[SPOILERS] SevenSpirits goes on a mysterious adventure

[SevenSpirits]

t62

Founded this beauty of a city on marble and teched masonry on t61. Remember that tech happens before production, so I had marble for the production phase.


Base production of Rocket is 6. Two turns gives 12. Add 7 forests to reach 152. Double that and you get 304, more than enough for the Mausoleum. Since the limiting factor was worker chop actions, the casualness of a two-turn build was irrelevant. Might as well start it a turn early if I can do so without trouble. I will improve those resources soon btw, once I can get several defending units there to cover them. For the moment I'm doing fine on happiness anyway.


After Calendar came in, I started frantically expanding. Here's the successfully placed border city with Mackoti. Next planned cities are a border city with Serdoa which should hopefully discourage further settlement towards me and give a very friendly border, and a coastal city up on the stone so I can get a couple of island cities up. As you can see here I'm already preparing for the stone city. I will want a fort NW of it immediately and as many chops as possible, as quickly as possible, for a galley, granary, and 2+ work boats.


The two cities pictured above, plus a several-turn deficit of available worker actions and associated whips, tanked my tech rate all the way back down to 15 or so. You can see above that I've recovered a bit from whipping off some commerce tiles, but I'm still an easy last place in GNP despite being creative and having 10 more culture from MoM...

[Fintourist]

Founded this beauty of a city on marble and teched masonry on t61. Remember that tech happens before production, so I had marble for the production phase.

Hmm.. I'm actually a bit confused about this. Wasn't the extra-mini-GA-turn trick when building Taj Mahal (highlighted in your previous PBEM) based on production happening before the beakers get calculated?

[SevenSpirits]

Hmm.. I'm actually a bit confused about this. Wasn't the extra-mini-GA-turn trick when building Taj Mahal (highlighted in your previous PBEM) based on production happening before the beakers get calculated?

No - the free part-turn of Taj golden age applies to production in cities that are processed after the Taj city.

Order is:

Gold/beakers empire-wide
Then for each city in the order of the city screen, it does these steps in order:
* Culture (Not sure if this is before or after food actually, but it doesn't matter)
* Food (including birth, but not assignment, of new citizens)
* Production
* GPP

So the Taj affects GPP in its own city, and production and GPP in your later cities (plus culture to the extent that you are building culture in those cities). But it does not affect tech (even if you are building wealth or research - these builds are actually processed in the first step).

Hanging Gardens has similar implications.

[Fintourist]

Thanks for the clarification! I was totally in belief that you received extra beakers, but extra production sounds good too.

I would have a small follow-up question.. Assume you build Notre Dame in your capital and you have unhappy cities elsewhere in the same continent. Do those cities get the happy effect and thus new tiles assigned in time? So, does it make sense to grow cities into unhappiness if you know you will finish ND next turn (and the cities are later in the order).

[SevenSpirits]

Good question. Anyone want to check?

[SevenSpirits]

t65

I'm enjoying this game a lot. I've snuck up to top crop yield at the same time as plummeting to 7gpt at 0%. I'd feel bad but it was on purpose. Since I've already secured plenty of happiness from calendar and IW, and a nice wonder, my next priority was the land grab. That's now accomplished with several gpt to spare () so now I can sit back and grow onto cottages. And get a presence in the sea, and a couple of island cities.

Lobster gets an immediate workboat and almost-immediate fort, allowing the workboat to hook the fish as soon as borders pop. Next item on the "menu" is a galley.


Vanilla gets a worboat, and a granary the following turn. Priority after that is, sadly, a galley, because it's a bit too close to Mackoti's borders on the other end of the world for my comfort. But then we will get back to wonderful things like a workboat and lighthouse.



My current including a good number of workers for the new-cities-and-growing-onto-cottages plan. Also the world's largest army.


Demos


On t66, the turn after this one, I had to consider whether I would try to build the hanging gardens. Essentially it could be done in 5t in my capital, since I have stone now and have some workers that can be moved in to chop. However it would be quite costly in sacrificed land development because all my workers have strong things to do right now - I actually still have 5 luxuries that I'm in the process of hooking up (silk, dye, spice, silver, fur)! (I haven't hooked them all because I haven't had the pop and improvements to use all that space anyway. But now that I've staked out some border claims, and my workers are done with the MoM stuff, growth is commencing.) Silk and silver will be hooked t68, spice soon after, and dye and fur will be in the near future. However, all this would not be possible if I went for HG. And I'd be losing my capital forests and sacrificing 3 pop there for an aqueduct, for a reward that I could still lose after building the aqueduct.

I estimated that there was a pretty good chance one of the other players would build HG within the next 5 turns, so though it was a close decision, I decided to ignore them.

Turn after that, hey check it out, Serdoa has already built them! Excellent. One less thing to worry about and it can't be sandbagged any longer. And the best part - I still have top food:



Of course, this could be an unfair comparison, since Serdoa hasn't had a chance to reassign the new pop yet. But I'd hope for him that most of the pop landed on good tiles on the turn they were born.

[SevenSpirits]

t68 - Good news and bad news.

Good (?) news is that Mackoti finished the great wall, setting me up to get Currency in 2t with my 66 failgold.

Bad news is that I only get to keep my fish for 5 more turns:



Yesterday Mackoti and I were grousing about the save being late, and he mentioned he made a mistake last turn and hoped I couldn't punish him. Well, I pretty much knew what it was going to be. In fact that night I dreamed basically the above screenshot, with the settler on that exact tile. Noooooooo my beautiful fish.

So, two turns prior I'd had the choice of which fish tile to hook up first. The one that he could steal culturally from that island? Or the one that he could more easily pillage? As you can see I decided to go with the stealable one. He hadn't settled any other island cities yet, and I was just a couple turns away from being able to defend this island with a unit or two (and the adjacent fish itself, with a galley). And then fairly soon I could get some culture on the relevant tiles and prevent him from settling there at all. On the other hand, the fish between the ice floes was liable to be pillaged by a galley after it dropped off a settler on his first island, I thought.

Well, unfortunately I misjudged his plan. Actually it seems he loaded two settlers into his first galley, dropped one off on one island, and the other off here the following turn. So this will be his second island city like I thought, but settled 1t after his first, which surprised me because apparently he didn't think it important to support these settlers with defenders right away, let alone workers.

So what's the plan? Well plan A is a vain hope that, seeing the situation and that he would be stealing an improved fish tile from his friendly neighbor, that he will move the settler SW so we can coexist without any animosity.

Plan B is to chop out an axe, plus an axe or sword, and then whip out a galley over the next three turns. Mackoti leaves his island city underdefended over those turns (just one unit defending), and doesn't check what I'm up to with his galley, and I can raze it before it even pops borders.

Plan C is to mourn the loss of my fish and hope I get the chance to pillage it. Then raze his island city at some imaginary future time and gloat over my cultural control of the island.

In any case it's not a big deal. My empire is doing quite well - I have top crop yield, power, land area, approval rate; and second MFG and (I believe) number of citizens. And my tech rate is rapidly improving to competitive levels with lots of citizens growing onto cottages, not to mention I'll have currency next turn, and an academy before I start teching again after that.

I will have to decide soon what techs come next. I am seriously considering Poly-Aesthetics-Literature(-Music?) as well as HBR and/or Construction. And Poly-PH-CoL.

[SevenSpirits]

t71:

I decided to go with plan J instead, namely mourn the loss of my fish and hope that me not pillaging his fish makes him want to not pillage my new fish. My new workboat is right now N of the corn tile, fingers crossed.

I also landed my great scientist, and I've made preparations to tech Poly-Aesthetics-Literature over the next three turns and build the Great Library and Parthenon the turn after. I originally had the vague idea that GL would go in my capital (which does have the best beaker multipliers, but I found a good way to build it quickly in my future NE city, Medalist, so I'm building it there instead.

[SevenSpirits]

Btw I still don't have contact with Gaspar and Novice, so I don't know if other people can beat me to these wonders. I do know that one of my neighbors gotPolytheism this past turn, and the other one got Metal Casting. I am about 99% sure it was Mackoti with Metal Casting and Serdoa with Poly because of how the score increases work out, and because I know that Serdoa got Code of Laws the previous turn. (I can tell because Serdoa goes before me in turn order and Mackoti after, and the message for Confucianism's founding came before my turn of the same year.) Based on this (both just completed major tech projects) I don't think either of them are capable of beating me to the Great Library at least, which is more important than Parthenon for me.

In other news, Mackoti built Great Lighthouse this turn, and someone far away built Colossus the previous turn.

[SevenSpirits]

Next save arrives and someone in a faraway land (I suspect NoShoot) has built the great library. No harm done I guess - workers were moving into position next turn, and tech was being turned on next turn too. Now, it doesn't seem quite as good to go for Poly/Aesthetics/Literature. (If Parthenon isn't built in the next few turns I'd be surprised or at least not impressed.)

Looking at techs I can reasonably afford that were on my wishlist, the only ones left are HBR and Construction. (Yeah, no other classical techs seem that useful yet, and medieval techs are still too expensive.) So I think I'll try to make a diversion into war mode.