[Spoilers] Shallow Old Human Tourist Hit the beach!

[Old Harry]

Re international news: OT4E just took a city off GermanJoey... who responded with surely a thorough 6-minute turn. 

These developments should be good news to us, but it seems that GJ has given up already (hopefully not quite to the extent that some of the players in past pitbosses). Fingers crossed this is just paranoia, but GJ surely knows that OT4E is bordering us and considering our history that might give him an added incentive to not put up any resistance and let OT4E just get stronger.. 

Anyways, this corner of the world remains crazy

I logged in to delete our trapped work boat, and had a look at the foreign affairs screen - OT gained 6 war weariness (he went from 7 to 13) so looking at this page it seems like the city he took from Joey was empty. Perhaps Joey has a stack ready to counter attack next turn?

In other news Xenu got Alphabet, so it's going to be harder to sell OBs to our neighbours. And Elkad is still our only contact with Currency.

[Old Harry]

Turn 100

Our two new cities are Jade Empire. (I'll come back to that war declaration in a minute.)


And Knights of the old Republic. We're going to try for the MoM here. We'll probably figure out timings next turn when we know how currency affects our tech rate.


This new city is why OT has declared war on Elkad. Fintourist took one look at this plant last turn and ed. I wonder if he's just attacking with one archer or if there are more units incoming? Our scouting immortal should be able to tell us next turn.


And since it's turn 100 you all deserve a nice big map stitch. I'm sure one of the others will do a state-of-the-game macro post as well.

The international situation is getting more complex as Xenu has Alphabet too.


Demos and power. With a bit of fiddling with slider and tiles it's possible to get us to #1 GNP. Toku is going for Alphabet, which seems odd since Elkad and we aren't likely to give him OBs. And we haven't let him defog a route around us. Edit: ah, but his work boat got around Elkad to visit GJ. Shame.

[Old Harry]

Oh, and the power graph shows OT4E got horseback riding a couple of turns ago. If he's been whipping stables this turn he'll be able to produce 3-promo (amphibious) numidian cavalry. If not then they'll just be promoted to shock or cover. We'll put some spears in our border cities just in case.

[Old Harry]

Turn 101

Currency means... Two international trade routes! This is to OT4E's city on the island that we share, while AC has one to Turfan. Did he take Turfan from Joey last turn? Just another 5ish turns before we should get 2-commerce routes everywhere from him (when the peace bonus hits 75%).


Although we should get a connection to Donovan next turn, which may fill up our routes...


Poor old Donovan seems to have had some flooding.


OT has his unique unit. I just hope we're now good enough friends that they don't come calling.


Oh. I don't think we need to worry guys! Actually I'd guess that OT put a couple of units next to the new city, which Elkad then destroyed. Hopefully they don't just leave it at that though. Attack!


Demos and power.

[Zalson]

What is the benefit of Numidian cav in RB mod? Str 6 + defensive bonus plus C1?

[Fintourist]

What is the benefit of Numidian cav in RB mod? Str 6 + defensive bonus plus C1?

Just C1 on top of normal HA (str 6, no defensive bonus). One could say it's only a minor boost, but on the other hand it will improve something that is already useful in the first place.

***

Macrowise, our output demos (GNP, MFG, Food) are not looking completely terrible at the moment, but the most alarming stat in our demos is the amount of our land tiles. The leaders have 50 % more land than us even after we settled our latest filler-quality cities. In order to succeed we would need to keep expanding heavily in the short term, but reality is that we will probably stagnate for 20-30 turns before we can achieve something via military or overseas expansion.

The lack of land tiles is of course related to the fact that the early expansion phase just did not go our way. Both OT4E and Toku expanded solely towards us and as you might remember, in addition put 10+ axes inside our borders at turn 60. As a result, in the south it seems that GJ and Donovan have a lot of land available (also thanks to eliminating razing Dark Savant) and even Elkad, who seemingly started slow, is now allowed to settle areas that should have been contested 40-50 turns ago.

OT4E and Elkad already signed peace so the OT4E-backstab that we started organizing last night when we got sight of Elkad's stack is not happening. So we are now trying to make the most out of our cards, which includes grabbing couple of key techs supported by Currency/wealth-building. Maths-Calendar for MoM attempt and much needed luxury resources (we go vertical as horizontal is not in the cards). And then some of Constru, HBR, IW and hopefully bulbed Machinery so that we can convert our hammers into military that can actually create trouble for our neighbors. More of that stuff surely in the coming reports.

[Old Harry]

Turn 102

Gotta feel sorry for Xenu's neighbour, whoever that may be. This is the Buddhist holy city, taken from Dark Savant's cold, dead hands. I guess we'll find Donovan's capital if we go west or south, so maybe trying to go south west will get us our next contact? We uncovered the coastal link this turn, but the trade connection icon didn't appear yet, so I guess it'll update when the turn rolls.


FFH will pop a great person in four turns. We can afford to drop a couple more scientist-turns to make the engineer probability as high as possible.


I didn't get a sighting of OT's Numidian Cavalry from Hippo, I hope it moved south, but we should get eyes on Hippo again next turn just to be sure.


This is our current plan for the MoM, which relies on running wealth and research builds everywhere to get Calendar eot105 and crossing our fingers that OT4E and Toku don't want to cause a stramash. We'll finish t107 or 108, depending on too many factors to count (the most important of which is the number of dumb miss-clicks the turn player makes).


Demos and power. It turns out running wealth in every city looks pretty good.

[Old Harry]

Looks Joey is fully checked out now. Is there a lurker who isn't spoiled on OT's thread who'd like to euthanize Mongolia so that the whole game doesn't just grind to a halt?

[Old Harry]

Turn 103

I was tempted by a road and ignored my own advice. Should have gone SW from the furs and been more likely to meet a new friend.


We were a bit concerned about TBS getting a big score increase but it was probably that he got Code of Laws and founded Confucianism, or he built a national wonder. T-5 on our MoM build.


I was looking through the diplo screens and noticed that Joey has iron hooked - makes sense since he's a bit jungle-choked - does that help him fighting back against OT4E? Toku has 307 gold and income of 35. If his economy is similar to ours he'll need another 3 turns of saving money, then 5-6 to get Currency. If we get a great engineer in a couple of turns and bulb Machinery we can attack without worrying about catapults (or indeed anything that might hurt crossbows ).


Demos and graphs. We're getting very good value from our trade routes! For some reason we've only got them to half of Donovan's cities though, which we're speculating is because he hasn't linked his empire up yet. Seems very odd. Anyway someone turned tech on to knock us off the top GNP spot.

[Old Harry]

Turn 104

With Maths in we just need to build 4 beakers of research per turn to make Calendar a 2-turn tech. We can dial back the wealth builds a little, so we're putting some hammers into spears and Moai again. We had some more score-jump paranoia at the turn roll, but Mack just built the Great Library. So that's okay then. The scout finds more of Joey's borders - once he's cleared out the jungle he'll have an amazing empire. If he's still in charge of Mongolia by then that is.


Demos and power. Toku laughs in the face of my guesswork last turn and it looks like he'll have Currency eot106. OT continues to build Numidian Cavalry, which I think he's sending southwards...