[SPOILERS]Acrid Pinot and other Pindicator anagrams

[NobleHelium]

So now I'm thinking we should probably delay the Golden Age by four turns and tech Meditation -> Philosophy after Civil Service (maybe including Drama too with an additional turn's delay). This lets us firm up our defenses with some longbow builds/whips and we should be able to finish Moai by then. RUO can grow rapidly after finishing the NE as well. Naturally we would swap to Pacifism immediately in that case. Delaying the Bureaucracy switch sucks but I think it's worth it.

[NobleHelium]

scooter accepted our gold and corn for silver deal!

[pindicator]

Sorry for the blackout over the weekend.  It's hard to keep myself going on this game, which probably makes no sense to a lot of people given how well my position is.  Reporting helps, so I am going to make myself write up a report on my break at work, even if it's going to come picture free.

We just finished turn 116 late last night.  Internationally, a couple of trends have happened over the last few turns:

Ruff_hi has whipped away a TON of population.  Consider how he had a population lead BEFORE he built Hanging Gardens - and now we've caught and passed him in total number of citizens for a couple of turns.  When we started the last turn we were even with him in crop yield.  So Ruff is going on an infrastructure push, or readying more settlers for the fray.

Ruff has also been acting more hostile as of late:  he canceled our gold for gems deal -- a deal that has in no way benefited us for it's duration -- and set up the same deal with Rego instead.  This was a little frustrating for us because we are just a few turns away from (finally) hooking up our second gold.  Ruff also has 13 cities and just finished teching Iron Working this last turn.  He's also started dumping 5 EP / turn into us, so we are not feeling too good about him as a neighbor right now.  Hopefully longbows will deter him until we can get through our golden age.

Rego has settled 2 more cities, bringing him up to 14 total.  After that he finally finished Civil Service, and last turn did a big swap to Bureau, Caste, and Pacifism.  Where Ruff has turned more hostile, Rego has turned more peaceful: he offered 5g for 5g, which I took as a token of friendship, and when he offered a crab for clam trade (he had no crab, but we have pleanty of clam), I just gifted him the health resource as a counter and then asked for stone in a separate request.  A few turns of back-and-forth later, and after Rego finished building Moai he gave us stone for pigs.  This is going to enable us land Moai on turn 120.

Ichabod teched Theology and then either picked up Monarchy or Code of Laws.  Monarchy makes sense because of the wines he has in his islands; Code of Laws is the better overall tech choice IMO.  He has not yet adopted Representation or HR, which makes me think he teched Code of Laws and is waiting to double-revolt with Bureaucracy.

Scooter is the biggest enigma -- we still haven't found his borders, but our exploration has been down right awful this game (seriously, it's past turn 100 and we haven't even found scooter's borders yet), but he's also a friendly enigma.  With Ruff canceling our gem for gold deal, we offered Scooter Gold & Corn for Silver, which he agreed to.


---

And then what we've been up to:

With exploration, we found that the island north of Spa Rag is entirely ours to grab:  the only pre-astronomy access to it is via Gaspar's namesake.  We also found whales off it's north coast, so we will hopefully line up settling that with when we research Optics.  Our next settler is not going that way -- possibly not even the one after that.  Because we are going to poach a beautiful island off Ichabod's coast: wine & wet corn.  It makes the islands off our coast just look awful by comparison -- then again, a lot of Ichabod's lands make ours look bad by comparison.  Not goign to turn this into a map rant...

That settler will land on t118 and settle on t119.  A longbow has been whipped out of Spa Rag to join it.  More longbows are being built in the far corners of the empire to dissuade any thoughts of attacking us.

And then farther west we finally found stone!  This may be why Rego & Ruff's expenses are so bad -- even with more courthouses than us.  We are whipping a settler out of RSS (that city has turned into a whipping post for settlers) to claim the stone and it should arrive about the same turn that our deal with Rego would end.

Next turn we will settle our 13th city on the jungle arm.  He Chows Late will grab Banana, Crab, and Dye for us, and we already have a missionary and a pair of workers ready for it's founding next turn.  We're also starting to eye settling the hub: putting a city all the way where our arm meets the middle area: the city will grab 2 fish first ring and will have a banana 2nd ring.

I'm not sure how many more cities we're going to settle outside of that.  2 more on the arm; 1 grabbing Ichabod's wine; 1 grabbing the stone in the far west; and then 2 or 3 more on the island north of Spa Rag -- that will put us up to 18 or 19 total.  After that it will be time to invade Ichabod.  Maybe even before we get that far.

With the economy taking off, we're going to have Civil Service a turn earlier.  I'm really trying to get used to not planting cottages as FIN, but with Colossus and all this coast there hardly seems any point.  Noble has been trying to tell me we should be planting workshops, but that seems like a waste too - workshops won't be nominally useful until we get 2 of Caste/Guilds/Chemistry, and even then it would be debateable to work a 1f3h tile over a 2f4c coast.  Also, I think after Colossus expires we're going to want some additional cottages planted.  But in the short term what it means is that workers have been in less of a demand: we're running our empire of 12 cities with 8 workers.  And while we are going to need more in the upcoming turns -- improving the jungle city, laying down post-Civil Service farms, improving the new cities out west -- we have done without the normal amount of workers due to Colossus and keeping the worker micro refined.

Another thing we've decided to do is push back the start of our golden age a few more turns.  Civil Service will finish turn 117; we can probably get Meditation, Drama, and Philosophy by turn 122, 123 at the latest.  We'll need 3t at 100% to get all 3 techs and our slider is still hovering around 50%.  This will also give us more time to grow cities and try to land a good number of great people with caste -- that will require some work to map out how many cities we should use.  Then we'll kick off our own golden age with Caste System/Pacifism/Bureaucracy.  But we're likely in a race with Rego for Liberalism.

National Wonder completion ETAs

* National Epic: t118
* Moai Statues: t120

[NobleHelium]

Yeah, it's possible that rego may beat us to Liberalism depending on how well he manages his current Caste/Pac swap. But I think we're still ahead even without Lib - we might need to tech Nationalism early though. I'm mostly concerned about not getting attacked right now, but rego isn't going to attack us while he's doing his GP thing and we should be good enough with some longbows on Ruff's border.

[pindicator]

Turn 117

We got us a new city!



That makes 13 cities for us. Rego settled his 15th, Ruff has 14. Scooter at 11, Ichabod at 10.

The work boat hooked up the crab right away; a missionary joined in on the fun; and then our worker moved onto the dye. We'll road, chop, and then hook that up in the time it takes He Chows Late's borders to pop.

You can see we're creeping closer and closer to 400bpt at max science. At breakeven we're right at about 200bpt. We ran 90% this turn to finish Civil Service. In the next two turns we'll tech Meditation and Drama, and then it will be 4 turns to get Philosophy - maybe 3 turns, if only because I keep underestimating our growth.

After that it's golden.

We finished National Epic this turn:



And put a huge chunk into Moai, thanks to stone:



The view out west:



We're going to settle 1W of the corn; our settler lands next turn.

And look at those demos

Beginning of Turn
Taken at 100% science with 2 pre-reqs on Civil Service.





End of Turn
Taken at 90% science with no technology selected

[NobleHelium]

Hmm, slight problem. I'm not sure we're going to be able to whip HCL's granary before we swap out of Slavery...

[pindicator]

Hmm, slight problem. I'm not sure we're going to be able to whip HCL's granary before we swap out of Slavery...

We should be able to. Best case tech path is 1 turn for Meditation, 1 turn for Drama, 3 turns for Philosophy. That would mean starting the golden age on turn 123. HCL is gaining 4fpt starting on t117, so it will grow to size 2 at end of turn 122. We can whip it turn 123 before swapping civics if we manage to get Philosophy in 3t

Now the other 2 cities we are founding... they are gonna be slow growers

[NobleHelium]

Yeah, we should be good. The wine city will be slow but if we plant on the stone for the other one we'll have three forests to chop. Need workers for that though...

[pindicator]

Yeah, we should be good. The wine city will be slow but if we plant on the stone for the other one we'll have three forests to chop. Need workers for that though...

Hire an artist, pop some borders!

[NobleHelium]

Ichabod is demanding crab it seems...or perhaps he's "requesting" crab.