[Spoilers] What's Sheaim to do? Irgy controlling Tebryn

[Irgy]

What I want out of city 2 all in all is a good production site, which I can use to build more workers and settlers for future sites. The capital will look after commerce for at least the first while, and since I'm going for a mostly specialist and/or aristogarian economy rather than cottages I don't need to get in early with maturing the cottages in the future commerce cities. So even with the capital being something of a hybrid city, I want the first two or three other cities to be good production sites. They can spam out the workers, settlers and defensive military required to set myself up in a good position.

I also want one city, probably an early one, to build almost nothing but adepts after a certain point in time. The sooner I build adepts the more I can get to mage and later archmage level.

Here are the second city options as I see them, in no particular order:
A. Banana-Clams, to the southeast. It would involve two new technologies (each with pre-requsites) to work either food resource, on top of the fact that the whole site is covered in jungle. It's a good area in the long run, but not a good second city spot.

B. Frigus, wheat, floodplains, to the far west. This is the spot I really want. However, it's a long way from the capital, especially since I'll be pushing into land WarriorKnight might think should be his. Plus there seems to be a lot of barbs in that direction at the moment.

C. There's space for a transitional city in between the capital and the Frigus site where I would eventually put a city in any case. However it does not have a single resource nor any farmable land (until construction at least) available, so it's a pretty bad option too.

D. Gold, Silk, Lake, to the north. Gets me some good resources, but again there's no food. I can farm two plains tiles at least, but it's far from spectacular. I need food to be able to work the gold at all.

E. Fish, to the southwest. It has fish. It has nothing else. Although at least the nothing-else is all of the superior grassy variety. But it does have fish, and it's close to the capital, and that means it's winning at the moment. It's just a shame that it'll take so darned long to get it going, having to build a workboat, and a monument as well if I want to settle it further north to pick up some more good land squares rather than a whole lot of useless ocean.

F. Maybe there'll be something nice to the northeast?


At the moment I'm leaning towards E (fish), because it's close and it has food. Plus it's at least a decent production site. Even given that I'm not sure the best place to settle it though. If the fish is in the outer ring it will take a good number of turns longer to get going, but settling next to the fish loses a number of good land tiles for ocean. The short term gain is probably the right choice, but it hurts to do it.

[Irgy]

Some more demographics analysis:


* 4th in GNP, and slightly below average. That should get better soon when I have an Elder Council, scientist, and improved wines though.
* Production is good, because everyone else is growing. No-one seems to be working any extra production at all, the extra 2 there is just Sciz's free priest. I'm at my caps already, as you can see with the life expectancy and approval rating, so I don't really want to grow any more.
* Food is equal 1st with 3 others, which is good considering I'm not trying to run any. On the whole food+production is high, especially given I haven't even started running God-King yet. It's not because I've done anything clever though, it's just thanks to that event.
* Soldiers I'm coming first, and this was before I finished another warrior. That's some good news anyway. Someone is on 0! Presumably one of the worker-builders.

By player:
* Hannah: 3 pop, 2 techs. One tech presumably from a hut. Working 9 food, not sure about the commerce but likely high. My guess is a 3 food tile and two coast tiles, which would suggest one of the techs is fishing, but I'm that's purely speculation
* WarriorKnight: 1 pop, 2 techs. Building a worker, and working the grass river rice. Researched agriculture (surely) and popped who know's what from a hut. I could just about try and warrior rush him (especially if it's him on 0 soldiers), but I don't think it's worthwhile.
* Thessa: 2 pop, 1 tech. Not sure what she's up to otherwise.
* Varn: 3 pop, no techs. Researching Mysticism, working flood plains, suspected of having a priest, to justify the GNP, although it does open up a new mystery: Why only 9 food? It should be 11. It's not unhealthiness, and working a production tile is inconsistent with the priest theory since the maximum hammers is 4. There's something I'm missing here.
* Sir Yellow: 1 pop 1 tech. Building a worker, and the tech is presumably a worker tech (likely agriculture).

On the whole it looks like the others aren't quite so intent on churning out warriors as I am, with two building workers and the rest working as little production as possible. My experience with FFH is that the barbarians kick you in the soft bits from very early on, and that if I want to explore and protect my future city sites I need to get in early. I guess we'll see whether the worker first pays off for them.

[plako]

I agree with your assesments. Your capital will be excellent commerce wise and you need a production city. The spot near Fish that could also borrow rice from the capital seems the best place at the moment.

Your main dilemma is, which food tech/techs you take before heading to BW since you've wide variety, but small numbers of each around. I would probably tech Crafting 1st and then Agriculture and leave the rest post BW time.

[Irgy]

Hi plako.

I agree with your assesments.

Great Always good to hear.

Your main dilemma is, which food tech/techs you take before heading to BW since you've wide variety, but small numbers of each around. I would probably tech Crafting 1st and then Agriculture and leave the rest post BW time.

I agree, except I think I'll get mining before agriculture. A farm only gives me +1 food (even on the rice), while with God King a mine gives me an extra 3 hammers. Since I've reached my health cap already there's no point growing, so for once I'd actually prefer hammers to food.

Your capital will be excellent commerce wise and you need a production city. The spot near Fish that could also borrow rice from the capital seems the best place at the moment.

I'm guessing the location you mean for the fish is the river grassland 1NW of the graveyard? I agree that this is the best location in the area for the long term. Going from there, E is not allowed (2 tiles from the capital), N, NW and NE lose coastal and the fish, S and SE lose a lot of land for ocean and finally W loses the ability to share the rice and surprisingly doesn't actually get me any more non-overlapped land.

The only reason I'd settle somewhere different near there is to get the fish without having to build a monument first. Sharing the rice would help mitigate that though.

In fact the more I think about it, the more I like your idea of sharing the rice. The capital doesn't want to work it anyway. Agriculture is quicker to research than fishing, and then I can have the rice improved before I even settle. Also, running pacifism, I will be building workboats at 90% (yes, they're a military unit! Even in straight BTS), which means losing at least 1 hammer per turn thanks to rounding. So building a monument first and growing with rice means I'll likely be working 2 mines by the time I start on the workboat so the 10% penalty and rounding down won't hit me quite as hard.

[Irgy]

I'm getting excited about the diplo contact that's coming any minute now (as soon as I get home to play the turn). To the point that I've written the greeting already, ready to send as soon as I pass on the turn:

Greetings, Warrior Knight of the revered Elohim!

As you will no doubt soon see for yourself, our scout has made it past goblins, skeletons and an attack from a pack of wolves to finally arrive your borders. I hope you don't mind him taking a well deserved rest there now that he has arrived. We have known about you for a while now, as a friendly village provided us with a map which included an area with a mysterious blue glow, that they could only describe as "Elohim" lands. You are indeed the only other people we have made contact with so far.

We would first of all like to assure you of our peaceful intentions towards you for the forseeable future. With your choice to concentrate on farming you may be understandably a little concerned about our large military. However this is simply the result of our evidently different opinions on how dangerous these lands can be. Our warriors will remain busy enough just sitting around in barrows, exploring the wilderness, and protecting our own territory.

We hope in fact to make this the start of a strong and friendly future relationship between our civlisations. As a sign of good will, I will give you what knowledge I have of the geography of our area.

Our capital Galveholm is situated to the southeast of yours. We are settled inland, but going further to the south and east of us quickly reaches the ocean. In between the two of us are what could broadly be described as two mountain ranges. One is to the south of you and runs predominantly east west from what we can see of you. The other forms an arc around our relatively fertile lands. In between the two is a wide, dry valley which our scout has been following. This valley notably contains Letum Frigis.

We have yet to explore all that far directly along the coast to the west and north. It's also possible (but fairly unlikely) that there is more land to the southeast, as we haven't quite seen through the jungle as far as where the two coasts connect. With all the jungle around we are unlikely to be the southernmost point of the continent, but the south coast does extend at least a fair way to our west.

We would be interested to know if you have met any other survivors of the long winter age, and what you know of the geography - particularly whether there's any places we should be wary of exploring.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,
Irgy Arbandi of the Sheaim

I did some out of game research on WarriorKnight, to find out a bit about him. He's at least one of the players who has a small history on RealmsBeyond.

Some advice to all: don't ever click the "find all posts by X" button. I thought it would just have links to threads, but I earlier on I found out the hard way that it shows the text of the posts right then and there. Closed that tab very quickly when I realised and fortunately didn't see anything spoily (it was indeed from another player's spoiler thread post, but all I saw was "so it's begun" or something before I closed it).

Here's the gist of why I'm planning to push strongly for an alliance.

Reasons in favour of allying with WarriorKnight:
* Seems to be an active and involved player. This makes for a good ally. You don't want someone who sulks about and doesn't ever get around to responding to things.
* Seems to be a reasonable fellow, based on his posts in his spoiler threads for other games. Don't want to ally with a psycho obviously. Most players in the game seem fairly reasonable so far though on the whole, which is good.
* Gives me basically a large safe land border. In fact, depending of course on where other players turn out to be, I expect this to make most of my land border safe.
* His worldspell makes declaring war a pain in the neck. You basically need to get yourself in a winning position twice. Plus you have 20 turns where you have to defend and can't counter-attack or even recapture anything you lose. Let someone else trigger it.
* It's good to have at least one ally, and your first contact is your best bet.
* I have a lot I can offer him (mostly by way of the tolerant trait), and he has at least a fair bit he can offer me (by way of palace mana mostly).
* He should be pretty glad for a peaceful border.

Reasons against:
* He appears to be a quite competant player. While you don't want to drag yourself down allying with someone who's hopeless, you don't want to ride into an endgame with someone more skilled than yourself
* It may make it quite difficult for me to expand if most of my border is up against an ally
* His worldspell is dangerous in the end game. I could end up in a winning position but lose to him out-racing me to a victory condition while I'm stuck unable to stop him.
* He may be paranoid about my strength - either now with my warrior heavy start, later with pyre zombies, or much later with eaters of dreams, which might make things more difficult.


Let's just hope that scout hasn't been picked off by an invisible griffon when I load the turn...

[fire&ice]

if find all posts don't work you could always click the find started treads button bellow that. it would provide less over all posts but you could select to NOT!!! look at the spoiler tread and look at the ones your allowed to.

[Irgy]

if find all posts don't work you could always click the find started treads button bellow that. it would provide less over all posts but you could select to NOT!!! look at the spoiler tread and look at the ones your allowed to.

Thanks - that is in fact what I did though. The only trouble is it finds next to nothing for some of the other players. Still, what's going to matter anyway is their personalities in-game, which may well be different anyway, who knows.

[Irgy]

Now here's a question for you; can scouts capture cities in FFH? I know they can't in BTS, but FFH changes a number of things.

I'm just going to investigate this issue before sending WarriorKnight the message I originally wrote.

Did I mention that there's a player with a soldier count of zero?

[Irgy]

And the answer is yes, they can. The time has come for some thought.

If only I'd moved the scout 1W of where it is, where it would not make contact. I could have moved it into the 2SW capital threatening position and made contact in the same turn, with plausible deniability that I'd had any plans to put a unit in range of his capital at all.

[Irgy]

Here's my analysis of the situation.
* The worker is 10 turns to build at 5 production (palace, city tile, and 3 food from rice) with no overflow. The worker should have appeared when he clicked end turn on turn 9.
* Turns 10-13 he's built a warrior at 2 hammers a turn while growing. Right now his warrior has 8 hammers invested. He's also gained 12 food in the box.
* Even if he doesn't react to my scout, T14 and he'll have 10 hammers in the warrior and 2 population. This is the turn I could move the scout into range.
* T15, were he to see my scout in position he would surely work two grass forest hills, for a total of 6 hammers to finish the warrior.

So, I can't do it. It's very close, but there's basically nothing to be gained by even threatening it. Let's just pretend I never even did these calculations then : D

I'll take a different tack instead, and make a point of the fact that I'm not trying to wipe him out when I had the chance (even though I know I didn't really have the chance). Otherwise I'll stick to the original message.