Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[mostly_harmless]

Score increase for RB. I was just going "WTF?! Where did we settle a city?" Its the shrine obviously!

mh

[Sullla]

Turn 84 - 775BC

The German team logged into the game exactly once last turn. They evidently played their turns, logged out... and never logged in again, as we all sat and waited another 36 hours to no purpose whatsoever. I mean... it's one thing if you genuinely need more time for discussion, but at this point they're just screwing with everyone else to no purpose.

Anyway:



Up in the northwest, our injured spear moved back into our territory. I promoted the winning axeman to Woodsman I as requested, and had him sit in place for this turn. Healing with take the axe from 4.3 strength to 4.8 strength, and that should be enough to move out again. Hopefully we can get further to the west this time before being driven back by barbarian spawn.



More interesting were events over here in the east, where our Great Prophet constructed the Hindu Shrine. (Sojourner Truth? Interesting "old man" graphic there! ) The shrine currently gives us +3 gold/turn for our three Hindu cities and doubles the passive rate of religion spread. With so many unconverted cities close nearby, we'll have excellent odds of seeing some more free religious expansions over the upcoming turns. The shrine is also worth additional culture, and Mansa's Muse will hit 500 culture and expand borders again at eot 87. This is non-trivial for the development of Forbidden Fruit, which will pick up a jungle/grassland spice tile and the floodplains tile in the border expansion.

We also gained more vision of Alemanni by moving up our axeman. I mentioned last turn that barb cities only appear on the recommended "blue circle" tiles that the game engine likes so much, and indeed we found two different food resources this turn, grassland pigs and clams. Along with its six river tiles, this instantly makes Alemanni an extreme high quality location. The barb city has been working the pigs tile (+3 food), and we know it's been there since at least T81 when we first spotted it, which means the city will hit size 2 on T89 at the latest. Probably a turn or two before that. Our axe should go ahead and start killing the barb warriors one per turn right now, and it looks like we'll have excellent odds to claim this spot around T87-88. Another extremely good city location completely for free!



As I said last turn, I decided to move the scout South-Southeast onto the plains hill in CFC territory. This revealed 13 different tiles, including their second city of Terasvin, which is also the Jewish Holy City. Terasvin has a granary and nothing else at present. We also have confirmation that their starting area looks almost identical to ours, as we long suspected via C&D scouting. I'm open for suggestions on where to move from here, although my strongest inclination is to move into Indira next turn. It's on a hill and on their road network, and would reveal another 8-10 tiles. Let me know.



Southwest remains pretty quiet for now. The barb warrior moved up, and we had to cover the workers with our axeman for safety's sake. We could have killed the barb warrior at the start of the turn, but then our workers would be at risk for more barbs moving out of the fog from the west. Much safer to do things this way, and we do still have another axe in Gourmet Menu if we need it. I'll be looking forward to the Stonehenge border expansion down here, if only to give more warning of barb activity.

Axeman Wyn has found even more floodplains tiles unclaimed by any team in the far west. This looks like yet another fertile region to go after with future expansion. Stone city first, then we'll go from there. He'll move another tile northwest next turn and keep defogging more terrain.

Overview picture for the turn. Horse Feathers and Tree Huggers grew between turns, and amazingly no city is planned to increase next turn (though there are quite a few that are 2t away from growth). I'm sure that some people will be unhappy with what I did with the workers near Horse Feathers. I did read the discussion about partially cottaging near the capital, but we had no immediate plans to finish that tile improvement. What I wanted to do was finish the road SE of Horse Feathers, which makes it significantly easier to shift workers between Horse Feathers and Gourmet Menu. This road was 1t from completion, and I believe it was more useful to us than partial completion on a cottage that we don't need at present. I dumped the other spare worker turn into the grassland mine next turn Horse Feathers, for the purpose of having 2t into a tile improvement rather than 1t into two different ones. Feel free to criticize, but that's how I preferred to play this one. It's a bit of a moot point next turn, as the road finishes at the silk tile and the workers move to start chopping/plantationing it.

Other issues of note here... We are working the unimproved silk forest (1/2/1) at Horse Feathers this turn. We could alternately work a coastal tile (2/0/3) instead if desired, although it won't be enough to hit size 6 this turn. Not really sure which one is better, any thoughts? Workers triple chopped an instant granary for Forbidden Fruit this turn, getting it off to a fast start. I have some thoughts for how to micro the workers in that area in upcoming turns (I don't really like the ideas that have been floating around, sorry!) but I'll probably post them tonight or tomorrow. We finished a third floodplains cottage at Gourmet Menu and started the wheat farm at Seven Tribes.

Our research hits a perfect target this turn with no beakers lost to rounding: 129 base beakers + 1 beaker (the free one you get every turn) * 1.2 pre-requisite modifier = 156 total beakers. I always like it when that happens. Note that with the shrine in place we are only losing 49 gold/turn with our eight cities. We've also gone from 74 base beakers/turn on T78 to our current 129 base beakers/turn in just six turns. And there's a library completing in Mansa's Muse next turn. Yikes.



The Demos are... pretty good. First in Food, first in GNP, first in Land, first in Total Pop, first in Trade Route incoming, tied for first in Production, second in Power, second in geometric Population. There's not much more to say here. We're rolling the snowball down the hill, and it's starting to get pretty freaking big.

I've ended our turn as we have no more moves to do, but there's plenty of room for discussion, diplomacy, and planning. Let's get to it.

[novice]

I think that's a fine solution by Horse Feathers, Sullla.

That barb city looks yummy. I guess we need more workers then...

[kjn]

No real comment on you choosing to finish the road SE of HF (I think your choice is quite valid), though I wish you had chosen to raise that concern earlier.

The one most impressive thing about our demos isn't our raw output, but that we are second in approval rate! We have a lot more room for vertical growth, still.

If the barb city had been placed 1W it'd have been a spectacular NE or GT city. Now it's merely excellent

[regoarrarr]

Wouldn't we be able to move a tile past Indira? 1 MP to cross the river and get on the road, then 0.5 to move into Indira (since they're both on roads). In that case, we could do that and then move NE. I could also get talked into moving to Trevasin and then one tile past that

[mostly_harmless]

No real comment on you choosing to finish the road SE of HF (I think your choice is quite valid), though I wish you had chosen to raise that concern earlier.

Yes. Sullla, we are not in a hurry really to play the turn and we have plenty of active people around for fast feedback and discussion. So why not try to get a consensus on some things before playing the turn and ending it.
There were for example a number of people in favour of moving the scout into Indira this turn instead of SE. Also novice made an excellent suggestion regarding keeping the SW axe to heal on the hill instead of moving onto the wheat.
Is it that you are missing these posts and discussions?

mh

[kjn]

I checked out the revealed parts of the map, and the tile SW of CFC's banana is a hill with a road. I think we should move our scout 2NE (onto the banana), and then we can either move 1W onto Indira, or 1SW onto the hill. I think the latter move would give us the greatest visibility.

That flood plains area to our west looks sweet! Stone City (what about calling it Brick by Brick?) picks up one, and we can place a city on the far western plains hill that picks up at least two, and I'm sure we can find a spot northwest of Wyn to pick up the remaining ones.

Also, Sojourner Truth was at least once accused of being a man, so there is precedent for the looks!

[mostly_harmless]

Wouldn't we be able to move a tile past Indira? 1 MP to cross the river and get on the road, then 0.5 to move into Indira (since they're both on roads). In that case, we could do that and then move NE. I could also get talked into moving to Trevasin and then one tile past that

I checked out the revealed parts of the map, and the tile SW of CFC's banana is a hill with a road. I think we should move our scout 2NE (onto the banana), and then we can either move 1W onto Indira, or 1SW onto the hill. I think the latter move would give us the greatest visibility.

Moving into Indira next turn has us crossing a river twice, therefore no movement past Indira is possible next turn. I think I favour moving onto the hill tile as kjn suggested next turn and then go to Indira (which we definitely want to visit, since it will reveal the complete BFC)

The tile 2E of Indira is also a fresh water lake, irrigating the corn and the banana.

mh

[novice]

So after running kjn's suggestion through a NobleHelium filter, I think his suggestion is moving NE-NE-SE with the scout, ending up on a hill that is E-SE of Indhira.

If we want to move into Indhira we should move E-NE-NW, that reveals the maximum amount of tiles (we can spot hills that are not visible from Indhira, and we get to look across the lake that is 2E of Indhira).

[mostly_harmless]

The shrine is also worth additional culture, and Mansa's Muse will hit 500 culture and expand borders again at eot 87. This is non-trivial for the development of Forbidden Fruit, which will pick up a jungle/grassland spice tile and the floodplains tile in the border expansion.

And we will also get awesome oasis area visibility and barb busting by getting the southern mountain cultured!





mh