Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Sullla]

Thanks for moving the settler and workers forward. We seem to have everything covered safely down in the south.

More importantly, Apolyton still does not have Education discovered at the start of this turn. And we'll be lightbulbing Education and finishing Liberalism at the end of this very turn. Folks, I think we can now safely say that the Liberalism prize will be ours.

I'm heading off to work in a few minutes, I'll play and report the turn this evening.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Whoo, I see the beak coming through the egg, go chicken, go!

[Brian Shanahan]

Whoo, I see the beak coming through the egg, go chicken, go!

I think our chicken is a Velociraptor somehow.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

I'm heading off to work in a few minutes, I'll play and report the turn this evening.

Works out perfectly because you were going to wait to set off the fireworks until late in the turn anyhow.

[SleepingMoogle]

I think our chicken is a Velociraptor somehow.

I was going to say Road Runner. But that would work too.

[Ceiliazul]

Here's the before picture. We have not yet bulbed education. After the turn roll, you can add 9000 more beakers to our line. That launches our dot up into the middle of SleepingMoogles last post!

Also: Can we stop talking about CivFr as our primary rival yet?



Disclaimer:

Note that the Ceiliazul graph underestimates the progress of several teams. These are the score points not accounted for currently:

Univers: 59
CivFr: 46
WPC: 18
CivPlayers: 13

Ie, the performance of at least Univers and CivFr is very much underestimated in the graph - that's why I haven't made any myself for some time now.

[Ruff_Hi]

Wow - CFC did well. What techs did they pick up?

[Sullla]

Turn 130 - 375AD

The Liberalism clock is down to its final turn... and none of the other teams appear to know what we're doing as yet.



We spotted two different Apolyton cities this turn, Edirne and Aurora. As kjn has already pointed out in this thread, Aurora was Apolyton's second city and has a ton of infrastructure inside, including an Academy. The presence of the gold resource indicates that this is their version of Mansa's Muse. It's a very nice city, and the home of their own self-founded religion. This would be a strong location to control if by some random chance we could ever get up here. Apolyton's capital should be located somewhere fairly close by.



This is the other side of Apolyton's territory, on the border with the Germans. We are going to have to make sure we have a new NAP in place with Apolyton before we go to war with the Germans; we can try to renegotiate in about 10 more turns. I suspect that they will foolishly sign another extention just like every other team.

Anyway, we now have visibility on every German city. Once we finish defogging that northwest corner, I'll recall the war chariot and use him for military police duty. We are actually pretty solid on military police units right now, despite a lot of shuffling around in recent turns.



I still can't decide if this land connects over to CFC down here in the deep south. I'm kind of hoping that it does not, as our galley won't have far to travel if it does. One way or another, we should know in the next few turns. Even if this is a closed sea, we can always build a fort down here and gain access to the polar ocean that way.



This is the south after moving our workers and settler at the start of the turn. The barb axe suicided against Lew (who would have about 13 XP now if it weren't for the experience cap against barbs), he moved to cover the settler, and then the war chariot protected our two roading workers. We'll found the city on this spot next turn, so feel free to go ahead and suggest names. Workers will improve the furs first, and then probably chop a forest for the work boat (we can't work the crabs until borders expand anyway). The Seven Tribes missionary will convert this city to help with that.



In the north, we'll have a road completed through this jungle next turn. There's been a lot of jungle clearing taking place, and this region is very slowly starting to become productive. I'm planning to whip the granary in Frozen Jungle this turn; it just grew to size 2, there are no other tiles to work beyond the rice currently, and we might as well get that food box filled up right away. I actually already did the whip in the sandbox, but I figured it would run it past this team before taking the action in-game. Seems pretty straightforward to me. We'll have some more jungle cleared by the time the city regrows to size 2.

Focal Point and Brick By Brick can finally stop building Wealth now; I wanted to make sure that we got to Liberalism safely before putting them back on builds. They should both be doing military for now. My suggestion would be for both to work on catapults, since we'll need plenty of them later on and I want to be building elephants/knights once we have the tech for them. War chariots are also an option, but again, I think we're OK for now on military police units, and we are definitely going to need a bunch of catapults as always. How about more 1t war chariots in the Heroic Epic city, and catapults in Focal Point/Brick? What does everyone think?

In the capital:



Everyone wanted to whip the market, so I have gone ahead and done so. There is your perfect 300/150 production overflow into Taj Mahal, the maximum allowed for a market. Credit to novice for the micromanagement. Note however that we've been forced to drop some cottage tiles in the process, and we'll be whipping off another pop point when we overflow from that settler in a couple of turns. It's probably worthwhile to lock down Taj Mahal and take no chances, I just hate whipping off those mature cottages.



Over in the east, we finished a library with whip overflow in Simple Life last turn. I have it set to a market for lack of too much else right now. We actually want a forge in the city next, but we can't build that yet, and the overflow was minimal enough that it didn't seem worthwhile to build Wealth. (Only 7 production overflow.) I preferred market over courthouse because Simple Life is such a heavy commerce city. These locations are mostly going to go forge -> market in the upcoming turns, followed by university (?) Well, we can use the Golden Age to get a lot of that construction done.



Eastern Dealers is working towards National Epic right now. I had thought to swap to forge and triple-whip it when we discover Metal Casting, but I've heard calls to grow this city to size 12 or 13 and then run a whole bunch of specialists during the next Golden Age, which does seem like a good plan. If we want to do that, then we can't slip in a forge whip. There are four workers over here in the process of mining the remaining two grassland hill tiles to help knock out National Epic quickly. I don't think we can have it done by the eot 138 when we kick off the next Golden Age with Taj, but we'll see what we can do in that direction. This is one city I hope to spend some more time playing around with.

Overview:

Apologies, I have to stop doing the tile micro each turn. We have too many tiles (well over 100) and it's taking too much time to draw them all in. I was starting to dread creating that image, and that feels like a sign to stop doing it.

I have not selected a tech or burned our Great Scientists on our Education lightbulb yet. I will do so before I go to bed tonight, and post again in this thread. I want our Liberalism play to be as much of a surprise as possible to the teams that can view our research (CivPlayers/Apolyton). I want to read those "WTF HAX!?!" messages in their forums after this game is over. But Liberalism is quite safely ours now, Apolyton still does not have Education tech yet, and no one else is even close. Education/Liberalism/Nationalism all at eot 130.



Demos with no tech selected and thus no GNP pre-requisite bonus of any kind. CFC's ranking in GNP fell quite a bit last turn when they revolted from Caste System back to Slavery. They have obviously been running a lot of Representation Scientists; this is what explains their performance on the Ceiliazul graph. And yes, CFC has now emerged as the clear second-place team. Their Pyramids play looks to have been a strong move. CivFr still has a lot of highly useful wonders, but they have not been developing as well as I was expecting. Not exactly sure why that is.

We are still first by wide margins in Food, Production, Land Area, etc. Note that we are quietly creeping out to a bit of a lead in Power as well, now that Heroic Epic is done and we've begun our military buildup. As I've said before, one of my minor goals is the hope that we'll be first in Power ranking for the rest of the game from this point on. We are always going to have a massive target on our back, and we want to discourage aggression by having tons of units. In other words, the opposite of what Parkin did in the Pitboss #4 game.

Nothing of note to speak of in the Espionage department. We have graphs on CFC, Germans, WPC, Spanish, and UniversCiv. Slowly climbing in EP with CivFr, we need maybe 5 more turns to get their graphs. Absolutely no prayer in the world of ever getting Apolyton or CivPlayers graphs.

CivPlayers moved their missionary away from our borders, and it seems that the little controversy with them has dried up. Let's respond to their diplo message, and I will re-offer them Open Borders tonight.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Absolutely no prayer in the world of ever getting Apolyton or CivPlayers graphs.

That isn't exactly true right? We will in all likelihood have a free Great Spy coming at Communism. Who knows what it might be used for at that time?

Do you realize that after we get all three of those techs, we are going to be farther ahead of the second place team in score than the Spanish team even have in score?

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Sorry for the double post:

Also, we went from -34 in trade route deficit last turn to -5 after closing borders with CivPlayers. Considering we lost two 3 commerce trade routes, does that mean CivPlayers was getting 30-35 commerce from us in trade routes?

Now I realize they may have filled those cities with trade routes with other teams, but it is possible closing borders cost them a chunk of commerce. That might explain their quick desire to placate us in diplo all of a sudden.