[SPOILERS] enough is ENOUGH! scooter opens some windows and finishes first!

[scooter]

Oh - forgot to mention. Check out that proposed elephant site SE of the fish. 2 fish, 1 deer, elephant, copper, banana. Absurd. I mean obviously I would split off some of that food for other cities, but it's still fairly ridiculous.

[scooter]

T18 brings anarchy to Mongolia

I'd like to have some slaves, so anarchy it is. In the meantime, um, Lewwyn is chasing me:



So I continued running:



Nothing too exciting this turn at all really. Here's the state of my home land during the anarchy:



Two workers chopping so this isn't really much of a lost turn. Only real slow-down is the Fishing ETA. Pottery will probably need to be next because I need granaries and then Animal Husbandry... That's my tentative thoughts anyways. Demographics:



My GNP is apparently terrible . Obviously I'm the only one working all these hammer tiles with settler and worker builds both ongoing. Cities shows that Commodore grew his capital out as well:



I would stop and do that but I can't do it in 1T the way I'd like. Though at some point I'll just do it because the warrior will start decaying. Unit decay is 10T right? Or that's probably adjusted to 6T on quick I'm assuming. I think in my test I lost a hammer after 6T IIRC.

[pindicator]

Unit decay is 10T right? Or that's probably adjusted to 6T on quick I'm assuming. I think in my test I lost a hammer after 6T IIRC.

It is adjusted to game speed, so 6t for quick. I learned that one the hard way

[scooter]

Okay some dotmap doodlings. As a note - I got about 2/3rds of the way through this before I chatted with Dazed about all this, so I'll have a couple comments that I note were added later after we finished talking. Ok, enough talk, PICTURES.

First, the immediate east:



Orange seems fairly obvious to me, but the rest depends a lot on defogged land. The purple dots up north could go either way - depending somewhat on how I handle the north. The teal dots depend on how much land is there before I hit the water, but either way those are filler-type cities most likely. Red dots also depend on what I find there - I'm headed that way with my southern warrior. But in general, I'll have three cities in those areas. Teal is last priority, red/purple depends on if there's any food in that area that's not visible. Given the lack of food around it I think there'll likely be some there, but it depends on what and where. Orange is pretty solid but I'm not quite sure I want to go there with City3... However, now that I think about it, the pre-made road chain actually makes it much more feasible as a site for my next city. It would be pretty strong. I'll think about it more. Any thoughts?

LATER: Orange is probably going to be the next city I settle for a variety of reasons. And purple is a lean towards the west site.

Briefly - the southwest:



You can mostly ignore the yellow dot for about 30 seconds - I'll say more about that in a moment. This red dot is the "if horse" dot, which is about 50/50 in my mind. I'm more optimistic than Dazed is due to general feel of the map, but I'm still definitely not counting on it. If there's horse, this is a priority site with fish + horse + 1FP + another shared FP + stone. If no horse... I may still go with this dot, but it won't be quite as high a priority. Below this is a likely deer/fish site, but I don't know enough about that land quite yet. Finally, elephant land:



This is from north of Lewwyn, but think of this as our north - assuming it's all the same. Red seems pretty set-in-stone if it means we can slip a galley in (which is still to be determined). Elephant lake is def not 20 tiles so we need to get a galley in there somehow.

So at this point in the report I was chatting with Dazed so I sent him the links to these pictures. So we talked about red dot and the wasted tiles here and such. He suggested moving red 1S, and I think we're going to do it. Thought process goes as follows:

1) 1S is more defensible from the northeast
2) 1S allows us to ignore a filler city between green/red/black. It wastes two tiles, but one of those is a non-river, dry, flatland plains so it's junk. The grassland tile is decent, but we're thinking it's worth having red on a superior spot.
3) This preserves the canal.

That does mean the crabs goes out of range, but if we DO settle on the elephant (haven't ruled that out necessarily), it'll use the crabs.

Purple is SE of fish site. It's quite possibly the strongest snow city I've ever seen . I don't know enough about the land southeast of it to really decide what to do. The land north of that (near the deer) will be pretty significant I'm thinking.

Finally, green dot is interesting. There's a pigs 1S there that the resource bubbles choked on. That plains gold is a 1/1/8 tile so yeah I want that. I don't think Dazed likes it quite as much as I do (in terms of priority, not placement), but I don't exactly see tons of commerce sites so getting a flatland gold to fund expansion seems super valuable to me. It does depend somewhat on settling strategy, but I'll get into that later. A canal chain can pretty easily be achieved by a canal on that grass hill and a canal on the tundra 1NW of the mutant corn. The teal circle is not a serious consideration - it just was my initial thought when I saw pigs/gold so I noted that, but it's pretty clearly a lousy spot now that I know more about the water and such.

So that about wraps up this post. I chatted with Dazed a lot about long-term settling strategy and how it impacts city placements. It's a part of why we're thinking orange has to be next. But anyways, I'm going to write up a strategery-type summary post with rough planning tomorrow morning when I'm inevitably bored at work and that will hopefully shed some more light on these dots. Short version: we feel we need to settle pretty aggressively in general and dare someone to call us on it... which is probably exactly what you lurkers were hoping for.

[dazedroyalty]

Another thing we need to think about for settling strategy will be what opponent is in which direction. Like we said last night, getting up on Lewwyn is probably riskier than Brian S for example. I don't know Brian at all but off the top of my head I think he might be the safest to steal land from.

[scooter]

Ok so some words about settling strategy. Dazed made a comment in my chat with him that was pretty significant. He basically noted that on a map as strange as this with so many distractions, I can't afford to not have a clear settling plan. I need to have a plan and goal. It seems settling may revolve around "elephant land" as it's the only source of elephants and it might be the only source of copper too. Everyone has two they can get to easily - to their north and to their east. The northern one is the closer one for everyone, and I'm expecting everyone to prioritize that one. There's also random prizes like the island town that are also valuable that everyone has one within reach. So it's important to prioritize and make a plan so we have some guidance in why we settle certain sites.

To take things a step further, we have Joao. This is both good and bad. It's good in that it gives me the best chance at this settling race. It's bad because if I don't leverage it properly and walk away with a lot of land, I'm probably playing for 2nd place. So "which city is best for a third city" means more than just land quality, but it also means which city gives us the most options for future expansion? The answer is definitely orange dot to our east:



Yes, I'm assuming I'll get my northern elephant-land which I'll have to push for, but what if I also stole some of the east's land? Lewwyn over there has no expansion traits, so it's not unreasonable to think I could beat him for some of this land. If I can get Kehiks too it'll be much easier to defend myself. But orange dot gives us 3 options for "aggressive settling"-

1) Steal elephant site from Lewwyn
2) Pending scouting info, settle a city south of the teal dots that steals that island town from Lewwyn. Lewwyn is Fin so he'll definitely want it, but it'd be pretty sweet to steal this and get 2 of the towns under my control.
3) Land north of the elephants is a mystery, but with a deer and apparently some green, it could be good land. Also, I have yet to see that part "mirrored" (I'm guessing I'll see it down south) anywhere else so there's strong chance I could get to that land quicker than Serdoa/Brian/Commodore or whoever's up there.

So the short of it is this - I'd like to get more than my share of land and that means getting certain patches of land more than once. The city that best allows me to do that is orange dot, so that will come next. Scouting priorites:

1) the area southeast of my capital - determine if I can build a town-stealing city there. Warrior headed that way.
2) Area north of the elephant and NE of orange dot. See what's up there. As I finish this write-up another turn came in and I stumbled on this area with my scout. So that will come later.

As Dazed said, I also need to consider who I'm stealing from. Part of the risk with stealing from Lewwyn is he's liable to get mad and throw away the game in an attempt to make me pay. I think that's less likely in an AW setting, but it's still a real concern. In contrast, someone like Commodore seems to be a bit more cool-headed. Another consideration is traits. I have Joao and Lewwyn has neither of the expander traits. That gives me an edge on settling races in that direction, for example. Lots to think about. I think that's enough for now, but I'd be happy to answer any questions. Next couple turns will bring some pretty significant scouting information, so some of this will be revisited shortly.

In case you're curious, here's an excerpt from my chat with Dazed that largely led to much of this.

dazedroyalty: in my opinion ,what you really want to think about is over arching settling strategy
there's the safer one and the risky one

me: yeah I think you're right.

dazedroyalty: and it works out to be great risk, great reward
i like pushing forward and back filinng later
but that is risky
but if you do it, you have the most land in teh game

me: do i want to consider rushing east? risky. but that's some good cities that way

dazedroyalty: which equals WIN

me: and i do have joao to help me

dazedroyalty: exactly
so if you play it safe
you don't really get the best use of IMP
because you don't settle that much more than other people

[scooter]

T19 learns more about elephant land. READ ON.


So my warrior south of my capital hasn't seen much of note lately:



Next 2-4 turns should all be different though as I'll actually be revealing tiles on top of that grass hill (vision was all blocked by forests this turn). Workers kept on chopping and having fun. More valuable was what I learned about the land north of the elephants. First, a reminder for reference:



That's to my east and north of Lewwyn. I just noticed how the land below the elephant actually sort of looks like an elephant. Sorry, got sidetracked. So yeah, my scout west of Lewwyn made a fun discovery:



Note the sign - the deer source is 1S of it. So that's what we're looking at up there and... wow. That's some nice land! A few floodplains, several foods, another flatland gold, and marble if I reach far enough. This is the kind of thing I mean when I said orange dot can be a launching point for quite a few nice spots! I'll finish out the scouting up here but yeah, this is some interesting land for sure.

Also yep, that's two lumbermills (west of the sign) with railroads already on them. Making two bad tiles seem remotely respectable-ish. Cool. Also, I notice the string of 3 tundra tiles between the two bodies of water. How far are you legally able to make a fort chain? If you can make it pretty long, that seems like a good place for one given that it's not like we'll be working tundra tiles extensively. The more I see the map the more it's obvious Seven wasn't kidding when he said ships would be important. Astronomy seems like it will be a better-than-normal tech here.

[SevenSpirits]

A boat can enter a fort if the fort is directly adjacent to a body of water (salty or fresh).

A boat can always enter a city.

[dazedroyalty]

I may have missed the worker plan somewhere, but the worker next to Simple Math should road after chopping in order to speed up the settler to orange dot! Even tho the tile 1W of there is already got one turn of roading invested, it can't be finished in time to help the settler along.

[scooter]

A boat can enter a fort if the fort is directly adjacent to a body of water (salty or fresh).

A boat can always enter a city.

So in theory that chain is doable but ONLY if the city is founded in the middle of the 3 tiles... Like: ocean-fort-city-fort-ocean. So it's doable but probably not worth it.

I may have missed the worker plan somewhere, but the worker next to Simple Math should road after chopping in order to speed up the settler to orange dot! Even tho the tile 1W of there is already got one turn of roading invested, it can't be finished in time to help the settler along.

Here's the plan:

EOT20: settler and worker complete due to chops
T21: worker that finished chopping starts road 1W of Simple Math. Settler moves onto that tile.
T22: worker completes road 1W of Simple Math. Settler moves E-NE-E-SE. (Warrior will be on orange dot for protection at end of this turn)
T23: Settler moves onto orange dot
T24: City3 founded.

Picture to visualize it:



Since on T22 I'll have a road and a settler 1W of Simple Math, it can follow the pre-made road (yay) and get to orange dot pretty quickly. I'm also going to send the warrior in Simple Math on ahead so it'll get to orange dot 1T in advance which will allow us to handle any possible intruders.