So before I start to go into some of the new stuff that's been happening or that we're planning, let's go over some of the older developments I alluded to in earlier posts.
First, we built the Great Lighthouse. Unlike most times when people build an impactful wonder like TGLH, there really was no plan behind this. You can get an idea of the reasoning just by looking at Thalassina and its hammer count:
At the time that we decided to build TGLH, Thalassina was producing 21 hammers every turn with the Organized Religion bonus. We honestly were just thinking that it would end up producing fail gold for our march to Currency, though I did make a comment at the time along the lines of "I doubt we'll actually get it, but if we do that'll also be nice." Well, we did get it. We actually ended up chopping Thalassina's two remaining forests into the city too, though we still weren't particularly fussed about actually completing it. That being said, it's a nice pickup -- or it will be once we get open borders again . . .
Speaking of Open Borders, Mjmd made the useful suggestion after my last post to bribe the other players to open borders. We offered 3 gpt to Bing and 4 gpt to Van along with OB, and we're hoping that at least one of them will take it. We need foreign trade routes both for TGLH and Currency! It's important! Plus, having open borders with other people will lessen the opportunity cost for attacking Rome . . .
Anyway, back to our prior plans. The other thing we did was start to build the Hanging Gardens. This was also sort of something we fell into -- while Mjmd had been pushing me to consider the Hanging Gardens for several turns before now, we actually landed on the idea of building it in Foramen for unrelated reasons. First, Foramen kept having to work unimproved tiles as Wolof grew larger, and we wanted to have it work improved tiles instead. However, most of the tiles that Foramen wants to work are currently forest hills -- so we needed something to chop those forests into before we could mine the hills, and the Hanging Gardens were a good choice. We'd also just like some sort of large cultural building in Foramen so we can claim the strategic hill tile to the northwest and potentially Waterdream Warm's first ring. You can see the prep work we did here, from a few turns ago.
It's less obvious in the screenshot, but we had 2-pop whipped a library near max overflow and were about to whip an aqueduct for the same. Organized Religion is putting in work here, letting us whip with much less hammer investment. Since then, we've also gone ahead and chopped one of the western forests while guarding our workers with Foramen's entire defense force and the units floating between Foramen and Satus to the south.. I think that made JackRB a bit nervous . . . oh well, you gotta do what you gotta do to get those sweet chop yields! I wasn't about to risk 2-5 workers (depending on the turn) on JackRB deciding to be nice! But anyway, while we could have built the Hanging Gardens on T99 if we wanted by chopping every forest, we're just slow-building for now instead. The issue is that we're going to be founding several cities over the next few turns. One should go up on each of T101, T102, and T103, though we may delay the T102 city by a turn since it's a jungle location that's completely worthless until we can do some chopping. Since each of those cities gets an extra pop point from the Hanging Gardens, we'd ideally like to delay the wonder until those cities are founded -- though if we see an aqueduct go up in Roman or Khmer territory, we'll go ahead and chop out the wonder. These are planned to be our last cities (at least prior to combat settlers being a thing), though I'll consider putting a city on the desert hill tile south of Hospes if Bing takes the nearby Malinese city.
We also founded two cities in the interim between the last big post and this one. These are relatively minor locations -- Mjmd has described Hospes as "an aggressive landgrab for food and a handful of grassland tiles", and The Grey Eyries exist for the sole purpose of extending cultural control over the strategic mountain tile to the far west of Garbo Peninsula. The most interesting thing about them is our terrace builds in those cities -- we discovered Math right before we finished chopping out the terraces, and we got 30 hammers in Hospes and 37 in The Grey Eyries from that, instantly completing our terraces. The 15-hammer discount really matters more and more when your chops get you closer to completion in the first place.
Anyway, let's end by taking a look at the current demographics screen:
You'll immediately notice that we're not nearly as far ahead as we appeared to be on T75, at least when you look at Food. There are two big reasons for this. The first is actually a lack of happiness -- notice how far behind we are in the approval rating category? Our top three rivals had more happiness than us for most of the game -- Joshy had Charismatic bonuses and both gold and gems, JackRB had both gold and gems, and Vanrober had Representation. That extra happiness means that their big cities could work more food tiles, inflating the food count. While this imbalance irks me, I don't think it's entirely because of the map; while both Joshy and Jack did have relatively nearby gold and gems, I think both of them settled gems resources that should have gone to their respective neighbors Jesse and Bing. That being said, it would have been very nice to have an extra source of happiness that we could actually settle . . . Anyway, we've begun to alleviate this deficiency by trading Joshy our extra gems for his extra gold now that he's lost his gems to JesseL, and we'll be basically fine once we discover Calendar. But it's still an annoying problem to have. Though it could be worse; Vanrober didn't even have a single precious metal resource until recently!
The second reason for our Food deficiency is . . . well, our food deficiency. I'll go over this in more detail when I make a post specifically talking about the map, and Mjmd has already griped about it, but our territory just has less food compared to JackRB's or Joshy's. A lot of our cities are settled near only one food resource, and often not even one that has a high yield. I mean, we have two cities whose main food source is a cow tile! Three when we settle the other city on Garbo Peninsula! We can't really build a Food lead long-term because we just can't work that much food in the first place.
Other than Food, though, we're approximately at parity with the rest of the major players. We did lag behind in city count for a bit, but that was mostly due to a combination of Organized Religion costs and our detour to Monotheism; we couldn't settle as many cities while we had to pay for the civic and play catch-up on research! Now that we've secured Currency (and the Great Lighthouse!) we're in a much better spot to finish settling. We were only third to Currency, but I think that's reasonable given the large detour we made along the religion tree. Vanrober made a similar detour and they hadn't even picked up Math by the time we did! So I think we're doing all right on the economic front. The one big takeaway from the research situation is that JackRB may be doing much better than we thought circa T75. Khmer was actually first to Currency, I believe at an early T92, and that was while having no Open Borders agreements! So we're on the lookout in case JackRB decides to start making major moves.
Well, I think that's all for now. In the next few posts, I want to talk about the map, city development, worker plans, and (hopefully) our beginning military build-up. But that will have to wait for now.
First, we built the Great Lighthouse. Unlike most times when people build an impactful wonder like TGLH, there really was no plan behind this. You can get an idea of the reasoning just by looking at Thalassina and its hammer count:
At the time that we decided to build TGLH, Thalassina was producing 21 hammers every turn with the Organized Religion bonus. We honestly were just thinking that it would end up producing fail gold for our march to Currency, though I did make a comment at the time along the lines of "I doubt we'll actually get it, but if we do that'll also be nice." Well, we did get it. We actually ended up chopping Thalassina's two remaining forests into the city too, though we still weren't particularly fussed about actually completing it. That being said, it's a nice pickup -- or it will be once we get open borders again . . .
Speaking of Open Borders, Mjmd made the useful suggestion after my last post to bribe the other players to open borders. We offered 3 gpt to Bing and 4 gpt to Van along with OB, and we're hoping that at least one of them will take it. We need foreign trade routes both for TGLH and Currency! It's important! Plus, having open borders with other people will lessen the opportunity cost for attacking Rome . . .
Anyway, back to our prior plans. The other thing we did was start to build the Hanging Gardens. This was also sort of something we fell into -- while Mjmd had been pushing me to consider the Hanging Gardens for several turns before now, we actually landed on the idea of building it in Foramen for unrelated reasons. First, Foramen kept having to work unimproved tiles as Wolof grew larger, and we wanted to have it work improved tiles instead. However, most of the tiles that Foramen wants to work are currently forest hills -- so we needed something to chop those forests into before we could mine the hills, and the Hanging Gardens were a good choice. We'd also just like some sort of large cultural building in Foramen so we can claim the strategic hill tile to the northwest and potentially Waterdream Warm's first ring. You can see the prep work we did here, from a few turns ago.
It's less obvious in the screenshot, but we had 2-pop whipped a library near max overflow and were about to whip an aqueduct for the same. Organized Religion is putting in work here, letting us whip with much less hammer investment. Since then, we've also gone ahead and chopped one of the western forests while guarding our workers with Foramen's entire defense force and the units floating between Foramen and Satus to the south.. I think that made JackRB a bit nervous . . . oh well, you gotta do what you gotta do to get those sweet chop yields! I wasn't about to risk 2-5 workers (depending on the turn) on JackRB deciding to be nice! But anyway, while we could have built the Hanging Gardens on T99 if we wanted by chopping every forest, we're just slow-building for now instead. The issue is that we're going to be founding several cities over the next few turns. One should go up on each of T101, T102, and T103, though we may delay the T102 city by a turn since it's a jungle location that's completely worthless until we can do some chopping. Since each of those cities gets an extra pop point from the Hanging Gardens, we'd ideally like to delay the wonder until those cities are founded -- though if we see an aqueduct go up in Roman or Khmer territory, we'll go ahead and chop out the wonder. These are planned to be our last cities (at least prior to combat settlers being a thing), though I'll consider putting a city on the desert hill tile south of Hospes if Bing takes the nearby Malinese city.
We also founded two cities in the interim between the last big post and this one. These are relatively minor locations -- Mjmd has described Hospes as "an aggressive landgrab for food and a handful of grassland tiles", and The Grey Eyries exist for the sole purpose of extending cultural control over the strategic mountain tile to the far west of Garbo Peninsula. The most interesting thing about them is our terrace builds in those cities -- we discovered Math right before we finished chopping out the terraces, and we got 30 hammers in Hospes and 37 in The Grey Eyries from that, instantly completing our terraces. The 15-hammer discount really matters more and more when your chops get you closer to completion in the first place.
Anyway, let's end by taking a look at the current demographics screen:
You'll immediately notice that we're not nearly as far ahead as we appeared to be on T75, at least when you look at Food. There are two big reasons for this. The first is actually a lack of happiness -- notice how far behind we are in the approval rating category? Our top three rivals had more happiness than us for most of the game -- Joshy had Charismatic bonuses and both gold and gems, JackRB had both gold and gems, and Vanrober had Representation. That extra happiness means that their big cities could work more food tiles, inflating the food count. While this imbalance irks me, I don't think it's entirely because of the map; while both Joshy and Jack did have relatively nearby gold and gems, I think both of them settled gems resources that should have gone to their respective neighbors Jesse and Bing. That being said, it would have been very nice to have an extra source of happiness that we could actually settle . . . Anyway, we've begun to alleviate this deficiency by trading Joshy our extra gems for his extra gold now that he's lost his gems to JesseL, and we'll be basically fine once we discover Calendar. But it's still an annoying problem to have. Though it could be worse; Vanrober didn't even have a single precious metal resource until recently!
The second reason for our Food deficiency is . . . well, our food deficiency. I'll go over this in more detail when I make a post specifically talking about the map, and Mjmd has already griped about it, but our territory just has less food compared to JackRB's or Joshy's. A lot of our cities are settled near only one food resource, and often not even one that has a high yield. I mean, we have two cities whose main food source is a cow tile! Three when we settle the other city on Garbo Peninsula! We can't really build a Food lead long-term because we just can't work that much food in the first place.
Other than Food, though, we're approximately at parity with the rest of the major players. We did lag behind in city count for a bit, but that was mostly due to a combination of Organized Religion costs and our detour to Monotheism; we couldn't settle as many cities while we had to pay for the civic and play catch-up on research! Now that we've secured Currency (and the Great Lighthouse!) we're in a much better spot to finish settling. We were only third to Currency, but I think that's reasonable given the large detour we made along the religion tree. Vanrober made a similar detour and they hadn't even picked up Math by the time we did! So I think we're doing all right on the economic front. The one big takeaway from the research situation is that JackRB may be doing much better than we thought circa T75. Khmer was actually first to Currency, I believe at an early T92, and that was while having no Open Borders agreements! So we're on the lookout in case JackRB decides to start making major moves.
Well, I think that's all for now. In the next few posts, I want to talk about the map, city development, worker plans, and (hopefully) our beginning military build-up. But that will have to wait for now.
Bellarch offered 8gpt. I thought at the time it was high still, but Vanrober is probably going to settle some filler cities soon so probably will even out and we don't mind Van being strong. ![[Image: Civ4ScreenShot0608.JPG?width=1065&height=599]](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/859137641193799741/880246868548915270/Civ4ScreenShot0608.JPG?width=1065&height=599)
Bell ![[Image: unknown.png]](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/859137641193799741/881777841962881024/unknown.png)
![[Image: HI0n10g.png]](https://i.imgur.com/HI0n10g.png)
