Gaspar and NobleHelium - More Arguments About Buildings & Food.

[CFCJesterFool]

but who cares, really?

Umm...I do. I chose to ded-lurk you and NH because I knew that the turn reports (and banter) would be the most entertaining to read. I'll be here to the bitter end (hopefully Commodore's )

[pindicator]

and assuming he libs a ~1k beaker tech he's up about 3k beakers on us. So any military plan that relies on us having a tech advantage is out. *shrug*

I say take inspiration from the latest Adventure 53 reports and build 300+ chariots. Oh wait, you don't have 5 million gold to burn through.

[Gaspar]

Umm...I do. I chose to ded-lurk you and NH because I knew that the turn reports (and banter) would be the most entertaining to read. I'll be here to the bitter end (hopefully Commodore's )

Appreciate the endorsement, though I can't say that I'm necessarily convinced this has been an especially entertaining thread.

I say take inspiration from the latest Adventure 53 reports and build 300+ chariots. Oh wait, you don't have 5 million gold to burn through.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? MAYBE GASPAR HACKED THE GAME, MR. CONDESCENDING DEDLURKER.



Anyway, we gave you the main news of the turn. Unless I'm vastly underestimating Commodore's research capabilities, he'll be taking either the useless to him Constitution or the relatively cheap for Liberalism Gunpowder with his free tech. The thread title indicates which way I believe he's going. That Great Merchant last turn was him as well, which will either turn into an extension of his Golden Age or will bulb Economics once he has the chance. I suspect the former, but we'll see.

Things are pretty glum in Sanctuary - we're both worried that the game is accelerating at a pace we won't be able to catch up. We debated a few different strategies for quite some time before finally deciding to tech Divine Right this turn, in hopes of getting Spiral Minaret done before our Golden Age is up. Next turn we'll tech Education with a bulb followed by Alphabet and Printing Press with a bulb. Then another decision point where we debate whether we can grab the Economics Great Merchant or whether we just go tech Constitution manually. Either way, we're going to start military build-up once the GA is over - most likely with the aim of grabbing territory from Yuri, since fighting Commodore will likely be both bloody and at a tech disadvantage. The expectation is that after this he'll head towards either Military Tradition or Steel.

The turn itself was pretty mundane. We finished mining the Iron which will get hooked up next turn:



We swapped scientists for merchants at Dahlgur Oasis because it allows us to remove more Wealth builds and also because a GM could be more useful than a GSci at that point:



We'll actually get a scientist out of Wortham Chapel sooner than that, which will bulb Printing Press. The mixed GP will pop out of Dahlgur Oasis 2 turns later.

A side quest in this GA has been trying to get this tile from Commodore. We've been running 3 artists to try and take it, it is a priority because Hidden Camp (which founded Islam as you can see in that picture) is our Moai city.



This scoreboard is pretty accurate. Its a 3-horse race at this point, but Commodore is definitely nosed in front. Also note the incredibly rare pre-Industrial Revolution situation where our Production actually outstrips our Crop Yield.

[CFCJesterFool]

Things are pretty glum in Sanctuary - we're both worried that the game is accelerating at a pace we won't be able to catch up

I know how you feel...every deity game I play is like that for me.

[Gaspar]

So 880 AD is in the books and what do I have to say about it?

...


Yeah, that's about it. Or maybe a better summation would be the end of our turn-playing chat:

NobleHelium: that liberalism icon
is going to taunt us for the next 20t
Gaspar: maybe longer :P
im actually amazed
at how much the events of the last few turns
NobleHelium: well we'll see what commodore took when we tech alpha next turn
Gaspar: have sucked any fun out of this game for me
NobleHelium: yeah
i know
but at least it's moving fast
Gaspar: like i dont even want to look at the save anymore
i hate our stupid small empire
and our stupid border with commodore
and myself for proposing this stupid game
NobleHelium: i hate commodore
end of story
Gaspar: and plako and novice for making this stupid shitty map
and commodore, certainly always commodore

That's probably a better summation than any turn report I can give. However, three of you were foolish to sign up to read this nonsense exclusively so the least I can do is let you know what we've done.



Looks like a bloodbath at Palaven, the French city which was the Byzantine target. They were successful and Palaven is now in Byzantine hands. That is also where Dave completed the Great Wall, so the Great Wall is also in Byzantine hands. Weird.

Speaking of those pesty Byzantines, we've been exploring Mistaboddom with our Chariot and can give you a shot of the area around their capital, First Touch. Pretty nice lands from what we can see, though awkward placement on the Whales.



Our treaty with Yuri ran out this turn and it is certainly possible he decides to attack us for real this time. One might have to ask, why else would there be all these HAs near our border?



Of course, if he invades it will just be GG points again, but I'd rather he didn't. More importantly, Iron hooked officially this turn and the first two CKNs came off the line. I can't imagine Yuri isn't afeared gazing into this particular maw:



We did win a brief, small victory over Commodore:



Hey! You didn't have anything to do with that John Terry! Bugger off!

(Sadly only the European readers will get that joke)

Anyway, we weaned ourselves off our Wealth build dependency, a development that probably only occurred because I was asleep for the first half of the turn. Stuff had become like crack for me. We finished off Education at 50%, allowing us to get some real builds fired up around the empire, including the aforementioned CKNs. We'll start on some Universities next turn. Oh, also started this:



No Organized Religion, but that can't be helped. Next turn we tech Alphabet, which will help with the whole "Knowing how far behind Commodore we are" thing. It will also allow this fellow to bulb Printing Press right after he's born:



That's probably a good time for me to do the full-body report, so T105 it is. Here's the demographics, with only us in Golden Age.

[Gazglum]

I guess the good news is that your stupid small area has the largest area in the game. Of course, half of it being plains and deserts is rather sucky. If that Cataphract army went north and ended up bogged down in Commodoreland, do you think you could take advantage by attacking one or the other of the leaders?

[Gaspar]

I guess the good news is that your stupid small area has the largest area in the game. Of course, half of it being plains and deserts is rather sucky. If that Cataphract army went north and ended up bogged down in Commodoreland, do you think you could take advantage by attacking one or the other of the leaders?

Let me address the first part first. When you look at the map of our territory as a whole, it is jarring, I think:



Stitch is a little off because I messed up slightly the second screenshot, and some of the middle resource icons didn't take but you get the drift. What's the first thing you see when you look at that? First word that comes to my mind is dry. We're tops in land area because we've less reason to settle coastally than our opponents and because our monk wonder focus has led to more culture buildings being built in our empire than our opponents. Commodore and Ichabod both have more cities than us and the only reasonable city we could plant that we haven't yet is the crappy stub north of the cap for deer and whales. We'll do so eventually, probably as Noble put it, when city settling costs become linear rather than quadratic - when we've taken enough cities from someone else that # of cities maintenance caps at 6 gpt. As far as I can tell, however there are three deserts on this board and all of them are in our territory. We've done the best with it that we could, I think but look at Khasim Outpost or Hidden Camp - you're talking about extremely marginal locations.

Now - the map probably sucks for everyone, don't get me wrong. Yuri has every right to feel aggrieved by the amount of jungle in his habitat and it definitely looks like there's just a random missing food resource in the middle of his lands. I will say that Mistabod's territory looks pure awesome at this point, though I'm sure we'll see whatever it is that sucks about it soon enough. But yeah, land area is pretty misleading as a statistic.

On the second question - attacking Mistabod is really not a reasonable proposition for a multitude of reasons. One, they're Byzantium which means they get a giant "Leave them alone" stamped on their foreheads until Rifling is teched. Two, we share no border. Any attack on Byzantine lands would be purely out of either spite or desperation. We could make use of Commodore or Yuri's territory, but Mistabod and Dave are just too far away to be useful anytime soon. And three, while I don't put too much stock in it, they're the only team who has perpetrated no hostile action towards us this game. Yuri, intentional or not, plonked a stack on our border. Dave made some variety of Simon Says diplomacy antagonistically towards us via Commodore, not to mention beat us to a wonder that would have put us in very nice position by ruining his own game. Commodore - well, we've been through all of that before, his list of crimes is well-known in this thread at least.

As far as attacking Commodore - if the opportunity were there, we would certainly take it. He ticks all the boxes for a target of aggression. He's in a strong position so bringing him down a peg would benefit our own chances. His land would fit neatly under our cultural umbrella. He's antagonized us all game long so there's no reason to feel even a little remorse about stomping on his sandcastle. The problem is, he knows this and has basically played all game to defend against potential hostility from China. His border cities are well defended and he's more advanced in terms of military tech than we are. If he were to go try and take a bite out of Dave or Mistabod were to invade him, we would be sorely tempted to take action. But barring that, we're going to need inhuman numbers to do damage and it just makes more sense to gather smaller numbers and go take down Yuri.

Anyway, thanks for the question!

[regoarrarr]

Just wanted to say that this game is the main one I'm interested in reading and I enjoy and appreciate your reports

[pindicator]

Nice stitch

[Mardoc]

Just wanted to say that this game is the main one I'm interested in reading and I enjoy and appreciate your reports

This is actually the only BtS game I tune in regularly for. And this thread is a large part of why.

Anyway, surely there's value in being furthest from the Cats?