[SPOILERS] Stonehenge First: scooter's thread

[scooter]

moar updates please!!!!

Coming! Would have happened last night but I was busy getting Margrave'd.

[scooter]

T41-46 changes plans

I've actually really been enjoying farming the barbs for XP:



Too bad it doesn't increment my great general counter. Pindicator report:



Moving forward with that archer/holkan pair. He would eventually settle on that plains hill because I don't know, I guess he likes getting crushed culturally? Troy is a holy city and has a monastery, so it's pushing out 7 cpt right now. Pretty significant amount. Next turn:



There's the settler. Anyways, the stone area:



Crap. Commodore has a road there. That may mean my chariot is dead, and it definitely means he's aiming for stone too for Pyramids. In a world where he has Agg Phalanxes, that's not a battle I can really win:



Yep, killed my chariot. Time to change my plans when he moves a settler here this past turn:



Yes I chased away Pindicator's chariot btw. Anyways, I sent the settler south towards AT instead. I'm going to try to pop Judaism into that city and maybe revolt to no religion for a few turns to pop the borders. Glance at the Pindicator front:



I hope he has a plan here for getting culture in because this is one tightly squeezed city. With cities as expensive as they are, you really have to make them count early on. The city I'm settling is just SE of here. Somehow the screenshot didn't take or something so you'll get that next turn which should be played in a bit. Time for a graph/demo dump:



I'm consistently behind on this one, though in fairness I'm not getting CRE culture so there is that. Though I am getting religion culture so it's not totally inaccurate. My teching is probably going to come a lot from Caste, though I definitely need some cottages down. The next two is where I'm doing fairly well:





Nice. Power:



Good enough but I need more military now. Demos:

[scooter]

T47 hits 3 cities

Pindicator beat us to 3 cities just barely:



Also, barb farming jackpot:



I'll get my max of 10XP and then send another unit.

Also, as expected I nearly went broke with that 3rd city. Next city is definitely going to need to work the gold to keep me afloat. Limping to Caste is probably my next play.

[scooter]

T49 gets all polytheistic

We've got room for more than one religoin right?



At the moment I'm more interested in Organized Religion, but this was a nice bonus. Really it's useful for the denial more than anything. Demos:



GNP is with no tech selected, but it's still not very good.

[scooter]

T50-52 gets annoyed at Pindicator

He ruins everything. When we last left our brave chariot back on T47 he had spied some warriors:



T48 he healed. T49 the warrior 1N of the city was gone, but the rest were still there. I moved 2E onto the forest. I should have moved just 1E and sat there, but that's what I did. I open T50 to see, well, okay, first the good news:



But you knew that so who cares. The bad news:



ARGH. That was a C2 chariot too. Lucky Pindicator. Next turn I flip into OR:



Nice and all. But then bad news again on T52:



He CAPTURED it. CAPTURED. This is REALLY bad. Why? It makes it so I'm unable to place a city on the fish lake! I had a spot planned just 1W of the fish. I positioned my Jewish city in such a way as to place a city just east of it on the lake that would be fairly well protected. So this city has to burn. Good news though? It's not on a hill. Honestly, he'd have been better off razing and replacing on a hill if he's going to make it a contested front city. Anyways, I'll get to work on this. I think I can manage. But yeah, that city is going to have to die. I have a settler with hammers sunk into it, so if I can raze it quickly, I can immediately replace. We'll see if I can string that together without screwing up too badly.

[scooter]

By the way, there's something sneaky going on in those last two pictures that I didn't comment on. I'll name a unit after the first person who can figure it out. Be specific!

[Merovech]

You're building a wonder? I wonder which one...has Stonehenge fallen yet?

[scooter]

Close enough. There was a few hints in those pictures. First is the fact that I settled in AT's face on a hill and wasn't really using the holy city culture. Surely I'd want culture from something else. Then from the pictures:



Swap to OR for the chops to be worth more. Then:



This was notable for two things. The main hint is the chops, but the secondary hint is Buddhism spreading into Britta right AFTER the OR switch but right before the chops came in. Two chops later, wala:



Yay. I didn't Britta it. 10cpt there now should give me the ivory easily.

[Bigger]

dang, merovich ninja'd me. I guess it woulda been cheating anyway since you told me already <G>.

[scooter]

T54 is nice round turn number for state of the world

Actually, more like I'm probably not getting another save for a couple days, so let's do a big update. Now that I say this, I see Pindicator did get the save away for one more turn before leaving, but TOO LATE. I already took a ton of pictures so they're going up regardless. Let's see. First, the news you've heard about:



This is purely for the culture of course. I'll own this region rather quickly:



As you see I'm well on my way to getting another border pop. The only unfortunate thing is it took this long to get it up, so it'll be AD years before I get my culture doubler. Still though, not bad. Some good news:



Ah. The event log said "captured" which made me think he kept it, but apparently not. Or maybe he kept it and then emptied it so a warrior could raze it . I should have known though when there was no city center on the tile as I'm pretty sure you can still see that in the fog if you've uncovered the tile. Anyways, EoT situation near Britta:



Couple things here. First, yay for border popping. That peak he owns is really unfortunate though as he gets some unnecessary vision. The one major problem with this location is the hills. There are two hills that a slow-moving stack could move across and be difficult to dislodge. I'm planning to get more defenders into the city so that I can afford to put some guerilla archers on the hills and hopefully prevent that from happening. We shall see.

Second, I really need to hurry and settle the "c" location before Pindicator replaces it or something.

Finally, I'm really having trouble with happiness right now because my cities (especially my capital) produces things so quickly that I can never double-whip. I'm hoping I can accomplish that with libraries, but unhappiness is really becoming obnoxious here. My only immediate option is the ivories. Quick glance at top cities for something notable:



AT already shrined Hinduism. Interesting. Why not settle the prophet? Or bulb early Code of Laws or something or whatever is typical for an early Prophet bulb. Well, in fairness, this is a better move than in the previous PBEM34 because there's no 3 city limit, so at least here you can get more than 3gpt for it. The demos:



Lagging behind a touch in soldiers, but in fairness, other teams have inflated soldier counts because their UUs score as higher. Fast Workers have a particularly low soldier count for a UU . I'll go through the graphs now too because I can, even though they're not super useful at the moment because of how they lag behind the demo screen:





AT and I clearly ahead in terms of pure expansion. I think this is because we've made better city plant choices and got our settlers our quicker. The perks of having played the scenario once before I guess. The one I look bad at:



The bad news is I do think it's accurate to say I'm teching slower than the others. That needs to be remedied with time. The good news:



I'm getting in noticeably less cpt than the CRE guys, so the actual teching gap isn't nearly as bad as GNP makes it look. Yet.

So that's where I am. I'd like to tech towards Code of Laws so I can get into Caste. That'll allow me to tech better to some short-term goals and let me get out some great people to get a few (hopefully) nicely timed bulbs. I have not yet decided which techs I'm actually aiming for though, but that's the rough plan. I'm thinking about aiming for a bit of a monk economy, aiming for the religious wonders. Well, not strictly a monk economy, but on this kind of map/settings I need a bit of a hybrid here. There'll be cottages, specialists, monk-type things. Gotta do whatever works really.