[SPOILERS] PB1- Mardoc buys a can of paint for Thoth and Ellimist

[Ellimist]

Conquest lets us use our surplus food for hammers rather than wasting it under "Avoid Growth". It also lets us keep building level 3 units while taking advantage of the gold savings from MS as well as the hammer boost.

FT? Sure maybe later if we have some Elohim cities we actually want to cottage (other than the capital)

I'm not opposed to conquest, but before we adopt it, we should check the cities and make sure that they'll still have surplus food without agrarianism. If we stay in aristocracy, a lot of that surplus will go away.

I want another one before picking up all the military techs: Animal Handling. We need Hawks or Floating Eyes in order to use troops effectively. I'm ok with delaying it until after Feudalism, though, on the theory that recon isn't worth much if you can't back it up.

Air recon is definitely a priority. I'm not sure where it fits into the tech path, but we'll want it sooner rather than later.

Devil's advocate time: does the potential for a few more hammers in the distant future really outweigh the immediate and continuous maintenance burden? That burden has only a 20% reduction, remember. If the cities are so hammer-poor that Manors are the best they can have, it'll take an awful long time or high investment to get those Manors built. Do you really want to send Vamps on a boat to get their feasting in?

(+other island stuff)

Once we have currency, gold will be fungible between our three civs, and the maintenance burden is going to be there no matter which civ owns them. However, the Calabim are our best civ for growing the cities faster, and we want to do that for the TR benefits in our other cities. In addition, the Calabim can produce the most hammers from coastal cities, and require the fewest to set up.


BTW, our Whiskey great person was a sage, so Riesling will get an academy in two turns.

Libraries and Great Libraries are going to be built as quickly as possible, especially as it doesn't cost us much to do so. Do we want to build a quick Elohim National Epic as well while they have the marble? Either Tequila or Whiskey would be a decent spot for it, but Whiskey has better food.

Our worker labor is getting stretched a bit thin trying to keep up with our fast-growing new cities. I'm also not sure where to settle some of our settlers.

[Qgqqqqq]

Not sure if you've already decided in favour of calabim, but consider that if your wondering how to get the hammers to get GM up, it'll also cost hammers to get courthouses up and will cost more (you are ORG right?) then GM which then give coastal sights decent production, allowing them to build shipyards etc. in a reasonable time.
I have no idea where your actually discussing, nor have I seen the map.

[Thoth]

Not sure if you've already decided in favour of calabim, but consider that if your wondering how to get the hammers to get GM up, it'll also cost hammers to get courthouses up and will cost more (you are ORG right?) then GM which then give coastal sights decent production, allowing them to build shipyards etc. in a reasonable time.

The issue is distance maint. The probable island(s) are to the West of the Orcs so they are a long way from the Calabim capital. We'll probably wind up going with Calabim Island cities (assuming that our fog gazing guesses are correct and there actually *is* an island ). But we'll squable over it discuss it a few times more over the next few turns before reaching some sort of consensus.

The way I figure it, the commerce boost will vastly outweigh the extra distance maint (which is reduced by 40% by the Aristocracy Civic and can be eliminated by building either the Summer or Winter (with Marble) Palace on the Island.

The main deal with GMs is the hammers they produce not the maint reduction. The Vamps are Org so they get cheap GMs (which rock btw. ). The Elohim and Orcs will likely never build a single courthouse.

[Thoth]

BTW, our Whiskey great person was a sage, so Riesling will get an academy in two turns.

Libraries and Great Libraries are going to be built as quickly as possible, especially as it doesn't cost us much to do so. Do we want to build a quick Elohim National Epic as well while they have the marble? Either Tequila or Whiskey would be a decent spot for it, but Whiskey has better food.

Our worker labor is getting stretched a bit thin trying to keep up with our fast-growing new cities. I'm also not sure where to settle some of our settlers.

GSage is AWESOME.

I'd figured on Tequilla for both GL and NE as we already have a Wonder there, but Whiskey could also make a decent GP farm. With Whiskey as our Elohim (and main) GP farm we can focus Tequilla on generating more commerce. Whiskey has forests that could be chopped into GLib but our Elohim workforce is currently overtaxed and isn't in position to do any meaningful chopping. Not a biggie as those worker turns are more valuable elsewhere (Glib would be kinda nice to have on the cheap, but we don't *need* to have it. It's a nice little boost if we can grab it, but I don't think it's worth making any huge sacrifice for). If we get it, great. If we don't, we have a couple of very well promoted warriors that would look very nice when kitted out with a Chariot. (135g each. or 67 1/2 hammers of failgold with Marble. hmm. Maybe we *want* to lose the Glib race. )


Our worker labour is mostly badly positioned. We're clumped up in a couple of spots where improvements are a low priority and sparse in some areas where we want tile improvements ASAP. Our overall Empire Logistics are poor.

I spent some time cursing and swearing ingame last night. Then I thought about it. If I'm going to be pointing any fingers about sloppy worker moves and city planning, I need to be looking in a mirror first.

I'm going to try and spend some quiet time in game and seeing what we can do to streamline our Domestic Logistics. We can REX insanely fast at this point, but we'll need some very careful attention to detail in order to do it effectively.

2hour chatsession turns are great. It's ooodles of fun playing the turns, but we don't really have a coherent empire development plan and I can't do that sort of thing on the fly whilst chatting about what do we do with the Scout/Wolfrider/city build here/ect/ect/.

So I need to get off my arse* and do a bit more ahead of time planning, and a bit less bitching.































*For some reason Firefox's spell checker doesn't like the word "arse". Daft buggers. Arse is a perfectly fine word.

[Ellimist]

Not sure if you've already decided in favour of calabim, but consider that if your wondering how to get the hammers to get GM up, it'll also cost hammers to get courthouses up and will cost more (you are ORG right?) then GM which then give coastal sights decent production, allowing them to build shipyards etc. in a reasonable time.

The issue is distance maint. The probable island(s) are to the West of the Orcs so they are a long way from the Calabim capital. We'll probably wind up going with Calabim Island cities (assuming that our fog gazing guesses are correct and there actually *is* an island ).

I've used goto orders and the flying camera feature to do some extensive fog-reading. I'm nearly certain that the coastline we can see is an island, and it's likely big enough for at least two cities. Unfortunately, there is a possibility that the landmass is connected to the mainland somewhere on the far side of it, because it's difficult to be precise with the goto orders when our units are all relatively far away. We'll know for sure very soon.

And yeah, GM hammers are awesome. Courthouses are too expensive for the benefit they provide, especially in a coastal city.

[Thoth]

Completely random thought:

NBA currently produces 20 base hammers. With HE that becomes 40h.

4 SoKs would take 3t to build.

IOW: Once we have the HE down in NBA we can add a Warrens every three turns (not counting SoK travel time).

I'm liking grabbing Philo/MS immediately after Currency and breaking this as hard as we possibly can.

[Thoth]

Also: The city site to the North of KIPA marked "city?" should move 1E. Working 4 Ag farms, the horse, copper, phm, and two ghm we can push out 20 hpt at size 9.

And I think Pig dot should be Elohim.

With another Elohim city in the North we can lock down the Northern borders with Sancutary. Elohim Pig dot won't close the southern front, but it will narrow the front considerably allowing better concentration of defensive forces.

In an ideal world, we'll be on the offensive as much as possible. But we're pulling ahead in land and pop so we're going to very rapidly become target #1 and need to give thought as to how to best defend the empire.

[Ellimist]

Completely random thought:

NBA currently produces 20 base hammers. With HE that becomes 40h.

4 SoKs would take 3t to build.

IOW: Once we have the HE down in NBA we can add a Warrens every three turns (not counting SoK travel time).

I'm liking grabbing Philo/MS immediately after Currency and breaking this as hard as we possibly can.

Yeah, Heroic epic is pretty amazing with warrens, for SoKs or other units, and we can do HE + Warrens in two cities for even more craziness.

Also: The city site to the North of KIPA marked "city?" should move 1E. Working 4 Ag farms, the horse, copper, phm, and two ghm we can push out 20 hpt at size 9.

And I think Pig dot should be Elohim.

With another Elohim city in the North we can lock down the Northern borders with Sancutary. Elohim Pig dot won't close the southern front, but it will narrow the front considerably allowing better concentration of defensive forces.

In an ideal world, we'll be on the offensive as much as possible. But we're pulling ahead in land and pop so we're going to very rapidly become target #1 and need to give thought as to how to best defend the empire.

I can't load the game to be sure, but I think the issue with moving that site 1E is that it conflicts with another potential site at that location. It still might be worthwhile, but we really ought to dotmap that whole northern area. With team reddit so far behind, I don't think it will be long before we're doing a settling spree across that whole area.

I'm not sure which site "pig dot" is. Do you mean the site SE of Gin with the river?

I don't see team centaur coming after us right now because team golem has a score and tech lead and is pulling down wonder after wonder. I do think we're target #1 for team golem, but that's mostly because team centaur can shut down their spellcasting.

[Qgqqqqq]

Oh sorry, it sounded like you were debating orcs vs. vamps because the distance maintenance would be less with courthouses, not simply being closer.

*tiny voice* all this wouldn't have happened if you posted more pics

Do you think you have a cchance fending them off atm?

[Thoth]

Turn done. Guild of Mercenaries completed in Ithralia.

I think I've got most of the hiccups in our logistics sorted out (or at least they will be over the next couple of turns)

Changes: To workers: many, but I think I signed everything we should be doing t97

Builds: Dialed up a 2t Thane in Reisling to pop borders in Calabim Silk city. It'll get the boarders out 6t faster than a Monument and only delays the Lib by one turn. We need that border pop in order to chain irrigate to our latest Calabim city. We'll have the road connection done t98 along with the border pop and enough workers nearby.


Military: I've consolidated our Eastern raiding forces a bit. With two WRs, two mob1 axes and a mob1/c1 Moroi we aren't going to be taking any cities....but we can do a bit of raiding or deny them the Rice. I'm not sure if the Clowns have a Brewery yet or not but they're exporting Rice to the Gnomes who are exporting Ale to the Illians. I really want to disrupt theses guys gameplans as much as possible ASAP. We've got a solid hammer advantage and a growing crop yield/pop advantage. Let's use some of that to slow down Dako while we tech up to Fued/IW.

I'd really like a dozen or so wolfriders to go and raid the Lurichip once we've finished distracting/harrassing them down south in Clownlands.

One medium sized glitch: After moving the Elohim workers and checking city micro, I zoomed out and tried to hit the "show units" toggle. And missed and hit eot instead. It's not as huge as it might be, all our wounded units will heal this turn. But it still sucks as there were a few scouts that needed relocating.

So next time I get up on my high horse and start bitching about sloppy moves....tell me to STFU and go look in a mirror.