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

[Thoth]

had a look at t35:

Couple of micro notes: Working a river grass in Asteroids instead of the Grass Forest gains us 2bpt.

T36: Swap river grass, new citizen and 1 floodplain to FGHs and keep a max hammer configuration. We should be able to complete the PT eot 38 and the Brewing Co by turn 50.

It's going to take 8/9 turns to finish Crafting and Edu. I think we grow the cap (building a granary next, not so much for it's actual benefits as to avoid building more warriors). Aim to complete a third worker here timed to arrive 1t before eduction. That will let us add a cottage/turn to Asteroids ready to work as soon as the Brewery is done.

I'd also rather collect xp on (and gold from) the southern Archer for the moment. We'll want him up to 65 xp for drill III and IV and we could really use the gold. There will be plenty of time to farm Shades once we get to Education/Bronze.

I think 4 warrs/2scouts once Edu is in. We can pop the dungeon (hopefully) and should have a good shot at getting a shade or two for our hammers.

Once Bronze is in, I think we aim to build 30h axes for our Waneables. PacMan will be able to build an Axe per turn once we get the hills mined.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Question: Why go for Kilmorph?

[Mardoc]

I'd also rather collect xp on (and gold from) the southern Archer for the moment. We'll want him up to 65 xp for drill III and IV and we could really use the gold. There will be plenty of time to farm Shades once we get to Education/Bronze.

Are you sure about that? Getting a Wane 1 turn early will be worth 13.5 gold or beakers; that seems worth losing a few gold here or there right now. Heck, at this rate of XP gain, I'd expect a Shade to cost us no more that ~6-7 barbs, total, which is only 14 gold; he'd pay back in the first turn. Even if we double that to assume we lose one at 16 XP, bounty hunter still doesn't pay compared to another Wane. And we're not desperate for gold at the moment, we've got something like 30 turns of 100% research in the bank, assuming no more huts.

For the most part, I'm really hoping that the barbs pick back up a tad, actually. That would let us do both. It's true we want the archer eventually to drill IV at least; I just think we're likely to have a bunch of battles available, and cherry picking out the easy ones for the warriors still lets the archer do most of the fighting.

Aim to complete a third worker here timed to arrive 1t before eduction. That will let us add a cottage/turn to Asteroids ready to work as soon as the Brewery is done.

I hadn't realized this before - but if I counted right, and we literally cottage every tile at Asteroids but the cow and the wheat, and work them all - we end up at +1 food/turn here. If we let the desert go unworked, or spring it, then we can even work specialists here too. I think we might want to build one or two farms, though, to let us work all the engineers we can - looks like we can eventually have 5 engineer slots (Tablets 1, Mines 3, Forge 1). At least Great Engineers seem like the best specialist to actually generate, rather than Wane, given the wonders we want.

But yeah, almost every tile should have a cottage on it sooner or later to run through the Academy.

Once Bronze is in, I think we aim to build 30h axes for our Waneables. PacMan will be able to build an Axe per turn once we get the hills mined.

Agreed! Your micro notes also make sense, and I'll look to address those. Assuming the barbs cooperate, of course.

Something you don't mention - I'm planning to start working the priest in Pacman next turn, despite the food cost. I want to cut as much time off of the Mines plan as we can, and I suspect the great people will be the bottleneck, not the tech. If you object, now's the time to speak up!

And I can agree with a Granary. Once we start turning the forests into Mines, we'll want the health, anyway, and until we start stacking up GMerchants Pacman will be perpetually food short, it seems.

I think 4 warrs/2scouts once Edu is in. We can pop the dungeon (hopefully) and should have a good shot at getting a shade or two for our hammers.

Sounds about right. Don't want too many units until we've got a GMerch settled, but if we don't start we won't ever get there.

Question: Why go for Kilmorph?

Mostly for the Mines of Gal-Dur. Even if Xenin gave us copper, we'll be surprised if he gave us Iron. Add in Axes being super-cheap, and that seems like a strong option. Especially for developing Wanes, which calls for units who can fight barbs wherever we find them, in the wilderness and cities and whatnot - high Str is more important vs barbs than vs humans.

Oh, and the Priests synergize well with a Shade plan, too. We don't want Tigers, they can't Wane. We don't want Cultists, they're very limited in area. But Stonewardens, in addition to passive XP, can boost all the units that'll do that actual fighting. Same thing with Bambur.

Secondary bonus that it's a way to get Dwarves, which means we can use Dereptus for another +2XP starting out, on whatever Soldiers of Kilmorph we build. Granted those are expensive units, but every bit helps. And it's a fairly early route to a unit as strong as Paramanders, as well.

Tertiary - it's an earth mana. If we mine every hill in our borders, even (or especially) those outside the BFC's, we might actually end up with gold and gems and copper and iron naturally; even one would be a nice boost.

Quaternary - Tablets of Bambur are the earliest Great Engineer points we can get, and the earliest Engineer slot as well. There are a few wonders - the Mines, the Guild of Hammers, the Form of the Titan, and the Great Library - that we really really want. Great Engineers would let us get them. (aside - Bone Palace would be nice for engineer points, too, Thoth. Just sayin' ).

So all in all - econ. By way of Shades, mostly. It's true the temples aren't likely to be worth much to us without the ability to grow the empire, but the ability to pop out 30 hammer axes that can then be Iron, Enchanted Blade, Blessing, Combat II - that's a unit that can just wander out, kill a bunch of barbs, then come home and settle down to making us money. And Kilmorph gives us benefits that don't depend on Xenin being nice to us - even if there's nothing more to our land than we currently see, we can end up in a good spot.

Is Kilmorph a long-term religion? Probably not, eventually we'll want to swap to something else like Veil. But we want to get all those benefits started first. And almost all of them stay when we switch.

Anyway, I played the turn, did no attacking. It looks like I'm going to have to micro both cities every turn, though, to keep the GPP pools clean; the governor tried to hire a Sage in Pacman this turn. I built the cotton road, next turn I'm thinking the workers put time into a farm 1S of the corn, then head to Asteroids finishing our travel road.

[Thoth]

Note:

Only worked mines have a chance at popping a resource, so no point mining anything outside our BFC unless it's already got a resource.

Suggest we not settle more than 2/3 GMs in PacMan total. Once we get up to 4 cities, we can move the Palace to Asterdoids and settle a mix of GE (4ish should be good enough) GS/GMs. PacMan is a great hammer city, but is lousy for commerce/cash creation. Asteroids will make an awesome commece city (cottage everything except the Cows and Wheat, extra food can come from settled GMs) and a pretty decent GP farm (with Tablets, Mines and maybe Bone Palace/Great Library (we'll need a third city to start that) plus a spec or two.

Agreed on farming that grass then completing the road to Asteroids. If possible, getting the Wheat roaded to and farmed before Education would be nice but the barbs probably won't let us.

As far a tech/gold ect goes: We've got 14 turns in bank assuming our expenses don't go up. (That still leaves us 100+ event/upgrade gold banked, which is where we want to be in case of Immigrants/Engineers/Orbs). By letting the BH Archer defend we can pick up ~2gp +1-2 xp on one of our Uber Units. Attacking out is risky, especially when you need to gain 17 exp. I'd rate the odds on us getting either of those warriors to wane at not much better than 50%. We'll still need another 3/4 80+% fights in order to wane.

Education is only 8/9 turns away and we can then start pumping C2 Warrs to try and farm some Wane xp. In the meantime, lets collect some gold and Uber unit exp.

[Mardoc]

I don't understand why moving the palace would help anything. Practically, I'm expecting that once we have enough GMerch's, we never run anything but 100% research, so it won't matter that Pacman doesn't produce natural commerce.

I don't know how I did (180-100)/6 and came out with 30 Ok, obviously I failed to subtract the 100 despite planning to keep it. That does make gold on hand a bit higher of a priority, to support our early teching.

I'll agree to leave most of the barbs for our archer. Practically that's probably the only option anyway, it'll be rare to have a good odds fight that doesn't stick a warrior in the open. I don't think I'll be able to entirely resist if Goblins stack up outside, or if we can throw a warrior at a barb on the desert who has no friends. But I'll certainly play it very cautiously.

I suppose the other option is to promote them (and whatever new ones we get) straight up the Drill line, and try to get our XP by a million defensive strikes on the attacking barbs, in parallel with the archer? Doesn't really seem a high odds play, though - 10% chance per battle won't add up very fast.

Maybe I can find another hut or two to make the cushion bigger. That'd make you happier to let me risk the warriors, right?

[Mardoc]

Yikes!


He's definitely got HBR. Maybe he was telling the truth about popping it from the hut. Maybe he straight-up researched it. Doesn't much matter now how he got there, he's got a military advantage over us for the moment.

Can you think of any reason to not warn him about the lizzie? Kinda want that warrior to bite it - but I also don't want to be hostile just yet

Thinking something simple like this:

Hi Serdoa, fancy meeting you in the wilderness like this! How's life in Hippusstan?

You ought to know that 2S, 1W of your wounded warrior is a lizardman. Be careful.

- Mardoc

Although, huh. I wonder if Hidden units even can give official contact? Cause there's still a ? next to his name and I can't look at his graphs to find out if he's the GNP leader or not.

In other news, the debate on feeding the warriors is moot this turn, they'd just die. And Pacman has a new shiny Pagan temple, with 28 turns to pop a GPro. Maybe we'll be able to speed it up a bit by building a Temple of Kilmorph here?

[Thoth]

n other news, the debate on feeding the warriors is moot this turn, they'd just die. And Pacman has a new shiny Pagan temple, with 28 turns to pop a GPro. Maybe we'll be able to speed it up a bit by building a Temple of Kilmorph here?

It's going to take very close to that to get to WotEM.

GP on t64 means tablets turn 66 and Mines around turn 90. Sounds like a decent timeframe.

From the screenies it looks like we don't have in game contact with Serdoa, so I'd hold off on contact for the moment. *
























*The fact that holding off on contact will mean that his warrior will be lizard poo or running for it's life in a turn or two has nothing to do with it at all. Nope. Not a bit.

[Thoth]

I don't understand why moving the palace would help anything. Practically, I'm expecting that once we have enough GMerch's, we never run anything but 100% research, so it won't matter that Pacman doesn't produce natural commerce.

I don't know how I did (180-100)/6 and came out with 30 Ok, obviously I failed to subtract the 100 despite planning to keep it. That does make gold on hand a bit higher of a priority, to support our early teching.

I'll agree to leave most of the barbs for our archer. Practically that's probably the only option anyway, it'll be rare to have a good odds fight that doesn't stick a warrior in the open. I don't think I'll be able to entirely resist if Goblins stack up outside, or if we can throw a warrior at a barb on the desert who has no friends. But I'll certainly play it very cautiously.

I suppose the other option is to promote them (and whatever new ones we get) straight up the Drill line, and try to get our XP by a million defensive strikes on the attacking barbs, in parallel with the archer? Doesn't really seem a high odds play, though - 10% chance per battle won't add up very fast.

Maybe I can find another hut or two to make the cushion bigger. That'd make you happier to let me risk the warriors, right?

I think the warriors should not go up the drill line. Straight combat with maybe a shock or two.

How far away is Serdoa? If he's close enough to hit us before turn 75 (we'll have Bambi and a bunch of 5 xp warriors with Enchanted blades plus the uber archers at the least) then I think we should focus on getting the Archers as heavily promoted as possible plus getting a few warriors up to C2/Formation before we even start to think about Waning anything.

If he's far enough away that he can't hit us until turn 90 or so then we can do some Waning focused barb farming.



My thinking on moving the Palace:

PacMan is an awesome hammer site. Trying to make it into a Gold city is trying to make a silk purse out a sow's ear. We'll want a couple of GMs Waned here as soon as we can afford the exp/hammers (Bambi should get Waned once he's finished up enchanting blades....unless we're under seige). The extra gold now will be very, very handy (ditto the food).

But


We don't have infinite Wanable units yet, and our costs are going to skyrocket as we build a military and expand to 4+ cities (we can't move the Palace until we have 4 cities, so until then this is all moot. )

We're going to have to drop the slider down a notch or two at some point. We'll likely be running God King for a longish time so having the capital in a city that can produce some commerce (and Aseroids is gonna produce some Awesome commerce) will help our tech rate more than settling extra Wanes in PacMan.

We'll need 4 cities before we can even start moving the Palace (note that the Palace counts as a National Wonder for Industrious purposes, so the move is quite cheap) so we've got plenty of time to discuss things.

The in game diplo/threat level situation will of course heavily affect how we want to use our xp.

[Thoth]

Couple of random thoughts:

Chalid is available at Honour. And he still starts with Law I and Channeling II and III......which means he can take Law III....which gives +1xp per combat to [strike]Wanable[/strike] all units.

Sacrificing the Weak as the Philo Sidar is probably a good thing.

Those two goals are not short term compatible.

But they'd both be fun. (and have Shiny toys to play with )

[Mardoc]

How far away is Serdoa? If he's close enough to hit us before turn 75 (we'll have Bambi and a bunch of 5 xp warriors with Enchanted blades plus the uber archers at the least) then I think we should focus on getting the Archers as heavily promoted as possible plus getting a few warriors up to C2/Formation before we even start to think about Waning anything.

Hard to say. I haven't found him yet, after all, just his exploring warrior. Can't be too far from home, can it?

We know he's found Selrahc already, at least, so presumably Selrahc is closer to him than we are. And everyone knows Selrahc's been having more barb troubles than the rest of us - I don't know if that bumps him up or down in the target list. I think if I were Serdoa I'd aim for Selrahc first, though. Much easier to be that last nudge into the abyss .

But they'd both be fun. (and have Shiny toys to play with )

Oooh, pretty....

[SIZE="1"]Yeah, I've got no idea if/when that's plausible to go for. I'm partial to Ritualists' Channelling II/Unholy Taint, myself. Especially with the EitB faster Quick channelling rate. And SacWeak does go well with a specialist/Conquest econ, yes [/SIZE]