free tech later), but he has not logged into the game yet and selected what that is. It pretty much has to be Nationalism; the only other Renaissance tech available is Printing Press, and Nationalism works better with Taj/Mausolleum synergy. But we'll wait and see what they take before assuming anything.

Kathlete has apparently been so focused on the war with slaze that they've failed to see us swapping our Espionage over to them. We've got research visibility (the Ottomans are sitting at 0% science building up gold for a Guilds push), and we'll start getting visibility on some cities soon if they don't adjust their spending. That would be very useful stuff!

slaze did finally respond to our messages, with a very curt email:

Yeah I'll trade world maps.

One question: When does your NAP with Athlete run out? Turn 300?

(sorry for the sarcasm)
slaze

Keep up that attitude, slaze - you're really making friends here. I wanted to write back and tell him that this whole mess was his own damn fault. Instead, I simply thanked him, and told him that our NAP runs out on Turn 205. slaze also requested 2 happiness resources, which we sent over to him.

We got the updated world map in-game, so I'll be posting a little later on slaze's situation. Long story short: it's not too good.

[Sullla]

All of slaze's cities are small in size due to emergency whipping. You can mentally add another 3-4 population to every city to imagine what they looked like before this latest war outbreak.

slaze's core:



Fetret Devri (5): Terrace, Barracks, Library, Lighthouse, Courthouse, Bud. Temple
This was the original capital (directly west from Gettysburg across the Worldwrap), but no longer as IKZ moved the palace to a more central location. It's a pretty good city, nicely balanced between food, production, and commerce. Doesn't have a lot of infrastructure, but then again slaze doesn't even have the techs for things like forges and markets.

DINA (4): Terrace, Barracks, Library, Courthouse, Hindu Temple, Hindu Shrine
As the Hindu Holy City, with shrine, this is one of the most important spots in slaze's territory. Unfortunately it's right on the border with Kathlete, and probably their #1 target in this latest war. Not looking good to survive. Nice commercial location, could have used a market for the shrine though.



Celebi (6): Palace, Terrace, Barracks, Library, Courthouse, Hindu Temple
The current palace, placed in a central location to control maintenance costs. It has a solid location, but really, nothing overly special. slaze can't even use the sugars here, because they're under sugar and he lacks Iron Working tech still. At least his capital is safe for the time being.

Anatolia (5): Terrace, Barracks, Library, Courthouse
Next in line behind DINA, and another riverside commercial city. Not a whole lot to say here. Get used to seeing this infrastructure setup in virtually every other city. 3 out of 4 buildings are half-price from Mehmed's traits.

Cuzco (5): Terrace, Barracks, Library, Courthouse
A strong production location with copper and multiple hill tiles, but slaze has set it up in exactly the same fashion as every other city, with cottages and no farms. His cities have virtually no specialization at all.

New Ulundi (4): Terrace, Library, Lighthouse, Courthouse
This is the original Zulu starting location, as the name and furs resource indicate. (Poor Mortius!) It could also be a strong production location, but once again slaze has cottaged all the flatland tiles and built a library. I mean, that's not bad per se, and still...

Tiwanaku (4): Terrace, Lighthouse, Courthouse
This would make a great Globe Theatre location, with double clams + fish + rice tiles. It's being held back by a bunch of jungle tiles, which limit the production to a single hill mine.

Machu Picchu (2): Terrace, Barracks, Library
A filler city stuck in between Fetret Devri and Anatolia. I'm not really a fan of this - why not simply place Anatolia closer to Fetret to avoid those wasted tiles in the first place (?) This isn't really slaze's fault, more a result of the revolving door leadership of this team. But it's not particularly good management to squeeze in an extra city here in such an overlapped position.

Ollantaytambo (2): Terrace, Library, Courthouse, City Walls
Point defense city in the north, where slaze whipped out walls at some point. Hopefully he can stall Kathlete for a little while here. Not much else to say, as slaze has whipped this city to such a small size.

Corihuayrachina (5): Terrace, Library, Lighthouse
Coastal city crammed onto the coast, with virtually no infrastructure.

Huamanga (6): Terrace, Barracks
This looks like a production city, but there's so little infrastructure that it's hard to tell. Tons of overlap again.

Vilcas (4): Terrace, Barracks
This is the city I'm most critical of. This city should not have been planted. It claimed no unused resources, there are cities on every side, and it shares 19 of its 21 tiles. Given how expensive maintenance costs are on this map, slaze would have been much better off using this settler somewhere else. What is the point of this city?

Vilcabamba (2): Terrace, Barracks
This city has a lot of resources, between its marble + horses + sugar + clams + whales. Looks like it's just getting started though.

Vitcos (1): Terrace
Andahuaylas (1): none
Just getting started down in the extreme south. With slaze already having 13 cities and suffering very badly in terms of economy, he should not have planted these two cities until later. He was only getting 80 gpt at 0% science even before the whipping - now he's down to 50 gpt!

Kuat (3): Terrace
Whosit's former Heroic Epic city, recently captured and still in revolt. Will show in pictures when I look at Whosit's territory.

Overall Stuff
Total Population: 59 (#6) -> 148 (us)
Food: 182 (#6) -> 371 (us)
Production: 98 (#4) -> 165 (us)
Total Beakers: 4582 (#7) -> 10,522 (us)
Soldier Count: 473k (#4) -> 656k (us)

Soldier Count Breakdown
Population: 29k
Technology: 46k
City Improvements: 29k
Units: 369k

slaze's population has been decimated by his latest round of emergency whips, down to just 59 total. (You can see how we're approaching triple his current population.) He whipped 19 and 18 population over the past two turns, about 40% of his entire populace dying to the lash of the overseers. Ouch, rough way to go. His production has strangely gone up, not down, after the war was declared. I guess that was swapping from cottages to mines (?) Would probaly be better to grow and whip rather than work mines...

slaze is dead last in Total Beakers, and not likely to improve any time soon. If you count Education, we've researched about 3 times the amount of beakers he has in this game.

slaze's army though is actually quite good. Not even counting the latest round of whippings (which are a turn behind on the Soldier Count, and don't appear yet), his pure military score is 369k. Kathlete's pure military score is 429k, and with slaze having the defender's advantage, he's probably not in as much danger as it might appear. If slaze fights well tactically, he should be OK. Remember that we were able to survive against an attack which had more than double our military score; an enemy military that's 15-20% larger by Soldier Count rating isn't exactly a juggernaut.

City Improvements Breakdown [our team]
14 Terraces [14]
9 Libraries [7]
9 Barracks [7]
8 Courthouses [6]
4 Lighthouse [4]
2 Hindu Temples [0]
1 Buddhist Temple [0]
1 Walls [5]
0 Forges [9]
0 Theatres [6]
0 Markets [5]
0 Monuments [5]
0 Stables [4]
0 Grocers [3]
0 Aqueducts [1]
0 Castles [1]
0 Academy [1]

1 National Wonder (Palace)
1 World Wonder (Hindu Shrine)

slaze has certainly taken advantage of his unique building, knocking out cheap Expansive Terraces everywhere. This saved him from having to build any Monuments, so the Terrace was effectively worth 60 free shields in the early game (half cost and no Monument). He also concentrated on building libraries and cheap Organized courthouses, along with what was probably an emergency round of barracks in the last war. Finally, slaze also got his cheap lighthouses up and running in his coastal cities. So far, so good.

The problem is... that's basically it. Just those five buildings: terrace, library, courthouse, barracks, and lighthouses in the coastal cities. He's got nothing else, and that's simply not good enough after 180 turns. Again, I know slaze is missing some key techs (e.g. no Metal Casting for forges), but he does have Currency and should have at least gotten a market in his Shrine city! And what was the purpose of building those temples, eh? Temples are a poor use of shields for non-Spiritual civs, unless you can exploit the religious wonder trio...

On the whole, I simply think slaze went about this game with the wrong philosophy. He basically did a settler swarm, trying to grab as much land as possible with a low-infrastructure build. But on this map, with these maintenance costs, that's a terrible approach to follow, and it left slaze very vulnerable to attack. A slower, more reasonable approach to expansion (with proper military to defend what you have) would have been a lot more effective, IMO. And a couple of those cities slaze crammed into his core are just wasteful. He should have done more city specialization (not a single national wonder again!) The Incan empire looks well run on the tactical level, but it's lacking in strategic vision.

I think this is a good situation for us. slaze's latest round of whipping has crippled him economically for good, and eliminated him as a long term threat. Ironically, Kathlete might do better to sign peace now without invading for a city or two, having done permanent damage to IKZ without firing a shot. Instead, Kathlete will attack and slowly grind through the northern Incan cities, taking heavy losses against longbows and slowing the Ottoman tech rate. By the time Turn 205 rolls around, we'll be close to cavalry and rifles, going up against a medieval army of maces, crossbows, and knights. That should be... fun.

Go ahead and take some of that territory for us, Kathlete. We'll relieve you of it later on.

[Speaker]

The good:


We are #1 in every important demographic category.

The bad:

In a repeat of Jowy in our Greek war, Whosit has gifted several cities to his "ally" (who didn't lift a finger to help him), to deny them as rightful conquests to his enemies. Sorry, but I think this is uber cheese. As far as I can tell, he gifted all the cities on the central island to Holy Rome, Sullla.



The ugly:

Whosit has just 2 cities left, and is not long for this world.

[Dr. Nomadic]

Never too late to start making new rules to prevent this kind of stuff from happening. It's comparable to the annoyance of you fighting a rival in singleplayer and then said rival capitulating to one of your allies, though it seems worse here IMO.

At least Nakor will now have lots of random cities on the other side of the world to drive up his maintenance costs and look like a bigger target!

[Sullla]

I'll also register my protest that this is total bull, and extremely poor sportsmanship. We were about to go capture/raze those island cities from Whosit, a very weak power in this game. Now they have suddenly reverted to Nakor's control, one of the strongest powers in the game. And while Nal Hutta is pretty weak, Dathomir is a very good size 6 city with five different resources. Seriously, how is that far? It's just a big "screw you!" to everyone else in the game from Whosit.

Whosit, you were a total jackass in this game. You deserved to be eliminated.

Nakor did take Nationalism tech last turn from Liberalism, and we did indeed pop a Great Engineer at St. Albans:



Lots of fighting elsewhere, with plako taking Carida and Kathlete capturing the first Incan border city (check the screenshots from yesterday for the location). We have to figure two things out:

- Do we go after these new Nakor cities on the central island? While we don't want to get involved in a hot war with Nakor, those Whosit cities will give Nakor a stranglehold in the center if we don't do anything. Yes, this feels totally unfair to us. Hmmm.

- How do we want to use the Great Engineer? I think the best option is rushing Taj, so I'm sending this message off to Korea:

Dear plako and Broker,

Congratulations on your success at Carida! Unfortunately Whosit has gifted away his central island cities to Nakor, which we were planning to capture. Wasn't your agreement with Nakor supposed to prevent him from doing that?

We produced a Great Engineer this turn from one of our cities. We'd like to use him to rush Taj Mahal, and steal the wonder away from Nakor (who took Nationalism from his Liberalism slingshot). Our team was hoping you could help us here by sending us some gold to help us research towards Nationalism. We did gift you those knights earlier - three knights are probably worth at least a hundred gold each, right?

Hope you can help us out again,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

I should be able to figure out which city Nakor is building Taj using C&D spying, and then calculate his wonder ETA. That'll let us know how fast we have to push on Nationalism.

Also, Dantski popped a Great Prophet this turn, so let's just ask him quickly about that:

Dear Dantski of Romali,

We saw that you produced a Great Prophet this turn - is there any chance that you'd be willing to trade him to us so that we could build our shrine? We can probably send you a non-Prophet Great Person in return, which would likely be more useful to you.

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

Did not end turn, so that Speaker and I can discuss what we want to do next.