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

[scooter]

Right after I posted that update about being leery of Xenu.

scooter: xenu jumped in within 10 minutes of me getting out
pindicator: uhoh...
scooter: i may just be paranoid but...
pindicator: i'm jumping in

[scooter]

Popped in game for lunch. 3 pieces of good news:



Serdoa offered. I accepted. Second:



Azza accepted! Third:



Still has not grown, so he cannot whip a 2nd unit in time to save the city.

[scooter]

Played the turn. Here's a look at our two main cities now that we've got the gold going:



It's currently working the minimum food to keep from starving. We've still got an unhappy citizen here - 1 unhappy from WW, 2 unhappy from motherland. Once this settler is within double-whipping range we should do that immediately. Just whipping it down and regrowing should help notch the Motherland unhappy down to 1 as the culture resets, I believe. There's also a strong chance I have no clue what I'm talking about, but we should still double-whip that settler . More relevant is that we just need to finish off India and all these problems go away. Sid's:



The 3 hammers are more valuable than the 4 commerce right now, so mine it is. Ok, some city management things:



I was pleasantly surprised to find out the corn only had 1T left on it, so I roaded it and hooked it to our network. I think we should cottage the wine tile next, but we could cottage a grassland instead. Thoughts?

TGIF should work the farm while it grows to sz2 and pops its borders. At that point it has two really nice floodplains hamlets to work that are not that far from villages, so it should do that, and the clam can bounce between these 2 cities starting in 11 turns.

Ended turn. Only Xenu left to play.

[scooter]

One other thing I wanted to talk about:



This is going to be a puzzle. The issue is that I'm afraid of Triremes still. At the very least he definitely has a galley and he could take the 30-some odd shot at our loaded galleys. FG will pop its borders soon (palace), so the staging tile will be visible. I think the only solution is to have an empty boat come along. We have 4 galleys total, though one is 2.5 turns behind the other 2 in the north (the south galey will make it here first). If we just use 3 at first, we can fill 2 of them and leave one empty, assuming it may die. Then we come back and pick up more units and ferry them over. I'm expecting he could pack as many as 4-5 defenders in here given that he has an axe from CC at least, but it's hard to say for sure. The upside is we should have both our catapults. Er, just realized that catapult at Dominos needs to load back up. We'll do that next turn.

Also, I think we need to build a couple warriors.



Very soon, too. Possibly interrupting one of these settlers. The reason is because we're using 2 valuable Impis as MP down here, and we're absolutely going to need them in the assault on FG. We really don't have that many units left after losing so many in the CC attack, so we need all these guys. That means building 2 warriors to garrison Sid's and Culvers so that it frees up 2 Impis. We should definitely be building a few warriors anyways now that we can build them due to having no metal. It's just a cost-efficient way to garrison cities right now - at least our southern cities that is.

[scooter]

Few more things I took pictures of earlier that I thought were interesting as I looked around.



Azza just got this second ivory hooked. Once we get our wines hooked, it would be awesome if we could swing an ivory/wine deal. First, the happy would obviously be great. Second, it would be nice if we could build ourselves some elephants. I'm talking 20T down the road, but it would still be really nice.



I feel bad for Brick. Look at these city sizes. His capital is sz3 128 turns into the game! This is RBMod where vertical is even stronger than usual. We don't have contact with these guys, so it's hard to really discern what's going on, but this is just an extraordinarily low level for population. Contrast that to the shot of Xenu's cities I posted last turn. Of course Xenu's land is much better, but still...



Wonders are falling hard in the direction of slowcheetah and Plako. I have no idea who got which wonder (nor do I really care), but slowcheetah definitely got one of those. He's, uh, doing pretty well! The big 5 in this game (slowcheetah, Commodore, Serdoa, Bigwyn, and Serdoa) should make for quite the late showdown. They've all got things going for and against them right now. Commodore is probably in the best shape land-wise, but he didn't manage to get any useful wonders due to having to deal with us, and I think he's been struggling economically a bit.

[pindicator]

We have over 60bpt?

I think that's our high watermark for the game

[scooter]

We have over 60bpt?

I think that's our high watermark for the game

Seriously. This was the previous best I could find:



42bpt, 5 cities, then it went downhill. We're now at 60bpt, 6 cities. And that will jump over 70bpt when that 6th one comes out of revolt. Amazing.

[Ceiliazul]

Golf Clap. I'll be the first to admit that in the lurker thread I said your plan was doomed to failure.

I was quite wrong.

[NobleHelium]

You know, in the Internet parlance that I'm used to, a golf clap means that you are not impressed.

And yeah, I was thinking that we should build some warriors while we have a chance (i.e. no metal) before we can't build them again. I don't think we should cottage the wine because we'll be able to build a winery soon.

[scooter]