[SPOILERS] scooter, pindicator, and Huayna Capac try some fast Zulu cuisine

[pindicator]

It was bothering me that I hadn't done any planning in this game, so...



Here's the timeline for roading to the sheep/stone site. Our workers on the gold are in green & purple, and the settler's movement is in blue. The turn numbers are where a unit will be at the end of that turn after using their movements.

The obvious problem here is that the workers are too early: ideally the workers finish the road on the same turn that the settler arrives. That way the workers can start pasturing the sheep the very turn that the city is founded.

Two solutions: speed up the settler, or slow down the workers.

Speeding up the settler can only be done so much. Zaxby's is at 50/100 on it's settler right now, and making 10f+h/t. If we whip it, the soonest we could do that is turn 70, meaning the settler is sped up by 2 turns at most. But I think we said we didn't want to whip Zaxby's? I was trying to search for that in posts but couldn't find it. If we did choose to whip Zaxby's, right now it has no whip anger, so this could be a solution. But it would mean 5 turns of not working the copper tile as Zaxby's regrows, so I'm not convinced that's a good choice.

Slowing down the workers means we have to find something else for them to do. If we don't whip Zaxby's then we have 3 worker-turns each to use before we need to start the plan listed above. Some things we could do with those 3 turns. Which gives us time to do one tile improvement in the area and possibly fit in a road before starting along. My preference right now is to get a cottage built 1E of McDonalds, although we could also build a mine SE of McDonald's as well. We may also want to chop a forest around McDonalds for defensive reasons (although it may be worth the risk to wait until after math comes in first).

Then with city #4, this is what my thoughts were for an improvement plan. Obviously we can't do the workshops or watermills yet, but there should be plenty of tiles to work in the interim:




Finally, while I was putting this together, Commodore played the turn, and brought this guy into view:

[NobleHelium]

Well...I expect him to try to settle that city again. I think we need to finish that axe and take out the archer.

[pindicator]

Well...I expect him to try to settle that city again. I think we need to finish that axe and take out the archer.

God damn it, you're probably right. We need to get our impi to pillage his roads. And yes to finishing the axe, although I would prefer not whipping it.

What if we settle the crab city next? That a good / bad idea? It slows down the stone, but it kills any chance of a hill plant in our face.

[NobleHelium]

Yeah let's just settle the crab city next.

[pindicator]

Yeah let's just settle the crab city next.

If scooter agrees then I would keep the same road plan - the workers can just road the tile SW of the desert to get to the crab city (and that keeps the workers away from Commodore's units).

[scooter]

So, guys, what do you think about taking a 90% shot?



Tempting at first glance, but I'm actually hesitant. First off, there's no real reason for him to place the warrior here if he's trying to get it on the hill. This just smells like a trap. Now yes, we can hit the warrior and then retreat a tile, but if he has an archer 1E of Hidden Valley (my bet: yes), this Impi is probably at risk unless we get a good win (>2.5/4h remaining). Thoughts? The extra XP sure would be nice.

Here's the homeland:



In-N-Out was settled last turn. Since we're going to delay the stone site in favor of crabs, I swapped to a Granary before Lighthouse at In-N-Out. LJS will probably aim to get out a settler at sz4. The 2 workers who will do our road chain put 2t into a cottage and now 2t into a mine as they do random things while waiting to build our road chain.

[athlete4life10]

So, guys, what do you think about taking a 90% shot?

My vote = Don't take the shot

I initially thought take it what the hell, but this does smell like a trap. Move McImpi 1NW is my vote and bring the northern Impi 2SE (so long as it's still 1S of the stone). If you can bring him down this turn to help cover, I'd say do it. Commodore will have to sac an archer to get McImpi and you can clean up the remaining archer/chariot/unit with the northern impi.

That's my 2 cents for now.

[scooter]

So we talked this over for a bit, and we came to the same conclusion Athlete did. Anyways, it smelled like a trap. Also, if we're redlined, that makes the Impi not very useful and unable to prevent him from stacking more units on the hill. So we did this:



Tada, archer as predicted. Ok, so here's the deal. If we land on forest, there's a chance he could attack with warrior + archer + archer. If that warrior gets in a hit or two, he gets probably 40-50% chance of winning with 2 archers. C1 Impi on a forest though - means warrior does 0 damage pretty frequently. Point is, good chance we survive a 3v1, which is why we moved forward to take a look. From here, we have another decision. Pull back to the same tile, or move 1W.

Our goal here is to keep him from stacking more units on that hill. We can deal with that archer really easily, but a second unit would be a tad more difficult to deal with. Still doable, but that starts to mean we rely on reasonable dice rolls rather than a sure thing, which I don't want to do. Anyways, if we move 1W, the archer on the hill cannot hit the Impi. However, I guessed he has another archer in the city, or else he wouldn't move this archer out onto flat ground. Sure enough:



As expected. Hoping that chop went into a granary rather than a unit btw, since I'm pretty sure that's what those workers just finished doing. Anyways, it's a little harder for him to move that archer onto the hill from here. The Impi doesn't get great odds on his city, but they are odds that are good enough that they're worth considering, even if I don't think we'd take it. I didn't actually check the odds, but I believe it's in the 25% range, give or take 5%. So my hope is he'll retreat that archer into Hidden Valley. If he wants to 3v1 us, let him. He'll either lose 3 units and give us a promo (total disaster for him, quite possibly resulting in loss of the city), or he'll spend 40h to kill an Impi. Either way, acceptable outcome. He could also move his units and try to trap us, in which case we'll just dig in and see how many units he has to burn killing us. All of these things stall him while we try to claim the spots that are rightfully ours and end this threat. Speaking of:



We were going to grow to sz3 and whip the axe, then work clam/gold for a bit at sz2. However, without a granary, there's really not much reason to not whip it now... So it's done. The cover Impi up north finishes healing this turn, so cover Impi + axe can reach the hill at the same time and neutralize him long enough to settle for crabs. That whip also let us hand the clam to LJS and hand LJS's pig over to In-N-Out. Our tiny little civ is crappy, but we're doing what we can.

LongJohnSilver is now 3T from sz4. The plan is settler at sz4. It was building a granary, but we also decided to swap that to an Impi and put 15h into it while growing to sz4, at which point we'll have flexibility to finish it or build settler as planned (settler will be 5T build with a math chop). If Commodore keeps screwing with us, fine, we'll wreck his game. His loss.

Alright, so that's where we are. Fun turns.

[scooter]

Hey guys, problem. I think we have a bug of some sort:



Like... how? Our impi moved NE-NE before I logged in without any sort of movement on our part. Nobody logged in after me, so I have no idea what happened here.

[novice]

Goto command?