[SPOILERS] The Wild Card

[Jowy]

I'm logging out, you should play this turn since you are around :P

[The Black Sword]

K, played the turn, left some signs for suggested worker actions too. Nobody should be on Avoid Growth anymore, so just grow the cities T137 and reconfigure for GA use T138 if I'm not back for that.

I worked the mine 1 turn too often in Captain trips btw, decided to give Kid Dinosaur it's lake tile so it can grow on T137, so Captain trips will be 1 food off.

Thanks again, see you!

[Jowy]

Commodore canceled the stone deal.
Modular Man got free hindu spread.
Dtay popped borders in New Xerxes, pushing away our lookout chariot. Might have been last turn :P
Set EP's to mackoti. This was for real last turn.
Dtay set research to Machinery.
I set ours to IW, but put research to 0% this turn.

Tech-wise, I think IW first. Having iron makes Guilds better, and the production yields are welcome as well. It's also cheap as hell.
After IW: Machinery -> Guilds -> Banking. Calendar possibly, but we only have silks to improve.

[The Black Sword]

Commodore canceled the stone deal.

1 turn too early . That'll cost us a few hammers but there's probably no point delaying the GA.

Everything else sounds good. I agree iron next is best, should generate some GA hammers too. I think Calendar will be worth a bit. We're building markets in all our big cities, so silk is +2 happy really. The second silk can be traded for Old Tourist's dyes instead of the 5gpt at the least. Given how cheap it is compared to everything else(and we'll have lots of pre-req bonuses too) I think it's worth picking up.

I should be able to play this turn in a couple of hours btw.

[The Black Sword]

On second thought, it looks like you're right about Calendar, any city that really needs the happiness to grow, which is pretty much only Jetboy, can make use of HR. We can pick it up when we feel we need it, maybe after Paper to double the probably very large pre-req bonuses. Last turn we picked up Iron and this turn I set full research on Machinery. We can make it in 3t, but I'm thinking we might want to keep a buffer of 200g for emergency archer -> LB upgrades.

Our iron sources aren't particularly inspired, but at least we have it:



Sitting under Modular Man is particularly annoying, but the Moai spot isn't a great one either.

It looks to me like we can make it to Guilds by the end of the golden age. I've been rethinking the GM trade mission from Captain Trips. With all the markets, banks and grocer in the capital we'll be putting up, our gold multiplier will be a lot higher than our beaker one I think, which implies to me that bulbing is a better use of the GP. Assuming we pick up Paper and Alphabet, both of which are reasonably economically useful, a GM will bulb Printing Press and a GS will bulb Education. I'm thinking Printing Press will be better, I've left it on Merchants for now, but I'm not sure. Some sort of long term plan would be really useful ...

Other techs to think about are Aes->Lit, which is hard to evaluate and Theology or Philosophy if we want to revolt from OR at the end of the GA. Another question is if we can revolt from Slavery to either Caste or Serfdom. I think either of them will result in more hammers than slavery in the long run, but we lose a lot of flexibility obviously, particularly the threat to whip out an army in a hurry if attacked. For the civic swaps, it's probably a good idea to see what dtay ends up in after his GA before making a decision. That should tell us if we need better military.

Dtay's power is slowly growing atm and we've lost research visibility on him. I set EPs back on him, he's got paper though, so we see his techs anyway, maybe they should go back on mackoti.


Dtay also birthed what I presume is another low odds Great Artist from his Great Library city. Might go towards bulbing Music, but either way, he'll probably have a GA threat for a quite a while and he's already pushing our borders back:

We lost the forest in Modular Man, we should get it back in the very long future. We lost those contested tiles in Popinjay but the Ivory at least should be stabilised by the Barracks in Bagabond. Originally I wanted to run artists and culture buildings to regain these, but I cooled down a bit. I was looking forward to working plains river farms in the GA but they're not worth much over the long run. The military threat is more relevant I think and we couldn't win enough tiles back to block that.


Here's some GA pictures:

Back to being the best city in the world.












I messed up here, should have left the HA completed this turn in the city. I cancelled the dyes+silver for Ivory +5gpt trade and figured Old Tourist would accept the Ivory for Silver re-offer. They haven't though, so looks like we have to eat a turn of unhappiness. I had a look around for possibly Ivory trades with other people, but none look promising.







Demos look ok:


The settler from Peregrine is going to the last island spot, here's our timetable:


After that we just have fillers everywhere, need to evaluate which of those are worth settling. Also, suttree is being very trusting:

We need just a few more GG points to unlock our Heroic Epic.

[The Black Sword]

I missed that the Ivory tile is 4th ring for Riole as well, looks like we're going to lose that too. Looks like Riole has TGL, Pathenon, NE, Library, Barracks and religion for the 26 culture per turn into the Ivory marked in the screenshot. In addition, New Xerxes is putting another 2 per turn in. Even if we popped third ring borders, we're only putting 22 into the tile. I don't see how we can keep it without something drastic.

Hopefully it's not the end of the world, that's our second spare Ivory and we're actually having difficulty trading it away, though I'm waiting to hear back from Pindicooter for Ivory-Spices now that we're no longer at war.

In other events,


I'm going to send a sentry chariot over here to meet plako to pick up the pre-req bonuses. We're closing the score gap between us and Lewwyn .

I'm assuming that's another skirmish between suttree and Old Tourist but we should keep an eye on that too to pick up any potential spoils.

Finally, we founded Chrysalis this turn:

[The Black Sword]

I thought we'd be very close to losing the Ivory this turn but we still had 66% on the tile, so I finally went into the world builder and gave a city 4th ring borders. Turns out Riole is not putting any pressure on the Ivory after all. So, it's just Bagabond vs New Xerxes which should be a fight we can win. Still, I noticed he had a library in the city too, so we should speed up the third ring borders a bit to be sure:


In the south, these guys showed up to mess with the plans:


I'm going to delay the Lighthouse in Water Lily and chop out a Trireme first. I'm pretty sure they can't travel on ocean tiles in our culture, so the whales should be safe, can anyone confirm this?



Feeling safe enough militarily, so I'm putting the market in here to deal with the happiness problems and allow it to grow a little more. We're connecting corn soon, so health isn't a problem. Modular Man is currently working the Ivory and Mine to complete the Lighthouse before it retakes the clams.


I think we'll spend T143 and T144 saving gold for the Academy when the markets in Fortunato and Sleeper come in. Not sure about T142, because we have a pretty high science rate.

Dtay is still growing a huge pile of gold. A lib run and he's waiting for the scientists to bulb Edu first is the only thing that really makes sense. That must be his last civic swap of the GA though, he probably wants OR to build Oxford and the Universities. We might be able to get away with staying out of Slavery.

[Ceiliazul]

I'm pretty sure they can't travel on ocean tiles in our culture, so the whales should be safe, can anyone confirm this?

confirmed. culture allows galley/trireme to travel on ocean tiles only for the boats of the civ owning that tile.

lurking with interest, keep up the good reporting!

[The Black Sword]

Thanks Ceil.



That free spread is awesome. Allows me to work the grass forest instead of the artist and only pop borders 1 turn later. The forest hammers are enough trigger an extra bonus hammer from Organised religion too. This shrine is great.

Dtay has now researched Education, I assume that scientist bulbed in, so he's definitely got a good shot at liberalism. If he does the standard route and takes Nationalism and the Taj then he's got another GA coming up, so these aren't necessarily his final civics. Even if he doesn take Nationalism, I don't think Taj is a lock for him.

Anyway, I really think we should stay out of Slavery after our GA ends. With the size of most our cities, it takes ~20f to grow back an extra pop. For our smaller cities we mostly want to grow them to that size anyway. So, only really the first pop is economical, that's 30h every 10 turns. Working 1 Caste workshop in the city is easily a better deal IMO. We can try to keep spare archers in our border cities for emergency upgrades to give a similar extra defense as slaving out an extra unit. The advantage of Slavery is obviously to get a lot of things out quickly in a short time frame but I don't think that will be necessary in our current situation. I still need to evaluate Serfdom vs Caste though. Caste vs Slavery is just the easiest comparison to make since every city can use both. Serfdom does depend on how many windmills we will use obviously, I think we will only have 3 watermills.

We settled Enovy:


I was thinking of saving this name for a conquered city, but that doesn't look too likely for a while, this also seemed a nice place. His power is to send out pheromones that makes everyone like him, hopefully it works on mackoti . The LBs are heading over if I can avoid the barbs.



Decided to save gold this turn in the end. Also, Pindicooter accepted the Ivory - Spices deal. The settler in Fortunato is for the plains cow spot.

Also, we passed Lewwyn.

[The Black Sword]

So, I'm thinking our labour civic should switch to Serfdom at the end of the GA.

I counted 20 Windmillable hills and 3 potential watermills to benefit. The hammer benefit from Caste is similar. It's complicated of course, because some cities want to grow, which means they can use grass windmills but not workshops, other cities need hammers and have no other way besides workshops to get them, outside of slavery(like Envoy). Also, our bureau capital wants windmills and not workshops and that carries higher weight. I made some rough estimates about the immediate future though and they seem pretty even.

The deal breaker then is that auxiliary benefits of Serfdom are better I think. Either workshops or windmills will require a lot of worker labour to put down and we're currently on 11 workers for 15 cities(growing onto coast tiles has allowed us to skate by with such a low number, but that's a good deal as a Fin civ I think). +75% worker labour is still worth a lot to us, and the sooner we put down the windmills, the quicker the bonus comes into play. Additionally we save 6gpt from the civic cost+inflation. In favour of caste, we currently already have 3 workshops, though I'm not sure we want to work the one in the Moai city. And there's obviously the specialist working ability, which would translate into getting Captain Trips GP out a lot earlier. After that I don't think we want to run too many specialists for a while. We can put down some workshops in Hiram, build the National Epic and run specialists there, but we'll have 4 spots from market+library already. We've gotten good border popping use out of Caste artists during the GA, but I don't think they're too important for the any of our other filler cities. We'll soon have +100% gold in the capital and missionaries will pay back pretty quickly when you include the OR bonus. The main caste advantage is the quick border pop for food in the second ring which seems unnecessary with Envoy and Chrysalis founded.

Other points
-workshops tend to steal prime cottage tiles from a Fin civ
-come replaceable parts, we probably want to be working Serfdom windmills 2/3/1 everywhere we can(hopefully we make it to replaceable parts ...)

Do you have an opinion here Jowy? I think they're close but the extra worker power clinches it for me.