Also, I'm not really with it atm, vicious throat infection, antibiotics and analgesia. If I seem a bit weirder or slower than usual that's probably why.
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[Spoiler] PB42: Rusten and mackoti play Krill playing Bismarck of Portugal
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Couple of pointers: the workers at the capital have to stagger the chops to be able to whip the settler, this is best done by using Worker 4 (the southern most worker) to road the tile SE of the capital for 1 turn and then move to the next forest to chop.
Leaving the forest N-NW of the capital to the copper city, allows the grass hill forest and that saved forest to get dropped into a granary within 5 turns of settling copper city. City 2 can 2 turn a worker with a whip at size 3 (overflow from the warrior enables this) but if we aren't going for Oracle then we really need to work out what the worker requirements are, as it may be that we don't want that fifth worker and would rather just grow straight to size 4 on warriors and build a settler, depends how the settlers come out and when the capital needs the pig for. I'm pretty sure the worker micro for a rush to the furs plan significantly diverges from the worker micro for a quick Oracle in a few turns (T43?), once city 2 reaches size 3. We can save gold after Pottery until T50, T51 so the tech is the problem, but we need to invest so many worker turns into prechopping forests that we don't want to chop if we ought to make a decision on which plan to follow sooner than that. 
Couple of stacked turn "reports". I committed the sin of being last to end turn this morning.
Turn 40  Turn 41  Turn 42  Turn 43  OK, I'm being ballsy here: the lion should attack the scout. The scout wins, we get Medic 1, the scout dies, I change the aim of the game to killing every barb lion I can find. I burnt a worker turn on T42 to see if there was a lion stopping me moving a warrior and worker forward to put a turn into a road on the corn, unfortunately there was. Thankfully the lion moved away from the city location. (Actually, this was one of the reasons Wheel has been useful, if we couldn't road and settle we would have struggled to deal with the barb animals).  At least one player had easy access to early happiness.  That player with a 13 food crop yield lead over us is OH:  I'm guessing a combination of seafood for the quick hook up, not working any hills, and just having more food resources than we do.  We are up by about 8hpt. Given we are two turns behind due to SPI and moving the capital, meh. Although we are putting 6hpt into warriors, it's not like we can manage without warriors due to the land lay out (we will need fogbusters). If OH doesn't need to build military because he has no land for barbs to spawn in, then that is a potential long term advantage we have.  I can't read this, and I'm not going to spend any time trying to figure it out.  I think most of this difference would be down to religion, however we are researching a 1.4 modifier tech so actually, it's still not great.  Why does Amazing Grace, OH's capital have 90 culture? Did he get a religion spread? The palace culture now gives 2cpt, I'll check next turn to see if he generates 3cpt in which case I think yeah, he got a religion spread. That would likely be why he revolted, to get the extra happiness in the capital rather than just hiding that he was the player that got Hinduism until later.
I played through a sim run after playing T43.
It is trivial to get the furs city down around T65 (actually earlier is not a problem). I can't see any options I'd consider viable, other than Oracle>Monarchy, or the rush to the Furs. Below is how we can get the copper/deer, overlapping deer/drycorn/plains sheep (future HE? city) and the furs city down.
The main advantage of this, is we can prechop and road the forests for the copper city granary chops, which we need to get the settlers to the north quickly, and we'll have 4 workers to do all the roads, hooking the deer, chopping the barracks at the middle city and then hook the furs. I've not detailed the worker micro, but sufficed to say that the warriors we build in the first 3 cities can cover the entire entire area via fogbust easily enough, or guard the specific tiles. The timeline for hooking the furs depends on how we want to micro the workers to get the barracks and hooking the deer, but I think we can get everything improved by T70 with no difficulty (other than barbs being pains). City 5 (copper city) can work the improved copper on founding, so reaches size 5 (as furs should be hooked) as fast is possible (literally, every food resource hooked and worked at the earliest opportunity, and copper is hooked about 5 turns sooner). Copper city can just sit on the copper, two grass cottages and two plains cottages for the capital, or we can swap the pig and the deer around much quicker than we could if we went to Oracle Monarchy. We would be able to settle the northern island by T75 with no difficulty (double forest chop galley in furs city). We would have half of the starting area covered by cities, so if horses popped in outer borders, we would still likely be able to get them hooked quickly as well. We are not chopping any forests at city 2 for this either. I've ran sims for both Oracle and the Furs rush. The Oracle plan is good, and we would have more than enough warriors to get the capital working 10 cottages. The problem with this is we would be delayed to getting an island city (city 4 on the coast has been neglected in this post, because I'm keeping options open, but there are no good islands down there that we can see, and Sailing would get delayed past AH). We will not know the location of horses until around T68-ish, more likely T70 even if we landed Monarchy. We will struggle to give the copper city the pigs if we are trying to grow the capital towards size 10, meaning that horizontal expansion would have to come from cities 2 (no granary, no forests) and city 3 (no granary, no forests, 1 food resources and few 2 food tiles to work). We are gaining 480 beakers towards a tech we are going to want anyway with this happiness situation though, but just because we have those beakers doesn't mean we can neglect getting Sailing, Archery, AH or HBR. The advantage of the furs rush is that we will cover all of the above weakness, but with one major downside: we can't get the capital past size 6. OTOH, we can work 4 cottages with the copper city, 1 cottage each from cities 2 and 4, and the capital can work 4 with no difficulty, so the cottage growth is not the problem, we will just have to wait for the opportunity to grow the capital. I think this is actually a safer play, given OH is ahead of us in expansion, and tech towards Oracle, and would benefit from GP points as he has a religion to shrine. We can't get a religion out of that tech path now.
Agreed on all counts. Will try to do a playthrough with the sim as well later, but strategically it seems sound. An early Oracle play makes a lot of sense for team OH and we'll always come 2nd to them. 1 luxury is not a lot, but it's what we have to work with.
Great Wall is an interesting idea -- I like it. Will save a lot of GPT in fogbusters.
Here is an up to date sim for the start of next turn, T44 (The FoW has not been revealed bu the map is basically accurate, might be one or two mistakes but it's basically sound).
Turn 44
 One dead lion for one hit. Promote and one turn healing (anywhere if promoted M1) and the scout is back to full health. Plan to heal T45 in the city, T46 move onto the plains forest 2SW and T47 to confirm if the SW is a dead end (I'm pretty sure it is). The warrior has already moved SW this turn out of city 3, so on T46 it can reach the plains hill 3S2W, so on T47 when we move the scout into the unknown we should have a bit more knowledge than we do now and it should not be as risky. T45 we whip the settler in the capital and the worker in City 2. T46 move the settler to the plains forest 1E3S of the capital, T47 settle, and the worker from city 2 (Worker 5) just moves to start cottaging the capital. We save gold from next turn. If we are just going to run straight to AH, we only need to save gold until eoT47 I think, rather than eoT51. City 2 will build 2 warriors after this worker. The current warrior needs to stay in place because we will need the happy on T48, as the warrior being built will be 14/15, city at size 3 with the whip unhappy in place, but the following two warriors should head NE to start clearing out barbs around the copper city location, and fogbusting north if at all possible. The capital will build 2 warriors whilst growing as well, the first one stays as MP, the second also wanders north for cover, but that's in about 12 turns.  So we are now second in Crop Yield...even with the double whip next turn we only lose 1fpt. I wonder what the terrain is like for OH, because it seems to be more...lush than what everyone else has. (Note to lurkers, this is not a complaint, just an observation, I'm not complaining that we've got 180 backlines tiles to settle). I can also confirm that OH is generating 3cpt in his capital, therefore he either got lucky with the religion spread, or he built a monument (ha) or a barracks (just no). |
