[SPOILERS] Emissaries from the blighted lands; Mardoc and Jkaen take on the world!

[Jkaen]

Played my turn, moved the hunter 1W onto the forested hill and will let them all come to me. I expect to be attacked by a lizardman EOT, but STR4 v STR6 should see me come out fairly healthy fingers crossed

[Mardoc]

Played my turn, moved the hunter 1W onto the forested hill and will let them all come to me. I expect to be attacked by a lizardman EOT, but STR4 v STR6 should see me come out fairly healthy fingers crossed

Sounds good.

[Mardoc]

Some possibilities for the location of Body:

I'm still thinking city2 makes the most sense, get a lot of food pumping and I shouldn't have any trouble grabbing the rest of these sites as well. But I'm open to arguments.

My main worry about this dotmap is that it's potentially too spread out.

[Jkaen]

Well, lizarman has gone around my hunter, hopefully he will change his mind and attack.

I have the appearance of a barb kill team of 4 combat 2 orcs on my borders this turn too. City should be fine, but I may get pillaged a bit if unlucky

In good news CoL finished end of turn

[Mardoc]

In good news CoL finished end of turn

Phew, finally .

I think we'd agreed to go up to Bronze Working next? It should be a lot less painful now that we're Aristocrats.

I think my plans for the next long while are pretty solid - build nothing but settlers, workers, bloodpets, and governor's manors. At some point I'll need to consider building infrastructure or military, but I don't think anything will compare to grabbing a bunch of land and growing onto aristofarms.

[Jkaen]

Ok, just make sure you can handle kill teams like the one heading to me

[DaveV]

I have the appearance of a barb kill team of 4 combat 2 orcs on my borders this turn too. City should be fine, but I may get pillaged a bit if unlucky

I've never seen a kill team stop to pillage.

[Jkaen]

Thats handy to know, thanks

That said, I am starting to get worried, what odds do 4 combat 2 warriors (well 3 combat 2 and 1 combat 1 first strike 1) have against 3 normal warriors and a first strike warrior in a city with i think 20% culture?

[Mardoc]

I don't have access to Sareln's calculator at the moment, so I can't give a precise answer. However - combat II warrior is Str 4.2 equivalent. Regular warrior, fortified completely in a city with 20% defenses, is Str 5.1 equiv. I'd guess therefore that odds are 3 victories and 1 loss.

Which will be greatly improved once we get our hands on copper, then a regular warrior fortified in a 20% city is Str 6.8 equiv. But it does suggest I need a larger population of Bloodpets, on average, for a while.

[Mardoc]

I went ahead and revolted to Aristocracy; time to start bumping off our techs a little faster. It added 9 to my GNP, should do more than that if I figure out how/where to also farm. Sadly, it appears we were wrong and the Pool of Tears is not an irrigation source. I may end up building a couple cottages at my capital - or maybe just hurry to get the next few cities founded instead, and build mines. Regardless, I've no need to revolt again for quite some time; I'll eventually want to add in Military State/Agrarianism/SacWeak, but that's not going to be needed until I'm prepared to start large scale drafting of Vamps.

Techs needed in the near future:

Crafting -> Mining -> Bronze Working (security)
Calendar -> Festivals (cash, Agrarianism, happy)
Fishing (tons of Malakim food)
Mysticism -> Religion(s) (get the Malakim good stuff rolling)

Aside from getting more happiness into my civ, I think I've now got everything I need economy-wise, and the only other tech I'll need is Feudalism for Vamps, which we can't afford yet. So for the time being, I think our focus ought to be a mixture of economy and Malakim-boosting.

Since these barb kill teams are so nasty, we probably do need to hurry to BW, so I'd think a path of Crafting -> Mining -> BW -> Fishing makes sense for the moment. I'd like to move Fishing earlier, particularly if we discover that copper is only outside BFC, but I'm not convinced we can afford to put off Bronze any longer. Hopefully the new commerce from Aristocracy and that nice trade road you're building will make this path less painful than the path to CoL was.