[90 Spoilers] Saxony's splendour and Miguelusten's glory

[Miguelito]

Things are stable and unexciting at home, so some news from the wider world. I'm still tabling whips and cities, here they are (of course it's possible I've missed one or another at some point):

cities:



whips:



So for us that means that we are doing pretty badly with cities (considering also that we have just one spot left open to settle, after that it's further overseas or by hostile takeover), while whipping significantly above average. The explanation probably lies in our 4 terraces (both how we can whip so much despite low city count and abysmal crop yield, and also a lot of hammers have just gone that way). Curiously the two leaders in terms of cities, GT/Empi and metal, have whipped below average. Hard to wrap my head around that, in particular since both leaders (GT with Imp 2pop whip settlers and metal with Exp for cheap granaries) should have incentive to whip a lot. Fwiw metal took one city from Mr. X's Freddy, so that's neat, the Prussians are going down before us.
Oh yes, our 4th neighbour is the city count leader, isn't that nice?

But the big news of the turn is of course a Great Merchant getting born. Must be Plemo, who switched to Caste a few turns ago. Apparently he ran merchants on top of his Oracle prophet points, betting for either a shrine or the merchant. Notably he did not immediately bulb currency, either because he doesn't have maths yet - from KTB I believe that one of our contacts has it, and that might be naufragar with Phi - or because an overseas trade mission is more profitable (but not necessarily trivial to pull off). That's what I concluded at least in PB54 after bulbing currency with an "early" GM (which came like 25 turns later ). So Plemo is on an ecellent track to winning this game already. Need to watch out if after Currency he goes straight for Construction, which could become dangerous for us. At least we have great defensive terrain.

I still can't get over how Asoka could afford to build Oracle and research Writiing by t54 (?) and still expand way faster than we did. Really curious for after the game, how much of it is excellent play (a given with the player), and how favourable the start was compared to ours (fwiw I'd rate Asoka of India at least as strong as what we have, although I'm of course not objective and also always a sucker for Spi)

[Miguelito]

One thing we've been lucky with lately are Hindu spreads, after they completely failed to materialize during the first dozen or so turns. Leipzig was the last to convert this turn. The very big map of course helps. I might get persuaded to convert before a GA, if happycap pressure gets serious. Generally we have too little food for that to be an issue, but Leipzig with the lighthouse will have too much surplus for even the 6->3 whip cycle to be sustainable long term (working a mine is a bad option if the alternative is 2/0/3 coast). And Chemnitz might find itself in a similar situation in a while. Revolting of course only postpones the problem.
For the moment we are getting silver online though, so it's not as urgent.

[Miguelito]

huh, what's this?


It looks kind of aggressive, and makes chopping our own forest more difficult, but also it doesn't make too much sense? Sure, if he puts his two super axes on the forest I will never be able to dislodge them, but that doesn't let him take the city either. And if he wants to attack soon, he has to come with reinforcements through our NE territory, so he'd just split his stack. Weird

Lovely bit of micro gone horribly wrong:


So I had scheduled two chops for the turn we got maths and felt great about it, but now it turns out that chopping would delay the new city, and I have to send the worker which is 1 turn from completing the chop to build the hill road (it can be argued whether on the forest would've been better). So now the chop comes in only t89, when Freiberg is at size 3 and 15/26 food already. But any other way would delay the new city even harder. And I have big plans for that one - the last remaining place we can hope to expand to peacefully requires a galley from that coast, so we better hurry and get it into water. Planning for Leipzig to 3pop whip a settler, bit of a question where to get axe cover from, probably Freiberg, huh. Likely a 3->2 1pop whip, further derailing the above micro? Maybe I should just whip a worker first from Leipzig?

[Miguelito]

I built a scout!  
Mission is to uncover more naufragar cities and hopefully trade routes, maybe even to his starting island? And probably a neighbour.
Also building a work boat in Meißen for the same purpose. Might be a bad decision, I'm unsure if it will ever pay back its unit cost, and probably it'll get stuck on some icy cape. Well, the fun of uncovering more map should be justification enough, and if we get to explore soeone's home island I can at least complain about map unfairness.

Plemo converted from caste to slavery/OR. Asoka living his best life... I suppose it wasn't him who founded Judaism though, that was a rather long while ago, and I suppose he would have taken OR earlier (although it's also costly). But it means that on top of Meditation he also researched Poly, Masonry, and Mono. Oh yeah, our GNP is pretty high ranking, but his is consistently higher, by a bunch. I'll show graphs in 2 turns when hopefully we get Ari's. And espionage tells me that he hasn't even started on his cheap courthouses yet

And a prophet was born, I assume from shade's Stonehenge.

[Miguelito]

Leipzig
To my great shame I have to admit that I personally know Leipzig very little, although it is arguably the most interesting place in Saxony, nowadays as well as historically. Its commercial strength displayed here corresponds well with the real place - the Leipzig trade fair dates back to the high middle ages and was one of the main trade hubs in Germany for many centuries (and remains important till this day). Correspondingly, while Dresden was always the King's (duke's/prince elector'/w.e.) city, Leipzig was a hub of citizenry, and some will say the different mentalities have survived into our times. A few years ago it was labelled as Hypezig, supposedly attracting subculturalists for whom Berlin was becoming stale/expensive. Not sure what has become of that, as I said, I have visited seldomly and without gettingto know very much.
Historically Leipzig was also one of the epicenters of the civilian resisitance to the East German dictature in the 80s, and Napoleon suffered his decisive loss outside the gates of the city (dooming poor Saxony to definitive irrelevance in the process, being his ally ).
Remember Civ 2 and 3's JS Bach's Cathedral? That would be Leipzig's St. Thomas Church:


It's not actually a cathedral though, and in both games they instead modelled a wholly different church (in case of Civ 3 I think it's Notre Dame, acutally?). Apparently the original architecture isn't sufficientlyworld wondrous.

With its new lighthouse, Leipzig is pleasing my sorrow-stricken heart. I want more cities like this - the obvious candidate would be Chemnitz on the other landmass:


It has an axe close to finishing, 8 hammers in a barracks, 4 pop and ten turns of still accumulated whip anger. Thankfully I was finally able to pasture the horse, although I have already spotted the spear that Ari is sending, so nothing will happen in terms of chariots. The cow will be lost soon enough. My original plan was to whip the barracks, build a 3XP axe with the overflow, and set this city up as a military pump with those mines, eventually maybe sending some units produced here elsewhere if things with Ari remain relaxed. Now I feel tempted to whip a lighthouse instead... any thoughts anybody? Currently Ari has his 2 axes in the city, 2 pop, and a spear on the way, so it doesn't look like he's up to something very soon.
Our Currency break even timing has gone down from 20 to 13 turns , but next turn it will increase again when we found our sixth city on the last available spot.

[Amicalola]

Pre-T100 Currency on Deity seems very nice.

[Mjmd]

I know commenting rules are more relaxed for this game, but when I player asks for lurker opinion the obvious answer is still

[Mjmd]

Can we get an overview shot, maybe both north and south? I mean part of me also just wants to settle any remaining viable cities when currency finishes.

[Miguelito]

Can we get an overview shot, maybe both north and south? I mean part of me also just wants to settle any remaining viable cities when currency finishes.

Family's out having fun while I'm still Corona positive , so have at it:


Regarding viable cities, there aren't any . Unless I really want beef with Plemo over some plains forests. My faint hope is that coast over the channel W of our new city to be founded next turn. But what I've seen so far is all jungled and no seafood
You also see Plemo's fast workers merrily cottaging all over the place. He has 2 axes on the landmass and I feel like we really should do something, but we are just so feeble. So, could the Mongols kindly ride in, please?

[Miguelito]

Bit of fresh exploration:


Looks like China (civac/Hagen) to me. I'll make contact next turn on the ice hill, then follow the coast south to hopefully find a connection to naufragars home island and get more routes.
You see naufragar's shameless landgrab - Ankara was founded before Bursa . It may not have done him much good in the big picture, despite Imp he's now again even in city count (6) with our own pitiful selves. I'm pretty scared of him long term, in particular him having Phi, as our home islands seem to be about 1.5 galleon turns apart .

Ari has continued to invest EP into us (possibly his vacation replacement Dulland just doesn't bother to check). But we've got graphs now, so here is the full set + demos:














Takeaways:

• Plemo's lead in GNP is alarming. Sure a lot of it is culture with at least one own religion plus Oracle, but we also have a lot of that ourselves, with 4 terraces, a holy city and 4 more converted. In that light, Ari might also not be lagging as much. He clearly has not expanded into bankruptcy.
  
• Both of them have 45-50% more CY and MfG than us. Are we not blessed with our neighbours? Judging from demos - which of course have this turn's data and not one (or two?) ago - with that they should be pretty close to world top.
  
• Ari is ahead of us in power (and with Agg he has better units), but not so much so as to be an immediate worry. But we also clearly can't do much against him, at least for the moment.
  
• We have, at least before we start whipping again next turn, caught up to the rival average in terms of CY and MfG. Of course, that average includes those that have been set back by war already, so we are still below the average of the viable civs. And as shown, in a local comparison we're doing terrible.
  

I didn't take the espionage graph, but it's telling us that Plemo has not build a courthouse yet.