[Spoilers] Grotsnot massively inflates his own View count

[Ituralde]

Good luck in your first PBEM!

[Grotsnot]

Thanks! I was waiting to post up the first turn until knew for sure it was working. Turn was back around to me this morning so I'll have a report on the first two turns this evening

[Grotsnot]

Bleh, I started working on some potential build/tech orders and fog gazing pictures and the night got away from me. Will have to wait until tomorrow for full report. Not much is happening, anyway. Everyone settled on turn 1 and exploring hasn't turned up anything of note yet.

[Grotsnot]

Ok well I can at least knock out Turn 1 quick. Spoiler tags for big images

Once again, our start:

Water lens didn't show anything new so sent warrior to forest hill as planned. Turned up another hill forest blocking view of the other side of the mountain, so decide to play it safe and SIP.

So now the important question: Japanese city names - to weeb or not to weeb?

Since nobody chimed in to stop me from embarrassing myself...

Panzer vor!
Our capital, Ōarai:

Work the sheep, start on a builder, start on Animal Husbandry (though will realize in a turn or two I should have started with Mining and switch). Made some notes for early exploration:

The gypsum is actually going to get in the way of cities pooling their districts so I'm going to go see if there's a decent site to the east that can share the mountain bonuses. If not, there's bound to be a passable location west along the river.

Turns 2-4 to follow asap!

[Grotsnot]

Turn 2
Explore eastwardly, score screen shows everyone settled on Turn 1:

Can see a river in the distance! Huzzah! Also ponies!
Also Housing lens shows coast to the SE. No fresh water spotted (yet?) near where I'd like a third leg of a triad, though.

I start trying to use the Appeal lens to supplement fog-gazing but haven't gotten anything actionable out of it yet.

Turn 3
Nothing eventful for my opponents on Turn 2, as expected. Warrior happily runs toward the river

And so now we have an alternate pair of 2nd City candidates

Turn 4
Still nothing in the scores (thankfully, would be a bit ridiculous to see something this early). Check out more of the river valley

Cows! Whales! And turns out the water we've been able to see east of Ooarai (right by Crummy Tundra) is a lake. Lots of freshwater here! Decide to keep going west and get the total vicinity of this option before looping back toward the western river site(s).

Rice! So much food here! ...Also a disturbing lack of forests! That is going to be a problem. I have started on a spreadsheet for city planning and I was banking on there being a forest at St Gloriana to chop out a Holy Site. The north bank of the river is looking better for the city's early tiles and for slotting a southern triad, but it is completely barren of timber. Also no stone spotted anywhere yet... The utter lack of choppable here might mean we have to go west and save this for city 3 or 4...

I chart out a course to wrap up here and loop back to check out the southern region and the river site

Bonus: Turn 5
I put off the report long enough there's another turn for this set. We have a majority now giving the go-ahead to use CQUI so I turn that on. ...and immediately see why that is not an unalloyed good after all

Lucky Alhazard has already met a scientific city-state! Hopefully that's from last turn. Not sure how I feel about getting this information. It did influence my play as I decide to take the detour path and hope to find a CS of my own in the housing footprint. No such luck

This area is swimming in food! More rice and more cows and a lake and nary a cog in sight. Ah well. I have plenty time to get back west before I need to decide where to send my Settlers. But for now can start contemplating lakeside options while I update my pins to the thoroughly-better CQUI symbols.

CQUI views of Ooarai and the Empire

Interesting how the from Population is clearly lacking and nothing but has the Amenity boost displayed, despite it being in the total calculation. It did the exact same thing without CQUI so it's not the mod's fault. Get your shit together Firaxis

Nothing in the scores this turn either. Can take a quick look at Great People. I have a draft going, similar to the wonders post, on who I'd like to get, but for now:

Obviously no one has any GPPs yet but CQUI lets us take a broad look of the field. Of the ones I'm likely to get, at least Hannibal is good and Prophets are all the same. But the dreamland options are more of a mixed bag. I'm not a fan of Aryabhata - random boosts almost invariably land on things I was going to boost naturally - though he's at least better than Euclid. Hopefully someone else grabs those guys and I have Campuses up in time to compete for Hypatia. James of St George isn't *bad* but considering Great Engineers require going out of your way to get, he ain't worth the effort. Was hoping I'd have the option to faith-buy Isidore of Miletus (215 wonder ) or Bi Sheng (allows an additional district in the city) but, you know, that was probably a stupid idea and I'm better off not having the temptation. Leaves our buddy Crassus who gives some money and clay. I was about to write him off due to experience in SP but maybe he's good after all in a game where money is tight. I'm already debating how much to spend on resource and district tiles - and will likely end up spending too much anyway

That's all for now! I might post up some potential build orders one of these days but we'll see. Would only be arguing with myself here Right now I'm gonna start on a Slinger after the Builder. Remains to be decided what to do after that, or even whether to finish the Slinger before I can get an Agoge chop out of him.

[Banzailizard]

Good luck on your first game. I will lightly dedlurk you.  By that I mean I will remain unspoiled and try to throw suggestions out, but I am so busy I am barely managing to do that in Chevalier's  Thread in PBEM 12 so it will be infrequent.  Just know that someone is reading your stuff so keep up the good work on reporting.

[Grotsnot]

Thanks! Welcome aboard!

Not much to report right now - most obviously due to the pause but also because I've been dissatisfied with plan sketches placing our first expansion in the east. It's a nice site for a mature city but the total lack of choppables makes projections for getting up to speed interminable. I'm thinking I'm going to have to settle the west river first after all, which is a bit unfortunate since the line of Gypsum - while nice tiles to work - is going to mean Ooarai and a western city won't be able to link up their districts effectively. Unless I harvest both of Ooarai's wheats anyway >_< Gonna be an extra tough call if there's no food resources hiding in the fog over there - forced to choose between chopping&  or pop growth is not a fun place to be.

The resources and mountains in this area are really disrupting the district carpet plans in general, actually. South of Ooarai looks like it might have some clear space but unless the coast swings back east there won't be a lot of it. District-adjacency-wise I probably need to give up on a the idea of a glorious triad (I rolled geography for a quad in one of my test games and was horribly spoiled by it) and go with an Ooarai-East pair and a West-South pair 

But all this needs to wait for my Warrior to loop back west and see how the sites look. Right now all I have is a Gypsum tile and what look to be a bunch more plains tiles to work with for spreadsheeting the west site. I'll try and get put some more thoughts to paper in the mean time - still have that GP ranking on the backburner and could plan out tech&civic paths or something - but probably gonna be mostly quiet for a little while. I don't have baseball epics to fill the downtime

[Banzailizard]

I agree you need to explore west for now and see what is there. Covering one Gypsum when you have 2 others is not the end of the world if it means a strong district. Also do not forget you can harvest that wheat latter as you hit the end of your growth.

Since you are going for an early religion what is your backup choice if Russia get's there first?

Do not forget the district discount mechanism, unlock Holy sites first and use your 50% boost to get those done, the rest will come more cheaply. I am not sure Japan has been played to its full potential with that feature yet.

[Grotsnot]

Can't district a Gypsum because it's a luxury resource or I absolutely would

And yeah I'm definitely keeping the discount in mind - not sure if I've posted in detail yet but the idea has been to get 2 Holy Sites and then switch to using Encampments as the leadoff districts. With Hojo I don't think I should need to pay full price for basically any districts - assuming I do it right.

Will post up turns 6-8 soonish. Some very good news and some very bad news... And can talk about Pantheon/Religions soon too. I'm not married to any particular belief strongly enough to mind being 2nd. If I can get a chop in City 2 my projections can swing my Religion around turn 65 - assuming I can get away with a Shrine build in Ooarai.

Other goalposts, assuming my Excel template is reasonably accurate and I don't get rushed: City 2 by turn 30, City 3 by turn 45, City 4 around the time of the Religion. Projections are pretty fuzzy though since I can only plan the Capital in detail - City 2 just uses a Slinger chop and the gypsum to get its Holy Site up and then is lost in the fog. Looking forward to being able to plot in more detail instead of burning a worker charge for a 2/1 plains farm since that's all I can see... A grass hill would be nice or, to be greedy, another sheep This iteration of the plan also assumes I can get a chop for each of the settlers coming out of the capital, which may be inaccurate since just maybe I shouldn't be spending all my on purchasing forest tiles

As you can see, lots of assumptions. More on why I'm worried they'll have to be scrapped soon!

[Grotsnot]

Okay, so! Turn 6: FOCK YESH

Yerevan found us on the interturn! Not the best CS, but the best religious CS I could hope to have in my backfield. Jerusalem would be a liability and Kandy would tempt me to throw envoys at it and then not find any Natural Wonders anyway. Good stuff! And since it happened on the interturn I got the +2 for this turn. Start the pantheon countdown! ETA Turn 17

And they're nicely out of the way in the backfield, filling up some of that useless Tundra and making it into a speed bump on my flank. They want me to boost Sailing which has me tempted to place St Gloriana on the coast, but we'll see what the south sites hold.

Wrap up the exploration detour over in the east and start looping back.

Settler view didn't show any contacts so omitting that 'shot

Turn 7, nothing much of note. Cross the river, nothing out in the world has changed.

Interestingly, it seems like we got the amenity boost for the this turn but not from the the turn they met us. Which means if the game engine's rounding screws us it could take until T18 for the Pantheon but whatever.


Turn 8: FOCK NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BADBADBAD

Stuck next to Alhambram's Romans. Shitting shit Dollars to donuts as a total newbie I'm looking pretty tasty to those frikking Legions. Bad day. At least there's a fairly narrow access path - gonna need to get St Gloriana up and running with a wall and an encampment toot sweet. Not sure I can afford to save their walls until Limes And will need a plan for when Rome just goes around over the top of the lake...

Speaking of Romans, AlB is the first to gain score, with their crazy free Monument landing them CoL in less than half the time it'll take me (and everyone else, at least) to finish it

We're right behind them with a point from Ooarai getting its second pop. Put them to work on the Wheat. Despite the Forest-Hill getting the builder a turn sooner, Spreadsheeting indicates the food will pay off more. Going to rerun the numbers, though, next turn we'll get the good (i.e. Hill) Gypsum tile The selector likes to bounce around but I have yet to see it change its mind with 1 turn left. Working that should still get the Builder a turn early if the numbers work out for that being the better plan.

Again it's still embarrassingly preliminary since I need to run more alternate scenarios, but current plan is to have the worker farm the wheat, buy the other wheat tile, farm that, and then go quarry the Gypsum. With that I should be able to swing Builder->99% Slinger->Builder->Settler w/ Agoge Chop from the Slinger. With the usual caveats around my spreadsheet's accuracy, this would finish the Settler on Turn 26. Main downside is it delays the Slinger until T25 since I can't manage to squeeze out Craftsmanship before then (stupid OP lucky Romans).

Any thoughts?

Also, Rome is making 1gpt more than me. With their culture boost they got their tile already. And since noone beat me to 2nd citizen, I'm starting to think the starts have at least some degree of uniformity to them. I'm expecting next turn will show everybody at Empire 7. Being the leadoff means I get a slight advantage in timing but a slight disadvantage in information.

Judging by how quickly they got to me, I'm guessing Rome is somewhere over hereabouts, though it's possible they're up at a similar latitude as Ooarai:

The warrior continues on his planned route, though. Finding Rome (and presumably a nearby CS) would be a marginal help but I think more information for which direction to settle first is more useful. He finds some seafood.