[SPOILERS] scooter - Zara Yakob

[Whosit]

-I conceded the Great Library to him, although that might be like me conceding Barack Obama the Presidency, as I probably couldn't beat him out if I tried.

Enjoyed the diplomacy updates. Very entertaining.

[scooter]

Thanks Whosit! Glad to see some are reading... It's been awfully quiet before today... So I sent this picture and message to SleepingMoogle a few hours ago:

SleepingMoogle,

Okay, well this discussion had to come sooner or later, so I'm going to send this now that I have some time. I'd like a port city on the lake in the middle of the map, but I really only have one last chance for one. Timmy has pushed cities very close to me, and attached in this screenshots are two circles as possible sites... It'll probably be the southern one, unless I (fingers crossed) find seafood in that one black spot on the lake. It's a fairly marginal site honestly, but a port city would be very helpful... So the purpose of this message is two-fold - first is asking permission to lay claim to this site. It's not going to be founded in the immediate future, but it's in the top 3 in terms of priority for me right now. If I were to found it now, it would be far away and exposed...

There is a second part, but if you find my city site there on the lake to be unfair, then you can ignore the rest of this, as you will definitely not agree to the rest! I'm guessing you won't have a problem with it though, as I believe it's closer to me, and you still have a (much better) port spot to the north of the peaks that is rightfully yours. Here's part two:

You'll notice some orange lines on the screenshot too... I'm going to officially propose that to be our rough "border" if that makes sense... Meaning tiles to the south of that line I would like to claim as my own, and tiles to the north can be claimed for you. From my perspective, this seems like a fair geographical division, but if you feel it's ridiculous, please don't take offense - as you see in that screenshot I have zero intelligence of what your land looks like, so it's hard for me to propose something like this.

Looking forward in seeing what you've got to say on the matter... You don't have to rush a response back by the way - this isn't urgent... It's more like I felt that now might be a good time to start discussing this, so that we don't procrastinate too long only to find ourselves stepping on each others toes.

Thanks!
scooter

[scooter]

Decision Time. Yesterday I took a screenshot of that port city, and I sent off a message to Timmy asking if he was okay with me laying claim to it. He sent me back a message today that basically said "Sure that's fine. Also, I want to found this city:"



Ugh. You'll remember this is the "horrible brown dot" we were talking about the other day, only it's moved east to take some of the floodplains - something I was considering doing myself. Problem is, if I cede this to him then I lose the floodplains, have to blow up my dotmap, and I have this one city shoved way up in my face. I'm not a fan of the site, and honestly I really don't want to give it to him. I have a few options:

1. Take the port city, and try to negotiate my way out of giving him this city right here that he's requested. Probably angers him and rightfully so.
2. Tell him I'd rather give up the port city and have ownership over the area he wants. Means I get no port but I don't have a city of his crammed up on my southwest. Also I don't have to culturally fight over those floodplains.
3. Suck it up, and tell him it's fine. We both get the cities we want.

I have no idea what to do really, going to need to think some more... Lurkers, what would you do? I'm halfway between #2 and #3. #1 probably isn't going to happen - though it sounds like something Krill would do in a heartbeat .

[pocketbeetle]

Tough call.

[scooter]

Timmy warned me of something, and I actually think it's going to sway my decision to forego the port city. Apparently when the lake was edited in, a lot of the coastal tiles are actually "ocean" and not "coast" which has a big impact:

1. -1 Commerce on the ocean tiles that are supposed to be coast
2. Work boats/galleys cannot travel on ocean tiles, which means I can't travel around the perimeter of the lake with a work boat.
3. Trade routes to Bob, Sandover, or TT will not work by coast.

I also checked in-game and sure enough the city I marked has several ocean tiles that should be coast. So that settles that, I'm probably going to let Timmy know that the port city is his if he wants it, and that I will be claiming the city down in the south. Hopefully he's okay with that... If he's not... tough luck? I can get a settler there within 5 turns if need be, so he'd have to beat that. If he does "beat that," then the city will get razed. I'm not expecting it to be a problem though.

[scooter]

Couple good things from yesterday's turn (looks like we're going to miss the turn today). First, Construction came in, so I can build catapults now. Going to head to Calendar now, so I've got to tech Sailing real quick which is just a quick one-turn tech. A settler finished and another will be in next turn, so we'll get to those in a second. I had a chariot with 7XP down in the southwest of my territory, until this turn:



I didn't get an action shot, but there was a barb warrior sitting on the tile where the chariot is now. I got 2XP out of the deal, which means I'm 1XP shy of a Heroic Epic unit. This is kind of a big deal for me because I wondered if I would struggle to get there because of the Great Wall, but I've been fine - occasionally picking off warriors on the outskirts of my land.

You'll notice something else big in that picture, mostly because I circled it in Paint . There's a food resource there!! I probably need to revisit a dotmap, which is what I'm going to do next. First I"ll jump up to the north, and then I'll come back down to the south.



This will likely be my next city - with the settler finishing from Adelaide on this turn. This will create my northern border with Timmy, which reminds me I forgot to update on what happened with the border negotiations. That will hopefully happen in my next post. Anyways, this is about as good as it's getting with this area... I'll probably farm all the grassland and work the mines, though I may consider cottages + windmills because productions cities are less useful on this map because...well every city is a production city. Either way, I'll think about it. Next the south:



Here's the original idea, with the junk city moved 1W. This land is mine, because I have ceded the port city to Timmy. Couple things I don't like about this dotmap:

1. That green city is such a garbage city
2. Yellow city wastes a floodplain by founding on top of it... That's a big deal on this map especially.

So here's an alternative dotmap:



Green is now actually a moderately respectable site... Yellow doesn't waste the floodplains tile, and just for perspective I stuck the black filler dot that I might found later. This is definitely a stronger dotmap, but there's one drawback... The incense gets moved to the third ring, which means it'll take longer to be able to hook it up. Granted, I'm creative and I get cheap libraries, so I could get +4 culture/turn in there awfully fast, but it's still a delay. Overall I think it's worth it, and I'm heavily leaning towards this version. The green dot will probably be founded with the next settler, though it will probably end up being founded around the same time as the northern city because the settler is closer. Yellow is better, but I want to found Green first to start accumulating the culture sooner.

[scooter]

I've had more conversation with Timmy and SleepingMoogle, and rather than post all the messages, I'll just summarize what the end result was:

1. I conceded my claim on the port city to Timmy, meaning the stone/incense spot in the south is mine.
2. I gave some extra land to SleepingMoogle, basically allowing him a spot on the western river up there in the north. This is slightly generous on my part as I gave a little extra, but I think it will pay off in the long run in terms of a diplo bonus.


Also something of consequence that I found yesterday - on the previous post in the last picture - it's the dotmap of the south... In the yellow rice city there were still two unfogged tiles, one is clearly a lake tile in the bottom right, and the bottom left one looks like desert. I discovered this past turn that it's actually an Oasis! Nice break for me... Usually I consider that to be a weak tile since you can't improve it, but with the kind of land Highlands spits out I'll take anything I can get.

[Krill]

You could always take the port city from him later on...

[pocketbeetle]

An angel on Scooter's other shoulder suddenly pops up and says:

"Maybe if we're really nice to Timmy he'll let us have that spot anyway!"

[scooter]

You could always take the port city from him later on...

This is a big part of why I'm not too crushed about losing the spot. I'll let him develop it for me . I figure if we go to war, I'd much rather have the southern spot as if he had it, it would require me to open two fronts more or less. My land is much more cohesive this way.

And PB - the port city doesn't have as much value to me now that I discovered I can't use it for trade routes until Astronomy. It's a relatively marginal site all things considered.