RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Issus]

It's possible to get seven:

2 Base + 1 Financial + 1 Feitoria + 1 Golden Age + 1 Colossus + 1 Random Event (can't remember which one)

[Jabah]

With random events, you can have (also) +1food (turtles?) which would be nicer than +1 commerce (perles?).
But that is of course for 1 tile only.

[Sullla]

We're almost about to start another turn, so let me hurry through the current one first (Turn 192):



We used our Great Engineer to rush the Apostolic Palace in Spartansburg, having discovered Theology tech. If plako somehow finishes the AP in a tiebreaker next turn, we're going to have some real egg on our face with all these temples and monasteries that we're building. Don't think they can pull that off though, fortunately. And as you can see, we're up to 770 beakers/turn in Golden Age mode, enough to get Constitution tech in just 3 turns.

The bad news for the turn was getting another Great Artist out of Spartansburg. That's our second Artist in a row, at consecutive odds of 18% and 25%. The combined odds of that are under 5%, so we've definitely been rather unlucky here, but them's the breaks. We're going to try and see if plako and/or Dantski would be interested in trading for one of our Great Artists. Worth a shot, right?

In any case, there's another Great Person due from Sparta in another 7 turns, so we get to play the GP slot machine again.

Two settlers due next turn:



Here's how I'm planning on moving the settler out of Antietam, destined for the spot on the northwest island. We can found this city on Turn 196, and no sooner (well, unless we road the forested hill tile, but that would be a waste of worker labor). We really need to start getting more workers out of some city after this current infrastructure push - Antietam might be a good spot for that.

On a similar note, we'll need a work boat out of Hampton next turn for the new city's clams. I'll slide it up in the queue.



We had a request to see Korea's territory, so here's our current map info (which is slightly out of date). Whosit's last city was located 4 East, 1 North of Imperial Center - it's also controlled by Korea now. They have their original core from the early game back again, plus all those offshore island cities. Going to take them a little while to rebuild everything though, however. There's also some unclaimed land on the Donut to the northeast of Korea and the south of Inca which no one is using at the moment (near the original Mortius starting position), which those teams will probably claim later on. At the very least, Nakor now has to watch both of his borders, instead of having a Roman ally to his east.



And here's our current military, which Speaker has nicely balanced between many different units. The real striking power lies in those 13 knights, which don't even include the 3 that we gifted to plako for free. We currently have about 60% more "Power" than Kathlete, and the disparity should grow if he continues to war with slaze. By the time our war starts, we expect to have ~20 cuirassiers and ~15 catapults on top of whatever muskets we can draft via Nationhood civic. Hopefully we'll be as successful as we were in our wars against Greece earlier.

Another new turn likely appearing later tonight! They tend to go faster when there are only a handful of teams left in the game. I looked at the score box this morning, and it's starting to look awfully small...

[Ashain]

We had a request to see Korea's territory, so here's our current map info (which is slightly out of date). Whosit's last city was located 4 East, 1 North of Imperial Center - it's also controlled by Korea now. They have their original core from the early game back again, plus all those offshore island cities. Going to take them a little while to rebuild everything though, however. There's also some unclaimed land on the Donut to the northeast of Korea and the south of Inca which no one is using at the moment (near the original Mortius starting position), which those teams will probably claim later on. At the very least, Nakor now has to watch both of his borders, instead of having a Roman ally to his east.

Thanks Sullla, nice job Plako and broker! Though it looks like they're still a bit squeezed on the donut and probably aren't going to make it to the inland sea anytime soon.

[Sullla]

Turn played.

Sullla

[Speaker]

Turn played.

Sullla

Don't go turning into Athlete on me...

[Sareln]

Don't go turning into Athlete on me...

even boring turns deserve more than a one-liner... two at least. :neenernee (Watch these words come back to haunt me in the FfH PBEM... :rolleyes: )

[Sullla]

Oh, sorry about that, my eyes were burning from the scintillating posts on display in the Email thread. Let's get some actual stuff up from the current turn (T193):



Say hello to the Apostolic Palace of Spartansburg, which completed as scheduled. It's located right next to the National Epic, which is the big arch-looking thingie. Also present are granary, barracks, forge, library, theatre, courthouse, market, and grocer... wait, is it sad that I could recognize all of them just from the map screen without looking inside the city? Maybe I've played too much of this game...

We are already getting the 2-shield bonus in cities that have Judaism present, even before any election for AP resident has taken place. I guess that's something inherent to the AP religion once the wonder is built. As such, we've starting building lots of Jewish temples and Jewish monasteries all over the place:



The Golden Age is a great time to build them, since we can use the temporary boosted shield production to add permanent shield production once it comes to a close. (Forges and factories are similarly strong city improvements to build during a Golden Age - accelerate your production first, then all the rest of the improvements will follow in turn.) Our production is almost ridiculously high in some of these cities during the GA, and you can see at the top how Gettysburg looms large in all of the major categories.

We've nearly reached 800 base beakers/turn in GA mode, and research continues to proceed along smoothly as planned. As for our competing rivals and their research:



Here's a picture of the spreadsheet I've been using to track everyone's tech discoveries. I started it as soon as we got Alphabet and could begin seeing other team's techs. It's pretty easy to do, just write down what techs each team discovers each turn, and lets us work backwards to infer some good information about the other teams. For example, by seeing how long it took Dantski to discover Education (12 turns), we know for sure that he's not researching very quickly at all.

The row at the bottom is my (very) rough estimate of how many beakers/turn each team has been averaging recently. Both Kathlete and Nakor look pretty impressive here, but they're both a little overestimated from long turns of running deficit science. Right now, both have under 50g and will have to build up their funds again, or run some break-even science for a while. And Whosit's death means the end of his "sugar daddy" funding of the other teams, which cuts a sizable portion out of Nakor's income!

Three quick thoughts here:

- Nakor did discover Economics first and took the free Great Merchant. We were never planning on going this route, and he's welcome to the freebie. Getting to Constitution, Gunpowder, and Military Tradition are more important to our team currently.

- plako just discovered Optics, so they now have caravels. Shouldn't be a threat or anything, just bears watching. (Would be pretty awesome if we could scout out Kathlete's coastlines with a gifted caravel as part of our attack!)

- Dantski finally discovered Education; he spent 7 turns saving up 1500 gold, then 5 turns spending it down to 250g. I have to say, I don't understand this one. Why research an uber-expensive Renaissance tech when you barely have any Medieval ones? Dantski lacks Feudalism, Guilds, Banking, Philosophy, and so on. Very expensive non-Philosophical universities can't be that important...

The rough overall beaker count looks like this:

Nakor: 18,753
Killer Angels: 16,741
Kathlete: 11,066
plako: 9741
Dantski: 8750
slaze: 4650

So Nakor is basically ahead by one Renaissance tech, which matches what you'd expect to see. He should remain at least slightly ahead of us for some time to come, thanks to his Mausoleum/Taj Golden Age and the free Great Merchant. The big difference is that we're more or less running even with Nakor in research while supporting a massive army. (Leaving aside points from Technology and Population, our overall Power rating is roughly double that of Nakor.) As long as we can keep up right now, we'll eventually pull ahead due to our vastly superior edge in Food and Production.

Doubly so if we succeed in our plan to crush Kathlete into the ground.

[darrelljs]

Oh, sorry about that, my eyes were burning from the scintillating posts on display in the Email thread.

At least one of those posts was brilliant :neenernee.

Darrell

[Kylearan]

Hi,

thanks for the tech overview - impressive beaker counts by Nakor and you compared to the rest!

Dantski finally discovered Education; he spent 7 turns saving up 1500 gold, then 5 turns spending it down to 250g. I have to say, I don't understand this one. Why research an uber-expensive Renaissance tech when you barely have any Medieval ones?

I'm not sure I understand why this is a bad move. Isn't researching a tech that enables you to research faster a good idea? He could whip out universities to clean up on those old medieval techs quicker. I don't have any idea about Dantski's situation really, but techs like Guilds or Philosophy can wait, or not?

-Kylearan