[SPOILERS] scooter's AW lunacy - De Gaulle of Native Americans

[scooter]

So I've simmed things out a little bit. Basically I'm definitely building Stonehenge before settler here. My rough gameplan is I'd like to wonder-whore a bit and grow my cities quite large, and I'll be settling nearly all my great people in my capital for what should be one ridiculous city. That's the plan anyways. So that's why I'm researching Myst right now - I'm going to start Henge as soon as the WB completes and use Henge to grow to size 2. Now, what I'm a little unsure of is if I want to plow straight through Henge until it's complete at T19 or build a worker first. I went two routes:

WB->Henge: Henge complete EOT19. 1T into worker at T20. Whip it T21. Then chop + whip two more workers (I want 3 before settler) to quickly improve a bunch of tiles while pumping out dogs for protection (Rome and whatnot). Then once I've determined what the best city site is (I need to make a smart decision so it's worth delaying a tad), I'll settle for it.

WB->worker at S2->Henge: Worker gets out before Henge. It farms the Wheat and then chops a forest to speed Henge, Henge ending EOT21.

So they are barely different. Upside of v1 is it builds Henge 2T faster (so I get my prophet 2T faster) and it uses up 0 of my precious forest chops. It also has a worker by T21 so worker + henge is equal on time. Upside of v2 is I'll have an improved tile and overall somewhat quicker start economically.

Techs would be Myst -> Mining -> BW -> AH. In both of these sims I revolted to Slavery immediately, so both times could be improved by 1T by waiting on SLavery until after Henge is finished. Something to think about.

Very much an unorthodox start, but this start seems to demand it. I'm going to build 0 cottages. I'm going to build Pyramids (save most of my chops for that) too. I probably need to squeeze out city 2 before Pyramids but I'm even considering not even doing that.

[scooter]

Also I'm worried about that stone. The land around it is awful and barely worth settling, but if someone gets it my Pyramids (and honestly my whole gameplan) could be in trouble.

[scooter]

Alright Cyneheard is empty:



But the reason is he's at size 2. So that's what he did - grew to size 2 and he'll get enough hammers that way. I actually did not have that option as I max-hammered the WB. He's the only one to do that btw:



Demos show he just grew this turn:



As he's auto-assigned to food tiles. I expect that to change next turn. Capital:



I swapped from fur hill 1/2/1 to the 2/1/0 Wheat as I could still finish the WB but that let me collect an extra food. FInally, the northwest looks lush:



Lake fish, floodplains, river, bunch of grassland, etc etc. Very likely that a city will go up here somewhere at some point.

[scooter]

T6 admires the Roman furs

Yep, I'm importing my PBEM32-style turn titles. I'm sure nobody even slightly likes them except me, but I don't even slightly care so I guess it's a wash. In fairness, there'll be less to report each turn here so it's very unlikely I'll be as comprehensive as I have been there... Anyways. SITUATION:



Alrighty. He's working that furs hill as expected - max hammering out a warrior now at size 2. Also he has another warrior nearby and I'd like to not be trapped - especially since his warriors are aggressive. I choose life. But I'm also not quite ready yet for Bravely Run Away time. So... compromization shall take place:



That's right, made-up word time. Suck it Merriam-Webster. Anyways, I figured here I could spy on his capital for a turn while letting me head north to explore the great unknown a little bit more. Plus this lets me deny him the use of a nice tile - 1/2/1 is moderately useful at this stage. Back to home-front:



WB will improve the crabs next turn which will be super fun and all. Unpillageable 5F tile yields are pretty much amazing to have in an AW raging babs game. I also finally remembered to rename my capital:



I got no votes from any lurkers on which stooge they'd like the capital named after, so I went with Larry because for whatever reason that seemed natural. If anyone thinks a different one would be better feel free to speak up. Anyways I'm thinking I'll do a worker at size 2 before continuing on with Stonehenge - Henge was just an easy way to grow at this point. I'd like to save my other 4 chops for Pyramids. I'm really hoping for a forest grow - the tile SE of the Wheat seems like a prime place for a natural forest growth. Demos are not particularly valuable and skewed since I just temporarily "changed" Cyneheard's worked tiles with my warrior move but here they are anyways:



Yawn.

[scooter]

T7 finds food, food for all

First though:



Alright yeah 2 Agg warriors. So I Bravely Ran Away:



Well that sucks. Good news though: That's like a 3.3 vs 3.0 attack (CG3 gives +10% vs Melee), so while that's > 50% odds for him, it's still not good enough for it to be smart for him to attack. The potential benefit of killing an unpromoted enemy warrior is not nearly good enough to outweigh the potential drawback of losing a CG3 archer, especially while next to the dude with resourceless Dogs that are only worried about his archers. Cracking 2 of them is not even worth trying. Cracking 1... Not impossible. Anyways, I expect to be safe there. So the more interestinger stuff:



Holy food, Batman! That site has 2 lake fish (6f apiece), rice that will be wet after Civil Service, floodplains, and 6 riverside grassland tiles. I think I found my National Epic/Globe site. SPeaking of which, I actually wrote up a post about National Wonders that I simply haven't posted yet. I'll do some final editing on it and post it sometime tonight hopefully. The capital:



It can actually hit size 3 in just 2T after this so it's tempting to continue at max-food to size 3 and then worker. I may re-do some sims. Demos:



Dazed and Krill don't start with Fishing and I delayed Cyneheard's WB, so I'm first to hook the clams. Demos will be more interesting in about 35T when I see if my "go vertical first" plan was worthwhile at all.

[scooter]

Little discussion on national wonders and related planning-ness. I'm actually not really doing this for you lurkers, I'm doing it for me as I need to sort through it myself. That said, I figure it can't hurt to share it with you all. So ok, I get 2 per city so 6 total. I need to decide which 6. So this is definitely making the cut:

Oxford
Globe
National Epic
Heroic Epic
Ironworks

That's 5 out of 6. That's roughly in order of importance but realistically I cannot afford to skip any of the first 4 so who cares about importance. The 5th is pretty valuable too. The rest to consider:

Forbidden Palace, Hermitage, Moai, Red Cross, Mt Rushmore, National Park - none of these make any real sense to build in this kind of game. Hermitage maybe if I was going for a culture win, but that sounds like suicide in this kind of game. So probably not. The rest:

Wall Street - Usually a duh, but I'll be surprised if my science slider ever dips below what, maybe 60-70%? And by the time Wall Street is available I imagine it'll be higher than that. Unlikely to build.

West Point - This seems my most likely bet. However, it comes a bit late. This will probably be my 6th national wonder.

--

So. how to pair these cities?

Capital: This will have Oxford for sure as I'd like my capital to have specialists + settled great people + representation so Oxford would be a duh there. Pairing it with Ironworks might be a good idea since I'm pretty much guaranteed to be running a lot of Bureaucracy.

High-food site: Globe + National Epic. This seems to be the no-brainer combination. Run tons of specialists at as much food as possible and build Globe here. Health could eventually be an issue but it'd be ok for awhile.

Military high-hammer site: Heroic Epic + West Point. Military pump. Build Heroic Epic as early as possible (going to need to do some serious barb farming to get my HE unit) and use this as my military base. Eventually weave in west point. IW + HE seems like overkill to me and seems prone to wasted hammers on Quick speed.

So the thinking here is two science cities and a military city. Capital would be the main one with Bur + Oxford + settled GP + Academy + Rep Specialists. Food site would be the second with tons of specialists and would produce a ton of great people. Military site would produce the vast majority of my military after the early game. Great people would alternate coming out of the capital and the high-food site most likely. This just overall seems like the best way to handle things. The more I think about it, the more settling for stone + marble just feels extremely short-sighted. Oh well. If someone settles it they'll make life annoying for me at great cost to themselves, and given the group in this game I don't think anyone would do something like that. We'll see.

[scooter]

T8 loses our first soldier

The Roman scum may be responsible:



Unlucky. I still think he's crazy for attacking but he's going to get some nice XP out of the deal. One oddity:



I met Krill but he is nowhere to be seen on my screen. Often that's a sign of a scout that popped in and out of vision, but that's not the case here. The only thing I can think is this - Krill is before Cyneheard in the turn order, so he walked up into view of my warrior before my warrior was killed by Cyneheard. Maybe Krill can clean up Cyneheard's wounded archer? More likely Cyneheard runs away. Anyways, I'm hoping it's a Skirmisher but I'm hoping that Skirmisher does NOT come at me. My pretty little Henge plans could get derailed if I'm forced to build military. I'm keeping one archer home while sending the other home pretty soon.

Haven't explained this yet - but I'm shooting for the EOT19 Henge with 0 workers built.

But that's insane

Ah, I see you have not read the title of this thread. Expect lots of tha there.

Anyways, the point is I don't want to sink hammers into defending my workers/tile improvements. If I squeeze out a worker now and a Skirmisher shows up, I probably am not going to be able to kill that thing without getting out a Dog and even that cannot get odds against a CG3 Skirmisher. However, if someone tries to choke and I have no workers to screw up... Who cares. I'll be fine. They can disrupt tiles I want to work yes, but that's not going to hurt me THAT bad. I'll likely park one archer on the furs and the other in the city and I'll be fine. If several units show up, well then that'll be annoying, but that's true for everyone. Unfortunately just that could happen with Cyneheard having 4 units and Krill apparently having a unit nearby (he just confirmed via chat that he saw me before I died so that confirmed my theory). Whatever, not too worried either way, just looking to have some fun and try something new.

(The bigger benefit of going Henge before worker is saving all my forests. If I go worker before, I feel required to chop into Henge or else it'll be even later. This way I can get Henge in 19T with 0 chops, saving plenty for Mids. It's helpful.)



Just growing now. My micro earlier of finishing the WB on the Wheat let's me get to size3 1T sooner on the cows. This actually has no effect on the end date for Henge though.



Dazed and Krill starting worker first as neither start with Fishing. Too bad for them. I imagine Cyneheard is working on a worker now if he's completed the WB. Actually he probably hasn't yet according to the demos:



Archer can see a couple more tiles north:



Time for him to come home. I'm debating making this area my second city. It's a massive reach and it's quite far, but with just 3 cities, spread-out makes sense. Plus with Henge culture the borders will touch by the time I get up here. I'll need a good military to support this type of nonsense though.

[scooter]

One thing I'm concerned about - people figuring out what I'm doing and sending units at me - particularly Cyneheard. He seems to be doing C&D and my military score is unmistakably the low one right now. If he notices I am growing but haven't gained any power it'll be obvious I'm just Henging and have nothing more than 2 archers so he may come at me. Of course I'll have both archers at home, but still, he's got 4 units at his disposal so a choke could be a pain. We'll see.

[scooter]

T9 is chased by bears

RUN FORREST RUN:



This is why I need to get back quick. That CG3 archer might be cool and all, but it's not really at a huge advantage out in the wild. It would still get odds against the bear on defense, but they'd not be the best odds on flatland like that. Not worth the risk.



The other archer is about to be inside the city by the way. I think I'll just fortify it immediately so it'll have the full +25% fortification should someone come. The second archer will come home and be used as some sort of sentry on the Cyneheard front most likely. Anyways, I hit enter and it's going to start getting super obvious what I"m doing:



Especially when there's no accompanying soldier points:



Thing is, BW is so close that honestly it doesn't matter, I'll be able to build resourceless dogs immediately and I'll immediately revolt to slavery. So I won't die... but someone could slow me down by just being annoying. We'll see. Now hopefully it makes sense why I wanted Native Americans - I can afford to do this ONLY because the Dogs are resourceless.

[scooter]

T10 lives dangerously

So I decided to dare the Bear to attack me:



Basically, if the Bear (str3) is attacking an archer with +50% defense bonus and animal bonus and first strike... Gotta think those odds are in the high 90s. So I'll take that chance to get some XP. Though it won't get me a promo, it'll get me one gimme attack away from one which seems useful enough. For reference:



I could attack and get 74% odds. Now of course, that's ridiculous and I won't do that because it's not worth it (that's still 1/4 chance of being down to one unit)... But if he attacks me, those odds are going to be above 95% I'd think. So go for it Gentle Ben. I dare you.



The usual. Juggling which tiles to work is a nightmare, but I've tried several variations of this and I always end up ending Henge at roughly the same time. I could swap from Furs to Wheat and grow in 3T instead of 4T, but it's just not worth it - I'd miss out on 2h/turn for 3T (because the 2h from furs gives me the 1h bonus but the 1h from the Wheat does not, so it's a 2h difference). That can't be made up by an extra turn at size4, let alone the 1 commerce I'd be missing out on. So I'm going with this configuration. I could also ditch the cows and work the other forest hill, but that results in me ending at the same turn or MAYBE 1T sooner at the cost of a whole city size. Considering I'll want to do some whipping down after this is in, again, not worth it. This is probably terribly boring, but in case someone is curious how I'm going about this, here's my thought process. Anyways:





Nothing's changed. Cyneheard got to 2 and parked there. Everyone will have workers soon, and I won't for about another 10 turns . Though thankfully because Krill/Dazed don't start with Fishing I won't be as far behind them - Cyneheard may be another story... Though I'm not really thankful I slowed him down enough to delay his WB by a couple turns... So maybe it works out in the end.