Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Any risk CFC have their own settler moving towards that area?

[Ceiliazul]

If the barb does suicide against our axe, can our new War Scooter be the advance guard for the oasis settler? This may allow us to see for sure there are no CFC settlers in the area before we warn them.

Was not expecting the username that goes with the Dora avatar to be novice.

This got me too. I thought Novice's old avatar was so awesome I might steal it.

[NobleHelium]

Yeah we can definitely use the WC as part of the escort party, it wasn't originally part of the plan anyway so it doesn't have any assigned duties.

[kjn]

Any risk CFC have their own settler moving towards that area?

They whipped something worth 100-120H on T93 in Mantra, so they have a settler available.

However, using the worker tile improvement trick I find no roads leading westwards from Indira or Daivagiti, or preparation for them. So CFC has for all intents and purposes lost interest in settling towards us.

[kjn]

I think our next war chariot (out of AO) should be sent towards Seven Tribes. It can scout the area around the plains cow and thus help secure our chopping operations in the area, and scout that annoying strip of fogged tiles east of the mountain-chain, and be ready for action if CivPlayers becomes frisky.

[kjn]

Turn has rolled.

The barb axe suicided against our axe, which got pretty beat up (55/100). Propose we let our axe heal up in Focal Point, and War Scooter can secure our settling party.

The barb warrior in the north went onto the gems. Do we have any units that can deal with it?



CivPlayers played timer games - waited until everyone had finished turn, then 1-pop whipped, grew back a pop as the turn rolled, and then 1-pop whipped again.

[Sullla]

Turn 96 - 475BC

The turns are coming around at a very nice pace these days, 36-48 hours each. Feels just about right. I can't stress how much better the flow is compared to those 3-4 day turns from before.



We've found a banana resource in the extreme east as our scout continues pushing northwards. I'm going to keep hugging the coast of that lake as the scout moves forward, since it cuts down on the potential number of tiles where we can run into a barb. For example, only two tiles could be deadly when we move north next turn. Keep the fingers crossed. It will take a few more turns to pass through the jungle belt to the other side.



Well, well, well. Look what we have here. Veeeeeery interesting.

This is probably the biggest news from this turn, as we found ivory up in the far northwest. Keep in mind that we are not playing under RB rules, and war elephants are very much in play for this game. Unfortunately the spot is not very convenient for our team, way up there in that jungle/peaks region. Hopefully CivPlayers has not scouted this region yet, since they can very easily plant a city two tiles east of the gems and have a cows/gems/ivory spot. Now before we take any drastic actions, we need to scout out the remaining fogged tiles in this area, which we can clear over the next two turns. I'm praying that there will be a food resource of some kind and that we can run of our next settlers up there, possibly by boat, to go claim that resource. But for the moment, we have to wait and see what our axe reveals in the area.

In the Brick By Brick area, we have a worker roading on the plains hill tile two tiles west of the city, and another worker moved onto the forest two tiles south. I had to cover that southern worker with our axe to keep CivPlayers honest. That means that the northern worker is uncovered, but he should be fine. We would have seen a barb unit incoming from the northwest, and CivPlayer shouldn't even have vision on that tile (the row of forests on the tiles between us should block vision). In any case, we'll finish the road to them next turn for a trade route, and BBB will expand borders in two more turns to make things a lot safer. (The CivPlayers warrior in the south has already moved this turn.)



A barb warrior moved onto our gems at Tree Huggers, and I decided to kill it with our spear instead of our axe. We had the choice of 3 XP on the spear at 99% odds, or 1 XP on the axe at 100% odds. Not a hard choice which one was better.

In terms of shuffling our units around, I would suggest keeping the new axe at Tree Huggers and moving our spear over to Brick By Brick. I'd feel a lot safer with an axe and spear there compared to just axes. Alternately we could send the spear to provide military police for an inner core city like Mansa's Muse where it's unlikely to see combat. The axe coming out of Adventure One will be sent over to Forbidden Fruit, as the axe in there has moved to go defend our new jungle city in the northeast. Mansa has no defender at the moment, although that's probably fine since it's so deep in our territory and has no happiness issues.



Here's the south of our territory. The barb axe suicided against our own 4 XP axe defending on the forest between turns, taking it to a fifth experience point and a second promotion. I've moved the axe into Focal Point to heal faster, and I'll probably promote the axe to Shock next turn since that will allow it to heal a turn quicker. With us already having Combat I, we almost certainly want Shock as the next choice. The workers roaded another tile towards the oasis spot, covered by a warrior and our war chariot war scooter. (I moved the warrior first to see if there were any barbs in the area, and only then moved the rest of the units.) Long term, the plan is to swap the warrior and the axe in this region, with the warrior sitting in Focal Point for HR happiness and the axe protecting the front lines at the pink oasis city. We'll make that change in a couple of turns once the city is down and the axe has recovered. The settler for this spot is sitting inside Focal Point and will plant our city on T98.

The other war chariot out of Adventure One has moved to the southwest to go do some scouting. We'll move this unit onto the forest SE of the cows next turn, and then go poke around the southern wasteland to see if anything gets revealed. The war chariot will also be in range to protect our workers during the Hanging Gardens chopping operations at Seven Tribes.



Here's a picture of the northeast frontier. CFC founded their eighth city earlier this turn on the marked tile, in a location that claims horses and grassland cows, while also being able to share the copper resource at Daivagati. This is great news for us, as we knew that CFC had whipped a settler earlier and it makes it impossible for them to contest our oasis claim with their own settler. After we plant our city, I expect them to put their border city south or southeast of the rice tile, either of which we could live with. Remember that the Eastern Dealers lake is too small to build ships, there's no risk of invasion via boating.

Our settler in this area is sitting north of Forbidden Fruit. The axe is covering a worker roading to the spot; city will be founded on T98. The Eastern Dealers axe moved back into our territory this turn to save 1gpt on unit supply costs, after making sure that the worker could move safely onto the gems tile.

Overview / tile micro:

We're building Wealth all over the place to preserve overflow into a whole bunch of different stuff. This has the side of effect of also giving us just enough income to squeeze out Monarchy tech at eot 99 for a Turn 100 revolt. Tile micro from this turn is very similar to last turn, just swapped around the tiles around Mansa's Muse and Forbidden Fruit to set Mansa to growing again with deer + corn. I've also drawn in the future city locations in the north and south, upcoming in two more turns.

By the way, everyone needs to give major credit to kjn and SevenSpirits for doing the grunt work of planning. The micro at Seven Tribes over the next half-dozen turns is absolutely gorgeous, some of the prettiest managemet of chopping, whip overflow, and targeted food numbers for exact city growths that you'll ever see. This is the most tightly microed game that I've ever been a part of, and it's beautiful to watch play out in practice.

Notice how the tech bar at the top states that Monarchy will take 540 turns to research? That's the exact number of beakers that it costs, 540 beakers. This means that we finished Monotheism tech with 0 overflow whatsoever, an extremely rare occurance in Civ4. We have just enough beakers to complete Monarchy tech by running 0% / 100% / 80% research over the next three turns. It's a nice contrast to the 20 turns (!!!) that it took We Play Civ to research Mathematics tech. Note that we are also making 99 gold/turn at 0% research rate; we can see what other teams are making due to Currency tech, and CFC gets 55 gold/turn at their own 0% rate. They have nearly as much population as we do, but our economy is way more advanced.



Demos at 0% tech rate. Two teams have turned up research to full and sit above us in the GNP lead, although at our break-even rate we go up to 220 something and take back the top mark. The 100% rate next turn will be fun to watch. Our Food is regrowing quickly as we recover from those whips, and we grow 4 more pop points next turn. We've also slipped back into 3rd in Power, below the German team (who is #1) and I think WPC at second, not completely sure of that though. Still first in Land and Total Pop, although not in the game's geometric population stat. German team researched Sailing tech a little while back, and now has return trade routes with us, which is why our Exports number has dropped. We don't really care if they get income back from us though - we simply want to maximize our own trade routes.

I don't think there's anything else to do, but I wanted to allow some time for others to comment before ending turn. Any thoughts?

[NobleHelium]

According to kjn, it's possible to build galleys in the sea next to ED. And I would expect it to be so since it's analogous to the sea at HF/BB.

Is that 3 turns of revolt in Alemanni? And can you check whether we can build galleys in the city (would determine size of the sea)?

Three turns of revolt. Can build galleys and lighthouse.

My initial guess is that we'll claim the ivory by planting 1E of it. 1NE might be good too. 2E is a peak.

[novice]

Ivory is great news, also for the happy.

With CFC's latest city they have also spotted Eastern Dealers. I don't know if we should address it in diplo, we should probably wait and see if they bring it up. Maybe we should just casually refer to it when we notify them about our Oasis settlement.

[NobleHelium]

I agree with sending the TH spear to BB by the way.