[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[TheArchduke]

The better spot is the northern one, both are vulnerable to attack, though.

[ljubljana]

I think +2 food was the old, bad Feed the World - new Feed the World, in Gathering Storm, gives +3 food for both shrines and temples and, crucially, +2 housing as well. The main reason I'm so obsessed with it is that, with no harbors until size 7 in most cities, they will struggle badly with both housing and food income due to the slow lighthouse access - I'm envisioning FtW as effectively turning the shrine into a pseudo-lighthouse, one that doesn't give a trade route but is available for the price of a half-cost district + 70 hammers instead of a full-cost district + 120 hammers, and that gives its food bonus without requiring us to work a bunch of middling ocean tiles.

The city yield tabs are awesome!!! Thank you so much for putting all this together I haven't played around with them much so far but am definitely going to have to soon when it comes time for the giant struggle to get my first two cities to size 4 before the era change... (oh yeah, did I mention the second city needs to do that too? it's not essential per se but I really don't want to have to take the 3 ES from a +3 campus when I'm trying for a Medieval dark age...)

TAD, do you mean the northern of the two spots next to Galapagos, or the northern spot NE of the lake? As far as I can tell, if we go for early Mogadishu suzereignty, we would have two main points of military vulnerability to thrawn or an opportunistic Phoenicia - the SW at Geneva, and the SE at Mogadishu. A second city in the south by Galapagos has 3 points of attack, which is very scary, but I guess it is at least also by Mogadishu where we will need a large nearby navy anyways. The city NE of the lake (your pinned city 4) has just one point of attack, and should be easy to defend from galley attack by plugging up the strait between the city center and coffee island. It does turn the NE into an area where we will need to concentrate forces, which it isn't now, which might mean diluting our navy....but it also has stronger first-ring tiles and a VERY strong early second-ring tile in the coffee. Not sure which concerns win out...

Also, what do you think of my planned second city site (4SW of Hakuho)? It has good starting tiles and serves two very important strategic purposes early - the 1 extra faith from the dyes ends up making the difference in whether or not I get the second pantheon, and its proximity to Geneva shaves several turns off the attack timing there if it makes a galley first. Also, because it is next to Geneva which we have to defend anyways, I think it shouldn't be a defensive liability despite its two tiles of coastal access. But it does lack fresh water, which will need a quick solution if I aim to chop out a +3 campus there before the era change...

[ljubljana]

Turn 19 - Japan

We have barb problems



Unfortunately, with 2 barb camps cleared by other teams, we and our two warriors now have been blessed by 2/2 possible barb camp respawns. I guess that makes up for our luck with offshore camps in the early game.

Talked to TAD and they are planning to send the settler to the banana + rice spot in the north under warrior escort. That's definitely a better spot than the one in the south, I think, and will get off to a very fast start growth curve wise (much faster than my own second city, lol). I am worried about defensibility if there are Vikings that way, though...but, well, I guess that spot is going to be one of our first 3 cities in pretty much any circumstance. Maybe getting it set up sooner than the lake city will give us an easier time chopping walls there if it does come under heavy attack...? But then again, I also don't want the spot to serve as a lure to an aggressive Phoenicia or something if it does get scouted before we have a navy in place, and a swarm of Norwegian quads actually can crack ancient walls if they show up soon enough and in large enough numbers...



For my part, I have greedily chosen to attack the camp first after the scout moved west. We have four turns left in Discipline, so with this approach my warrior should get in two boosted hits instead of one, and might even manage an extremely fast camp clear with lucky rolls. The scout shouldn't possibly be able to reach Hakuho and activate before the camp is done, nor can it menace our settler. The one worry I do have is that it might pillage our holy site after we kill the camp, but I'm pretty sure that's not how scouts work...?

And, yes, I did remember to switch off Foreign Trade. I finally resolved the EE vs Craftsmanship debate as far as these extra clefs go by noticing that, duh, they can't go in EE because I don't have FT yet

Score updates:

- Chevalier finishes a settler 1t before everyone else. Um...what? How is that possible with monument-first, exactly? Oh, I suppose I could maybe have gotten there 1t faster if I'd worked the PFH the ENTIRE time. But I assumed the cost to the growth curve from dropping to size 1 (which Chev did do) would make that not worthwhile...
- Incurian gets a tech, so I am officially last to tech #1 :D

Very excited for next turn. I'm gonna wear my holy site-constructing shirt:

[williams482]

Very excited for next turn. I'm gonna wear my holy site-constructing shirt:

Love it.

We gotta get out and meet more people; there are way too many civs in this game who default to some shade of blue and I don't know what colors to use in the graphs.

I think I prefer the more defensible eastern spot for Portugal's second city, but the northern spot does have a lot going for it. Shorter walk for the settler and slightly better first ring tiles will be a slightly faster snowball and thus get boats on the water slightly faster. I do wonder how many other teams are going to be as singleminded about getting a significant number of galleys in play as quickly as possible the way we have. Hopefully we shoot up the power graph quickly enough to dissuade any would-be raiders hoping their early UUs won't face a fair fight, and defensibility doesn't ultimately matter much. That is the optimistic take though, I don't trust it.

Reviewing the scores, interesting choices happening in Phoenicia. Based on the milpower rankings and empire score growth, it seems Incurian opened slinger -> granary to get their capital to pop 3 ahead of anyone else, but have significantly slowed their 2nd city in the process. The extra food from the granary is definitely a benefit, but that seems like a definite error in build priorities.

Finally, I added a "City Yields - TEST" tab for arbitrary tinkering (such as working out probable build and growth times for foreign cities) that won't affect the empire yields tab or trample on any historical yield data or micro plans laid out in the other sheets.

[ljubljana]

re the single-mindedness of other civs' galley pace: my (admittedly paranoid) best guess is ALL of them thrawn is thrawn, and chev and woden are too talented and too aware of game dynamics to delude themselves into believing they can skate by with anything less and NOT end up as thrawn's first-choice target. it might have been possible that, eg, chev's team would only put Phoenicia on boats early and have Indo work on infra, but that's not really how i'm reading all these monument openings, the most compelling argument for which seems to be that they bootstrap you into Foreign Trade asap so you can spam galleys as soon as possible. of our 6 foes, only woden and krill lack such a monument rn as far as i can tell :/

re Phoenicia: yeah i'm a bit baffled. it can't be a granary i think as they lacked a tech until last turn (and presumably that tech is Sailing for biremes or Astro on their way to Cothons). they do also have a monument judging by their empire score + their team's culture ranking, so i'm reading them as slinger - monument - probably a settler now, which is a reasonable opening albeit one that will likely leave the slinger with nothing to do for ages on end. perhaps their team was planning to start with just one monument opening at first and have inc go slinger - settler, but then freaked out when they saw FOUR other monuments show up in the scores and decided Phoenicia needed fast biremes to keep up

but as for how they got to size 3, it doesn't make a lot of sense if our starts are symmetric as they appear to be. best guess is they pooled gold with CMF early and bought their team's equivalent of my plains jungle hill tile ASAP, and have been working that instead of the PFH in the capital this whole time. that's a pretty neat move if so and one i wish i had thought of  although they will lose much of the benefit from doing so by building the settler at size 3 (paying 24 food) instead of size 2 (paying 15 food)

[williams482]

Son of a gun, I keep forgetting that granaries require Pottery. I never build them that early so I'm not used to even thinking about them before they are unlocked.

Even working two 2 food tiles as soon as possible, they would only grow to pop 3 on t21. If they bought a tile, it was a three food tile, which we could have done only if we bought our 2nd ring mountain and then the grass jungle on the other side. Even with no techs or civics that would have required 125g, which they could have had as soon as Incurian's t12 if they planned this. Alternately, perhaps they had a three food tile in their third ring that was next to their first culture expansion (also on t12) instead of hiding behind a useless mountain like ours. That would have cost a much more reasonable 50g, no gold pooling required.

My best guess given all that is that they did buy both a first ring plains jungle hill and a third ring grass jungle hill, and burned a turn on *something* before swapping to the monument. Sacrificing an in-progress settler to get the monument out would be a very odd move for them, as getting the second city out two turns early (t18) is a real benefit and delaying all the way to t25 instead seems seriously problematic.

[ljubljana]

Yeah, I guess the preponderance of the evidence then favors the starts not being quite as symmetrical as they seem - after all TAD and I have identical first rings but markedly different second rings that do represent a pretty big swing in start speed (as is about to become evident when TAD has to drop to size 1 next turn :/). I'm guessing nobody has a 3f tile in the second ring, but I like the third-ring 3f tile hypothesis, probably next to a natural cultural expansion as there is no way CMF would let them spend 125g on two tiles instead of 2/3 of a trader...

lol guilty confession: i have built ONE granary in my entire PBEM career up to this point, in Cuneiform in PBEM20. and uh, i'm not really expecting that to change this game either . I'm inclined to favor some early pastures + fishing boats + dyes plantation at the second city instead to get to size 4, and the shrine can take over from there. maybe some cities will need them after shrine AND temple but they seem like clearly the least-efficient housing build for us here short of, like, an aqueduct

[ljubljana]

tiny little observation: note that both our home island have a ring of plains tiles on the coast, while the interiors are mostly grassland. this means that, when scouting, if we see another large-ish landmass with plains on every coastal tile, we can be reasonably confident that there is another team there

btw re civ colors: we are not the only pair of civs that conflict - Norway and Sumeria also share the same default dark blue. Based on what happened with TAD and I, I think Norway will get its default colors due to being first in turn order. As for Sumeria, both of their first two jerseys conflict with Norway's (which raises the question of, under what circumstances would the game EVER use the second one, but i don't want to worry about that now lol). So I am guessing we will see orange Sumeria with Norway's dark blue as its secondary color... And I've never played in a game with Gaul before, but it looks like they default to a dark green, which is dissimilar enough that I'd imagine they'll get that here as well.

[williams482]

Yeah, if a human were picking jerseys for these civs, taking Japanese and Portuguese colors as a given, I think the natural breakdown would be:
- Gaul: Green+teal
- England: Red+white
- Sumeria: Orange+dark blue
- Phoenicia: Purple+white
- Indonesia: Maroon+green
- Norway: ???

For the moment I assigned chart colors as above, and just made Thrawn pink because who the heck knows.

And this information theoretically has in-game relevance for identifying borders bleeding out of the fog, so we can't even ask the lurkers.

[ljubljana]

yeah, i mean, IMO it would be a bit weird for Norway to not get its defaults, as dark blue + red seems pretty distinct from all of the above even though both individual colors are used elsewhere. as far as i can tell, backup jerseys are only used when two civs would otherwise share a primary color, but maybe there is some other, weirder criterion...

also check out this extremely rare halloween japan i found today during an MP game with friends:



note white portugal, maroon mali, and blue mapuche all present, forcing a fall-through to the fifth, "just pick one at random from a list of defaults" criterion

naturally as soon i saw them i sputtered something incoherent about how "omg holy shit ALL FOUR of their jerseys are taken!!!" and my friends all looked at me like i was insane

i will choose to interpret spotting this shiny Japan as a good omen with respect to our chances