[SPOILERS] The Wild Card

[The Black Sword]

Had a silver for Ivory offer from Old Tourist last turn. Long term, that's a good trade, because we're getting another Ivory from the island. Short term, it makes our capital unhappy. Sent them back this:

(I turned off tech if they want to haggle, will finish the turn later).

We really need another happiness source over the next few turns, a lot of cities are primed to grow and could use it. The other person with spare happiness resources is dtay, spare wine and Ivory(if we trade ours away).

Third option:


We could settle the hill the chariot is on, instead of 1N, so we don't need to wait 10t for the border to pop. Considering also a filler city on the desert the workers are on. Does anyone know if that will spread irrigation? Otherwise irrigating the corn is very difficult. If so, that's not a terrible spot and will pick up all the tiles we miss.

[The Black Sword]

Old Tourist accepted, so probably no need to change the location of that city. Also, the growth + completed Library in our capital knocked Feudalism down to 4t. Good, because dtay is onto Metal Casing in 2.

Btw, thinking some more about the next settler from Popinjay, let's send it to the northern spot, sharing clams with Sleeper. The south of the island is heavily forested and we can chop out the last settler for the fish/stone spot from down, saves a lot of travel time.

We should also get a galley/trireme from somewhere, to explore the islands south of ours, and meet yurimack, Azza and Bacon. Given that we're likely to be behind people in tech, accumulating the pre-req bonuses would be smart.

[Jowy]

Tbh I'm not spending enough time on the game to really challenge any of your micro plans
Took a look at some general stuff though:



We have OB with Fintourist and a chariot sitting nearby. Go find his scary stack and keep an eye on where it goes!



This shows Fintourist still building up. Dtay should watch out, right about now would be the perfect time for Fintourist to hit him. However I don't see Fintourist doing that when he's got mackoti rampaging in the south and an angry suttree to the east. He has declared war on MH to grab cities so mackoti doesn't get everything. Fintourist might have high power, but he shouldn't even be thinking about going against us, so we only need to worry about Dtay right now. We are somewhat keeping up with him, but he can build an army of catapults and maces very soon.



We are 17th(!!!) in Soldiers in a 18 player game, with two monsters as our neighbors. In fact you could say it's three monsters, because mackoti is a huge player and he's not too far south of our island. If he settles the small island just south of ours, we'll have clashing borders. I reckon he's the kind of player who would pull the trigger on lightly defended islands. It's not an immediate threat, but in the long term we need to start thinking about the security of the island. Anyway, back to Soldier count, it seems we are currently building a lot of units and got Feudalism lined up, so things should get better on that front

[The Black Sword]

I completely forgot that OB gives more than juicy trade routes! I definitely want to keep a chariot in the area, he's been moving back and forth from the grassland to give us some warning if they're sending a force our way. But sending a chariot to go find their army, and see what's going on in mostly_harmless land should be fun.

I've been rather ignoring the soldiers figure, didn't realise we had sunk to 17th though. And all the archers I've got queued up are actually for MP duty rather than actual fighting. I've even pulled a few archers off Bagabond and Popinjay for MP on the island. I just got suttree's graphs this turn and his power his pretty high too, only just behind Old Tourist. I think we'll do one last pre-GA whip in a lot of cities after Feudalism comes in, and get a couple of Longbows into border cities. How important do you think a promo is for LBs? Might be a better idea to whip another barracks somewhere, just whip that place heavily, despite the GA, and lighten up everywhere else. I'd like to keep Sleeper on HAs since it has the stables and they're still very useful.

Btw, we had a flurry of Hindu spreads a few turns ago that I forgot to mention, shrine is now making 30gpt.

Also, we passed the rival average food this turn.

EDIT: Forgot the most important thing, Commodore re-offered stone for marble! I was just about to offer gpt next turn. I guess we just needed to finish Moai off himself or something.

[Ceiliazul]

congrats in clawing back to above average in food. it looked dim for a while there!

[The Black Sword]

Yup, things are looking a lot better than 40t ago when we were at 3 cities. A lot of that is the massive farmer's gambit of course, and dtay has certainly benefited from that too.

Pindicooter offered us another map trade, which I accepted since we hadn't really gotten any new info ourselves. It shows some potential expansion prospects:


If we could grab the first one on the copper hill, and put LBs there, that'd be hard for yuri-mac to remove and should give us a lock on the second. Also, Azza and Nakor are pretty slow settling the islands past that too:


They seem to be treating them as backline. That's probably hopelessly optimistic though.

It also showed us the extent of M_H's collapse:


Our new wanderer:

[Jowy]

They seem to be treating them as backline. That's probably hopelessly optimistic though.

Very much so, but if they remain unsettled we might as well grab them and see what happens
@ Barracks, they are worth building if you know that you'll be producing units from that city and thus making use of the barracks.

[The Black Sword]

Dtay is being annoying again. On the bright side, if he really wanted to surprise us, he didn't need to show us the workers. Is it worth covering with the horse archers? I'm not sure how much the information that we have HBR is worth. He might have managed to figure it out already anyway, there's only so many reasons you can be as late to currency as we were.

Also, I don't know what he researched after Metal Casing. He played after me and he must have 1 turned the techs so I didn't see his research. It is possible that he built up enough overflow to 1t Construction. Philosophy doesn't seem too threatening though and he's remained in Caste after his GA finished.

[Jowy]

I don't think hiding HBR matters.

[The Black Sword]

I pulled them back in the end, they can move onto the forest again next turn with the axe from Popinjay covering as well(got to love Fast workers ). Leaves only 1 archer in Popinjay, but we'd have 1t notice on any attack and then we would definitely would use the HAs.

I guess I'm a bit paranoid with trying to keep the info under wraps, but you never know when it might come in handy.

Btw, I had a look at the tech rate now that we have Feudalism, looks like CS on T137 is possible. We can certainly get the GP ready for that time too, I think Dr Tachyon can be ready to get out it's Great Scientist and Peregrine can finish the Moai but getting Captain Trips properly set up looks like it would probably be T140.

I'm leaning towards just throwing the GA when CS comes in, get as much gpp as possible in Captain Trips during the GA, whip in a Library to join it's Market and finish the Great Merchant a few turns after the GA ends.

The other option, if we want to wait for Captain Trips, we can probably slip in Calendar now first. The extra happy from the Silk would certainly be useful for the pre-GA growth.