RBP4 [SPOILERS] - Shaka of Zulu (sunrise089, regoarrarr, and friends)

[regoarrarr]

One other thing to mention about plako's chat is that he claims he's only going to settle 20 cities. He's probably lying / sandbagging, but last time I checked, we were going to have 30+

[regoarrarr]

Email from Locke to everyone but plako

Hey there. This email going to all teams in game except plako. This is gonna sound kinda weird but hear me out. We are all losing to plako. Some doing better than others but all losing. You all see his GNP graph spikes. He has 14 cities and most food and most production and most GNP. If we do nothing he just outtech us and eventually kill us. WarriorKnight first and then the rest of us. That is bad result.

So what do we do? Most teams are way far away cant go to war. Also I think war coalition has been tried in other games and it doesnt work well. Because someone doesnt send units and then they get ahead while everyone else fighting. But there is something else we can do. plako has Currency tech. He is running economy off foreign trade routes in 14 cities. That is 28 trade routes to other civs. If we all CLOSE BORDERS with plako, he lose all them at once and economy crashes. It is a lot of income will hurt him a lot. So I want ask everyone to join together and close borders together with plako. Has to be everyone though. This will not work if only some of us do it. It is in eveyones interest to close borders with him. Even if you are friends with plako. We need to present united front. This is peaceful boycott as a group.

Some of us have units in plako borders. We do right now. So if we do this it should be together on turn 110. Give time for units to move through plako borders.

So tell me what you think. I think it is best way for us to slow down runaway. It is easy and you dont have to do anything. Just click to cancel OB. If we all do it together plako cant get mad at any one team. You will still have plenty of foreign trade routes OB from other civs. We need EVERYONE in on this. Lets do this. :D

Locke

PS Please dont say anything to plako. Even if you are friends theres no reason to help him win easier.

I said we'd probably be up for this but I doubt it will work

[DMOC]

ooooh very interesting message. I wonder what will happen.

[regoarrarr]

It's been a long time since we had a real honest to goodness update. So here's a bit of overview of what's been going on in Zululand. These screenshots are 2 turns out of date (probably soon to be 3 as the turn will likely flip here before too long)

Here's the capital with some of the northern territories.



Vine (Capital) is on a pretty repeated 5->3 whipping cycle of settlers and workers. It's currently growing back on a workboat which will net the clams at the newly founded city of Batavia.

Montgomery is on a 4->2 whipping cycle.

Hamilton just whipped the lighthouse from the picture, overflowing into Moai. I'll be building Moai on whip overflow mostly. Stinks that there is no stone on the map - 250 hammers is a lot, though this should definitely pay it back with 14 water tiles.

Astute observers will notice a settler 1NW of the pig tile



The city of Harrison was founded this past turn. It actually raised gold by 3gpt, so we still have not yet reached the point where cities are costing us money. When they start with 4 2-coin trade routes it's quite the bonus! Fauntleroy the worker is already pasturing the pigs which are in our borders already thanks to 3rd ring capital culture.

Here's the southeast.



Reading is a slow growing city currently working on a worker (which will be completed by a chop in 2t). Colerain has turned into a powerhouse city - it has (shared) corn, iron, furs, horses and with 2 grassland mines will be making 15hpt at size 6.

We've agreed with Adlain as to our border - we'll have a city at the choke 2E of the rice (or 2E1S). We gave up settling one tile further east which we didn't really want to do anyways in exchange for getting 2 more Buddhist missionaries (40h each) in exchange for one worker (60h but we're expansive). They'll be at that staging tile in about 15 turns. I'll try to remember to use them for cities that need border pops this time.

We'll have a city near the western bananas and then I think the location marked "Globe" is a good city for the Globe. We'll have the adlain border city and maybe another city to its east depending on the deal with Moogle.

Beechmont is a slow growing kinda crappy city but founded there for the Bob's Fork border choke. It's likely that we will not get any other cities on either of the other sides of Bob's Fork.

Here's the Southwest.



There is a settler onroute to the cows / wheat / copper / silks city - should be founded in about 2 turns. Next city is probably the corn / ivory site.

Tech-wise as you can see Currency is finished, adding 9 new 2-coin trade routes in our empire. We're teching at a pretty good clip I think so we just need to continue focusing on expansion. We are on Calendar now, due in probably 7t. After that I think either Metal Casting or up the religious line to Monarchy for a revolt to OR / HR.

We have a NAP with Lord Parkin till T140 and we've got sentries near Plako and WK, neither of whom are likely to attack us. We're also moving towards closer relations / alliance with SleepingMoogle, though I do need to chase him up just to check in. WK's power is growing a bit but nothing (hopefully) too scary. I'll ask him about that too.

[regoarrarr]

The other thing that I want to do is now that we have Currency, do a brief analysis of people's gold and gpt amounts. Mostly gpt - as that can tell how fast people are researching. Not having any gpt available for trade (generally) indicates that they are deficit researching, sometimes doing binary research. If they're making more than 1 or 2 gpt that usually means that they're saving gold, and the amount is their surplus gpt @ 0% science.

For comparison, our gpt amount at 0% science is 70gpt

Ioan: 21gpt, 35g
Adlain: 0gpt, 6g
plako: 3gpt, 1g
Locke: 0gpt, 34g
luddite: 0gpt, 102g
LP: 0gpt, 17g
WK: 28gpt, 0g
Nakor: 0gpt, 22g
Moogle: 0gpt, 7g

I'll try to check these every turn to see how things are progressing.

[regoarrarr]

T109 played. I did grab the gold numbers again but too early to tell about that.

One interesting thing to note is that nobody has iron hooked up, and also nobody has wine or any calendar resources hooked

[sunrise089]

T109 played. I did grab the gold numbers again but too early to tell about that.

One interesting thing to note is that nobody has iron hooked up, and also nobody has wine or any calendar resources hooked

Buil-il-ilder game In our MP game we played over the weekend can you imagine no iron 7t from the end? That's actually a great sign for us, as we've peacefully secured our land borders at least giving us a fair share despite the GLighthouse play, and it doesn't appear anyone is going to war before construction/horseback riding.

[darrelljs]

Buil-il-ilder game In our MP game we played over the weekend can you imagine no iron 7t from the end?.

Yes I can, because I didn't have any. I had one Copper and no Horse/Iron. I stretched to grab Elephants though. Between that and my "food" resource being plains Cow, I was angry with the mapmaker . I think those kinds of games need balanced resources.

Darrell

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Haha, and I thought I had it bad with a plains sheep. I got lucky, moved, and managed to add 2 floodplains to my capital.

It's also taught me to be more aggressive, moving that one axe in my general direction caused me to freak out and build way more archers than I really needed. In fact, that's my biggest problem, poor decision making causes me to overreact to any pressure and does a ton of economic damage in slowing down my expansion, and makes me lose focus.

[regoarrarr]

Haha, and I thought I had it bad with a plains sheep. I got lucky, moved, and managed to add 2 floodplains to my capital.

It's also taught me to be more aggressive, moving that one axe in my general direction caused me to freak out and build way more archers than I really needed. In fact, that's my biggest problem, poor decision making causes me to overreact to any pressure and does a ton of economic damage in slowing down my expansion, and makes me lose focus.

Yeah I had really bad food too - a grass sheep and then tons of floodplains.

I didn't have any metal though - no copper and iron was far away. I had ivory at my first city and financial floodplains cottages got me to elephants pretty quickly.