Turn 95 - 500BC
We're mostly done with this turn, just a couple more things to finish up before we end our turn. I'm working from Seven's latest micro plan here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...kdWc#gid=1 Right now it's still a work in progress, and there are some some incorrect elements left over from the previous plan. I'm going to outline here what exactly still needs discussion and input for this current turn. Off we go.
Moving northeast-northeast with the CFC scout found the newest Spanish Apolyton city. It was working an unimproved grassland forest at the start of the turn, and has since swapped to something else. Not much of interest for our team. I guess it's useful to spot the sugar resource; it looks like all of the Calendar resources are distributed throughout the equatorial jungle region of this map. This unit will go northeast again next turn unless we would spot a barb unit. Cross your fingers for no barbs.
Here's the situation in the northwest. We did not find anything by moving the scouting axe this turn. He'll go east next turn and continue defogging that peaks region.
The biggest news here was a free spread of Hinduism to Brick By Brick, which speeds up the border pop by quite a bit. It's now due in 3t instead of 6t, plus we'll be able to use the Organized Religion bonus here shortly to chop out a library and (hopefully) control the third-ring 100 culture borders. That would make us a lot safer. The two workers have split, one on the forested plains hill and one onto the plains tile SW of the city. I covered the latter one with an axe just to keep CivPlayers honest. We should have a trade route to their team in 2t, and then we'll be off to improve the wheat and wines. Probably the wines first, as Brick By Brick is kind of a resource dump city, and the empire-wide benefits of the wines are more important.
Not picture to the east: there's a barb warrior about to move onto the gems tile at Tree Huggers, but the city will complete an axe next turn and kill it easily. Nice timing there.
This is the southern region where the barb axe has been troubling us. We chose to produce a war chariot out of Forbidden Fruit last turn, and that will make this little conundrum much easier to handle. I moved the chariot onto the pigs tile, where it should be able to kill the axe next turn. I expect the axe to move onto our copper, where we get 99% odds; even if it moves north and stays on the forest, we will get about 90% odds, plus have an axe on hand to clean up if we would somehow lose. It should die and make things a lot easier here. (Now that I look at this, the axe should be a tile southeast on the road, so that our axe can cover the workers next turn if needed. I'll make that change later.)
On the left side of this screen, I have worker H selected. This guy still has not moved yet; his orders as written must be a copy-paste mistake or something, as they no longer make sense. (As written he was supposed to be cottaging a plains hill, which is impossible! Heh.) I've left the worker unmoved for now. My thought is to spend this turn in transit, moving to the tile E-E of the capital where the CFC chariot is sitting right now. The worker can then either finish the grassland cottage north of Focal Point (which would be useful immediately), or go chop forests near Focal Point for Mausoleum purposes, or go help cut down the jungles in the northeast. Any of them would be good choices. Let me know what everyone thinks here.
The settler in Gourmet Menu has also been left unmoved for now. I'm 99% sure that we want to move this guy to the tile SE of the capital this turn en route to the southern oasis or the northeast jungle, but we don't have directions for the settler written in the plan as yet. (The old orders heading to the west are still in there.) Just want to get the all-clear OK before moving.
Here is the northeast jungle frontier. We finished a road this turn on the jungle spice tile N-NE of Forbidden Fruit, and pushed a worker on to the next tile beyond it, covered by our axe. Swapping to the cultural overlay reveals no new WPC borders up here for the moment, which means we appear to be clear to found our next city. That said, we've never official nailed down the spot for this city. Red and blue appear to be the two options, with red being a better city and blue claiming dyes for our team. I'm going to suggest rather strongly that the red spot is better for the following reasons:
1) Double food bonus (duh)
2) Can borrow the 3/0/5 grassland spice tile from FF while waiting on border pop (blue is terrible pre-cultural expansion)
3) Has a forest in first-ring for insta-chop granary
I'm not worried about losing out on the dyes because we can plant another city on the tile north of the gems to claim dry rice + dyes. Maybe there's an even better spot that we can't see at present in the fog, but that spot itself should be nice and safe. (WPC is unlikely to be pushing cities into the jungle any time soon, given their war and the fact that they told us they are beelining Construction, not Iron Working.) This seems pretty straightforward, just want to check with everyone first.
As mentioned last turn, I do not want to push the Eastern Dealers axe another tile north to scout. We're very thin on units in this area for the moment, until a war chariot can get up here from our core. If the ED axe goes north, we can't stop the pigs from getting pillaged by a barb walking out of the fog. We'll simply have to wait and explore that tantalizing gems/rice/dyes area in a few more turns.
Overview / tile micro:
The cities are nearly all configured as written in the micro plan. The exception is at the capital and Horse Feathers. The plan I have linked at the top of this post has Adventure One taking the corn back this turn from HF. However, the capital is currently at the happy cap, and using the corn just causes it to grow into unhappiness. Horse Feathers can grow to size 8 before hitting the happy cap, and actually should be able to reach size 9 because its whipping penalty wears off in 3t. Feels like we'd rather have the corn going to that city to me. I've drawn in the tiles above as they are currently configured, and will be happy to change if I've missed something.
Elsewhere, the price for getting the war chariot out from Forbidden Fruit last turn is that it takes another turn to grow to size 4. I agree with the rest of the team that this was still a good trade (darned barb axe!) So far, we still have not lost a unit since that initial starting warrior, and only had the one cottage tile pillaged all game, while killing about 30 total barb units. Most cities are growing back quickly in the wake of last turn's whipping spree. Gourmet Menu is sitting on 14 shields of overflow by building Wealth; I have no idea what that's going into just yet, but I'm sure there's a plan there. Seven Tribes is actually only 9t away from completing Hanging Gardens, and I like our chances to land that one with our stone resource. We're also taking a shot at Great Wall in Mansa's Muse, where getting the wonder would be nice and failgold (with stone bonus) is nearly as useful.
A word about research: there was some discussion on whether to research Monotheism tech this turn or run 0% gold for another turn. I believe that we should finish Monotheism this turn (at 80% rate) for tile micro purposes: next turn, we'll be giving the gold tile to FF and MM will take back the corn to start growing. Since MM has a library and FF does not, we'll get more beakers by researching this turn while MM has the gold tile, and then running all gold next turn when FF has it. After taking this screenshot, I went ahead and set us to 80% research in-game, whch will finish Monotheism tech. We should be in good shape to finish Monarchy at eot 99 and then double-revolt to HR/OR on Turn 100.
Demos continue to be very flattering at 0% science. We're at 190 something when we run 80% research, and it will just be stupid when we go for Monarchy tech with 40% pre-requisite bonus and the known civ tech bonus from CFC and CivPlayers already having the tech. Our Food lead has shrunk over the past few turns, which is what you'd expect in the wake of whipping 8 pop last turn. Soldier count is rising as we complete more war chariots. Amusingly enough, we are first in Approval Rate despite whipping more heavily than anyone in the game.
I know how that stat is calculated, it just always amuses me to see that.
Anyway, we are about 90% done for this turn as I said. We should be able to go over the last few tidbits and then be finished.