[Spoilers] Shallow Old Human Tourist Hit the beach!

[Old Harry]

Turn 166

BRIIIIIIICK! (Note that we snuck past a Mackoti galleon - dunno how far he's settled this continent - so how far should we be willing to push with our settler?)

Can you give us lurkers an overview of your build orders in astroland? And in the core? I'm curious.

We settled our 45th city, Sensible Soccer this turn. I've been meaning to do a shot of every city for a while, so this should answer your question. Spoilered for the ridiculous number of cities and slightly out of order to group the continents together.

Mainland cities:

Note the pre-primed great people bar, ready for the next golden age.


















As has probably been mentioned elsewhere BGN wins the city naming prize by some distance.










Then we skip a few on westworld.




Skip a few more.


Skip again.




We won't actually starve Jimmy this turn - I moved a defender back in after taking this shot.

Westworld - you'll notice we're working a lot of unimproved tiles as a result of the land-grab. Weaker cities might be producing workers before granaries as we try to catch the workforce up. If we weren't IND then forges might be more optional in cities that will never make a lot of hammers.

Skip.






Skip.


Skip.

Azores

Australia - this gets a bit more embarrassing. Lots more unimproved tiles...

Skip.










Skip.

More importantly we can use this to plan logistics for attacking/defending in five turns. Where do we position catapults, muskets and knights to defend against Toku so that we can also defend against GJ if necessary. Right now I think we're going to try to get another enforced peace with Toku and hit GJ, but we'll probably change our mind again next turn.


Demos and power.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I'm glad you are enjoying my city names. Where do I collect my prize?

Thanks for the update. What are your next immediate objectives in astro settling, war aims on the main continent, other paths to victory?

[Zalson]

Thank you for the overview. I always love the near complete lack of infrastructure; everything is sacrificed for the good of the empire.

[Old Harry]

Turn 167

I'm glad you are enjoying my city names. Where do I collect my prize?

You got to leave the game without getting killed, then take credit for whatever Gavagai does and blame him for whatever goes wrong now. What better prize is there?

Thanks for the update. What are your next immediate objectives in astro settling, war aims on the main continent, other paths to victory?

I think we're done with astro lands, using our boats to make gains vs our neighbours is the next priority. Our main path to victory is that TBS fights Mackoti.

Thank you for the overview. I always love the near complete lack of infrastructure; everything is sacrificed for the good of the empire.

A new city is better than a library! (Although if your break-even tech rate is 10% then perhaps you've built too many new cities...)

Note the inaccessible whales out in the middle of the ocean. Mapmaker trolls! This is a pretty good island though. We're not falling for the BRick trick - we'll settle on the gold or the flat plains tile and orphan the fish. We hope that Mackoti adheres to Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine and doesn't want to upset us... I have a little history (PB31) with Mack of dragging him down from the win it looked like he was sure of (funnily enough gifting it to TBS), and back in PB13 he fought one war with us and then kept us at arms length for the rest of the game, so I'm fairly confident that he'll either try to keep nice with us or totally knock us out of the game, and with AGG/CHA Gavagai on one border and culture-victory-chasing Xenu on the other I don't think the latter is an option.


In the mean time we continue building up to hit Joey. We're still sure he has Guilds, but we haven't seen a knight on the field yet, so fingers are crossed. We're not hitting him until turn 174 though, so by then I expect him to have a few mounted units to hit back with. We're not going to get to Z in time, so we'll attack from T instead. We should have more than 30 knights for this fight.


We're still going for a few economic builds (believe it or not that's what a castle is!) but our power will keep going up for the next seven turns, let's see what Joey does to prepare.


Demos and power. Toku hasn't built any new units in the last five turns. We can declare again on t171, so at that point I guess a war/peace is possible, but so is declaring a phoney war. Although GJ can see most of the tiles in our empire, so who knows what he'll believe.

[Fintourist]

To complement OH's report. We are kind of in a weird place with this game. As a result of our early dogpile, this has been a constant struggle including:
1. Attack OT4E without a true military / decisive force
2. Commit for a Astro beeline despite a major need for economic snowball (e.g. Civil Service)
3. Spam Astro-cities to grab as much as land as possible without economy/worker force/military to back it up

So far all of the above has been kind of successful and I feel that mack and TBS have not totally snowballed away of us. On the other hand, all the suboptimal stuff included in the above also means that we can’t say that we would have truly catched up either. (Not sure if that would have even been possible)

So what follows next is probably another risky military campaign. I guess the basic idea is that by staying put we are certain to lose and we rather keep making moves and try to give us at least some sort of an opportunity to make ground until everything falls to pieces.. 

[Zalson]

A new city is better than a library! (Although if your break-even tech rate is 10% then perhaps you've built too many new cities...)

Can you help me understand this, when you get a chance?

My assumption is that, where you are the game now, the 100h for a settler is more valuable than 90h from a library. The 100h invested in a settler is:

1. Completed faster (food surplus plus hammers)
   
2. Creates a net increase in commerce (city center plus trade routes is greater than maintenance costs).
   

Plus, there's the benefit that the city grows over time. Whereas a library would only increase the net commerce by 25%, and that's only if you're running 100%. Since you're 10% break even, the value would be negligible until a city creates 40 commerce (which you always knew you were going to do because of how the game incentives you to expand).

This is an important milestone for me to understand, I think. Given that one expects to crater their tech rate by expansion, libraries are a reduced value.

[Old Harry]

Turn 168

A new city is better than a library! (Although if your break-even tech rate is 10% then perhaps you've built too many new cities...)

Can you help me understand this, when you get a chance?

Well it was a bit of an off-the-cuff remark, but I'll try to justify it... We built about 20 (IMP) settlers to claim land in Westworld and Australia. We could have built infrastructure instead of settlers but those cities tended to be smaller without much commerce, so libraries wouldn't give great benefit even if we were running the slider high. But for a couple of big cities such as Goldeneye where we built settlers instead of banks and courthouses the decision was much closer. It mainly came down to the fact that land is limited, we were in a race and we can always come back to build infrastructure later, while taking a city from someone else is almost always more expensive than settling it yourself.

Because we expanded like this we now find ourselves in a fairly unpleasant economic hole, with break-even at 10% research. But we are now getting the economic builds up that will let us solve that problem. This is usually the other way to know if you should stop expanding and switch to infrastructure, but I don't think there's a firm formula to follow. Experience probably counts for a lot. Both Mack and TBS have done this better - they both have more cities than us and economies that are humming.

In international news TBS ends his golden age in rep/nationhood/caste/merc/free religion. He also settled another annoying city this turn. LEGO Start Wars is going to have to run a lot of artists to keep its tiles.


Anyone know if this means that we're voting for Xenu's diplo victory? We've had two free Judaism spreads in the last two turns, but we've still got about 25 cities to proselytise.


Mackoti should see what we're up to next turn so we did some diplomacy, sending fish-fish to him. We also sent iron-iron to Donovan to encourage him to attack GJ. He can see our galleon nosing up his coast to hit Joey, so he should get some idea of the timetable.


Speaking of Joey, this is the first knight we've seen in his land. We should expect a decent sized force by the time we come to attack...


Demos and powers.

[Old Harry]

Turn 169

In domestic news we got the great merchant that we expected from Goldeneye so it's 9 turns until we get the next one and launch golden age #3. Also Buddhism failed to spread to SuperBomberman.

Just one new city this turn, which perhaps has the potential to be among our very best with all these resources. It also has the potential to be very tempting to Mackoti.


Internationally Donovan sent iron-iron back, hopefully meaning he'll attack GJ when we do. His units seem to consist of longbows, swords and catapults so I'm not too hopeful that he'll do any heavy lifting, but perhaps he'll pin some GJ units?

Mackoti didn't return our fish of peace message. We've found an island city of his, but we're inclined to avoid sending galleons too close as he's had chemistry for a while now and might have some frigates around. There are useful things for our boats to do though - they can move to threaten Toku's coast and make peace more likely on t171.


One of the reasons that Mackoti and TBS (proud owner of gunpowder this turn) have better economies than we do is likely that our newer cities are still developing and that too many of them look like this, with unimproved tiles and infrastructure still to be completed. We switched Xcom to a worker after taking this picture as we need a lot more improvements here.


Tactical discussion this turn included thoughts on how to hit Sicca on t2 of the war, will we capture both Thapsus and Sabritha on t1 of the war, and whether to push on to burn Beshbalic quickly?


On the eastern front I don't think we'll flip this tile before t174 so that makes a two-pronged attack less attractive. Jimmy White may fall to Toku on t171 anyway, but even if we keep it we'll only have about 15 knights in our main stack. Joey will have 10 cats (with another 6-7 down south that could consolidate at the capital) and definitely has 2 knights already, by t174 I expect him to have 5-10 knights and after that I expect him to whip 10 more knights so we'll need to be very careful about how we advance, especially since he can see exactly what we do. So keeping all our units together is probably wise.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 170

Is this a defensive force or is Toku going to hit IK+ (musket, crossbow and spear) this turn? We've positioned knights to hit his stack if he does. Jimmy is indefensible (both from Toku and from GJ if he want to counter-attack when we hit him), so it's just building wealth and running artists to pop borders quicker.

Toku's on his way to Music, after which I think he needs Philosophy, Nationalism and Military Tradition to get cuirassiers. That's 11 000 beakers, so not worth panicking about just yet.


Toku's trireme spotted our northern galleon this turn, so I moved both to be threatening but safe, hopefully discouraging the attack on IK+...


Naufrager took a city back from Mackoti and he has knights and an island base on an ocean that Mack lacks a naval presence on, so perhaps he can hold out for a while longer?


Overviews of the mainland (some of the battle plan signs might change).




Our holdings on Westworld feel a little tenuous due to TBS' CRE culture. Might be time to run a few artist specialists


Australia feels solid on the other hand (even with the TBS knight in the top left of the picture). I'd love to set off an artist bomb in LEGO Star Wars.


Demos, power and some other graphs.

[Old Harry]

Turn 171

So this is the turn that our peace with Toku runs out, with his relatively flat power score over the last few turns we wondered if he'd want to mess with us. Civstats says yes...

At least we took out a couple of knights (both coinflip battles) on the way. (Also note Naufrager and Mackoti are still duking it out.)


Luckily we never got too attached to Jimmy, so we could just offer him peace and concentrate on our main plan of attacking German Joey, but is one extra city going to give him the incentive to sign that peace deal? What if he was worried about his coastal cities too?


We've only got one knight on these two boats, but Toku doesn't know that...


- C2 Amphi Knight vs CG1 Crossbow - 75%... WIN!!!! :D

We get 177 capture gold as well, and although the granary, lighthouse and forge survive we decide the location is just unsupportable and burn the city. Interestingly Toku lost 30 points when we took it - 10 for pop, 2 or 3 for land which leaves 17 or 18 for a wonder. I didn't check tile yields before we hit the ciy but Moai seems more likely than National or Heroic Epic.


So the question is - will he take peace now?

We did a bunch of other stuff, but none of it serves our purpose of building our warmongering reputation (except for moving our boats into position for the fight against German Joey) so I'll gloss over it for now.

Demos and power.