[SPOILERS] Small Wunders and Izzy of Inca: The fat lady sings

[MindyMcCready]

Ok,....beating the warrior scout topic to death,.....

Retep starts with Mining right? T15ish gets a worker & has BW,...T18 slow builds warrior + chops warrior. T25 2 warriors at our capital. Alternatively T28 4 warriors at our capital.

I think that you're underestimating what a boxed in opponent can do when he's so close to us. We need to watch his power like a hawk to avoid this. T9 we discovered him right? So T20 we'll get graphs?

If we scout with that first warrior, he could so easily take our new city off of us. 3T to build warrior + 4T of travel means we have 7T delay in our reaction time if retep takes a run at our new city.

Let me know if I'm missing something,...but I'm still not seeing the land intel as worth the risk.

[MindyMcCready]

Holy cow! Like seriously holy cow!

Hunting --> The single most valuable tech you could possible have! Is the RB mod supposed to do this? We're making a run at Buddism strictly because of this mod change.

Er, what?

So we're making a run at Buddism due to the combination of the RB Mod change to Hunting + the abundance of cows on this map.

Comparing the strength of Agriculture vs Hunting:
Pigs (6F), Cows (4F2H), Sheep (5F) vs Corn (6F), Wheat (6F?), Rice (5F).
-So it seems like total production it's every bit as strong.
-No worries about getting the dry variants of the grains
-Hunting sortof allows Spears
-Hunting allows scouts
-Hunting leads to Archery
-It also allows horses to be pastured even though it doesn't reveal them.
-Not sure if it's my imagination, but I feel that I've always had more cow+pig+sheep than corn+wheat+rice.
-Rice is often found in jungle as well.

Choosing Agriculture and you're pursuing an economic choice and delaying your military security. Hunting's on the way to Archery so you're not making the same kind of tradeoff.

Mining vs Hunting,....both are on the way to military tech but Hunting has better economics. Also getting to BW is very expensive compared to getting to Archery (40b now?). Slavery nerf + time required to hook up metal are also considerations.

So it seems to me that Hunting is a slam dunk choice compared to the alternatives. For our particular slice of this map overly so.

Put another way, we're simultaneously pursuing a religion and planting in retep's face largely due to the RB Mod changes.

[Krill]

I typed out a long post but really this is the straightforward point: this start is just about the most perfect religion first start there can be. It has food resources that work off 3 different food techs. Anyone that started with Myst and Fishing, Agri or Hunting would have been able to go religion first and then research to Archery regardless of whether this used RB mod or base BtS.

[WilliamLP]

It's fine to flog this to death - we won't have that much else to talk about for the next 10 turns anyway.

Retep chopping warriors that early would be insane! He's going to need to hook up food resources, and probably research agriculture at least. He doesn't even know the gold exists right now, and it's questionable whether he's even seen anything beyond his borders in that direction. The site wouldn't be that valuable to him anyway, because it heavily benefits from sharing our corn. And he won't know we've planted the city to react until turn 32 (when we can plant it).

Under my warrior-to-scout plan, the second quechua is in place (admittedly, only most likely) to be guarding the second city the moment it gets made. The way I see it, it's 95% that the first quechua has no value at all just sitting in the capital for 10 turns - we might as well use him to extend our overall map awareness.

For as aggressive as this planned city is, it's still closer to us than him, and also will be adjacent to capital culture, so it's hard to call it a pink dot.

Putting myself in Retep's shoes, yeah I get that we have to be paranoid after the opening game, but I really just can't see him leaving his capital completely undefended this early in this situation. I think we'll have graphs by T18 or 19, and we'll be able to react to more than 2 warriors just fine - it is a 7 turn lag from him building them to us being hit after all. If we had some personality read on him that he likes to throw away his early game to throw up a hope and a prayer - even then I think we're safe just at the cost of having to interrupt our settler build, at the very worst.

Ok,....beating the warrior scout topic to death,.....

Retep starts with Mining right? T15ish gets a worker & has BW,...T18 slow builds warrior + chops warrior. T25 2 warriors at our capital. Alternatively T28 4 warriors at our capital.

I think that you're underestimating what a boxed in opponent can do when he's so close to us. We need to watch his power like a hawk to avoid this. T9 we discovered him right? So T20 we'll get graphs?

If we scout with that first warrior, he could so easily take our new city off of us. 3T to build warrior + 4T of travel means we have 7T delay in our reaction time if retep takes a run at our new city.

Let me know if I'm missing something,...but I'm still not seeing the land intel as worth the risk.

[WilliamLP]

Uneventful scouting turn:




There's another hell of a city site down there for someone, not likely us.

Our chances of landing Buddhism have been revised from 99.5% to 99.9%. I'm thinking Mining -> BW is fairly obvious after this. I would consider wheel before BW if there were a way to use worker micro to drop a road and accelerate the settler getting to the city spot, but we don't have enough worker turns for that unfortunately. And we want visibility on the copper as soon as possible.

We will get graphs on Retep in 3 turns. I went forward with the scout instead of doubling back to the south. The case for forward is more huts, but I can see the argument for the other too.

[WilliamLP]

It's a relief to see this come in, even though reason says it was overwhelmingly likely we'd get it for the last few turns. I didn't see any good reason not to convert. Mining is next. The corn is improved and we'll grow in 2.




This could suck. The bear is attacking into forest across the river, and I think the scout needs a coin flip to survive.

[WilliamLP]

(The real Renata Tebaldi was one of the greatest dramatic sopranos and singers in the 20th century. She died in 2004 and a former voice teacher of mine still talks to her former housekeeper on the phone sometimes. The wonderful aria linked is not about being eaten by a bear.)

So that kind of sucks. I can't say I think it was a tactical error though, and I don't think it's a win to be so conservative with scouting to only inch forward one square at a time in open terrain. A forest across a river is nearly as good as defense gets. So these things just happen with barbs on, I guess.

Retep is giving us an incredible gift by letting us see his graphs at 32 EP. (He has only 16 on us, and will need the full 43 or more to see ours.)










Retep has mining and hunting (that's his 4k power), and the tech from the hut he got when he settled. This is not a soldier count tech, so it's either Fishing, Myst, or Agriculture. Thankfully it cannot be Wheel! And there was a two out of three chance that it was something pretty useless for him. I think he's certainly about to finish Bronze, anything else would have finished already.

He has no warrior yet, so we don't have to fear shenanigans before turn 24 or so. (It would take him 7 turns to walk a warrior over). The best thing here is probably that he has no such info on us for many turns.

Our first GNP rise is capturing the silk in borders. The second is a combination of a drop in GNP (moving to mining without a prereq) and a rise in culture for the holy city.







He's working 2 prod and 5 food, which is a 12 turn worker, and very probably a plains hill city working a 3/0/1 tile.

The blip in our own graphs confuses me! I'm certain we've been working 3 prod / 4 food all along, just the capital plus the 1/2/1 silk tile. But the graphs look like we worked 2 / 5 for the turn the worker finished. My sandbox show this too. Does anyone know what's up with this?

[WilliamLP]

Turns are pretty easy to play without a scout. We are first place in score! Pyrrhic victories ahoy! It's difficult to get a worker out and be size 2 much faster than this.




We're working this hammer configuration for only one turn, then will switch to the silks. Quechua production goes 4->8->11->14, then gets three overflow into the settler when we grow to size 3. That just happens to work out to make 100/100 food-hammers at the end of turn 28.

Retep finished BW last turn, and his GNP went down so he's probably on a tech without prereqs. That's either Wheel or Agriculture I think, hopefully the latter.

[WilliamLP]

Jowy got a religion 3 turns after we did. We would have beat him by 1 turn if we'd have gone Poly first, I think. I wonder if anyone got their heart broken trying for one or the other this early?

Operation hare-brained quechua scout has commenced. It doesn't look like the land to the E is useless.

Retep is now working a 4/2/1 tile, something like a river grass cow. He has no warrior as of last turn.

The next couple of turns are fun because we can see how many land tiles are in everyone's capitals by the score increases, with the weird "land tiles as of 20 turns ago" metric. We're also going to be a high scoring team because of our land-locked capital.

[MindyMcCready]

Yay for Buddism!

Don't feed the bears! Couldn't be helped. Forest + river is defensive terrain so of course you'd land on that. Good play, bad outcome.