[Spoilers] Shallow Old Human Tourist Hit the beach!

[Old Harry]

Turn 129

OT moved his triremes to cover one galley and offloaded his CR3 axe and C2 Numid to defend Ivan. He also moved a couple of the fast galleys into Tacape, meaning Kerk (new name needed please!) might be under threat next turn. Hopefully not, as I don't want to lose the CR3 sword that's been healing in the city. Another spear is heading that way, but it's a couple of turns before it can enter the city.


Our intrepid explorers find that the new world doesn't have existing occupants. I love exploring. We'll know more next turn.


We moved the trireme SE after this pic to get a shot at this galley next turn when peace runs out with Toku. We don't want him seeing our galleons and he might just have units on board which could cause trouble. It would be funny to war/peace Toku and keep the galley trapped for another ten turns though.


These chaps are going to be the naval strike force. They'll hit OT's island first, after that it's probably Toku, but who knows what our explorers will find. I've got a hankering for hitting Xenu and taking his shrine and pyramids, but I guess that's a bit premature just yet.


Demos and power. We really need to improve our crop yield.

[Old Harry]

Turn 130

GJ just took another city from OT. I think there's still one more city south of here for him to acquire. Mackoti ended his golden age without revolting to Bureau, which makes me think he's planning some astronomy bulb action too.


Our sentry has a look at what Toku is up to and we breathe a sigh of relief as we've got ten further turns of peace to prep our attack on him. Funnily I was thinking of trying to figure out how to teleport his galley away from us to get peace without aggro, but he deleted it to save us the trouble.

Worryingly we think he's on his way to getting knights. He still needs  Machinery, HBR and Guilds to start building them, which is 3362 beakers. Toku got monarchy eot121, then I think revolted the next turn, he'll complete Feudalism eot131 so that's 9 turns for 1200 beakers. Which means about 130 bpt, which means 25 turns - perhaps 20 as cottages mature and his economy improves. So we need to be ready for that by t152.


In much more important and exciting overseas news our explorer lands and finds... nothing at all? Is this a cruel mapmaker trick or have we just found the only bit of astroland without any resources at all? Even without resources I guess we can build a few decent cities, but I was sure we'd at least find some gold over here. The explorer will go NW and the caravel SW next turn, hopefully there's something for them to find.


Our second caravel will head NW from Goldeneye and discover northern astroland in two or three turns, which is happily just when we need to make decisions about where to send our settlers.


Demos, power and victory screen.

We have 136 tiles out of the 5720 land tiles out there. Using the demos screen we think that there are (181904*21+178000)*(136/178000)=3054 land tiles settled right now. So that should give us 2500 still available to use. :D That should be enough to win the game, right? No-one else wants an early Astro do they?

[Old Harry]

Turn 131

Phew, it turns out the mapmakers didn't hate us after all. Project settler-spam is under way. Note the barb axe by the fish - we'll be sending a few crossbows over with the settlers.


Our coastal cities are pre-building galleys to upgrade the turn we complete Astro, otherwise settlers are the order of the day. We're grabbing Polytheism this turn too, to save a bit of time on the epics and maybe take a shot at the parthenon.


Elkad re-settled up on Morrowind. This is a bad sign for future relations.


In the battle for Carthage we thought OT was the winner, but a bit more scouting revealed a mini-stack to the west of the city which could just tip the balance in Elkads favour. It's all down to how many promotions each side has earned in the fighting. Not shown is that we've moved 5 swords and a spear towards Carthage from the north. Elkad can see 2 swords and the spear - will that influence how he approaches the city? So do we push forward and attack Elkad if he takes the city, or do we push forward and attack OT if he saves the city? Or do we avoid picking a fight on territory where we don't have an edge (which right now is at sea)? Stay tuned!


Demos and all the graphs.

[Old Harry]

Turn 132

We do a little bit more exploring and get some bad news. TBS is ahead of us.


Hopefully we can settle this northern land and leave him to do the south, but who knows. He has six more cities than us and is in bureacracy already.


I was playing but waiting for Elkad so we wouldn't double-move him at Carthage, but then he logged in and I got to watch him hit OT. OT had promo-healed a few units, but Elkad must have had more promotions. I didn't get a before shot - this pic is after Elkad had fought at least one battle.


He got a great general early, and gradually whittled away the spear and archers leaving a situation like this.


I suspect that he deliberately didn't take the city because if he moves one unit in then the culture disappears and we can use the roads to take it from him. As it is we can move up this turn (I'd put everything N of the city so it can be covered by the spear) and we would most likely take the city from Elkad next turn. But we've got no idea what he's bringing in terms of reinforcements, we definitely don't have a tech edge, we've got our overseas expansion to concentrate on and if we do declare then he will almost certainly turn it into a death match. Rather than advancing we moved our units toward Hadrumentum, but they can hit Carthage next turn if Elkad clears the culture. We'll have to see what Elkad does first.

In other international news Mackoti has knights and banking. He and TBS really need to do something about each other.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 133

Too knackered for a proper write up, so this will have to do:



Turn 134

[Old Harry]

Turn 135

And lo the heavens guide us and keep us safe on the oceans. We used galley pre-builds to complete three galleons the turn that Astronomy completed, we'll have four more by t139, hopefully securing us a good chunk of the new world. On one galleon we load up some swords to attack Ivan next turn, on the others we have a mix of settlers, workers and units. TBS' galleon is a little worrying, hopefully he won't take a 50/50 at one of our loaded galleons.


Up north there is a barbarian city to attack (just next to the highlighted tile) along with some furs to add to our already joyous nation.


I made a world map stitch. I've done some speculating about where astro islands might be, but nothing is certain. We're sending our southern caravel to investigate the ones I think are off GJ's coast. If we can settle these then it'll make hitting GJ a good next target for us. Will Pindicator (or a neighbour of his) contest these islands?


Dotmapping thoughts on the new world. This will change as the explorer and caravel uncover new terrain and TBS keeps settling cities where we want ours to be.


Figuring out some logistics with our galleon manouvers. It'd be easier if we had the new world dotmapped, but this'll do for now. There are two options for Jade Empire and Goldeneye. We can decide which to use next turn when the explorer uncovers some more land.


Demos and power. We really should do something with all this power.

[Ituralde]

Very nice maps and overviews. Thanks for that, they're always appreciated!

[Old Harry]

Turn 136

Just a quickie - I screwed up some moves this afternoon and didn't have the best evening ever, so this is more rant than turn report.

It's been a bit of a kick in the teeth that TBS beat us to the new world. He settled four new cities last turn. Hopefully there is still plenty of new land for us to take (particularly in the north and the land off German Joey's coast), but we'll have to see - more exploration will be vital, so I'm gutted to have lost one of our explorers to a hasty move and barb axe a couple of turns ago.

There was a point where we could have launched our golden age 12 turns earlier instead of building an academy and so possibly got the astro bulb earlier, but we decided that hitting Toku (then changed our minds to OT4E) would give more benefit. I'd be interested to know how much difference that decision made.

Anyway TBS is claiming gold. Hopefully we'll get 2 clams, deer and silver. And maybe a silk/clam city to the north.


Up north there's a city that should grow in four turns (if a worker isn't being built). Maybe we'll get there in time to take the city. Maybe not.


Back home I lost two swords (at 67% and 50%) and beat an archer (at 70ish%) attacking Ivan. We won't take the city next turn, maybe the turn after?


Demos and power.

[superdeath]

How would you rank the field currently?

Is there anything you would have changed about your opening 60 turns or so had you known what you now know? ( such as rushing toku, taking a faster bee-line for astro ect )

If you have time, i would love to know your thoughts on my pb39 thread. Thanks!

[Old Harry]

How would you rank the field currently?

Is there anything you would have changed about your opening 60 turns or so had you known what you now know? ( such as rushing toku, taking a faster bee-line for astro ect )

If you have time, i would love to know your thoughts on my pb39 thread. Thanks!

Well Mack started well, but TBS is going to catch up fast if Mack doesn't have an Astro plan of his own (Liberalism?). I don't know enough about Rusten's position but he's built a lot of catapults and is keeping them on his border with Mackoti. If we want a chance we need some uncontested astro land of our own (maybe down south?) and for the leaders to fight each other.

I think the biggest mistake of the early game was settling up on OT4E instead of grabbing the excellent Goldeneye site. We could have handled fighting Toku alone, but getting bogged down with OT as well put us waaay behind the curve. There's probably some other stuff too, but we had such strong micro that it's disappointing that a strategic decision like that had such a big effect.

Turn 137

I got lucky with one of last turns mis-moves - should have covered the galleon with the triremes, but it works out nicely, the galleon only needs one more XP to get an extra move and OT threw away all his 4-move galleys.


I dropped two swords and a spear off and loaded a few more units onto another galleon. Unfortunately most of our army is down south on GJ's border, so it's hard to put a strike force together quickly. We'll go gather some of them to attack Tacape in the coming turns.


We'll settle one city next turn, then another the turn after. Hopefully this explorer will survive against the spear. Then he can go uncover some more fog.


With Literature in we start the Heroic Epic in Elite and we'll get onto the National Epic just as soon as AC builds a library. Our tech path was going to be a knights beeline, but Music doesn't have any known tech bonus, and I don't see an artist getting born in the event log, so it could be worth a shot for the free great artist and the Sistine Chapel.

Demos and power.