[SPOILERS] A new Thread [SPOILERS]

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Holy cow, there's like three people updating? In *this* era, where it's arguably anyone's game (well, anyone but Sian) but we're well past 'moved scout, hit enter'?

New plan: Physics beeline, so that we can keep an eye on the world for the lurkers.

Yeah, the reporting has been a bit on the anemic side in this game. See if you can breathe some life into it. And then beat the life out of it!

Good luck.

[Mardoc]

This cost 12 gpt. Obviously won't be worth it until we get Confucianism well spread - but I think 12 gpt for a Forge effect everywhere will definitely be worth it once we do.



Quite a bit happened between turns! Two Golden Ages...and proof that Catwalk is well ahead of us in tech. I dilly-dallied for a bit, and ended up treating this as a gold-saving turn. Leaning toward Guilds next to unlock Grocers.


Founded a new city. Definitely doesn't pay for itself yet, dropped empire-wide gpt by about 10. But that just means we're in the steep part of the maintenance curve and need to push through to the conqueror's plateau. Well...that and we need to grow cities onto commerce tiles and consider putting up some Courthouses after all.



Barbs gave us a unit to unlock Heroic Epic with. Not that we have the tech yet, or the marble, but we've got one step accomplished.


Next city for analysis: Ankara

Honestly, this is a classic 2nd city. Growing cottages for the capital to steal once it can, shares capital food and connects a new one. It's bound eventually for the usual fate of these cities, stagnating on the tiles no other city wants, being so-so once it finishes its early game snowball aid. And...I think using the rest of its population for specialists.

First, though, we need to grow Istanbul, to steal the two grass villages, and grow Ankara some as well. No reason we can't be working all these coasts, a cottage where that jungle sits, and the odds and ends of plains cottages and a hill (probably going to be windmilled).



Of course, every time I'm getting worked up about ungrown cities, I have to remind myself that you did better than everyone else on this front. Probably my complaint is entirely unrealistic expectations.

I really do like this position. Best Crop Yield by a good margin is great potential. Once we slow expansion to grow everything vertically and put up infra, the GNP and mfg are going to spring up fast! And as best I can tell, you kept us even with the neighbors in tech so we don't even suffer the usual fate of overexpanded empires.



But I'm still gonna build some Courthouses to go with the settlers .

[Mardoc]

Hmm, ok, I could see Ankara capping at size 14, which is hardly so-so. Mine the grass hill, cottage the jungle, work all the tiles it owns barring the two villages to give to Istanbul. Ends up with ~10 hpt and a steady supply of commerce, which is enough to put up most any infra it needs and provide a nice steady stream of units to the empire. And...we can get there soon, which is also a value.

Alternately we could push as high as 17 if we windmill the hill and steal the floodplains town from the south city, but that ends up with much fewer hammers (8 base down to 6 loses another from forge), plus we'd need to find the food to grow three more sizes. I don't know that I want to wait that long to have a city dedicated to unit pumping and GPP.

[Mardoc]

The pace is maddening. Keeps looking like the turn's about to roll, and then it doesn't.

I guess the silver lining is that I get more time for analysis. For instance, core worker tasks now include two cottages at Edirne and a cottage/mine at Ankara; if I didn't spend time thinking about the empire in lieu of playing I'd probably have just thought 'coast is good enough'.

Not as urgent as making sure that the east cities have improved tiles - but still, the sooner I get cottages down and growing, the sooner we surpass the 3-commerce mark. Probably this'll be what Istanbul's produced workers work on first.

[Mardoc]

Not a whole lot to report this turn. And it's getting late. I'll just post my next two cities and analyze them next time I'm pacing, waiting for the save.

[Mardoc]

So....Bursa. Produces pretty decent hammers already - and I'm thinking this is the right place to optimize for hammers.




Do need a bit more food to pull that off, but I think taking the Fish from Konya will accomplish that. Konya's got two other foods, it'll be fine - although Konya's also growing nicely onto Fin coast at the moment, so I'll hold off as long as I can bear to. Then, add in the plains mine from Konya, and a workshop or two, and we're looking at something like 24 base hpt. Maybe work an Engineer specialist on top? With its forge, that's more like 30...and then that means this is the right place for a Heroic Epic, too. 1-turning longbows, missionaries, and 2-turning just about anything more expensive? Yes, please!

To get there from here - well, Bursa doesn't need a whole lot. Maybe 2-3 more pop, so we can keep working the coast that's not shared. 2 workshops contructed. And population redistributed. Well, plus workshop-boosting techs and civics.

One more thing. I could add 11 base hpt if I grow Bursa a bunch and make it the Moai spot instead of Edirne. That'd be darn near 80 hpt on units, total, which is something like 1-turning Knights. Nice! But...this *would* take a while to set up. Not just the extra national wonder - but also something like eight more pop required. I kinda think this is a bird in the hand scenario - a less awesome HE site in 20 turns is better than a very awesome HE/Moai site in 60.

Bursa's currently turning some hammers into cash via Courthouse - it may be worth knocking out a market and grocer here too, or it may be best to put up a barracks and just knock out a dozen longbows, to let the rest of the empire focus on infrastructure.

Speaking of Konya:


I've a choice here. Try to balance it with Bursa, or go for specialization. Realistically, I think specialization makes more sense. Better to run hammers through +125% than to mix and match.

That means Konya's ultimately destined to be a rather nice fishing village. Sugar and Cows aren't awesome food sources, but they'll be sufficient to grow Konya onto a million coast tiles and whip back off. 6 food surplus after I give up the fish and plains mine is either a nice supply for a regular whip cycle, or 3 specialists worked indefinitely. On top of all the coast. Further, Konya's got 4 base hpt and a Forge already, so it'll be able to put up Market, Grocer, etc. Since it'll be losing two tiles to Bursa, it only needs to grow three more pop - well, perhaps four if I want to steal Bursa's southern coast tile in return. Which could make sense if Bursa's going to be on unit duty for a while and hence not finding time for commerce multiplication.

For the moment, of course, Konya's our only source of Confucianism. So it'll be stuck on missionary duty for a while, until we get our state religion spread a bit better. First missionary's probably heading to Bursa, since that'll speed the spread as much as anywhere.

[Mardoc]

More screenies to add commentary to later:

[Mardoc]

Jowy declared war on Yuri. Civstats implies that he took a city. History implies that he'll get maybe two more, then Yuri will whip enough to stop him, then Jowy'll offer peace and be shocked and dismayed that Yuri doesn't take it But hey, at least we've got another turn-split to 'help' the pace, and at least we don't border Jowy.

Actually the war may be good for us, since we do border Yuri (corner-wise by sea); he's not close enough to be worth invading soon, but I could see wanting to take him on in an era or two maybe.

Closer to home...not a whole lot going on. Just keep building infrastructure and growing pop. Workers are starting to catch up on the backlog, but not enough that I want to put any settlers in queue just yet.

We'll have two missionaries built EOT, getting us up to four Confucian cities shortly. I hate the missionary limit, it means we'll be spreading religion for a good long time rather than having it go exponential. Especially once we start building cities again.

And we'll have Guilds at EOT. To be followed by gold-saving and then a jaunt to either Optics or Literature. Or Gunpowder. Probably optics so we can start building a navy, but gunpowder's quite tempting...Jans would definitely be a cheap way to secure the borders.

[Mardoc]

More screenies to add commentary to later:

Ok, time to take care of some of this. First up: another Golden Age pops. Seems like just about everyone's doing it these days. I'm actually quite pleased with how we're doing, given that we're saving GA for later.



First in food by a lot, decent GNP (although it could be better, we're working on that every day in many ways), pretty sad MFG but then I'm currently optimized for growth which means few hammer tiles.



Cities!
Samsun is...well, half its purpose is already fulfilled, growing cottages for the cap. At this point, it's just another fishing village. No food really, and only a few more coast tiles. I think I want to simply grow this one up to size 11 and stagnate on all its current tiles, three more coasts, and three grass hill mines. 10 hpt base, a good deal of cash - that's good enough. It'll never be a star but it makes a good backup singer.



Gaziantep is in a similar boat, only mostly finished prepping. It's actually stealing tiles from neighbors now, as long as those neighbors have another tile to work instead. But it could stagnate at any time, just working some specialists with the extra food....if I had infrastructure complete here, that is. One of the only mature cities that I'm seriously considering whipping in the next few turns, in fact - I want a library and a market and a forge pronto. Course, some extra units would also be handy...that's what it's been mostly busy with up til now.



Finally, I think I've found the limits of where Rome expanded to. Pretty sure he has at least one city on the island, too, if not more.



Also, having thought it through - I think Astronomy's the important mark, not Optics. At least with our current neighbors, no one's really threatening the sea anyway and caravels aren't very good for offense. We could research directly there...but it's a lot of beakers.

So after Guilds I think it'll be better to pick up mostly economic tech. All our neighbors seem peaceable from what I see, which means this is the time to push for economic advantages. Up to Literature so we can get our epics in gear, and also quite possibly Writing-Paper-Printing Press for simple commerce boosting. Maybe mix in HBR to enable Knights and Gunpowder for Jans - but both would be intended more as a deterrent than anything else.

Plus rather than dumping hammers into military, I want to dump them into workers and infrastructure and settlers. We've ~5 sites to claim in areas that are basically backfill now, and we could possibly push further east after that. We've only got a handful of libraries and even fewer Markets/Courthouses/Castles. And...sometime soon I need to resume GPP generation, in about 20 turns we'll be in excellent position to run a Golden Age or three.

[Mardoc]

Jowy seems to be averaging about a city/turn against Yuri . Yuri's staying about level in Power, so I'm getting less confident that he'll stop Jowy.

Decided to grow Istanbul some more after all. We've got a handful of cities nearly to their own happy caps, so we'll be able to worker-ize some more from somewhere else. But Istanbul really needs those extra pop to run through its multipliers - and time to build a Grocer and a couple Monasteries - and that's incompatible with worker-building.

Two more cities to think about and talk about later: