The Haunted Forest: Mardoc puts the Sidar to the test.

[Thoth]

Depending on what time you guys are blitzing, I can be available on Saturday for some RCC.

Sat eve is my work X-mass party....free food, free booze. I'm going to be stuffing myself and getting corked from about 7:00 pm EST onwards, and will likely be unavailable after 6:00 EST.

[Mardoc]

Unless Selrahc demurs, it sounds like we're good to go for 10am-1pm EST on Saturday. Which ought to leave you time for pre-party rum, and sobering back up in between .

Anyway, more from me tomorrow. Maybe I'll even take a shot at extending the dotmap in the Lanun game.

Gotta say, with no settlers, the turns here seem like there's even less going on . But there's got to be something worth talking about.

[Thoth]

Unless Selrahc demurs, it sounds like we're good to go for 10am-1pm EST on Saturday. Which ought to leave you time for pre-party rum, and sobering back up in between .

Anyway, more from me tomorrow. Maybe I'll even take a shot at extending the dotmap in the Lanun game.

Gotta say, with no settlers, the turns here seem like there's even less going on . But there's got to be something worth talking about.

Ok, Think I can make that timeslot.


Note that if we have 100+g in the bank, we have a shot at a third early city.

[Mardoc]

Note that if we have 100+g in the bank, we have a shot at a third early city.

I'm willing to build up for that possibility once we have God King, but I think odds of that event are low enough that we can afford to delay our warchest.

[Thoth]

I'm willing to build up for that possibility once we have God King, but I think odds of that event are low enough that we can afford to delay our warchest.

Definitely wait until after Myst/Exploration. Those two techs are going to be critical for our early game economy. Think we want Ag ASAP as well to start growing the cap. Asteroids has more than enough food to grow fast as it is. It'll make a first rate commerce city once we get to Education for some cottage spam (plus Apprenticeship/Conquest).

Myst/Exploration/Ag/Calendar/Crafting/Education/Mining/WotEM with a swap to GodKing/Religion at Mysticism and into App/Conq at Education

[Mardoc]

Definitely wait until after Myst/Exploration. Those two techs are going to be critical for our early game economy. Think we want Ag ASAP as well to start growing the cap. Asteroids has more than enough food to grow fast as it is. It'll make a first rate commerce city once we get to Education for some cottage spam (plus Apprenticeship/Conquest).

Myst/Exploration/Ag/Calendar/Crafting/Education/Mining/WotEM with a swap to GodKing/Religion at Mysticism and into App/Conq at Education

Ok, good, we're on essentially the same page. Now I can blame you if we get the settler event next turn :neenernee. I assume the point of an earlyish Crafting is an Industrious Dereptus build?

On another subject - I think we want our first 2-3 Shades to be GEngineers; having more hammers ought to lead to more non-archer combat, and hence to more Shades . Seem reasonable? Or do you think our limit will be beakers rather than hammers?

Obviously Pacman is the GMerch capital and Asteroids the GSci home. Engineers, I think will be mostly unnecessary past the first couple, but should divide relatively evenly.

[Mardoc]

Got another 24 gold from the last hut. And...T10, you said? I think your sandbox was optimistic



It's now or never on the invisible scout idea. I think, all in all I still lean toward no, we'd rather get at least a couple invisible workers out of the worldspell, if not a whole invisible army. Which would call for leaving the scouts in the wilderness, maybe fortified on wooded hills in the off-chance they can become Wanes, maybe wandering in the hope of one more hut before death.

[Thoth]

Ok, good, we're on essentially the same page. Now I can blame you if we get the settler event next turn :neenernee. I assume the point of an earlyish Crafting is an Industrious Dereptus build?

On another subject - I think we want our first 2-3 Shades to be GEngineers; having more hammers ought to lead to more non-archer combat, and hence to more Shades . Seem reasonable? Or do you think our limit will be beakers rather than hammers?

Obviously Pacman is the GMerch capital and Asteroids the GSci home. Engineers, I think will be mostly unnecessary past the first couple, but should divide relatively evenly.

Maintenance costs will be high and tech will be the biggest bottleneck in the early game. Once Kill'em'orf is in gold won't be a problem, but a +7g GM in a God King capital, combined with a Priest Spec yields +12 GPT, enough to cover our civic maintenance plus a decent army.

We won't want to Wane everything. Both those Archers can be turned into Uber units. If we get them up to 35 xp before we start throwing warriorpults around, that's enough for C5/Commando.

And Archers upgrade to HAs.




Speaking of upgrades.....

Soldiers of Kill'em'orf upgrade to Paramanders.

They're Dwarfs, so they benefit from the Brewery's +2 xp on Dwarf units ability.

With Bambi available at WotEM, we can (and should) delay Arete until the GE is due to arrive. The Tablets only enable one Engineer slot so the GE for the Mines is going to take awhile as it'll be our third GP.

But that's ok I think. C2/Eb SoK's will have odds vs st3 barb warriors even without Bronze. The highly promoted barb kill stacks won't be arriving until after the barbs have had cities for awhile.

Once the Brewing Co and a Temple of Kill'em'orf /Pagan Temple (+2 total happies with Religion) I think we should go hard and heavy on the SoKs here with the intent of farming some xp and promoting to Dwarf Paramanders. A dozen or so would be nice.

Got another 24 gold from the last hut. And...T10, you said? I think your sandbox was optimistic

Told you so.

:neenernee

It's now or never on the invisible scout idea. I think, all in all I still lean toward no, we'd rather get at least a couple invisible workers out of the worldspell, if not a whole invisible army. Which would call for leaving the scouts in the wilderness, maybe fortified on wooded hills in the off-chance they can become Wanes, maybe wandering in the hope of one more hut before death.

I'm waffling....WS now gives us invisible scouts on a map with 3400 land tiles. It'll guarantee contact with everyone while they'll likely not meet each other for some time. What's the diplo in this game? If diplo is on, it would give us the inside track on building relations.

If it's off, we can kill at least two workers.

Plus all the hut goodies.

And maybe a dungeon or two.


Let's do it. :

[Thoth]

I took a look around in the turn 9 save (I didn't move either scout).

I think we can shave a turn off Myst by working another floodplain in Asteroids (you'll want to turn on "avoid growth" in Asteroids until we get the road connection complete.

And working the unimproved bare river side grass in Pacman. I hate doing this, but I think that combination shaves a turn off Myst. Which means our ECS (and hence the GS) and God King/not in Pacifism hammers arrive a turn sooner.

I think our best "not in Pacifism" choice is Religion. Pagan temples now give +1 happy with the Religion civic. And we'll want to start farming the GS for the tablets ASAP. Ideally one turn after Asteroid starts running a Sage, but that's not going to happen. The warrior in Pacman should complete one turn before Myst comes in. We'll be at 15/17 food. If we put one turn into another warrior, we can build a worker at size 4 under God King 5 turns later working unimproved Corn +3 forested hills. We'll make 8 base hammers from the three 1f/2h tiles + two from palace and base tile food neutral working the Corn as our 4th tile. We'll have 10h of overflow to put into a 1 turn Elder Council. We could then finish the warrior without any hammer decay. And then start into a pagan temple.

Except that would leave the worker idle for a turn or two. If we build the EC first, we can work the same tile configuration for a two turn EC. Probably won't lose any worker turns (tech is our early bottleneck here), at most 1. But we'd gain 8 beakers in exchange for 1 h on the warrior due to hammer decay.

I like the EC plan better.

Asteroids needs to have "avoid growth" turned on after it grows to size 4 at eot. Do yourself a favour, and post a sign on the city to REMIND YOU THAT AVOID GROWTH IS ON.

We'll be able to increase the happy cap here to 5 once the road link completes but until then extra people here will just drive up our Civic Maint cost.

Monument should complete one turn before Myst. Put 3 turns into Worker, then swap out to an EC working max hammers after the borders pop. EC will take three turns, then swap back to Floodplains while the worker completes. Hire a Sage as soon as the EC is done. ETA on GSage t33.

Gsage should build an Academy in Asteroids I think. Short term it's a bit weaker than an Academy in Pacman, but it quickly becomes better once the Brewing Co and some cottages are online.

Techwise, I'm leaning to Myst/Exp/Ag/Calendar/Education/Crafting/mining/Animal Husbandry/WotEM.

Followed by one of Bronze (only if we actually *have* copper available), Writing (Philo Libs to boost our tech rate) or Festivals (Markets and Carnivals for +1 happy).

I like Writing/Bronze/Festivals myself. Assuming we land Runes, a lot of our gold problems will go away so maintaining a 100% slider is doable for some time to come and those Libs will pay off quite quickly.

We'll have little other than units/infra to spend our hammers on for some time to come and C1/Shock or C2 warriors out of the box (from Conquest and Apprenticeship) can see to our defenses for awhile.

Any road up, I'm starting to ramble a bit so I think I'll just hit "Submit Repy" button and be done with it.

Oh, and BTW.

Once we get up to 4 cities, Asteroids would make an awesome place to Build an Industrious Palace.

[Mardoc]

All right, alea iacta est. We have invisible scouts now. And I did check one thing first - invisible archers, in cities, do still defend. Which is good, that would have been an embarrassing way to go.

Diplo is fully on. Exploring lairs will remove Hidden from our scouts, though, so we probably don't want to do that except for great temptation. But huts will not remove Hidden. So here's hoping for a Tribal Bounty!