[SPOILERS] scooter Expands the Empire Across the Sea

[scooter]

I had another thought about a Monument in Y’Ghatan. This city is only 3 tiles from our holy city so we might get a natural religion spread. From a pure hammers point of view it might be more efficient to build a missionary somewhere and a settler for stone city and use that as the mechanism to get horse in culture for Y’Ghatan — especially since we need culture at the stone city to get the fish netted anyway. The sticking point is we are not sure about the relative priority of when that stone city would be settled.

Yeah, this has definitely crossed my mind too. I'm sort of holding out hope on a lucky spread. I know like Aren we'll get the spread as soon as we finish a Monument. That said, the Monastery/Missionary combo costs 100h, so I'm not in a huge rush to commit to that kind of expense when I can just build the occasional Monument.





Turns out the tundra is much more resource rich than the rest of the map save Unta/Pale.





Found a passage to the west finally. I think I may keep this WB going and let the WB completing in Ehrlitan net the Crabs.





With the settler out, time for some infra in Pale. Quick Granary and then on to the Lighthouse. I might do a 5 -> 3 Lighthouse whip if I can line it up nicely, we'll see. Whip anger doesn't really hurt here given that this city is totally fine to stop at 4 and build workers/settlers while waiting for whip anger to expire.





I pick up the settler from Pale next turn, and it'll head west for GoldenPigs. I'll likely transfer over the Worker/Warrior pair from Y'Ghatan, then transfer a replacement worker/warrior pair from the main continent into Y'Ghatan. Fortunately I can flex the grass mine, so the city doesn't need a ton of improvements initially. Ehrlitan will actually finish the WB next turn as it'll take the Cow from Aren which will take the Clams. That WB is ticketed for Aren's Crabs. I think the way to go is to have Ehrlitan grow to 4 while slow-building a couple MP warriors, then double whip a Lighthouse.


Unta is about to drop its whip unhappiness. I think I'll pause the settler for 1T to grow, but I'm not certain yet. I'll figure it out. In any case, I think this Unta settler might be the right time to settle Red Dot. The fact that there's a couple shareable improved tiles (mine/cottage) and a good road network means it might be the right time. The islands need a breather to get more support ferried over in the form of defenders and workers, and doing Red Dot after GoldenPigs makes a lot of sense to me.


Finally, I'm going to do Archery before Math starting next turn. It seems prudent to at least get islands to a state where they either have an Archer or could whip one at any moment as players are presumably starting to explore.

[scooter]

I had another thought about a Monument in Y’Ghatan. This city is only 3 tiles from our holy city so we might get a natural religion spread. From a pure hammers point of view it might be more efficient to build a missionary somewhere and a settler for stone city and use that as the mechanism to get horse in culture for Y’Ghatan — especially since we need culture at the stone city to get the fish netted anyway. The sticking point is we are not sure about the relative priority of when that stone city would be settled.

Yeah, this has definitely crossed my mind too. I'm sort of holding out hope on a lucky spread. I know like Aren we'll get the spread as soon as we finish a Monument. That said, the Monastery/Missionary combo costs 100h, so I'm not in a huge rush to commit to that kind of expense when I can just build the occasional Monument.

Also, Monastery requires Meditation, which I'm avoiding to keep the Astro bulb option on the table. So I don't know that I'd go this route. OR is not impossible of course, but teching Monotheism is not the super near-term priority at least. Maybe after Currency.

Do we know about how many cities we are supposed to have room for / how much distance there is supposed to be between civs? Does that support the island to our east being a site for competition? It seems like we have ocean to our west, at least south of the jungle. I wonder if there is land to our west but we can only reach it easily via the poles/jungle belt, or if that is meant to be an Astro island area. Being a bit behind on exploration compared to our rivals might be hurting us here. At the same time, though, we haven’t found anything super awesome to be fighting to expand toward before someone else does — we’re still just seeing decent sites, not fantabulous ones. That suggests we perhaps haven’t quite found potential contested resource areas just yet.

I did miss this first question here at one point, or at least I intended to check in-game and forgot. But it was on my mind. So, some stats for you.


Total land tiles: 613 (123 per player)
My current land tiles: 37
My current cities: 5


So I currently have 5 cities averaging 7.4 land tiles per city. At this rate I would expect there to be, on average, 16-17 cities per player. Now of course, this is ballpark. The core cities have more land tiles than the islands will, so the average per city will likely drop. Or in some cases they're already accounted for. Red Dot for example will add just a single land tile to my current cultural borders. If I were to settle that now, it would single-handedly raise my global estimate to 20 cities per player.


So, let's call it 15-20 per player, maybe even a shade more if players settle the tiny islands. This is generally pretty roomy. To me it suggests the GoldenPig island is likely "mine," but I shouldn't be surprised to see a neighbor on the island east of it. I also would expect my west scouting WB to find someone soon. It all depends on how much land is actually Astro-locked. There will be some because Commodore would never allow a water map to not have them. So that unknown variable makes it hard to be really confident. In general though, the only place we have seen outright ocean is directly west of our starting location. Every other border has visible galley-accessible islands, but west of us is ocean.

[Tarkeel]

Just picking up something from earlier. Number of tiles that would have been improved by picking the Inca? Zero. (Although I guess you could have interim-farmed the crab-island banana)

[Zed-F]

What do you think for Unta about grow to 6 -> swap to settler & whip -> overflow to lighthouse & regrow? If we are going to settle red dot & hope for a spread or build monument so we can get fish in culture, it seems like we’d rather get that project going sooner than later so we can quickly increase Unta’s food for future settler builds.

I do think we want to settle the western tundra city on goldenpig island ASAP so it can help set up the furs city, so I think it’s relevant to spend some time thinking about what we need to prioritize building transport and worker / workboat / defensive resources to do that. At the same time, we also probably want to consider sending some settlers west once we find a viable site; we surely have a neighbor over there and need some forward outposts to screen our core. So, we can’t send too much more to goldenpig island too quickly after settling that tundra city.

SD & Yuri just settled city 5. Cairo has yet to settle city 4. Will we get to 6 before he gets to 4?

[scooter]

Just picking up something from earlier. Number of tiles that would have been improved by picking the Inca? Zero. (Although I guess you could have interim-farmed the crab-island banana)

Yeah good call. Although there will be times later where we'll wish we had a source of irrigation. However, it will be later and not have much of a snowball impact. The new Terrace feels like a luxury more than a needle mover. However, I bet it does a little better on a random map. Reason being mapmakers generally watch for irrigation paths to foods, while random maps do no such thing.

What do you think for Unta about grow to 6 -> swap to settler & whip -> overflow to lighthouse & regrow? If we are going to settle red dot & hope for a spread or build monument so we can get fish in culture, it seems like we’d rather get that project going sooner than later so we can quickly increase Unta’s food for future settler builds.

I'm definitely considering something like this, see below.

SD & Yuri just settled city 5. Cairo has yet to settle city 4. Will we get to 6 before he gets to 4?

There's a chance as I'll be settling GoldenPig on T70, and I just played T67. In addition, if I whip the settler next turn, then RedDot (FishWine?) would also be T70, getting us to 7. SPEAKING OF CAIRO.





I was not able to avoid contact this time as moving 1S of the banana put me in range of the hill. I saw no point in trying to hide my WB as it comes across as a slightly hostile move to do so. But also because I didn't consider it until after moving the WB forward . It seems likely we're in an alternating pattern as Cairo appeared almost exactly where I expected given where Bing was. Imagine the following where the two rows are north and south hemisphere and P are players:


--P----P---
P---P---P--


Not the best effort, but it seems like a reasonably likely guess. In this case we'd have pretty good access to Cairo/Bing and more limited but non-zero access to SD and Yuris. All things being equal, that would be a pretty good result. This means I'm likely to meet either Yuris or SD east of GoldenPig.





It's possible this is all natural spawned, but this is really feeling like Commodore's love of tundra fishing villages resulting in him boosting this area. (This is not a complaint!) Either way we can fit 2-3 useful cities down here.





This hover is after ending turn and growing to 6 on the half-completed WB, FWIW. Don't read too much into tile assignments - I micro'd Ehrlitan to complete the WB this turn to speed Aren's second seafood by 1T this past turn. Anyway I'm sort of inclined to do the triple whip next turn. It's ideal because I can regrow to 5 lightning fast, and then sit at size 5 and build some badly needed workers for the next phase. Essentially follow the same playbook as last time - whip to 3, regrow to 5, workers/settlers at size 5 while waiting for whip anger to expire, then grow to size 6 right when it expires.


This would result in FishWine also being settled on T70. I have enough improved tiles in the area to have good tiles to share until I get borders popped. I would probably suck it up and build the Monument because the Fish is valuable enough. The Cow, PH Mine, and Cottage are all borrowable, and I'm Mining the hill 1W of the capital in order to faciliate giving away some of its other tiles.










Up 17fh on Rival Best and up 27fh on Rival Average. Looking forward to picking up Cairo's graphs. Also, if I do whip the settler from Unta next turn (T68), it may be worth considering revolting to Hinduism T69 while both settlers are moving so that it'll be done before they both settle on T70. I was going to just wait until we got some useful spreads, but I imagine we'll get a couple more, and this might be the most efficient time to take a revolt. Mainly it's about 1) happy cap to make whipping less challenging and 2) making a future potential OR revolt less painful.

[Tarkeel]

Up 17fh on Rival Best and up 27fh on Rival Average. Looking forward to picking up Cairo's graphs. Also, if I do whip the settler from Unta next turn (T68), it may be worth considering revolting to Hinduism T69 while both settlers are moving so that it'll be done before they both settle on T70. I was going to just wait until we got some useful spreads, but I imagine we'll get a couple more, and this might be the most efficient time to take a revolt. Mainly it's about 1) happy cap to make whipping less challenging and 2) making a future potential OR revolt less painful.

We actually did a similar revolt in PB66, but that was slightly later (t93) and we were severly happy-capped with a broken economy and nothing very useful to put hammers in. We are in much better shape economy-wise here and have more important stuff to build, but I still agree that this might be the best spot to revolt outside of a GA.

[Zed-F]

I am wondering if the players are at vertices for an M or W shape. I had thought that the presence of Astro ocean to our west meant it was more likely to be a W than an M. This might be the case but it’s hard to say for certain; our northern neighbors are both pretty close. I guess we’ll find out as we scout more.

It looks like we might have some difficulty putting a forward outpost to our west unless we stick to just the jungle belt. The whale island would be a bit hard to defend, given Cairo’s proximity. On the other hand he is expanding the slowest of all our rivals so I guess we’ll see whether he continues to expand in our direction or priorities other ones; we might be able to snag something in that corner if he continues to be slow.

One note: once gold is hooked we ought to be able to maintain size 6 at the cap if we want even with a single whip unhappy. Once we have a lighthouse that might make sense due to the lake tile.

[scooter]

Yeah, I'm a bit torn on the revolt. The main reason I'm considering it is because I think it's sort of unlikely we do an early GA. For one, I think early GAs are a bit muted on islands where you're simply working fewer land tiles, so the production boost is quite mild. Sure there's a commerce boost, but even that requires cities to have Lighthouses up and running. In addition, I think MoM might make a lot of sense for us, in which case we definitely don't want to GA until well after Calendar.

The wines also push us towards Monarchy. So it's easy to envision somewhat soon teching Mono -> Monarchy and revolting into OR + HR which will fix happiness and make it easier to use the religion. We'll want to get religion spread around anyway as it's our easiest source of naval promotions (I can imagine a later GA ending in a Theocracy revolt), and as discussed I'm not really planning on investing in Monasteries for a few reasons.


Of course, you can throw all this out by saying to simply wait for a GA and go Hindu + OR + HR all at once. I just wonder if OR might be one of the tools we need to win MoM anyway.

I am wondering if the players are at vertices for an M or W shape. I had thought that the presence of Astro ocean to our west meant it was more likely to be a W than an M. This might be the case but it’s hard to say for certain; our northern neighbors are both pretty close. I guess we’ll find out as we scout more.

It looks like we might have some difficulty putting a forward outpost to our west unless we stick to just the jungle belt. The whale island would be a bit hard to defend, given Cairo’s proximity. On the other hand he is expanding the slowest of all our rivals so I guess we’ll see whether he continues to expand in our direction or priorities other ones; we might be able to snag something in that corner if he continues to be slow.

Yeah it's a little hard to say on westward expansion. It's just all generally very far from the core. If I were to find a killer city site it might change the calculus, but so far I don't see anything worth pink dotting over when we have quite a few perfectly good options east of us.

[Zed-F]

It’s probably worth checking the south coast of whale island to see if there is more land there but I am expecting it all to be Astro territory. If so, does the workboat keep going W around the equator (where we don’t expect there to be ocean in the way) to make more contacts & try to circumnavigate, or does it explore N between Cairo & Bing to see what’s up there? It doesn’t seem to make sense to use it for something else.

[Zed-F]

That’s weird. Cairo ended urn, then reloaded & got a score increase corresponding to a city plant, then logged out. I’m not sure if that’s a city plant or not.