[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[aetryn]

is "the same opinion that many regulars here do on early aggression" that it's mostly not worthwhile?

yeah, i agree that this is mostly good neighbor luck (if dreylin even IS one of our neighbors...). especially GT looks like a potential midgame eating target, i am not sure how boudica is going to keep up with us in expansion/economy (both PRO and ikhandas are about to really start coming in clutch to forestall economic collapse) and suspect we're likely to get a window of tech advantage over them around knights or (G2) muskets. if GT is sending units to test us, they seem to be just warriors so far (unless i'm misreading their recent 300 milpower increase as pop + warrior when it's actually a whipped chariot). but yeah, much though i really don't want to do this, i'm starting to make eyes at archery tech again

looking for a way to road up to the fourth city site that does NOT end up stranding our worker on a forest with fogged tiles in range that could contain GT warriors. i think there's a path that will do it but we also need to road the wheat tile to hook up ivory which complicates things. i also think the third city settler has to be exposed to sniping for a turn in the NE to get our third city up on turn 43 as desired. but really there's no way around that and given that dreylin of "scouting our way with actual scouts" seems most likely to be there i'm not quite as worried about it

I mean, I haven't played a ton of games here, so it's hard for me to feel safe summarizing what I think the consensus to be, but from my perspective reading games it mostly seems to be: expand mostly-peacefully while there's land to take, only attack when you're ready to take everything or at least utterly cripple them, and avoid grinding land wars. Razing an early city plant with warriors sets your opponent back, absolutely, but this isn't a 1 on 1 game. It almost certainly locks your neighbor in retaliation mode and forces you into a long-term land war, especially in a game like this where capitals are very far apart and probably economic ruin to try to hold that much land early before you can develop it. I get the sense this works okay on the German forum (which I believe is where GT is from) because everyone there plays this kind of game, so a) people don't take it so personally and go into retribution mode, meaning it's less costly to make that kind of move against someone, but more importantly b) you can assume everyone else in the world is also getting this kind of treatment, so nobody can play a farmer's gambit and get way ahead in economy while you and your neighbor have a border skirmish. This also indirectly affects point a, as if nobody is soaring ahead then even what by RB standards would be a massive setback on the economic curve isn't quite so crippling, meaning you don't shift into "game is lost might as well get revenge" mode quite so easily.

I think the third city is far enough away from GT's front that it's relatively safe, but we should definitely think about getting a unit in the capital, or at have something on hand that can kill his warrior if it does find our capital and decide to take a flyer.

[aetryn]

is "the same opinion that many regulars here do on early aggression" that it's mostly not worthwhile?

yeah, i agree that this is mostly good neighbor luck (if dreylin even IS one of our neighbors...). especially GT looks like a potential midgame eating target, i am not sure how boudica is going to keep up with us in expansion/economy (both PRO and ikhandas are about to really start coming in clutch to forestall economic collapse) and suspect we're likely to get a window of tech advantage over them around knights or (G2) muskets. if GT is sending units to test us, they seem to be just warriors so far (unless i'm misreading their recent 300 milpower increase as pop + warrior when it's actually a whipped chariot). but yeah, much though i really don't want to do this, i'm starting to make eyes at archery tech again

looking for a way to road up to the fourth city site that does NOT end up stranding our worker on a forest with fogged tiles in range that could contain GT warriors. i think there's a path that will do it but we also need to road the wheat tile to hook up ivory which complicates things. i also think the third city settler has to be exposed to sniping for a turn in the NE to get our third city up on turn 43 as desired. but really there's no way around that and given that dreylin of "scouting our way with actual scouts" seems most likely to be there i'm not quite as worried about it

I mean, I haven't played a ton of games here, so it's hard for me to feel safe summarizing what I think the consensus to be, but from my perspective reading games it mostly seems to be: expand mostly-peacefully while there's land to take, only attack when you're ready to take everything or at least utterly cripple them, and avoid grinding land wars. Razing an early city plant with warriors sets your opponent back, absolutely, but this isn't a 1 on 1 game. It almost certainly locks your neighbor in retaliation mode and forces you into a long-term land war, especially in a game like this where capitals are very far apart and probably economic ruin to try to hold that much land early before you can develop it. I get the sense this works okay on the German forum (which I believe is where GT is from) because everyone there plays this kind of game, so a) people don't take it so personally and go into retribution mode, meaning it's less costly to make that kind of move against someone, but more importantly b) you can assume everyone else in the world is also getting this kind of treatment, so nobody can play a farmer's gambit and get way ahead in economy while you and your neighbor have a border skirmish. This also indirectly affects point a, as if nobody is soaring ahead then even what by RB standards would be a massive setback on the economic curve isn't quite so crippling, meaning you don't shift into "game is lost might as well get revenge" mode quite so easily.

I think the third city is far enough away from GT's front that it's relatively safe, but we should definitely think about getting a unit in the capital, or at have something on hand that can kill his warrior if it does find our capital and decide to take a flyer.

Also, re: opponents here are my belated thoughts:

Naufragar has a very scary econ combo with PHI America. We can expect a lot of technology bulbing, early Golden Ages, maybe an early Academy. If they never get disrupted, they probably pull out ahead of everyone in the mid-game and eventually turn that into a military/territory advantage, and Naufragar is a good tactician, so he won't flub that. I rate them the favorite going into this.

MJMD is a good builder with a somewhat oddball combo. But India is solid, and MJMD loves to expand and build, so again, this will be a strong empire played along fairly standard RB lines that will be competitive.

Superdeath is generally a highly aggressive player. Sometimes he plays for econ, but he really plays by feel - and kind of hates that people sim and analyze and are able to do things like see attacks coming from watching the power graph. He's got a possible rush unit in Rome paired with an AGG leader, but like Xist in PB72 he might just be wanting to settle a bunch of territory and be basically invulnerable to serious attack until at least Knights, and CRE actually fits in with this. Either way, he's not a safe neighbor, so it's good that we've seen no sign of him yet.

Gavagai I haven't read as many reports from, as he tends to be a sparse reporter, but my sense is that he's a good aggressive player - the kind that will make intelligent attacks, snatch a city or two from threats or an opportune attack, and somehow leave you in a position where you can't effectively retaliate - basically like Superdeath hooked up to a Supercomputer that overrules his impulsive attacks. We want nothing to do with him, and we want him to be next to Naufragar or MJMD and disrupt them.

Ginger is a solid player with a tendency to go AWOL at times. Expect him to contest territory well. He's got a combo that lets him build massive cities - which might not actually work that well on this map given the land isn't terribly green - and his aggression level is a notch below Gav and SD. Civac is his partner and is very solid and reliable and good with micro, so I expect a very competent econ game out of this team alongside a competent military stance.  I probably rate them second or maybe third behind Gavagai (MJMD's wacky combo pushes him far enough down that I think he's behind this team).

Greenline seemed solid in PB72, taking a very slow-starting Byzantium and expanding well with it. Seems a decent all round player, just not as experienced as some of the above. Catherine of Sumeria's likely to be good on this map - CRE seems like a very solid pick on this map given the sparseness of resources and the overall difficulty of copper locations. IMP is never a bad pick since a strong expansion phase is key to even being in contention. And Sumeria being able to get cheap maintenance reduction while also pursuing religion is solid. How they do will probably depend a lot on neighbor luck, but they've got the tools.

GT and Dreylin are both largely unknowns to me. I've only seen GT in PB74, where I'm ded-lurking Pin and can't read his reports, and he's still alive but not doing especially great there. Dreylin is instead an RB vet coming back to play again, but I was away when he was around, so I don't think I've seen any of his games. Again, only game I've seen him in is PB74, and was first eliminated from that game. GT's combo looks fun and might work in a huge game where everyone has time to expand, but it feels too late/slow to be competitive next to some of the other options out there. Dreylin's combo is kind of like Ginger's in that he has a building that plays off his Charismatic bonus, but this one is growth instead of overall happiness, and ORG is an economic trait, though not the greatest one on this difficulty unless he's also getting lighthouses out of it. He might be one of our coastal capital starts.

Ricketyclick is totally unknown, and picked a restricted leader combo that's nerfed in Close to Home. This suggests that he might not be familiar with unrestricted leader play, which is pretty standard on RB and thus he probably hasn't lurked a whole ton. And he might not have read the patch notes for Close to Home. At the very least, these are not good signs of, say, a secret genius that's going to come out of nowhere and beat a decent field. I fear that the game will be heavily tilted if not decided by who happens to be next to him and can best absorb him when the time is right. Hopefully I'm selling him short.

Neighbor rating from worst to best: SD/Gav, Ginger, Naufragar, GT/Dreylin, Greenline, MJMD, Rickety.

We met Dreylin with our southern scout, correct? So he could be down there or from anywhere, really, if the desert is the center of the map.

[ljubljana]

thank you so much for all these thoughts! i have been pretty avoidant about oppo analysis but it's way past time.

@nauf PHI America looks amazing, and if we had a fishing start they were high on my list of civs i'd like to play. What happens if the American UB's typeless GP spawn a great person, by the way? I do question whether this map is the best for for that combo, though, as it seems unlikely that they'll have the food to run tons of specialists without lots of counterproductive farming. And I really question IMP as the second trait.... does that work with, so far as I can tell, no way to make paying for the extra cities easier than usual? With no direct expansion traits and even PRO to make it somewhat less expensive, we are still riding the line of economic collapse in our sims (if we do hit 8 cities on @t75) to the degree that we may have to delay settlers.... I guess I just don't really get how IMP functions in normal play without major diminishing returns...

@Mjmd this looks fun! I imagine India has strong value on this map with the large amount of forests and hills; they were on my shortlist too, techs allowing (which they did not, lol). Surprised that there are multiple IND civs on this map, as I don't think that's happened in past PBEMs - hopefully rickety is credible enough to offer some wonder competition, and of course it's nice that American wants them too and should have even more trouble. I will note that Nebu does actually have a significant synergy with India, since we can probably expect most wonders in this game to be built via the kind of mass deforestation that Fast Workers are especially efficient at.

@Superdeath mmmm yeah. I share your suspicion about not going for the Praet rush, how is that going to work with 19 tiles between capitals and a civ that telegraphs it as a possibility. But.... maybe the point is to expand while hard to attack and then seize the initiative IF they turn out to be next to someone who is slow to get going. In that case this pick is a lot like ours, weaker in terms of econ but faster-breaking in terms of when it will make sense to attack someone. As I said earlier, if I could repick, I'd have given KK a hard look, there's a very reasonable chance CRE beats PRO given our resource setup.

@Gavagai yeah, any aggressive, good player with Egypt looks like a major threat. I'm not sure I get the explicit synergy between Egypt and ORG/SPI per se (WC too early to benefit from any military help from SPI) but, as we seriously considered ourselves, SPI looks really strong on this map for Serfdom reasons and ORG seems like a meta pick overall

@Ginger how AWOL is AWOL? I was under the vague impression that they are (at least arguably) in the top tier of players skill-wise, but they have already come perilously close to missed turns multiple times just this week... I do really like the pick, you'd think CHA happy into cheap Hammams into grow onto cottages would go a long way towards financing an EXP granary-fueled settler push, and CHA happy means the push is easier too since cities effectively start out with the happy to 3-whip settlers. I think I might be more bullish on this team than on PHI America even, the only question, as you've said, is whether the map is foody enough to allow it.....

@greenline yeah, this pick looks scary good too, you'd think ORG would make more sense than CRE combined with Ziggurats but maybe not, given the diminishing returns you'd get by discounting an already discounted building further (only 45 hammer savings per city vs 60)...? I honestly don't really believe that though, 1-whipping a courthouse in every city as soon as it hits size 2 seems unbelievable. What I'm not sure I get is CRE as the second trait, which seems to have anti-synergy with their expected religious push, but it looks strong on this map so maybe the sheer snowball value of getting all the new cities on their food tiles ASAP and up to ziggurat and then settler whipping range will overrule that. but yeah, American UB is crazy but I think there is a major contrast in how leverageable IMP is likely to be between that pick and this one...

@GT yeah this is the slowest combo of any of them I think, with neither economic nor expansion acceleration (outside border expansions and a few marginal happy from CHA, but on a food-poor map) and on a bad map for a rush. @Dreylin looks slowish as well as I think Colosseums will come too late to help with the expansion phase (in noted contrast to the relatively fast-breaking Hammams). I guess the extra growth storage, given that +4-5 food surplus is standardish to whip every 10 turns, amounts to about one farm per city that can turn into a cottage, which is a big deal on this map, but it will be some time before they can really take advantage of it, and courthouses from ORG are late as well. Given our civ picks, I think we should put high-value on neighboring not the weakest early-game civs per se but the ones most likely to be smaller and squishier than us when our military push is online, and I am hopeful that GT/Dreylin will score better than at least the scary Greenline snowball pick by that metric... I am at least quite glad that, in a field where our picks are probably lower-middling from an expansion perspective, neither of our two neighbors seem likely to start outscaling us without giving at least some chance for us to influence that militarily

@rickety yeah, who knows... it is a little hard for me to imagine that they thought leaders were restricted given that everyone else picked unrestricted leaders, and that we had a whole separate draft round for them... As restricted leader picks go, this seems like a solid one - Inca to snowball off cheap granary whips, FIN to eventually pay for the cities you overexpand into. Only IND doesn't make sense to me, picking as they did after Mjmd of "chop out every wonder", but I'm told that tech speed tends to matter more than production in wonder races, so maybe it's reasonable to expect FIN with a decent number of cities to get them there faster...?

We met Dreylin with our southern scout last turn, and this turn their other scout met our eastern scout.... so yeah, who knows. For all we know they are just to the east of us and have scouted more or less symmetrically to us, such that our first scouts are meeting in the south now and later scouts are meeting in the east halfway between our capitals... At any rate, they should at least be a neighbor in SOME direction, or the odds of meeting two separate scouts within a turn of each other would be astronomical. I am also realizing belatedly that I should have moved our scout away from Dreylin's in the east last turn with its second move in order to hide from them, it would have been better to deny them the intel that we are very likely to be a direct neighbor... although, does pulling something like that abide by the RB honor code?

[aetryn]

thank you so much for all these thoughts! i have been pretty avoidant about oppo analysis but it's way past time.

@nauf PHI America looks amazing, and if we had a fishing start they were high on my list of civs i'd like to play. What happens if the American UB's typeless GP spawn a great person, by the way? I do question whether this map is the best for for that combo, though, as it seems unlikely that they'll have the food to run tons of specialists without lots of counterproductive farming. And I really question IMP as the second trait.... does that work with, so far as I can tell, no way to make paying for the extra cities easier than usual? With no direct expansion traits and even PRO to make it somewhat less expensive, we are still riding the line of economic collapse in our sims (if we do hit 8 cities on @t75) to the degree that we may have to delay settlers.... I guess I just don't really get how IMP functions in normal play without major diminishing returns...

@Mjmd this looks fun! I imagine India has strong value on this map with the large amount of forests and hills; they were on my shortlist too, techs allowing (which they did not, lol). Surprised that there are multiple IND civs on this map, as I don't think that's happened in past PBEMs - hopefully rickety is credible enough to offer some wonder competition, and of course it's nice that American wants them too and should have even more trouble. I will note that Nebu does actually have a significant synergy with India, since we can probably expect most wonders in this game to be built via the kind of mass deforestation that Fast Workers are especially efficient at.

@Superdeath mmmm yeah. I share your suspicion about not going for the Praet rush, how is that going to work with 19 tiles between capitals and a civ that telegraphs it as a possibility. But.... maybe the point is to expand while hard to attack and then seize the initiative IF they turn out to be next to someone who is slow to get going. In that case this pick is a lot like ours, weaker in terms of econ but faster-breaking in terms of when it will make sense to attack someone. As I said earlier, if I could repick, I'd have given KK a hard look, there's a very reasonable chance CRE beats PRO given our resource setup.

@Gavagai yeah, any aggressive, good player with Egypt looks like a major threat. I'm not sure I get the explicit synergy between Egypt and ORG/SPI per se (WC too early to benefit from any military help from SPI) but, as we seriously considered ourselves, SPI looks really strong on this map for Serfdom reasons and ORG seems like a meta pick overall

@Ginger how AWOL is AWOL? I was under the vague impression that they are (at least arguably) in the top tier of players skill-wise, but they have already come perilously close to missed turns multiple times just this week... I do really like the pick, you'd think CHA happy into cheap Hammams into grow onto cottages would go a long way towards financing an EXP granary-fueled settler push, and CHA happy means the push is easier too since cities effectively start out with the happy to 3-whip settlers. I think I might be more bullish on this team than on PHI America even, the only question, as you've said, is whether the map is foody enough to allow it.....

@greenline yeah, this pick looks scary good too, you'd think ORG would make more sense than CRE combined with Ziggurats but maybe not, given the diminishing returns you'd get by discounting an already discounted building further (only 45 hammer savings per city vs 60)...? I honestly don't really believe that though, 1-whipping a courthouse in every city as soon as it hits size 2 seems unbelievable. What I'm not sure I get is CRE as the second trait, which seems to have anti-synergy with their expected religious push, but it looks strong on this map so maybe the sheer snowball value of getting all the new cities on their food tiles ASAP and up to ziggurat and then settler whipping range will overrule that. but yeah, American UB is crazy but I think there is a major contrast in how leverageable IMP is likely to be between that pick and this one...

@GT yeah this is the slowest combo of any of them I think, with neither economic nor expansion acceleration (outside border expansions and a few marginal happy from CHA, but on a food-poor map) and on a bad map for a rush. @Dreylin looks slowish as well as I think Colosseums will come too late to help with the expansion phase (in noted contrast to the relatively fast-breaking Hammams). I guess the extra growth storage, given that +4-5 food surplus is standardish to whip every 10 turns, amounts to about one farm per city that can turn into a cottage, which is a big deal on this map, but it will be some time before they can really take advantage of it, and courthouses from ORG are late as well. Given our civ picks, I think we should put high-value on neighboring not the weakest early-game civs per se but the ones most likely to be smaller and squishier than us when our military push is online, and I am hopeful that GT/Dreylin will score better than at least the scary Greenline snowball pick by that metric... I am at least quite glad that, in a field where our picks are probably lower-middling from an expansion perspective, neither of our two neighbors seem likely to start outscaling us without giving at least some chance for us to influence that militarily

@rickety yeah, who knows... it is a little hard for me to imagine that they thought leaders were restricted given that everyone else picked unrestricted leaders, and that we had a whole separate draft round for them... As restricted leader picks go, this seems like a solid one - Inca to snowball off cheap granary whips, FIN to eventually pay for the cities you overexpand into. Only IND doesn't make sense to me, picking as they did after Mjmd of "chop out every wonder", but I'm told that tech speed tends to matter more than production in wonder races, so maybe it's reasonable to expect FIN with a decent number of cities to get them there faster...?

We met Dreylin with our southern scout last turn, and this turn their other scout met our eastern scout.... so yeah, who knows. For all we know they are just to the east of us and have scouted more or less symmetrically to us, such that our first scouts are meeting in the south now and later scouts are meeting in the east halfway between our capitals... At any rate, they should at least be a neighbor in SOME direction, or the odds of meeting two separate scouts within a turn of each other would be astronomical. I am also realizing belatedly that I should have moved our scout away from Dreylin's in the east last turn with its second move in order to hide from them, it would have been better to deny them the intel that we are very likely to be a direct neighbor... although, does pulling something like that abide by the RB honor code?

I think part of the point is that you don't need to actually run that many specialists with America, since you can let the UB accumulate 5 (2 * 2.5) a turn - double that in a GA -  and then just stick whatever specialist you want it to pop as in for the very last turn to give it a "flavor". Obviously specialists speed it up if you can run one or two, but I think it's really strong regardless. It does diminish with time, as all Great People strategies do, but he doesn't need to have a great Modern age economy if the game doesn't get there.

Part of the point of IMP is making it less work to get settlers out, letting you get on to infrastructure faster (or saving chops for infrastructure/wonders, instead of spending them all on expansion as we are doing). It's not necessarily about making more settlers, it's about making them faster, getting to contested spots a few turns ahead, getting the cities down and starting to be productive faster. Remember, cities are always positive eventually, it's just a question of how much infrastructure investment they take (and assuming you have the tech to GET that infrastructure before your science collapses). IMP is also the king of taking moderately effective filler spots and er, filling them.

I may just dislike the new Inca granary - I think it went from being ridiculously broken to very unremarkable. On maps where the irrigation effect is important, maybe I'd think differently, but so far even though we've seen lots of brown land it mostly has enough rivers for irrigation to be reasonable. It's not terrible - there are some worse UBs out there, but it just feels like a very weak, early-breaking bonus and their UU is just totally useless on a map like this.

I was scoring players and combos in the final analysis. GT and Dreylin being somewhat counter-meta makes them unpredictable in a way that makes them more difficult neighbors in my mind than Greenline, though Greenline's combo will grab land better due to CRE and easier maintenance. Similarly I think MJMD is generally better than Superdeath even with a crazy combo, but I really don't want to neighbor SD - I want to neighbor the civ he decides to attack!

[El Grillo]

I am also realizing belatedly that I should have moved our scout away from Dreylin's in the east last turn with its second move in order to hide from them, it would have been better to deny them the intel that we are very likely to be a direct neighbor... although, does pulling something like that abide by the RB honor code?

I believe the standard convention is to PM the player if you do this, telling them that your scout stepped into their vision, and which tile. However, I think this is strictly for first meeting a player, to make it similar to how it works in singleplayer. Later in the game, there are plenty of ways to move units in such a way that they would be briefly visible to an opponent, but hidden from view at the start and end, and no one expects you to tell your opponents about that.

[Tarkeel]

I am also realizing belatedly that I should have moved our scout away from Dreylin's in the east last turn with its second move in order to hide from them, it would have been better to deny them the intel that we are very likely to be a direct neighbor... although, does pulling something like that abide by the RB honor code?

I believe the standard convention is to PM the player if you do this, telling them that your scout stepped into their vision, and which tile. However, I think this is strictly for first meeting a player, to make it similar to how it works in singleplayer. Later in the game, there are plenty of ways to move units in such a way that they would be briefly visible to an opponent, but hidden from view at the start and end, and no one expects you to tell your opponents about that.

The question I ask myself is: "Do I get an advantage by double-moving here?" If so I'll try to avoid it, but in the early contact phase you can just send a PM with where you met and which way you unit was facing.

[ljubljana]

Turn 40 - Zululand

In the south, I realize belatedly that we stumbled upon the edge of the "southern conifers" last turn. Hmm.... our capital borders are just one tile north of the edge of the northern conifers.... maybe it's a good idea to turn slightly to the south here



:D looks like greenline of sumeria, yes? if this is their capital, our inter-capital distance is a massive 26 tiles (!!) which puts the gold region cleanly within our sphere of influence. is there any reason not to make contact next turn? i can't really think of one, other than that it will let them put EP into us (and i'm not planning on reciprocating, dreylin's graphs seem more urgent)

speaking of graphs



ok, I'm realizing that 3k spike a few turns ago was probably just Wheel tech, which we did indeed get a KTB on shortly before the end. Weird that it finished just 3t after BW though, so either that's incorrect or they've been jumping around on research goals. [edit: reread Demos Explained and Wheel tech is 4k oooops, ignore this] Re techs generally, as you'd probably expect given we're in the "research goal convergence" part of the opening, only one player has a tech we don't have, Mysticism... I'm guessing Dreylin based on CHA-ness, though of course I should have checked the turn I met them in order to definitely know (and should remember to do that with Sumeria next turn)

I don't understand why this doesn't reflect the pop growth we got last turn from founding the second city though.... even if the graphs are delayed by a turn relative to soldier count, it's a been a full turn since that happened and our current (20k) soldier count reflects both pop and Wheel tech from this turn. Unless, ugh, unless the reported soldier count in the demo screen is NOT the same as the number displayed here......



We should this burn image into our brains.... if GT moves by the most direct route, they are 7t away from our fourth city site, which they can indeed be in position to delay if they play perfectly (though it is encouraging that they've gone south). But... look at our westernmost worker (whose name is thrawn). Their task now is to road toward the fourth city site, to enable a 2t transit there and instant TR when the fourth settler pops in the capital. At some point, this means they will have to step on a forest with fogged tiles in range, which, if they contain a GT warrior, could result in a lost worker. For micro reasons, we are not going to finish all the roads between capital and forest before that happens, and that could be as soon as 4t from now. This is probably a little paranoid, buuuut.... I am taking our scout off warrior-tracking duty for now to just to make absolutely sure that doesn't happen. My intention is to have them walk home for 4 turns, stay just long enough to defog next to the forest, then meet up with the warrior at a position such that, if they move toward us every turn between now and then, our scout will be able to spot them without having to end their turn next to them.



In a similar vein, I have screwed up in the east  The other 4 workers all half-finished a road this turn as Wheel tech came in, so next turn the third city settler pops and moves to the wheat. On the following turn, we want to move to the cow for the fastest possible founding time.... buuuuuut there will be fogged tiles in range if we do that and there is again a tiny but nonzero chance that we could lose the settler. If our scout were slightly to the north of where it is, we could defog the settler's path in the same way as we're doing for the worker, but it isn't, which is the screwup. Well, if we move it back by the most direct route, we will be 1NW of the horse when the settler has to move to the cow, which does at least defog SOME of the scary tiles (3 of the 5). Then we will have to decide whether the risk of a warrior appearing 1N or 1NW of the cow as our settler uses the last of its movement points to get there is worth delaying the city founding by a turn. I'm guessing it isn't, but that would be a really obnoxious way to lose a game if it does end up happening :||||

if our settler does NOT get sniped, it looks like we're in a good position to be first or near-first to 3 cities, at least in the immediate neighborhood. And, well, I assume we are first in workers

Next turn looks right for swapping to slavery, BTW - I have delayed it until now because the workers would have nothing to do if we got Wheel tech any later than this, and obviously we don't want to do it this turn with 1t to go on a settler. If anyone objects please let me know Capital's plans after this are, yeah, just to slow-build the fourth city settler unless I think of something better (it is possible that whipping the settler could count as "better")



We are still fourth in land area, so I think it's a good bet that there are at most 3 third cities out there, and some of our foes are getting points here from Creative so there may not even be that many. Let's see.... we control 30 tiles and have 30k points here, so 1k per tile seems to be the conversion factor. A CRE capital with 3rd ring borders controls, what, 21 + 16 = 37 tiles? That plus 9 from a second city with no overlap would match the 46k we're seeing here.... and it's also true that, for non-CRE, even a third city without overlap would give at most 21 + 18 = 39 tiles, so I think we can safely assume that whoever is in first here does NOT have three cities yet. Similarly, for the other of our two CRE opponents, they would have to have claimed at most 9 tiles between two new cities to be at or below 46 tiles now, which is possible but would be really inefficient. So probably just one third city out there at this point, I think, unless someone's start has so much water that they control fewer land tiles with 3 cities than we do with 2. I assume the fact that it says we're in fourth means there are 3 players with strictly more tiles than us, even if we are also tied with a bunch of other civs with 2 tile-disjoint non-CRE cities, right?

Since turn 36 (the last time I screenshotted the demos, yikes....) max power has gone from 22k to 26k. It also is not GT, who should be on 25k by adding up all their increases in the power graph. So while it's encouraging that nobody else has all the techs we do and also at least one warrior, the 4k jump over the last few turns is suggestive of a possible War Chariot. I'll keep a closer eye on this going forward..... (and please feel free to chastise me if I do not)

I missed another important thing a few turns back:



Turn 38 Stonehenge! That's really really most likely too early, right? Note also rival worst is on 21k land area still, so we were NOT last to two cities despite our opening, and whoever this is probably opened something like worker - worker - chopped stonehenge in the capital before the second city. Well.... as nice as pseudo-CRE is looking on this map, I am definitely glad we went for the "two more workers" wonder (civ5 pyramids?) instead...

[Jabah]

Any reason you are at 90% research (or you have switched after taking screenshot) ) ?

[ljubljana]

UHHH because i forgot about binary science thank youuu 

in my defense we're only losing 1 GPT at 100% so we wouldn't burn through all 16 gold before mysticism finishes..... and there is a chance we'll want to put hammers into the monument immediately in 6 turns, though i think it's more likely we'll want to finish a chariot first. but yeah i just forgot thank youuuu <3

although @aetryn, you are smarter than i am, is there any other reason such a leading question might be asked other than because we could get an extra KTB on mysticism from meeting sumeria next turn?

[Tarkeel]

I don't understand why this doesn't reflect the pop growth we got last turn from founding the second city though.... even if the graphs are delayed by a turn relative to soldier count, it's a been a full turn since that happened and our current (20k) soldier count reflects both pop and Wheel tech from this turn. Unless, ugh, unless the reported soldier count in the demo screen is NOT the same as the number displayed here......

graphs are snapshots at the turn-roll, while demo screen is live.