Mikehendi Pitboss 16 Thread

[Ituralde]

Very nice and concise overview. Already looking forward to your Turn 200 analysis.

[Mikehendi]

Our scout found the Noble / Gaspar capital of Whisky Ring this turn. It was a little closer than I expected - it's actually amazing that we didn't have contact until almost Turn 100 given how close we are. It has the usual infrastructure that one would expect: granary, library, etc. along with their UB mint. They do not have an Academy, since their first Great Person was the Engineer for the Pyramids. I also noticed the horse archer heading northeast, presumably the front line in their conflict is somewhere over there.

We also picked up the Demographics bar graphs with this team, which is currently a one-sided affair because they have not spent any EP against us. I'm guessing they are spending all their EP against Gavagai. Here's what they look like:



This was unexpected. They started out behind in the Food / expansion race, and they've never really recovered. I knew that they only had 7 cities, I didn't think it was this bad. They are seriously behind at the moment! Pyramids and Oracle don't matter if you're this far behind. Well maybe they're compensating with an awesome economy...



What the heck?! They're barely ahead of Bantams! It's not a good sign when Hashoosh is making you look bad. This team is in major trouble. Ignore those score points from 2 wonders and a free tech. I'm liking their long term chances less and less.

What have they been doing all this time? Building units, apparently:



Yeah, they have a lot of power. (They also have very high Production, from working a lot of mines and making use of the UB mints.) Gavagai has been conducting his own counter-buildup, or maybe Gavagai was the initial aggressor, I don't know. Goreripper is also building up a lot of power of his own, either to fight someone or maybe he's already in a war with a team we don't have contact with. Bantams, of course, continues to do nothing.

This was very important information. It reinforced what I see as our big picture strategy goal: do not get into a conflict with Noble / Gaspar. They have a lot of power right now, but their population base and economy are pretty weak. We should settle defensively along the border, let them duke it out with Gavagai, and out-tech them down the road. Sevenspirits wrote in one of the PBEM games recently that a demilitarized border is extremely valuable in these games, and I completely agree. We'll try to achieve that here. (One related criticism of this map: there's little point in fighting anyone for land, because EVERYTHING is so fertile everywhere. There's little tension to settle one spot, everything else is just as good. I feel like avoiding war is the best option until the map fills up, and there's vast tracks of empty land still out there on the islands.)



So the big conclusion for this turn was pulling back from the overlapping city spot southeast of the wines. We'll send this current settler to the tile west of the southern rice, and then send the next settler to plant on the wines themselves. I plan to make use of the "Build Culture" option to pop borders in both cities, and we'll have that option in about 5 turns when we research Music tech. We pick up gold as a resource at the southern spot, and of course we'll connect wines immediately at the northern one. I hope that these spots will not be seen as particularly aggressive from Noble and Gaspar, and we won't try to expand further east. There's a natural dividing line between east and west around this area, and the hope is that they're more concerned about their other neighbor. (Southern spot is somewhat vulnerable to knights on the diagonal in later eras, the one nice thing about France is that we can stack musketeers and 2 movers in rice city and still be able to move instantly to cover Le Havre or wines city as needed.)

It was an interesting turn for information purposes. Next turn we flip on 100% research for Music (I think we get the tech end of turn 105) and our scout should start getting close to the battle front (?) between Noble and Gavagai.

[Mikehendi]

The theme from this turn's exploration was horse archers. There's another horse archer under the skirmishers in Plame Affair.



And another one here in Iran Contra. Lots of horse archers. I really hope that these aren't coming after us, but I don't think that they are. The diplo screen suggests that we finally had a battle between Noblehelium and Gavagai:



I've been checking this every turn, waiting to see if war weariness would pop up. It finally did this turn, 28 war weariness for Gavagai. This suggests that a battle took place in Noble / Gaspar territory (since they have no war weariness) and Gavagai came out the loser. Probably a decent-sized battle too, as I checked in my sandbox file and managed to recreate the same 28 value of war weariness by killing a bunch of AI warriors with tanks. 10 successful kills = 28 war weariness, although I don't think Gavagai lost a full 10 units, because I'm pretty sure the penalty is higher for losing units in enemy territory. He probably lost something like 4-6 units, and Noble's team lost an unknown number since they were in their own lands. I still don't know exactly where they're fighting either, around Plame Affair is my best guess from how the horse archers have been moving.

Anyway, this is exactly what we wanted to see, some kind of confirmation that these teams are truly fighting each other. Gavagai has been doing a bunch of 2 pop unit whips, and Noble is working a lot of mines with the UB mint production bonus to churn out horse archers. Neither one is a good strategy at this stage of the game, they're only going to put each other behind. We're relatively safe right up until these teams sign peace, and then we might have a huge target on our back. (I'm very glad that Noble doesn't have any EP invested in us, they can't see our military weakness on the bar graphs.) Short term goal: build some spears for the eastern border, just to be safe.



We found the third Bantams city over here to the west. I think the fourth (and last) one is north of his capital. This screenshot tells you everything you need to know about Bantams in this game: Ecbatana has a mine on the plains hill, but doesn't have a farm on its dry corn resource yet. Oh, and it was founded 35 turns ago.

It's almost certainly inviting bad karma to do this, but I've already dotmapped where to put cities once Bantams has been conquered. Four tiles south of Ecbatana for the National Epic city, northwest of the iron to avoid wasting the clams near Ecbatana, another city between Lourdes and Persepolis, etc. There's tons of great land here waiting to be put to use. Gavagai is a fool to be fighting with Noble's team, he could run over Bantams with minimum effort. I'm still wondering how their teams built up so much bad blood.



We have the first capital to size 12, no one else is above size 10 so far. We're pausing here to squeeze out a 3 turn worker (which can be achieved by swapping onto the hill mine for a couple turns) and then going back to vertical growth again. Plan is to get that Music tech free Great Artist, use it for a Golden Age to pop into Bureaucracy as soon as we discover Civil Service (and then pop out 3 Great Scientists during that GA for lightbulb purposes), and look into building the Great Library here with GA + Bur production. We also have two more cities going down in the next few turns, should hit 12 cities on Turn 105. That feels pretty good for a civ without much in the way of expansion traits, no EXP / CRE / IMP / etc.

The other big news of the turn was Sevenspirits team popping their Great Scientist on a lightbulb for Philosophy tech and Taoism religion. It was another impressive move from their team, one of their biggest weaknesses was not having a religion to make use of their SPI trait. Now they can pop into the religious civics as well on demand. Very smart move. There's a reason why I've spent the whole game talking about their team, they've outplayed everyone else by such a huge margin. Their team or our team are the big favorites to win this game. I hope I'm up to that challenge. Let's see if we can land Music tech first, and then see what we can do with our own PHI lightbulb fun. Two can play at that game.

[Mikehendi]

No wait, I think I have that whole war weariness thing backwards. I think that's Gaspar's war weariness with Gavagai, which would mean that the fighting took place in Aztec territory. (It would also explain why I haven't seen any Gavagai units in Noble / Gaspar territory so far other than the 3 on the forested hill.) If anyone is reading this and can clarify the mechanics, feel free to let me know. Thanks!

[Mikehendi]

We found the Noble / Gaspar stack of doom! There's 10 total horse archers here (nine on the hill and another one under the scout). I would not want to be on the receiving end of all these units. Given that they're at war with Gavagai, and trading units / creating war weariness, I think that we're not going to be the target. We'll try to follow these horse archers around with our scout, although that's a little tough because Gaspar insists on being the last one to play every turn, and I won't be a jerk and hold up the game just to move after them.



Moving the scout revealed two more Noble cities this turn. We now have vision on 6 of their 7 cities (and we know where the last one is from borders, it's southwest of their capital). It looks like the eastern coast of our continent is over here as well, that's probably what drew these teams into conflict earlier. Someone settled aggressively and then the arrows started flying. Depending on where those horse archers go next, we'll probably try to head into Gavagai territory and see what it looks like on the other side of the border.



Here's the new city of Caen, our 11th city. Le Havre finished a granary with a forest chop this turn, we're going to overflow into a barracks there and get some spears out. I also want to turn some of those forests in Caen into a granary and probably city walls, force any attack with horse archers to go through fortify defense + river crossing penalty + city walls. We'd probably need about 4 spears with those defensive modifiers in place to hold off 10 horse archers. But hopefully we won't be a target any time soon, please keep fighting over there guys!



This work boat is for the clams resource; there's a settler about to found a city over here on Turn 105. When I moved it this turn though, I saw the orange borders of ad hoc, and I figured it was worth moving to meet him. That will delay the work boat connecting the clams by one turn, obviously worth it though. Ad hoc is playing Huayna Capac (FIN/IND) of the Dutch, kind of a weird combo. He built Stonehenge, and has done very little of interest otherwise.



He has 6 cities to our 11 cities, and just as importantly, only 6 food resources connected. We have 11 food resources on this screen, plus this ignores the clams for crabs trade we have with Goreripper, so we've got about double his food bonuses to go along with double his cities. (When you don't have vision on another team, I feel like looking at their resource list is a decent proxy for how well they are doing.) This pretty much confirms that ad hoc is not a major player in this game, one of the also-rans as predicted when we did the Turn 100 writeup. I offered Open Borders so that we can grab some more 3 commerce overseas trade routes. I don't care if it benefits ad hoc more than our team, he's not a threat to win, and if it props him up against someone like Sevenspirits, even better.



Demos from this turn, we're well on our way to Music tech. I think we'll be the ones to get that bonus, we have contact with 7 other teams and none of them have Literature or Drama techs. Unfortunately we were not able to stack up enough beaker overflow to 1-turn the tech, but we should land it at end of turn 105. Then it's on to Code of Laws and Civil Service, to get into Bureaucracy for our monster capital ASAP.

Sevenspirits picked up another huge surge of points this turn. Hard to say what it was without having contact with their civ, more population and tech and land points. We're rapidly moving to a point where our two teams will be far out ahead in score. Should be fun when we finally make contact.

[Mikehendi]

Our scout has lost track of the Noblehelium stack of horse archers. This appears to be the border region between their team and Gavagai, so I'm hoping we'll spot the horse archer stack or some of Gavagai's units in the next few turns. I have one of our chariots poking around on our eastern border, in the hopes that we'll have some warning if those horse archers would start to come after us. But Noble and Gavagai are still at war, and there appears to be bad blood between them, so we still have to assume for the time being that we aren't the target.

I would sleep better at night if I saw those horse archers crossing the border into Gavagai territory, however.



Our other scout found the fourth Bantams city this turn. I'm running out of things to say about the poor Bantams gameplay, let's put this in list form:

* Working three unimproved grassland tiles - where are the cottages?
* The fish tile doesn't have a work boat on it. Note: this city was founded on Turn 68, or 36 turns ago.
* Susa's only building is a monument. No granary, nothing else. Also remember that Bantams is a CRE civ.

Is Bantams really this bad, or is his game thus far an elaborate trolling attempt? I'm genuinely unsure at this point. It's great for our team's success, but it's certainly not fair to everyone else when there's one player doing this poorly in the game.



More good stuff in the islands to the south. We should be competing for them with Bantams, but... well, you know. We need another galley soon, to allow us to use one for ferrying units and one for exploring. Have to fit it into the build queues at some point. There's a settler going to go for the crabs / silks spot in the near future, roughly half a dozen turns from now.




Overview shot of most of our cities. I don't have a whole lot to say here, feel free to ask questions. It's a shame that we didn't quite have enough research power to one-turn Music tech. End of next turn will have to do. (The free Artist is still there.)



The battle between Noble and Gavagai from a few turns back finally showed up on the bar graphs, and it looks like Noble's team got slaughtered pretty good. That means the fighting must have been in Aztec territory; I guess that Noble's team tried to invade, and failed at it? I think? The big stack of horse archers must be another attempt to get revenge, or attack, or whatever. Still hoping that more scouting will clear this up further.

Goreripper has also built up a fair amount of power, but again I find it hard to believe that we would be the target. We're sending him a happy resource he doesn't have in the form of wines, and our mutual trade routes have been highly profitable. I'd be disappointed if that turned out to be an elaborate ploy to set up an attack.

Ad hoc accepted our offer of Open Borders, which means that we have two 3 commerce trade routes in all of our cities. Total value of all trade routes is something like 66 commerce, completely ridiculous. Free Market civic and Corporation tech are going to be enormously important on this map down the road.



Demos are about the same as before. We still have to work on that power rating, Le Havre will be getting our first (LOL) barracks up in a few turns and finally turn out some units. What can I say, we haven't been pressured by anyone so far. There's no point in building units if you don't have to do so.

Next turn we grow 5 population and found our 12th city. I'm hoping that will give us back the Food lead temporarily, at least until Sevenspirits founds his 13th city any turn now.

[Tredje]

Do you know whose GNP it is that rivals yours?

[Mikehendi]

No, I'm not exactly sure. My best guesses are either Goreripper or Gavagai, they have both had strong GNPs on the bar graphs in recent turns. The only other candidate would be Sevenspirits, I have no idea what their economy looks like because we've never had contact with them. None of the other teams we know (Noble, Hashoosh, Ad hoc, 2metraninja, Bantams) have very good economies, and the other two teams we don't know (Kuro and wetbandit) are both pretty far behind.



This was our perspective of the Noblehelium stack of doom moving in against Gavagai. They both update their spoiler threads, so lurkers probably have more details from their threads. We just sat back and watched the fireworks.



This was our 12th city of Lille. It should be very strong once the workers hack down the jungle over the bananas, and we get the iron connected. With lighthouse, this city gets +6 food while working the iron tile for 6 hammers (it's +8 food without the iron) and then we can use the lighthouse for a couple more 3 food lake tiles on top of that! It would be a strong National Epic candidate, except that I want to put a city NE-NE-E in the middle of the banana patch for that role. Have to wait for the post-Bantams world for that to happen.

I felt really good about our standing in the game for the 1 hour until Sevenspirits logged in and double-expanded up to 14 cities. It actually wasn't surprising, we saw the triple whips come out from them a few turns earlier, and they almost certainly had to be for settlers. Still, that short span where we were tied on cities was nice.



Later the same turn, Gaspar attacked and razed the Gavagai city on the border. This was Beryllium, Gavagai's fourth city by his periodic table naming scheme. It didn't look like much of a battle, only a minor drop in global power, few units changing hands. Gavagai's power is equal to that of the Noble / Gaspar team, so I'm still hoping for a major bloodbath between the two of them soonish. Come on! Fight to the death with no one winning!

[Mikehendi]

This current turn (Turn 106) after moving the scout further into the warzone. Those two horse archers in the front are a bit exposed, I wonder if Gavagai will have something to whack them on his turn. (Gavagai hadn't played when I took these pictures.) The chariot to the right has Sentry promotion. Hopefully we'll start to get a view on the Gavagai forces next turn, he's got a lot of power, he has to have something to hit back with.



This was very interesting: the brown of Malinese culture popping up deep in Gavagai territory on the culture overlay! I'm eager to read these spoiler threads when the game ends and find out what happened here in the early BC years. Someone trying to "pink dot" someone else I'd guess.

We did get vision on the final Noblehelium city this turn with our chariot. Healthcare.gov is on the southern coast, and production spying reveals that it's in the process of building the Colossus. They are welcome to it, all of the focus on wonders and 800 something posts still doesn't have this team in particularly good position to win the game. Their GNP is the same level as Bantams right now, and that's horrendous.



We did land the free Great Artist for discovering Music first, it doesn't look like there was any race at all for the prize. Leaving aside the Great Person for the moment, the tech itself is quite valuable. Now we can easily pop borders at any city by working high production tiles for a few turns, it's almost like getting to be mini-Creative trait. We have three different cities using the Build Culture option right now to pop borders. As for the Great Artist, we'll use it for a Golden Age as soon as we reach Civil Service to pop into Bureaucracy civic, as well as popping out triple Great Scientists for lightbulb purposes. ETA on that is right around Turn 115, we're getting the capital ready for the swap into Bureaucracy, which is going to be very strong with our Academy and many cottages. I'm feeling pretty good about this plan so long as we can continue to avoid war.

I'd better explain the monument build in the capital so that people don't think I've lost my mind. I decided to take a shot at building the Statue of Zeus in there, which is not banned for this game. There's no stone and marble on the map, but we do have ivory, and that makes the wonder very cheap. It's sitting around 10 turns to build, and that's before popping into Bureaucracy and a Golden Age. Statue of Zeus would also fit perfectly with our gameplan of avoiding warfare, and giving other teams a reason to leave us alone. And it never obsoletes either! If we get into a lategame showdown with Sevenspirits, doubling their war weariness could be a major help. I think we have a good chance to get the wonder, none of the teams in contact with us had Aesthetics tech when we researched it a few turns ago. At the worst, we'll get excellent failgold conversion from having ivory if someone else builds the wonder. But we need 3 monuments to build Statue of Zeus, and we only had 2 of them, so the capital needed to pop one out. Kind of wasteful, but whatever.



The insanity of trade routes on this map. 3 commerce trade routes everywhere! Hard to believe that no one has built Great Lighthouse yet. Also note the poor state of civics across the board, we're one of the very few teams to be using HR and OR civics. That has to be helping us. We still need to get religion spread to more of our cities, maybe we can work on that during the Golden Age. I want to get the OR + forge pairing in place for +50% production before trying to add courthouses, markets, universities, etc.



Demos again would be amazing... if Sevenspirits wasn't playing in this game as well. They are the #1 team in Food and have to be the #1 team in Land Area as well. Fortunately our economy is pretty awesome, we're #2 in GNP at 0% science. We're also right around 300 at max rate, and I think the number there is from Goreripper. It's hard to make too many comparisons without having contact with Sevenspirits, however even from here we can see how well they're doing. I'm hoping that their economy isn't as good as ours. If it is, and they also have the most cities and most population, then the rest of us might be out of luck. We're going to have to use our Great People and our cheap PHI universities (and run over Bantams quickly and efficiently) if we're going to have a shot at winning this one. Should be entertaining, stay tuned.

[Mikehendi]

The Gavagai stack of doom makes its appearance on the battlefield! He also has a whole bunch of horse archers, along with a mixture of axes and chariots. Both sides seem a little low on spears though, considering their armies are comprised mostly of horse archers. Gavagai killed at least 3 Noble horse archers on this turn, I'm a little surprised that he didn't kill the one isolated Mali horse archer off to the east, or the isolated Sentry chariot on the hill. Perhaps Gavagai's units didn't have the movement points to reach them. Gavagai then whipped a couple of his cities, hopefully for even more units to continue the battle.

Gavagai posted in his spoiler thread, so he can give you a better picture of things. I'm posting more as a way of celebrating this amazing war, which is just so perfect for our team's chances. On the one hand, we have a team with sacrificial altars which can 1 pop whip units endlessly at essentially no penalty. On the other hand, we have a team that rushed cheap IND mints working tons of high hammer tiles (and low food / commerce tiles) to pump out their own counter units. They are both using all of that production to slam into one another in bloody conflict, where neither side has gained any advantage thus far.

Appropriate smiley: