[PB69] Naufragar turns over a new leaf. Randomly.

[Mjmd]

naufragar

Sure, I still think he's lunatic suicide bomber, but anybody who has the stone cold nuts to look me in the eye and say "Fuck your Pyramids" has my deep respect.

[naufragar]

A lunatic suicide bomber? No, no, I'm just a soul who's intentions are good!


And besides, each game is a clean slate and my words can't be used against me! 

But in the case of PB62, you were absolutely right to burn the 'Mids! Vanrober had a force in the fog to retake it. As for the Pyramids in this current game, I don't want to run Representation. Police State might be nice someday but definitely not anytime in the immediate future. The Engineer points are negligible. If anything, I should've kept the city for its own sake: two food resources, great invasion lines into Ginger, lots of irrigated plains. But I'm desperately worried about costs. With the capture gold, I'm still looking at ~20 turns to Currency. That'll decrease as we grow a bit, but I'm still so worried about going bankrupt without anything to save my economy.

[naufragar]

Had some choices to make:


Given our earlier losses and current wounds, it's looking like we're reaching the end of what we can do without reinforcements. Ginger offered up an undefended worker, which screamed TRAP to me, but I'm not very good at caution. (By the way, look at those beautiful green river tiles. In our empire there are...zero of those things.)

I forgot to take an "after" pic, so you'll have to squint at the right side of your screen:


I moved two of my three chariots to spots where they could be assassinated, but they hopefully save an axe. I ended up deleting the worker late in the turn. If I knew I was going to delete it, I probably would've kept my chariots together.

I ended up offering peace (and then a ceasefire) to Ginger. I can't do much more damage and I was terrified by his axe/spear combo moving away from his capital. I believe his capital is defended by 1 warrior and Magic Science just burned a city minimum distance from Ginger's cap. I'm very worried that Ginger's pulling everything back to defend against me, possibly in fear of losing his copper, and Magic will walk all over him.

So I offered peace. We can wait for catapults to initiate Round 2.

Demos look ok, although other people have already built their libraries while I was building axes:

[naufragar]

Now that I've got the EitB 55 map out into the world, I can feel less guilty about reporting. Ginger accepted peace. He played a 4 minute turn with no whips, so Magic might be about to steamroll him, but I (optimistically) doubt it. But boy did Ginger get burnt. This is not what Joao wants his Crop Yield to look like:


Well, he shouldn't have burned Geidi Prime.

Because I rolled the turn, I got to see the Great Wall Graphic:


Cute. Wonder why Bing built it. Great Spy golden age?

[Charriu]

To prevent the barbarians aka his neighbors entering his lands.

[naufragar]

To prevent the barbarians aka his neighbors entering his lands.

This has been a pretty violent game already. I wonder if people are feeling compelled to live up to PB64's bloodiness.

Swap to Despotism, with maybe an extra turn delay.

I forgot to respond, but you were spot on, Dave. Swapped to Despotism, without an anarchy turn.

By the way, here's a fun pic for the files:


Agg is saving me as much gold as Org would.  Guess we should play to our traits. 

[naufragar]

Well, Turn 96 will be another turn report with nothing but a demos screen, but a happy demos screen it is:


I'm now top power after Pindicator took a city off of Gavagai. I haven't met Pindicator, so I don't know what's going on, but I can only imagine it's going to end with Gav dead and Commodore and Pindicator very powerful.

My GNP looks good but I have 1000 year old Oracle and Stonehenge for a total of +32 culture in my capital, monuments in all my cities (+6), and religion in like 5 of my cities (+5). So if you take out all the culture, my GNP is only 62. Still higher than #2 but not by so much. I've turned on tech for Currency. Should get it in 8 turns. My economy is very vulnerable to an embargo, so I worry about being perceived as the "tall poppy."

I'll talk more about long term strategy in my t100 report, but the gist is that I'm currently in a precarious lead. I'm going to play more conservatively to preserve that lead, rather than taking wild swings. I'll need to keep building up garrisons and grabbing economic progress. I set a secret goal at the start of this game to try to play around with Spanish Conquistadors. That's the time frame I'm looking at. Very slow; very steady. We'll see how it goes. It'll go poorly if Gavagai gets eaten (or Superdeath. The guy has no soldiers and the Great Lighthouse, making him the world's most enticing pinata.)

[naufragar]

11 tiles from Comm's cap and 8 tiles from mine but water again is screwing me!


It's also easily the best land I've seen. Y'all remember how brown and dry my empire is. 

The worst part is that this could maaaaaybe be a stable border with Comm if I let him have it. We'll each have vision into our cities and that might lead to a troop draw down and peace. The problem is that I have no freaking land worth anything. Everything around me is terrible. Except for this spot.

What's scary is that Comm's earlier antagonism towards Gavagai is going to pay off big:


Pindicator captured a core city off of Gav, bringing him down to only 2. Commodore is set to be a dominant regional player, made all the more intolerable if he steals the Apostolic Palace from me.  But I can't do anything about that just yet.

Very, very precarious position. Unless I land the monk wonders, I'm dead. I don't have good enough land to compete with the Magics and Commodores of the world who have good land and soon to be dead neighbors. (In Magic's case, I originally meant Ginger, but if Superdeath survives for much longer, I'll be surprised. Look at his power ratio and remember that he's got the Lighthouse.)

[naufragar]

Of all the turns, this is the most 100 of them.

So, as is tradition, I will bare all. No secret plans left obscure; no embarrassing micro left obfuscated. Here is the Greater HOSAV:


We have the most land area in the game by a tiny amount, but that is mostly due to expanded borders. You can see from my signs that I have spots for more cities but they have only tundra deer for food or must rob another city. Our land is terrible. No rivers, no grassland outside the capital. It's just atrocious.

So let's see how I've developed it.

If I can make it all the way to windmills and bureaucracy, I bet our capital's going to be one of, if not the best city in the world. In two turns, I hook up a deer resource, so we'll still be at -1 health at size 10. The last forest in the BFC is being chopped now, and it will propel an aqueduct. Oh, the horrors of a random map making me build aqueducts. Honestly, my lack of rivers is a pain for the lack of commerce, but I'm hurting for health all over, too. When I show the demos screen later, remember that my capital is producing +39 culture, which inflates the number a bit... You can see me running a Priest specialist. If memory serves, Commodore has a 60% chance to spawn a Great Prophet on t108, so he could have a 5 turn head start on me for the Apostolic Palace. Oh well. More talk about this in the Opponent Analysis section.

Speaking of Priest specialists! I had some tiny idea to grab Divine Right via bulb as soon as I could after a Theo bulb, but I think this is probably a terrible idea. Even after a bulb, Divine Right is some 700 beakers (more expensive than Currency or anything I can research now). So I'm just grabbing some Prophet points until I need to work better tiles. Next turn that grassland gets cottaged, and I swap one Priest to it. Once we get Currency, we go max hammers for a market, because of all that sweet, sweet shrine income.  For what it's worth, this city needs to be very, very defended. It's my front line city with Magic, whom I trust exactly as much as I can see what he's doing. So I'd love to be building a library, e.g., but my power is getting a little low for my liking. The additional border pop in 4 turns will be welcome.

Ah, our first embarrassing city. Notice how we're not working full foodhammers while building a settler?  I also didn't feel like I could build a settler out of our two good cities, Mos Eisley or Ankh-Morpork. So I'm slow building from this runt. Once the settler gets built, we just swap to coast and be boring. The settler is going to that southern X you can see. And then it gets weird.  That city will build Moai before either a lighthouse or a granary.  Because I'm bad at the game and don't like doing micro. 

No mysteries here. This is the reason we run Serfdom. This is our second embarrassing city. Notice how, despite a granary, we are below the 50% mark on our food bar? That's because last turn we starved down to finish our library a turn earlier. Why? Well, because I'm bad at the game.  One turn faster border pop, axe, etc. No good reason, but oh well. We should be able to hold our third ring against Ginger's second ring. This will be important for...later stuff.

Hey! A third embarrassing city! That's right folks, I put 46 hammers into a Granary before deciding I would rather slow build a lighthouse with 3 hammers per turn!  I'm so garbage.  This area's going to get very interesting once Commodore takes that barb city.

Geidi Prime Resurgent. Ginger burned this sad little city at size one but look at it now! A sad little city at size 5! This city isn't actually embarrassing yet. We'll have a Serfdom farm done in time for the next pop point. Geidi Prime is sort of emblematic of our game. It's...fine with enough worker love and growth turns. But it just kind of disappoints. And this was our last viable plant. Any new cities come from land that's way, way worse than this.

Those are the cities. I'll return to give a macro overview of the game state once I've done something with my Saturday besides play or report Civ.

But for a spoiler, have a demos screen:

[Tarkeel]

I've been meaning to share this one with you for a while now, and T100 seems like as good time as any: