Turn Tracking Thread

[Sullla]

Turn 116 - 25AD

We get our first real look at the CFC/Spanish war this turn. It's not phony as best I can tell.



Our scout in the extreme east looks to have found the fifth and last Spanish city. We should spot it when we move north onto the grassland hill next turn. And yes, their team only has five cities. What a bizarre team.



Scouting along CFC's eastern border finally turned up this stack, on the tile southeast of our war chariot. This was the first real confirmation that these teams are fighting a true war. I know that the odds of this being some kind of phony diversion were extremely slim, but that's what paranoia will do for you. I had Praetorians sail halfway around the world to attack me once, you never know. Anyway, this is a nice little stack here, we'll keep an eye on it and see where it moves. There's a very strange mountain range of peaks that completely blocks movement in this area between east and west. I'm curious what the area further south holds.

CFC finally revolted this turn into Caste System and Representation. They must not be feeling much pressure from the war if they're willing to swap out of Slavery.



Here's some interesting stuff in the extreme west. Our Woodsman II axe has found an unprotected settler moving out. Obviously we are not going to kill this thing, but we could if we wanted to be total jerks to CivPlayers. A bit sloppy by them, they knew we had a Woodsman axe moving around in the area.

I'm expecting the settler to plant a city on the tile northwest of its current position. One thing we want to avoid is getting blocked out by CivPlayers borders; we won't be able to explore any further to the west if that happens, since they refuse to sign Open Borders. I'm going to try to move our axe south at the very beginning of next turn; I hope that this will teleport us further south, and let us keep exploring. Not entirely sure where our axe will end up. But I think it's worth a shot to keep on going.

I also requested Open Borders with CivFr in-game. The worst they can do is simply decline, so it's worth a shot.



Move of German territory uncovered in the north. There's not a lot to say here, other than the fact that they are crippled by lack of happiness. No happy resources other than gold, too backwards to have Monarchy tech researched for Hereditary Rule. There's little access to religion for most teams in this game either. We have Hinduism, CFC has Judaism, and CivPlayers founded three religions (Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity). Apolyton got into the religious club with their Philosophy lightbulb for Taoism, but that's it. All the other teams are locked out. CivFr and UniversCiv in particular are going to be missing religion down the road. Poor French teams.



I spread religion in the WPC city of Hill to the Sky as requested by them. The city has... barracks and totem pole inside. No granary. Seriously, these guys are god damn idiots. How can their third city, founded 60 turns ago, still not have a granary inside?! Yeesh.

One other item of note is the borders of UniversCiv peeking out to the east. WPC is actually squeezed pretty badly here, and they aren't the only ones. We are in an unusual position with lots of room still to expand. Most teams appear to be running out of space. We pushed very aggressively into the border region between teams, leaving us with lots of space to backfill in the south. Virtually everyone else has not been so lucky. Expect to see more fighting soon as the teams run out of space and look to conquer more land by the sword.



Here is our southern region. We did lose our exploring war chariot to the barb axe in the extreme south despite 68% odds. I know, I know, but it would be nice to win at least one coin flip against a barb unit for once. We're going to need knights to get that south explored in full.

In this picture, Adventure One finally got its second plains cottage finished and was able to fire its Scientist specialist. Horse Feathers and Brick By Brick both will complete barracks next turn. HF is going to start on Heroic Epic almost immediately, but we need some kind of build for BBB. The micro plan just says "military". What unit do you want me to build there? Elsewhere, two more turns to Shwedagon Paya in Focal Point, three more turns to our Great Person in Mansa, and Starfall keeps growing like a weed at +12 food/turn (!!!)



This is the northeast of our territory. Settler has moved next to the rice and will found our 15th city next turn. No one else has more than 12 cities at the moment. At Forbidden Fruit, we had the option of finishing its library or producing 85% of a missionary with the overflow from its worker whip. I suggest that we produce one more missionary to send to WPC: they asked for it, and it should be a little more of an incentive to get them off our backs. It's about time that they make the formal switch to our religion and start spreading the darn thing themselves. The Tree Huggers missionary can go either to our new city next door, or it can be sent to the Germans, who also requested religion from us. I leave that up to all of you.

Overview / tile micro:

We'll be producing 364 base / 451 modified beakers and finishing Civil Service at end of turn. Next turn, we'll use that overflow and run 50% research to finish Literature tech and open up Heroic Epic for Forbidden Fruit to start working on. I would dearly love to get marble somehow, but I don't think that will be happening. It will be a quiet turn for us next turn: only three pop growths, a new city, and Civil Service discovered.



Demos look really good this turn, but of course that's because Apolyton has 5 gold in the bank and must run 0% science this turn. We do at least have confirmation from this that they are the top GNP team from last turn (they had GNP 394 last turn). Apolyton makes about +110 gold/turn at 0% science, which is actually less than we make at the same slider setting (we make about +155 gold), but they have much more in the way of beaker modifiers, so even with less total commerce they probably make more beakers at 100% science. The Bureacademy capital adds some giant modifiers to research.

On the other hand, that lead in Food and Land Area... holy crap you guys.

Apolyton discovered Metal Casting this turn. GNP tracking didn't note any other new techs among the ones that I can check (the ones that we can research). We will need to get Alphabet tech soonish to be able to track what everyone has more closely. Probably after our Golden Age. In terms of espionage, I am putting the occasional turn of EP into UniversCiv to keep their graphs while also accumulating points towards the Spanish. We are roughly 5t away from being able to see their graphs, and then we'll go for CivFr. The French did not spend any EP against us last turn, which is far better than I expected. Some teams don't appear to be paying much attention to the allotment of their EP. CivPlayers has now spent over 300 EP against us (!!!) We need to spend 150 EP just to see their bar charts. Heh. I would be offended, but they've spent over 300 EP against CivFr as well. They just have a ton of points to spend from rushing sacrificial altars everywhere.

Should be all for this turn, but I'll wait until tonight to end to hear from the team.

[Sullla]

Turn 117 - 50AD

Our lead in food and cities continues to balloon ever upwards.



Here is then fifth and final Spanish city of Nobamba. This one has a surprising amount of infrastructure inside: monument, granary, ikhanda, library, and a colosseum for some reason (?) They must be really hurting for happiness. The Spanish actually have some excellent land, they've simply done a terrible job of making use of it. They even popped copper at the capital from one of the mines. The micromanagement gods shed a tear at the sight of that 5/1 deer tile going completely unused by any city.

From here it's further into the wilds of the east with this scout. CivFr's borders on the opposite side have to be pretty close.



Our war chariot in CFC territory found this little ministack along the border. It certainly looks as though CFC captured a barb city down in the tundra, and that could well be the reason why the Spanish declared war. We still have yet to see any true front line fighting between the two teams, although war weariness and injured units signal that some blood was indeed exchanged. We'll see what's going on in that city to the south next turn.



Despite moving our Woodsman axe at the start of the turn, we were still bounced backwards when CivPlayers founded their own new city. Ah well. This is what I expected to happen, but it was worth a shot. I guess we'll go north and try to circle around the big body of water in that direction. At the very least, making contact with CivFr made this little trip more than worthwhile.

It also looks like CivPlayers is just about out of room to expand to their west, with CivFr very close, so hopefully... popcorn?



Our scout in German territory found the city that was at the heart of the earlier WPC/German war, this location here. Willemshaven was razed by WPC during their war, then apparently refounded on the exact same spot later. The city has a terrace and nothing else in the way of buildings. This is where the bulk of the German army is hanging out, made up entirely of axes and chariots. In fact, pretty much every army that we've seen from everyone is made up of axes, chariots, and catapults. By sitting out the various rounds of early wars, we'll be able to avoid wasting production on these ancient era units, and when we do start to field an army for real, all of these units will be outdated garbage.

Note as well the marble sitting right on the border between the Germans and WPC. It certainly appears as though plako put the stone/marble resources directly on the halfway point between civs, like the stone in the desert to our southwest and the stone at Brick By Brick. Maybe some day this one will be ours, or at the very least become property of WPC and then we can trade for it. In the meantime though, it's literally in no man's land, and not even connected.



Back to our own civ now. We established our 15th city in the northeast part of this picture next to the rice. I named it Cutting Edge after one of our old succession games, since it has to be hacked out of the jungle. I shifted the axe inside Tree Huggers over to the new city, because the Germans don't have visibility into Tree Huggers but will inside Cutting Edge soon if they don't already. I would like to get a unit of some kind into TH soonish, just because I never like having an empty city anywhere near the border. It invites aggression from other players.

Horse Feathers and Brick By Brick both finished barracks at the start of this turn. I have Horse Feathers stuck on Wealth for this turn while running max food; it's about to start Heroic Epic next turn when we discover Literature, and it doesn't seem useful to start building anything right now. Why start a unit now and have it sit in the queue for 10 turns, when we could build a unit post-HE and get the production doubled for free? There are also no city buildings that we want to start in there; we need more tech for forge and stables. Let me know if you want this changed.

Brick By Brick does indeed want to build military, but what unit? We had a suggestion before that catapults will hold their value the longest, which is why I selected one for the moment. However, I'd also like to get some kind of unit for Tree Huggers, and a war chariot would be the cheapest and most useful option there. Which do you want: catapult or war chariot? I think I'm leaning towards the chariot now for military police defender, but let me know what everyone thinks.



Here's the southeast corner of our territory. Shwedagon Paya is due to complete at the end of this current turn, although it's hard to see in this picture. I am going to cry if we would lose this wonder now and force me to redo hours upon hours of planning for our Golden Age. At the very least, we have a coinflip shot at this point. Cautiously optimistic.

Starfall and Eastern Dealers are growing in preparation for their Great Scientist Starvation play during the impending Golden Age. Both will hit size 8 by the beginning of Turn 120, albeit just barely in the case of Starfall. I'm also having the workers chop the remaining two forests at Starfall, including the one outside our borders, for the following reasons:

* Worker labor in the area and not needed for another more important job.
* Borders will take a long time to grab that forest tile, another 15-20 turns at the least.
* No new cities planned for that corner of the map anytime soon.
* We need the extra forest chop to finish the library in Starfall, which has three purposes: 1) culture to push back CFC city 2) finish library in time to benefit from working 6 Scientist specialists 3) finish chop to benefit from OR civic before swapping out

So while we do lose out on some production by chopping third-ring outside our borders, I think the benefits outweigh the costs here. It's very important that we hold onto the cultural lead in this area to hold the stone tile; I'm willing to lose a future forest chop to get library up sooner. (And we'll be getting theatre here very soon as well once we tech Drama.)



Meanwhile, Mansa's Muse is two turns away from finishing its Great Person. We are at 181/200 GPP right now, which allows me to drop a Scientist for this one turn and work the gold tile without delaying the Great Person. This lines up the production very nicely (8 base production = 10 production with Organized Religion for the turn), get some extra food into Forbidden Fruit since it doesn't have to work the gold, and use the gold tile here in a city with a library on a turn where we're doing research. The micro worked out pretty nicely here.

Mansa's shrine is all the way up to 21 gold/turn now, which is fairly incredibly for a competitive MP game at this early date. We only have 14 cities with our religion, and we only spread religion to 2 WPC cities, which means there are another 5 cities out there where we have no vision that are sporting the Hindu banner. I'm guessing they are located somewhere in WPC or UniversCiv territory. Our religion is by far the world's most spread faith, and it's been doing wonders in the background to keep our teching going. We have 15 cities on an Emperor / Toroidal map, and we are almost breaking even at 50% science. With zero courthouses. That's fairly incredible.

Overview / tile micro:

Relatively modest changes this turn in the tile micro. The Covenant borrowed the cows from Simple Life for one turn to grow to size 6 faster. We'll pass the tile back next turn as a cottage complete at TC. Forbidden Fruit is sadly one food away from growing (31/32) but there's no way to get that extra food in there without forcing other cities off improved tiles. Sad face, it just could not be done. Most other cities are doing their typical thing, growing and working cottages. I drew in the colored dots for our planned next two cities, #16 and #17, in the northwest and the south. Please note that no other team has more than 12 cities right now, and many of our biggest rivals have less. City count:

RB = 15
Apolyton = 12
CFC = 12
UniversCiv = 11
CivFr = 10
Germans = 10
WPC = 10
CivPlayers = 9
Spanish = 5

"One of these things is not like the others!"



This is naturally reflected in our disgusting 75 point lead in Food, and the 79 more tiles that we have under our control compared to the next best team. CFC is second in Food and CivFr is second in Land, for the curious. The GNP leader this turn appears to be CivFr, as Apolyton still had their science at 0% when I checked their diplo screen. We're running 50% science this turn, because it will allow us to finish Literature tech and then prepare for our Golden Age thusly:

T117: 50% science, finish Literature
T118-119: 0% science, stockpile gold, overflow into Drama
T120: 100% science, pop Golden Age, finish Drama
T121: 100% science, overflow and finish Music

Four more turns to go. Let's hope that CivFr isn't racing for this tech and the free Great Artist as we speak. (If they do, we'll skip Music for now and speed up our research on Metal Casting instead.)

Let me know what you think on the military builds and we should otherwise be good to end turn.

[Sullla]

Turn 118 - 75AD

We finish another wonder and continue preparing for our impending Golden Age.



Scout in the extreme east has cleared Spanish territory and now found the CivFr blue borders on the other side of the world. This gives us a pretty good idea of the general contours of their territory. At the same time - whoa, what the heck is going on here?! Injured Spanish units right next to a CivFr city. This must be the barbarian city that kjn was talking about in the C&D numbers. Looks like CivFr stole this one out from under the noses of the Spanish. Wonder if they'll do anything about it? Could we be seeing even more aggression from the Spanish???



We've also unconvered the CFC city in the southeast corner of their territory, and this is probably also a former barb location that they captured. Abhi has a granary (and Judaism) present, nothing else so far. I saw no military action from CFC or the Spanish along the border as the chariot passed by. I moved our chariot onto the ice tile to the southeast after taking this picture, which revealed more water tiles and no seafood resources. It looks extremely likely now that there's an ocean along the polar worldwrap separating north from south. Getting some port cities and some ships into that body of water down the road could be crucially important. Remember that for circumnavigation purposes later.



More from the Germans in their north. These guys don't have much territory, but they're doing a solid job of making use of what they do have. I think they would probably be roughly around where UniversCiv is located in the game hierarchy or maybe even higher if they hadn't been the recipient of WPC's idiot attack earlier. They have two more cities north of Wien in the northern tundra that we have yet to reveal. There's also another settler guarded by an axe on the tile east of our chariot, which will found city #11 for their team. If they could ever somehow get some research going, they could be a much more dangerous team. Unfortunately they only make +22 gold/turn at 0% science right now, so... yeah.

I haven't moved the Woodsman II axe through the one tile of CivPlayers territory yet. We do have Open Borders in place now to open up that move. I'll scumbag it and move at the end and beginning of this turn roll, just to avoid any diplo complications. We never actually end a turn in their territory, just pass through via Woodsman II forestwalking, but still. Better safe than sorry.



Here's the northwest corner of our territory. I've got two minor issues for discussion here. First up is the build in Ditchdigger: we've finished the granary via forest chop and have quite a bit of overflow to play around with, about 36 shields total. I have no strong feeling about the build, and set the city to courthouse for lack of better choices. The other best option I could think up was to build Wealth for the moment and preserve that overflow for a theatre when we get Drama in a couple turns. More culture for a third-ring border pop would certainly be useful up there. However, we would lose the OR bonus on the overflow because we'll be in Pacifism by that point in time, costing us about 6-7 production. Worth it? Give me your thoughts.

Horse Feathers is still working fish, corn, lake, and 5 Moai coastal tiles. We get a ninth population point this turn though, and we can choose to grab the 1/1/5 silks or the 1/3 grassland hill. I took the hill tile since I figured we wanted to production for Heroic Epic over the extra commerce right now. We're amassing gold, after all, not researching. Good call or not?

I'm going to swap one of our axes with 0 XP over to serve as military police at Tree Huggers and keep the 3 XP war chariot coming out of Brick By Brick over there in the west in case of trouble. That unit shuffle will take a couple of turns to enact.



Seven Tribes swaps to settler this turn, will whip next turn and move to the spot two tiles north of the horses. There are workers up at the top edge of this screenshot roading to the location; we'll have the settler come out T120 and found the city T121 thanks to their nifty roadwork.

In the south, I'm sending axeman Lew to explore down by the furs. If there's anything that can survive down there, it's a C2/Shock axeman walking around on defensive terrain. Thank goodness there are no barb chariots. There's an axe and warrior circling around our borders and heading over to CivPlayers territory - I wasn't going to initiate an unnecessary axe vs axe battle for no reason. Let them go bother our neighbors instead. We are of course safe thanks to Great Wall.

Gourmet Menu's Great Lighthouse is actually due eot 125 after we due some micromanagement during the upcoming Golden Age. Seven more turns total. Given the vast stretches of land on this map, and every capital being landlocked, I think we've got pretty good odds to land this one, and it'll be more valuable than most teams probably think. (It's fairly easy for us to get 7-8 cities on coast, and more than that if we take over German territory.)



This is an overview of the east. Forbidden Fruit is producing one final missionary for WPC; does anyone remember which city they want us to send this one to? I lost it in all of their in-game messages. Starfall and Eastern Dealers are frantically building population for Scientist usage during the Golden Age. Starfall will finish its library at the end of next turn with the help of two forest chops. I really want to start pushing back against the CFC culture on that stone tile; they are in Caste System and could hire a bunch of Artists in there if they really wanted to screw us over. We need to get library and then theatre in there ASAP, which fortunately is very easy to do.

Let's look then more closely at two of our core cities in this area:



Focal Point just finished Swedagon Paya and will overflow/complete a barracks this turn. This wonder allows us to run our Golden Age + Caste System + Pacifism strategy without researching Philosophy tech ahead of time. It also allows us to skip researching Theology tech, ever, and still lets us make use of Theocracy civic later on. That's 1000 beakers saved forever right there.

Focal Point the city has worked a lot of cottages so far this game, but is actually a terrible commerce city longterm and won't ever bother building much in the way of commercial infrastructure. We'll even be giving that grassland cottage north of the city over to Mansa's Muse in time. It's pretty much all military here from now on. What we really need is State Property for workshop spam here, but in the absence of that, I'm going to chain irrigation along the indicated line of blue "F" signs to get a little more food going here. The city currently has 17 base production, and I would dearly love to grow onto a few more plains farms to hit 20 base production / 25 production with forge for 2t catapults. That's a longterm project, not a priority, but we should have the worker labor to improve it.



Mansa's Muse is the exact opposite, an extremely strong commercial city where we're unlikely to build much in the way of military. We've been crippling the growth here for quite some time running specialists, which will finally produce our second Great Person next turn. The type doesn't matter at all, since it's going to be used for a Golden Age. Feel free to lay your bets anyway.

We'll finally be able to grow this city further once it can drop the specialists. Sadly, the need to work 3 plains cottages and a gold tile (-5 food) means that growth will never be that awesome here. Mansa needs to steal the deer tile from the capital and work the corn tile just to get any growth going most of the time. Because of that, I'm very hesitant to whip this city. The Golden Age will let us knock out the rest of that market fairly quickly (worth a lot of gold with the Shrine in here), and then start making progress on a forge. We definitely want a grocer and bank in here ASAP.

Overview / tile micro:

The main thing I'll discuss here is research plans. We were discussing that in the C&D thread, and it's better placed here. So right now we've finished Literature tech and overflowed about 145 beakers into Drama. The plan is to run 0% science for the next two turns to stockpile gold, and then go 100% research on T120 when we pop the Golden Age and revolt into Bureaucracy / Pacifism / Caste System. (Note that this produces about 560 beakers/turn. Not bad.) The preferred tech route would look like this:

Drama -> Music -> Metal Casting -> Horseback Riding -> Philosophy -> Liberalism beeline

* Drama makes Music/Philosophy cheaper to research and unlocks theatres
* Music gets us Great Artist
* Metal Casting for forges, which we need really badly
* Horseback Riding lets us build some "real units" in the form of elephants and get stables
* Philosophy is a prerequisite for Liberalism, and then on to Paper/Education/Liberalism

Now that said, this might not be possible. CivFr has Literature tech and they are currently researching something at 100% rate, which could very well be Music tech. We don't know what they're up to. I'm hoping that they are just trying to pick up Civil Service, which would be the most logical choice. They have no idea what techs we have and no idea how close we are to Music. We also don't have to invest any beakers into Music until we 1-turn it on T121, so if CivFr would take the Artist, we lose absolutely nothing. We'll just drop it out of the tech path. While that would be a shame, it would also effectively lock CivFr out of the Liberalism race, because there's no way they can beat us to the tech if they invest that much into the top of the tree.

Alternately, how many of these techs depends on how aggressive Apolyton gets at pursuing Liberalism themselves. We can see their research thanks to their Alphabet tech, and we'll know if they start pushing for Education. Right now, they have about 200 gold and have been stockpiling it for the last two turns at 0% science (they make just over 100 gold/turn at min science). If we see them piling up like 1000 gold, that's an obvious sign they are preparing for a Liberalism run. Or if they grab Paper as their next tech, that means the same thing. Depending on how aggressive they get, we can do this path instead:

Drama -> Music -> Metal Casting -> Philosophy -> Liberalism beeline

Or if we're really worried:

Drama -> Music -> Philosophy -> Liberalism beeline

Since we have both an upcoming Golden Age and another Scientist ready to lightbulb Education, I'm fairly confident that we can beat them in a straight race. We could even use TWO Scientists on lightbulbs if we really wanted to get desperate, and simply not use one of them on an Academy as planned in the capital. I do not think they can beat us if we really try. Anyway, we're going to try and pick up the Music free Great Artist first, and then we'll play it by ear from there. Cross your fingers and hope that Apolyton diverts some research into the Aesthetics line, or feels the need to get Machinery tech for maces, or some such alternate path. They also have literally nothing in the way of military stuff (no Iron Working, Construction, or Horseback Riding); maybe they'll feel the need for some of that too.



Start of turn Demos. I'm pretty happy with our GNP at 0% science, especially given that both CivFr and CFC are at 100% science right now. Our value was 375 at max rate, for the curious. Everything else looks pretty solid.

We're a couple turns away from graphs with the Spanish, getting close though. Should be all for the moment.

[Sullla]

Turn 119 - 100AD

T minus 1 turn to Golden Age.



We had a little discussion about this earlier in the thread. Our scout has found a very weird situation around this barb city of Chinook. CivFr took this city on their turn, only to lose it back to the barbarians again on the interturn. Now the Spanish appear to be in the driver's seat to take more permanent possession of the city, as long as it doesn't autoraze. That's a highly preferrable situation for us, as we would much prefer to have the Spanish gaining a city over CivFr. It also means that the CivFr borders are further to the east than we initially thought, and they don't have quite as much territory as we first estimated.

Some people were worried about the imminent demise of the Spanish at the hands of CFC, but I don't see that happening, at least not any time soon. Despite their huge population edge, CFC still can only build axes, spears, chariots, and catapults in terms of military units. They don't even have Iron Working researched or their iron connected. There's really no way to attack and win with axes/cats against an opponent who also has axes/cats, not without massive casualties on both sides. CFC needs to tech up to maces to gain a real edge, which they will do, but not for some time. I expect continued stalemate unless the Spanish are dumb enough to walk a big stack into CFC territory and have it wiped out.



Here's our trapped Woodsman II axeman in a little pocket of CivPlayers/CivFr territory. I moved this guy back onto the tile 2N of the cows, and will get him out to the north on the following turn, but not before snapping this screenshot of a CivPlayers city. Texcoco somehow has a warrior at 1.0 health inside - what the heck?! Was this spot also getting hit by barbarians? Seems like other teams are getting hurt much worse than us so far. Despite some bad dice rolls, we've handled the barb threat pretty well overall.

Texcoco has both a Buddhist temple and monastery along with sacrificial altar. CivPlayers is very clearly running a heavy monk economy / Apostolic Palace strategy. I do think that's a pretty solid choice for this map, but for whatever reason they've done a poor job of expanding and growing pop. Perhaps they've just been squeezed badly by their starting position between us and CivFr.



Here are two more German cities in the extreme north; we've now spotted 11 of their 12 cities. It's all but a certainty at this point that there's a polar ocean along the north/south worldwrap. The Germans actually founded two cities this turn, both size 1 cities visible above. Their poor team is clearly running out of room to expand. The Germans have also run their economy into the ground; they are only making +14 gold/turn at what I believe is 0% research. Ouch. At this point, I'm not at all sure whether they can even reach Feudalism tech by Turn 150, which I kind of assumed that they would easily be able to do. If they can't get to longbows by the end of our NAP, we can easily run over an army of axes/spears/chariots/cats without much difficulty. Wait and see there.



Interesting tidbit here in the south from axeman Lew: we've found a crabs resource down in the extreme south. This will allow us to place at least one semi-decent city down there much later on. Hopefully Lew will be able to uncover the final remaining secrets down there over the next few turns.

Seven Tribes triple-whipped a settler for the "red dot" location two north of the horses. Workers are roading to this spot now and the settler will be able to found the city on T121. Soliciting name suggestions for this spot right now! I didn't see anything jump out at me in the list of past RB games. Fire away.

Great Lighthouse ETA in six more turns. Steady as she goes there.



We've got another missionary en route to WPC which will enter their territory next turn. Feel free to send them another diplo message soonish asking them where they want this missionary to go, I can't remember. The Covenant is going to whip that settler at the start of next turn before we swap out of Slavery civic; it actually needed 2t to get the 10 foodhammers necessary for a triple whip. The Covenant will only grow onto unimproved tiles if we don't whip something, making this a good time to pop out a settler. (Remember too that we'll be swapping out of Slavery civic for the next 7t; this will be our last settler for a little bit.) Plan is for the settler to grab the rice spot in the northwest jungles with this guy. I believe the city itself is founded on T125 for city #17.

We also popped out our Great Person for the Golden Age this turn, and the roulette wheel produced....



Abu Bakr the Great Prophet. So much for any of those convoluted plans to use a Great Scientist or Great Spy here. Prophet makes it easy to follow our Golden Age plan as expected. Abu Bakr is just hanging out for one turn by Shwedagon Paya and taking in the sights. (Anyone remember when Abu Bakr was the Arab leader in Civ3 Play the World? Poor guy got demoted to a Great Prophet.)

Then there's one more piece of micro weirdness for me to explain:



OK, I have not officially lost my mind here. What you're seeing is a Hindu missionary where we're 3 production short of finishing the build. Remember, we can only build this guy because we're in Organized Religion; we don't have a monastery in Tree Huggers. We're about to swap to Pacifism next turn, which means no more missionary build until we swap back 7t later. It's wasteful to have a missionary sitting around in the build queue at 37/40 production for the next 7t, especially when we said that we would send one over to the German team. I would much rather work horrible tiles for one turn and finish the build than have it sit there doing nothing for us (instead of earning shrine income) all throughout the Golden Age. It's just a shame that we don't have one high-production tile here to work. (I tried to get a mine on that grassland tile to avoid this and it simply was not possible.)

Overview / tile micro:

We've finally fired all of the Scientist specialists and Mansa's Muse will grow to size 10 next turn, just in time for the Golden Age. The capital is also going to take back the corn tile and start growing again next turn. The Focal Point chariot is designed to be the military garrison for our new city in the south. Forest chopping in Starfall finished its library in time to benefit from Organized Religion civic and the hiring of mass Scientist specialists next turn.

We'll turn on 100% science next turn and 1t Drama, then follow that up with 1t Music tech, assuming that the Great Artist is still there. It is still there as of this turn. CivFr is currently at 50 gold in the bank, no idea what they are researching. It looks unlikely that they can go 100% research this turn however, so I'm feeling better about the Music Artist. Apolyton has run three straight turns of 0% science; they are now at ~320 gold and have turned their teching back on. We'll be able to see whatever they research via their Alphabet tech. If they go for Paper next, the race for Liberalism is well and truly underway. We'll be watching them very closely.



Our 100% GNP rate tops out at roughly 380 right now. We have the expected dominance in most other categories. We will get bar graphs with the Spanish next turn, and then I'll start spending our EP against CivFr. (They have only run 6 EP against us so far, we're barely behind, fortunately.) Everything in this category will look about 100x better in Golden Age mode next turn.

I've got the worker actions and tile micro into a state that I'm happy with for the upcoming Golden Age turns. I'm actually working on the city builds, of all things, which have been the hardest to figure out. I will try to finish this up and post a group of save files tomorrow when I get a chance.

[Sullla]

Turn 120 - 125AD

"Our great civilization has entered a Golden Age!"



I don't have a great time of time to type something lengthy at the moment, so this will be more of a picture dump. Sorry about that. Here's the diplo message going back over to WPC. I hope that they will stop pestering us about more missionaries.



CivFr city founded on this turn, actually after I moved our scout at the very start of the turn roll. It's city #11 for them, three tiles away from the barb city that the Spanish recaptured.



Still moving to that last CFC city in the south. My observation: they've certainly built a lot of roads in neutral territory down at the south pole. Not sure that was the most efficient use of worker turns.



More evidence that there's very possibly some islands in the ocean along the polar worldwrap. We will definitely whip out a galley from Starfall when it's in the Globe Theatre whip overflow phase to go check this out.

I made sure to triple whip the settler in The Covenant before pressing the big glowing gold button on our Great Prophet. Then he worked his magic:



We revolted into Bureaucracy, Caste System, and Pacifism as planned.



Oh, and we also found our war chariot killing barb axe down in the extreme south. Let's hope we can claim our vegeance next turn.



Here's one of our missionaries in the north. This one is scheduled to go into German territory, so we might want to send them an email about it. Speak now if you would rather send this to WPC instead, last chance before I move him into German territory at the end of this turn.



This is the other missionary, which I renamed "Last Available Missionary" so that WPC will finally get the darned message. We'll see what they say back in response. Note also the whipped settler in The Covenant, which will head over to the rice spot along our northwest border.



Here's the Great Scientist Starvedown in operation. 6 Scientist specialists in both Starfall and Eastern Dealers producing 54 GPP/turn. We'll get two Great Scientists out of this by the end of the Golden Age.

I did not have time to create the tile micro map; will try to do so later.



Demos are what you would expect for being in a Golden Age. Note that we are throwing away about 25 Food by working all those specialists in Eastern Dealers and Starfall, so we are actually doing significantly better in that category. (We actually get more GNP and more beakers from working tiles instead of Scientists too, sadly. Scientist specialists are not that great without Representation civic.)

We will finish Drama research this turn, and I suggest going for Philosophy tech next. Then, depending on what Apolyton is doing, we can go straight for Paper or grab Metal Casting after that.

[Sullla]

Turn 121 - 150AD

I'll get to the whole Liberalism tech path stuff at the end. Hold your horses until then.



WPC seems happy with the missionary we're sending to them right now. I opened up the game to find this message from their team. They seem to want to send an archer in return, so sure, why not. We'll take it. We can always stuff it somewhere for military police purposes. They also don't appear to have any idea how to exchange messages without proposing a gold transfer, and thus the 1 gold for 1 gold exchange. Cute.

I have no idea where they want us to send the current missionary, but I suspect they'll send more messages to that effect soon enough.



We've got visibility on the final CFC city, Bono, down in the southern tundra. It has a granary and nothing else at present. There's also a ton of Fast Workers building a grassland farm down here for some reason. I guess they want a bigger food surplus in the city, which makes sense. We now have vision on all 12 CFC cities. I'm going to send the chariot to scout the remaining southwest corner of CivFanatics territory, just to make sure that there's no land bridge down in that corner over to our territory. Still waiting for CFC to plant more cities, they've been on 12 for some time now.



At the complete opposite side of the map, or close as the seagull flies across the toroidal north/south pole, we've confirmed the presence of icy islands in the ocean. This is actually only about ten tiles south of our own polar region. Definitely want to get a ship down from Starfall in the future to explore this. I'm also really hoping that we'll be able to land Great Lighthouse now, as there appears to be quite a lot of room for coastal cities along the edge of the map. Due in 5 more turns on that wonder, no way to speed it up since we're outside of Slavery civic at present.



We did get revenge on the barb axe that killed our war chariot earlier. Lew will heal for one turn to reach 4.8 health, and then head further south to keep exploring.



Probably the biggest news from the turn was the founding of city #15 down to the south of the capital. We had no popular name for this city, so I went ahead and went with French Riviera after the name of Adventure 15. Close enough, and the number was thematically appropriate and everything. The workers managed to finish a road to the spot before settling, allowing us to begin with two foreign trade routes immediately. French Riviera's micro has it run an Artist for the first two turns to pop borders while workers finish a cottage on the floodplains (T121-122). The other worker to the southeast meanwhile roads the plains forest tile. Then on T124 the workers all move to the forest and chop to insta-complete the granary, then move onto the wheat and farm it. We could get slightly more food and production in here via the Build Culture bug, but sadly CivFr's grab of Music tech has ruled that possibility out.

We discovered Drama at the start of this turn, and a lot of cities have gone onto theatres as a result.



On the other side of our territory, The Covenant overflowed into and will finish a war chariot, which will finally give that city a military police unit. Maybe we can use the archer from WPC in that city or something. There's an axe moving to Tree Huggers for the same purpose which will arrive there next turn. There's a missionary in both German and WPC territory just visible in this picture. Please send off some kind of message to the Germans letting them know that a missionary is on its way. I'll probably gift it to them and just let them pick which city to spread the religion in.

Workers are building cottages and clearing jungle all through this northern region. We'll have a farm next to the rice to spread irrigation there finished next turn. Chop also completes the Cutting Edge granary next turn.



Here's the obligatory "Moai city in a Golden Age" screenshot as Horse Feathers builds Heroic Epic. We're borrowing the corn tile from the capital for a single turn to get +9 food and a city grow to size 11; HF will then work the plains hill mine and a normal grassland farm and give the corn back to the capital. We'll grab the iron mine back from Gourmet Menu as soon as it finishes its own Great Lighthouse project. Heroic Epic is due to finish eot 127.

Overview / tile micro:

I've drawn in all of the tile micro, including the cadre of Scientists over in our eastern cities. We're up to 15 cities overall, and the settler from The Covenant is on its way to the marked tile in the northwest, due to settle city #16 on T125. Everything is pretty much on schedule as planned.

We are not planning on researching Metal Casting next; I've stuck us on this tech while we discuss things over. No reason to tip our hand to Apolyton in the Liberalism race until we have to do so.



Here are the disgusting Golden Age Demographics when I set our research to Philosophy tech (40% prerequisite bonus + 3% known tech bonus). I wanted to see how high we could make the GNP number go. Everything else is about what you would expect. Note that we've climbed into second place in Soldiers now despite making no real effort to do so. We have almost 70 more tiles under our control than any other team.

Liberalism Tech Path Stuff

Alright, this discussion is going to take a bit of time, so might as well pull up a chair and settle in. I'm going to explain our situation as best I can and then outline what I believe is our best route through the tech tree over the next dozen turns. First of all, here's what the tree itself looks like right now:



We currently need Philosophy, Paper, and Education techs in order to research Liberalism. Apolyton needs Paper and Education techs; they are up Philosophy because of their earlier Great Scientist lightbulb of the tech (which they used to found Taoism). We are up a bunch of other techs on Apolyton that are not important to the Liberalism race one way or the other. Every other team is out of the Liberalism race and will play no part; even CivFr is missing Code of Laws, Drama, Philosophy, and Civil Service. There's no way they can make up that many missing beakers when we're in a Golden Age and have multiple Great Scientists to play around with for lightbulbs. So Apolyton is the only real competition here.

Apolyton spent three turns accumulating gold (eot 116, 117, and 118). They make roughly 100 gold/turn when they run 0% science, and then they lose about 100 gold/turn when they run 100% science. So they amassed gold for three turns until they had ~325 gold, then they flipped research back on at the start of Turn 119 and ran max research at eot 119 and 120. We are currently at the beginning of Turn 121, and they have 100 gold left in the bank, with no new techs researched as yet. This means that they must be going for one of the following techs:

Feudalism (unlikely)
Machinery (very possible)
Paper (also very possible)

They would have already finished a cheaper tech like Calendar or Construction, and I can't see them going for Theology tech when the religion and AP wonder are already gone. So it's almost certainly Machinery or Paper tech in the works for them right now. We should now at the start of next turn which one they are researching. If we're lucky, they've decided they need maces and went for the otherwise unimportant Machinery tech. Should that be the case, you can stop reading this section right now, because we have Liberalism in the bag.

Of course, we have to plan for the worst case scenario, which means a direct Liberalism beeline going through Paper. This is probably the most likely case; Apolyton is Philosophical in this game, and they have every reason to push for cheap universities and early Liberalism. But this is not such bad news either, as it means that Apolyton needed 6 full turns (3t @ 0% research building gold and 3t @ 100% research knocking out beakers) to get the relatively cheap Paper tech. If they can't do better than 180 beakers/turn at break-even rate, then we should be able to beat them to Liberalism in a walk.

Still, we'll assume the worst case scenario, and also assume that Apolyton is engaging in some kind of complex research swapping game to build up tech overflow. What's the fastest way for us to get to Liberalism? Well, we have two Great Scientists to play around with. We would prefer to use one of them on an Academy in the capital, but we should be willing to burn both of them on lightbulbs if necessary to land Liberalism first. I'm arguing for this due to the following reasons:

* Liberalism into Nationalism gives us an extremely good chance to build Taj Mahal. Landing 8t more of Golden Age and denying 12t of (Mausoleum) Golden Age to CivFr is almost enough to lock up a victory for our team right there.

* This is a Huge map. Individual cities are less important on a Huge map. The Bureacademy capital with Oxford is inherently less valuable here. Still good stuff, but we're very likely to get 30+ cities on this map before we're done. This is not a Standard game where everyone gets 8-10 cities. Academy is simply not as important.

* We're only going to be in Bureaucracy civic for about the next 20-25 turns before we going into Nationhood civic and draft for pretty much the rest of the game. This makes an Academy in the capital less valuable.

Again, we'd like to use a Scientist on the Academy, but we certainly aren't tied to it. We can use both on lightbulbs if necessary. With that in mind, what is then the best path through the tech tree? The BTS Great Scientist list heavily favors Education tech for lightbulb priority:

Great Scientist:
Writing
Mathematics
Scientific Method
Physics
Education
Printing Press
Fiber Optics
Computers
Laser (BTS)
The Wheel
Alphabet (BTS)
Philosophy

This is all the relevant stuff; we're not going to do all the elaborate trickery necessary to open up a Liberalism bulb itself. Not worth it. Essentially, we lightbulb Education first, and then we can lightbulb Philosophy if we clear Alphabet first. Which is more valuable to lightbulb? Some numbers on the techs:

Philosophy = 1440 beakers
Education = 3240 beakers

A Great Scientist lightbulb is worth about 1800 beakers for our civ currently. We'll be wasting some of the value on Philosophy tech no matter what we do here, making Education a better choice. But it's actually even more lopsided than this, because Philosophy tech gets 40% bonus beaker multiplier from two pre-requisites (see the tech chart picture above) while Education only gets 20% bonus beakers. This makes Philosophy cheaper than a "normal" tech, and a worse choice for a lightbulb. Then we get another 3% bonus on Philosophy tech because Apolyton has it, and we benefit from "known civ" bonus as well. And furthermore, we have to research Alphabet tech to lightbulb Philosophy tech at all. This makes it a bad deal: we want to research Philosophy tech, not use a Great Scientist on it.

OK, with that out of the way, which tech to research next then on our Liberalism beeline: Philosophy or Paper? Well, both are viable options, but I suggest Philosophy tech first. This is mostly due to the fact that Apolyton already has researched Philosophy, making it cheaper for us to research by following in their wake. We get no such known civ bonus on Paper, and we could even make it cheaper for Apolyton by blazing ahead in that direction first. Plus, researching Paper tech makes it extremely obvious that we are going for Liberalism. With Philosophy tech, we could theoretically be going for Angkor Wat or something. I mean, it's theoretically possible, right?

So I would suggest following along this path. Philosophy first. The two turns it takes to research the tech will let us known if Apolyton is going for Paper or diverting off into Machinery/Feudalism for defense. We then research Paper second, and knock out 95% of the cost or whatever, then build gold for a few turns. We'll be able to see if we need to use one Scientist on Education or if we need to double lightbulb it, depending on what Apolyton is doing, but then we knock out Education almost instantaneously and push on to a very fast Liberalism. My estimates have us able to finish the whole path around T131-32 with a double lightbulb, should that prove necessary. Apolyton would need to clear 6800 beakers in the next 10 turns to beat us, and since they appear to be researching at under 200 break-even beakers right now, that doesn't seem likely. We can fiddle with mass overflow from Archery tech or whatever if people like that, but I think Apolyton will know full well what we're doing the minute we start teching Paper, and we might as well just race them straight out. Up to you, of course.

TL:DR - We should research Philosophy tech for now, then 95% of Paper tech, while watching what Apolyton does. We build gold for a few turns, single or double lightbulb Education, and then push on to Liberalism at 100% research to finish around T131-32.

Let the discussion begin. (Someone always has something to say. )

[Sullla]

Turn 122 - 175AD

Apolyton reveals that they are racing for Liberalism... but we should have the inside track to win that race.



First some scouting pictures. Our scout in the far east has found two different sets of Apolyton borders next to that new CivFr city. They're a bit tough to see, try looking at the very top and right side of the screenshot. This is another indicator that the map in most other parts of the world is quite crowded; the territory of CivFr is pushed up against the borders of CivPlayers, Apolyton, and the Spanish based on what we've been able to see.

Side note: did Apolyton ever request a no-scouting clause for our Open Borders deal? I believe that they did not, and we can start moving the scout through their territory. Someone double-check this when they have a minute by going through our past diplo exchanges. We're pretty close to getting the full east-west circumnavigation bonus, and then we'll only need the north-south component to give our ships the extra movement point. Starfall will be popping out a galley to help in that effort once the Golden Age / Scientist shenanigans are over.



More confirmation of the polar ocean to the south of CFC territory. This is our first picture of a whales resource. If we're lucky, there will be more whales down in our own polar water region. That would give us all four market happiness resources (we have ivory + silks, and we'll settle for furs in the next ten turns).



Poor Sian is once agains stuck by the placement of another CivPlayers city. At this point, we just want to get out of this cul-de-sac and start exploring the region to the north. A Woodsman II unit is far too valuable to sit here and waste its time doing north. I plan to get this unit past their city by playing scumbag double move fashion: move at the end of Turn 123 and then again at the start of Turn 124. That's the only way to get clear of their territory. CivPlayers will know what we've done, but we can avoid having them log into the game and see our unit sitting within their territory.

Before anyone suggests it, no, I'm not deleting this unit. A Woodsman II axe is extremely valuable for scouting and swiping workers. We can and will use this unit later on in our wars.



Here is the scouting information from our own south. We have finally reached the southern shores, and found a non-forest deer tile in the tundra. I will move the axe southwest next turn to reveal the max number of ocean tiles, then head east from there. Our current best suggestion for city placement has us sending our next settler to the tile north of the furs (cows + crabs + furs). This may change depending on what we see in the polar ocean. That city gets founded on roughly Turn 129 or Turn 130; it will depend on the exact spot we pick.

I'm really hoping now that we'll be able to land Great Lighthouse (due eot 126), since it would make any coastal cities down here in the deep south far more profitable. We already have 6 coastal cities, and we could easily get another 3-4 down here if we tried. Remember, this is non-nerfed vanilla Lighthouse with two extra trade routes per city. 10 cities x 4 trade routes x 2 commerce each = 80 commerce. Not too shabby. Keep those fingers crossed.



There really isn't anything all that exciting going on in our civ this turn. I took a picture of our heartland for lack of anything particularly noteworthy. We're halfway through a whole bunch of important builds: Great Lighthouse, Heroic Epic, four theatres for Globe Theatre usage, two markets, etc.

With regards to Adventure One's management: I should be able to incorporate novice's suggestions there to speed up our Taj Mahal finishing date. I much prefer the plans that have us finishing the market on schedule, since the capital produces a *LOT* of commerce, and would also greatly benefit from the extra market happiness. I believe the plan I'm working with has us finishing Taj Mahal at eot 146, which feels like it should be good enough barring a Great Engineer from someone else. CivFr will need to research about 6000 beakers just to get Nationalism tech and start Taj, and that's equal to the sum total of all research they've done up to this point in the game. Hopefully, the German team stupidly sends us marble and turns this into an academic question; we'd be done around roughly T138 in that case, which feels extremely safe.

Since there's not a terrible amount going on with our own civ this turn, let's look at the some Demographics charts. We can now see the bar graphs of everyone other than CivFr, Apolyton, and CivPlayers. Sadly, these are some of the strongest and most important teams. Not much we can do about that though.



Food is about what you would expect. Note the sizable dip downwards when we hired 12 Scientist specialists in Golden Age mode. I won't bother posting the Production graph, which has everyone clumped together and then a huge surge upwards from our team when we started the Golden Age.



We've comfortably led all of these teams in GNP for essentially the whole game, even ignoring the Golden Age spike at the end. The CivFanatics GNP spikes upwards at the same time that their Food goes down, which is a reflection of the times when they hired a bunch of (Representation) Scientist specialists. UniversCiv's GNP has begun to recover in the last dozen turns as a result of their whipped rathauses. This is slowly getting them back to a decent rate, but they are probably too far behind from their awful early game research, and they do not have Financial trait to boot. This is basically what CivPlayers would have looked like if they had missed their Oracle -> Code of Laws play and had had to research the tech manually. It was a long, slow crawl by UniversCiv to their courthouses.

WPC, the Spanish, and the Germans all have pitiful economies and are out of the game completely. It's only a matter of time until stronger, more advanced teams devour them and take their land.



Everyone is pretty clustered together on the Power graph, no one team really standing out in any direction. We are #2 in Power behind CFC, although not by any sizable margin. The war between CFC and the Spanish has clearly entered a stalling phase; I would not be surprised to see them sign peace soonish. Very few units exchanged by either side. When we actually start building units in about 10 turns, I expect us to take a dominant lead in these graphs. Horse Feathers can nearly build 1t catapults outside of Golden Age mode (it actually can hit the one-turn mark once it finishes its forge) and easily does 2t maces/knights. I believe that we can do 2 knights across 3 turns there once all the modifiers are in place, and that will make for a big army in a hurry.

Overview / tile micro:

As I said before, no major changes this turn anywhere. Still running the cadre of Scientists in the east, still building up in Golden Age mode. French Riviera will pop borders next turn from its Artist. There are missionaries in both German and WPC territory, who should be spreading religion soonish.



We are dominant in all of the Demos except for GNP, where our 0% science rate has caused one of the teams to leapfrog us. Kjn has pegged the leading team as CFC running a whole bunch of Representation Scientists; they just finished Civil Service and revolted to Bureaucracy last turn. Much of the "Rival GNP" is rather fictitious this turn though, since all of our major rivals are sitting on 0 gold and running 100% science. They'll all have to swap to lower rates and begin to pile up gold again.

This includes Apolyton, who discovered Paper this turn as expected. Let's look at their situation a little more closely. Here are their recent turns:

(Start of) Turn 116: discover Metal Casting, 0 gold, 0% science
Turn 117: 100 gold, 0% science
Turn 118: 200 gold, 0% science
Turn 119: 300 gold, 100% science, start Paper
Turn 120: 200 gold, 100% science
Turn 121: 100 gold, 100% science
Turn 122: 0 gold, discover Paper

In other words, it took them exactly 6 turns of research to discover Paper tech. They have 3 gold in the bank right now, and will have to begin building up their treasury from scratch. That or do break-even research at a lower rate, one or the other. Since Paper tech costs 1080 beakers, we have a pretty good estimate of their research rate, roughly equal to 150 base beakers / 180 modified beakers per turn. Our current beaker rate in Golden Age mode is about 370 base / 450 modified beakers per turn. In other words, we're researching MUCH faster than Apolyton at present. (Of course, we don't know how many beakers Apolyton overflowed from Paper into Education, but these numbers are very much in line with the GNP values we were observing and past techs that they've researched. I'm reasonably sure that Apolyton makes about 300 base beakers / 360 modified beakers at 100% science right now, literally double their break-even rate.)

So Apolyton needs to research Education tech (3240 beakers) and Liberalism tech (2520 beakers) in order to win this race. We need both techs as well as what's left of Philosophy (we have about 1100 out of 1400 beakers) and Paper tech (1080 beakers). Our plan is to research 99% of Philosophy and Paper techs, then chain-overflow research from both of them and Archery into a double Education lightbulb and a 1t Liberalism. It's pretty darn slick to watch in practice, as we go from not even having the pre-requisites for Education on T127 to getting Archery (eot 127), Philosophy (eot 128), Paper (eot 129), and then we instantly bulb Education and one-turn Liberalism for eot 130. Apolyton will likely feel as though they have this thing in the bag, only to be left scratching their heads when we suddenly claim Education and Liberalism in a single turn.

OK then, how does this race shape up? Well, if Apolyton doesn't have a Great Scientist sitting around for a lightbulb, they have zero chance whatsoever to win this race. They would need to get 5700 beakers in the next 8 turns, and that is just not happening (needed: 720 beakers/turn!) Other scenarios:

* One Scientist: It will be extremely difficult for Apolyton to win this race with one Scientist on hand. That would give them about 1650 beakers (we get more beakers from lightbulbs because we have about double their pop), and leave them to research 4100 beakers in 8 turns. That's 514 beakers/turn, more than triple the rate that they just showed on Paper tech. Seems unlikely. This is the case that I think is most likely; I believe that Apolyton has one Scientist available for Education, but not two or more.

* Two Scientists: In this scenario, Apolyton does what we've going to do, and double-lightbulbs Education. Then they just need to get the beakers for Liberalism, 2520 beakers, or needing 315 beakers/turn. This is still more than double the rate that they just showed on Paper, but it's within the realm of possibility. Hopefully the sneaky way that we research Liberalism will catch them off guard and help to rule out this possibility. (Any beakers invested in Education are completely wasted here because the tech gets magically researched by the double lightbulb. Trying to research 1000 beakers and then lightbulb the rest will not work under this scheme.)

* Three or more Scientists: OK this is extremely unlikely, but let's still consider this case. Here Apolyton runs afoul of the lightbulb order. After Education, they must research Iron Working (360 beakers) and Compass (720 beakers) in order to bulb Liberalism itself. In other words, they must invest 1060 beakers into these techs so that they can lightbulb Liberalism for about 1600 beakers. That's still advantageous to them, but remember that you can only discover one tech per turn in Civ4 through normal research. For this to work, Apolyton would have to recognize what we're doing about 5 turns ahead of time, double-bulb Education, research two wildly non-essential techs, and then use a third lightbulb on Liberalism. The odds of all that happening in the next 8 turns are effectively zero.

I believe that Apolyton will have one Scientist ready to use in their Liberalism push. That's a very standard play: one Scientist knocks out 60% of Education as you research towards Liberalism. We know that Apolyton has already gotten two Scientists (one for Academy in the capital, one for Philosophy lightbulb) thus far, and kjn thinks they may have used a third one for an Academy in their second city. I'm less certain of that, but maybe. Apolyton has never run Pacifism or Caste System at any point in time in the game; they are currently in Slavery / Organized Religion. Even for a Philosophical civ, it takes 25 turns of running double Scientists from a library to get a Great Person at the 300 GPP tier, and then 33 turns of the same to get the fourth Great Person at 400 GPP. If they are already on the 500 GPP tier, it takes 42 turns. Unless they have been setting up an elaborate chain of Great Scientists as far back as Turn 80 (when Apolyton only had 5 cities; they did not get city #6 until Turn 91), they simply do not have that many Great Scientists to play around with.

TLDR: Apolyton probably will have one Great Scientist to play around with, at worst two. They are unlikely to spot our plan and will very probably be caught off guard by our sneaky mass overflow / double lightbulb 1t Liberalism play. In the absolute worst case scenario, we don't invest any beakers into Liberalism until Turn 130 itself; we can always redirect all of that into Nationalism tech instead if by some miracle the free tech is already gone before we get there.

I think we'll win this race and win it without too much trouble. But better safe than sorry.

[Sullla]

Turn 123 - 200AD

The water-based wonder that we weren't building (Colossus) gets finished by Apolyton. Keep your fingers crossed for Great Lighthouse, due in three more turns.



First of all, check out the crazy overlap between these two cities of CivFr and Apolyton. "Our Close Borders Spark Tensions" anyone? I sure hope so. Remember too that CivFr is Creative in this game, and their new city will be popping borders shortly and pressing even harder against the Apolyton city of Izmir. I am really hoping that these civs will get into a contest for land later on, which would virtually seal the game for our team.

Note that we have Open Borders with Apolyton and there is no deal to avoid scouting one another's territories, so we'll be moving the scout through their borders starting next turn. We only need a few more turns of movement to complete the east-west circumnavigation requirement. Still some time away from the north-south part, however.



We gained some useful scouting information in WPC territory this turn. First of all, I detoured one tile west to get vision of Huron River before moving on. They planted this one directly on an iron resource, which may or may not have been deliberate, and the local terrain is pretty good with irrigated rice and floodplains nearby. Inside the city, we can spot a barracks and a totem pole... nothing else. "Interesting" city management there.

Then it was on to their next city:



North River was the second city founded by WPC, their version of Mansa's Muse. Inside the city, it also has... a barracks and a totem pole. No library, no granary. Their capital also does not have a granary either. I'm going to drop politeness for a moment here and be honest: this team is full of goddamn idiots. They don't seem to have any clue how to play Civ4 at the competitive level. I mean... not building granaries?! Even the most basic Civ4 neophyte should understand that. It's especially bizarre because WPC has a very active PBEM community. Granted, from what I've seen of those games, the skill level is extremely low (games full of AIs competing alongside players and such), but still, I'd expect better. Watching this team play is just brutal.

I would be very surprised if WPC is still alive at the end of this game.



Our scouting axe in the deep south didn't find anything of note this turn in the water. Just another icy island (?) further beyond the sea. Well, our galley will be down there soon enough. Definitely looks like our upcoming city in this region will be placed on the tile north of the furs. Lew will start heading east and try to map out the remaining southern coast to see if anything interesting turns up.

Oh, and the German scouting chariot did die to the barb axe down here, in case anyone missed the earlier posts on that subject. They either didn't read our warning message to them or didn't care.



Here's the southern half of our territory. Not too much going on here. Continued builds into Great Lighthouse (3t) and Heroic Epic (4t) are nearing completion. Focal Point is popping out a quick worker for use at the capital and in the south. The new city of French Riviera finished popping borders with an Artist specialist, will get a granary forest chop next turn, started working a newly finished floodplains cottage until we farm the wheat. Starfall reached 12/50 production into a theatre, the perfect time to swap over to a galley so that we can double-whip the theatre later, on Turn 127 to be exact.

Meanwhile, in the capital:



novice's plan had us take the market to 149/150 production last turn. Now we spend one turn growing to size 14, then begin production on a settler. These builds will all be whipped in the turns leading up to T130, eventually producing a cascade overflow into Taj Mahal. For now, everything looks fairly normal before it gets complex later. (Anyone else amused by how little infrastructure we actually have in the capital? It's been super-low production working mass cottages for nearly the entire game to this point.)



Here is the northern half of our territory, where again there's relatively little of great interest taking place. More workers cottaging, clearing jungle, and farming most everywhere. We will finish a market in Mansa's Muse at the end of this turn, which is why I have us running 100% science this turn and then 0% science next turn. May as well take advantage of the little commerce boosters.

Overview / tile micro:

We're getting ready to found city #17 on Turn 125 on the tile two west of the northern rice. Workers are roading to the spot, and the rice will be cleared / farmed / chain irrigated in short order. It bears noting that no other team has more than 12 cities, and we are about to plant our 17th city. Not bad.

The research plan is 100% on Paper tech this turn, then as close to 99% completion next turn as we can get, which I believe is about 40% science. Then we run max gold on Turns 125 and 126, before going 100% science on Turn 127 (Archery), Turn 128 (Philosophy), Turn 129 (Paper), and Turn 130 (Education double bulb / Liberalism). We'll be running Wealth builds in Focal Point and Brick By Brick on a lot of these turns to avoid running out of cash. The shortfall is actually gold and not beakers to make this work; we can get Liberalism with only 90% science on the final turn, which means there's plenty of headroom to spare on the research end. In the worst scenario, we can always run Wealth builds in every city for a single turn and pull 100 gold out of the ether to make sure we land Liberalism.



GNP retakes the familiar top spot after turning on research at 100%. I believe that the top rival GNP is either Apolyton or CivFr for this turn; it is not CFC because they ran 0% research and gained +100 gold between turns. Apolyton is sitting on exactly 0 gold in the bank, we'll see if they start building up gold again by running 0% science for a few turns. That would be ideal for us, since every turn they aren't researching brings us closer to Liberalism. I really hope than no one is gifting them gold in an attempt to deny us the free Liberalism tech in scumbag fashion. We may want to watch their gold totals at end of turn and just make sure there are no such shenanigans taking place. Probably not, but a healthy dose of paranoia can be good.

Everything else in the Demos looks about as expected during a Golden Age. I'm particularly pleased at our edge in the Food category, since we are 60 Food ahead of the next-closest team (CFC) and that's while running 12 Scientists. Remember, Food gets no multipliers from a Golden Age whatsoever. We are also likely to take over the #1 spot in Power soonish when we finish Heroic Epic and get into the military game for real.

CivPlayers discovered Civil Service tech and has already revolted into Bureaucracy civic, eating a turn of Anarchy in the process. Apolyton built Colossus but did not discover any new techs that I could see. They will need to discover Education in the next few turns to have any shot at Liberalism whatsoever. Remember, they cannot lightbulb Liberalism itself, so if they are still sitting there with Education undiscovered on Turn 127 or whatever, it will be nearly impossible for them to beat us. Stay tuned.

[Sullla]

Turn 124 - 225AD

Apolyton picked up the circumnavigation bonus, and CivFr completed the Great Library. Otherwise, steady as she sails for now.



We didn't find too much of great interest from our scouts this turn. This was probably the most interesting tidbit. As it turns out, it's not CivFr that's settling aggressively - it's actually Apolyton who's cramming a city right next to established borders. This is going to get awkward in a hurry when Nom expands its borders in a turn or two (CivFr is Creative). As for our scout, we'll continue to head east for the moment and then swing to the north when we run into the other side of that large body of water. We must be approaching the eastern edge, since the western side is only about 8-10 tiles east of this screenshot.



Here's a little bit more of WPC territory after detouring to the gold tile for more information. The city they want us to spread religion into is located two tiles west of this spot; we'll get there next turn. Could not have reached the city and spread religion this turn no matter what we did. WPC has more wines up here that they don't have the technology to use; still no Monarchy tech. Honestly. Their land is actually pretty nice from what I can see, they just had no idea how to use it properly.

I have no idea how relations will ultimately shake out with this team. I could see us keeping them around as a weak vassal state, or I could equally see us devouring them later on for more territory. We'll keep them as friends for now, and keep our options open for the post-German period. A lot will depend on what the other teams choose to do diplomatically.



Here's our Woodsman II axe that successfully managed to scumbag double-move through CivPlayers territory without them ever seeing the unit inside their territory. Thanks to sooooo for doing the actual move at the start of this turn. Next up: trying to head northwest around the big lake to try and find Apolyton borders on the other side.

The event log has the two major events of the turn: Apolyton getting the circumnavigation bonus, and CivFr landing the Great Library. This second event was 100% guaranteed, it was just a matter of time until they finished the wonder. CivFr has cleaned up every marble wonder of the game thus far: Mausoleum, Great Library, Parthenon, and Temple of Artemis. They've made great use of that resource. Their play to hit the top of the tech tree also worked out handsomly, resulting in the Music Great Artist and those various aforementioned wonders. Their size 16 capital will be a sight to see once they finally research Civil Service and pair up Bureaucracy + Academy + Great Library in there. With all that said, however, they've given up any chance at Liberalism by hitting the top of the tree so hard, and with German marble, we should be able to deny them Taj Mahal as well. Hopefully.

Losing the circumnavigation bonus to Apolyton is a shame, but nothing to be done about it. That was a lowish priority, still something we were hoping to get later. They might well have landed it through map trading and a little bit of north-south exploring. The advantage of teching Paper first, I suppose. Not the end of the world.



A couple of things to note in this screenshot. First, we'll be planting city #17 on the indicated tile next turn, planned to be called Frozen Jungle for lack of a more appropriate name. The goal longterm here is to workshop all those jungle tiles and end up with a totally kickass city in the State Property era. In the meantime, I am thinking of farming one more grassland tile (for +6 food) and probably cottaging 2 tiles, letting us run size 4 -> size 2 whip cycles for a bit. Then let the city grow to size 6 for drafting purposes a bit later. Something like that should work out. We'll also be roading through here over to Ditchdigger in the next few turns, which will help to secure the two cities to the west if CivPlayers would ever get aggressive.

Elsewhere, Heroic Epic is down to 3t remaining. Sure would have been easier to build that one with marble, heh. The capital swapping off temple and onto a settler, which we'll take to 98/100 production and complete much later with a one-pop whip. Tree Huggers finished a theatre, and I have set it to a Hindu Monastery. This is a debatable call, so hear my logic. We do need a couple of cities with monasteries since we'll be abandoning Organized Religion later on. Tree Huggers has spent most of its life thus far building OR missionaries, which makes it a good candidate to get a monastery. It also will have a great deal of production later on, when we can workshop a bunch of those grassland tiles, and the city is located very close to our northern border, which is where I expect to send most of our missionaries in the future. Shorter transit times for religion spreads. Feel free to overrule if you will, but I think the logic is sound, and until we get Metal Casting / forges, there is nothing terribly important to build in this city.



This is the eastern side of our territory. With nothing too terribly important going on, I'll highlight our research instead here. At the start of the turn, we are at 735/1080 beakers into Paper tech. We want to get as close to maximum beakers as possible without going over (Price Is Right style) for overflow purposes later. This works out almost perfectly at 40% science for this turn: 269 base beakers becomes 333 beakers after modifiers. 735 + 333 = 1068 beakers, out of the 1080 needed for the tech. That's 98.89% of the total. Not too shabby, if I do say so.

From here, we do the same thing with Philosophy tech (20% science), then run another turn of 0% science on T126, and start going full 100% from Turn 127 to Turn 130. Liberalism at end of turn 130.



Once the deal for German marble goes through, it will be very easy to build the National Epic here in Eastern Dealers. We just need to get the three grassland hill tiles mined. We can then work the pigs, clams, gems, 3 grassland hills, and an Engineer specialist after whipping forge. That's 14 base production, with 250% bonus production from forge + Organized Religion + marble = 14 + 14 + 7 = 35 production/turn. The National Epic costs 250 shields, so it's roughly a 7 turn build, less with more overflow. Should be easy to do. There are two workers heading down here now to get started on those hill mines, and two more workers following in about 4 more turns to help.

For the current turn, the city is working 5 specialists instead of 6 because that's all we need to produce the Great Scientist. It's due in 2t either way. We might as well work the gems tile, the city's best tile, on both turns instead of working an otherwise crummy Scientist specialist. You do not want to be ignoring 1/3/8 tiles.



The Military Advisor gives us a nice little overview of the world map, and also shows off our mighty army. Sad as this is, we are the world #2 in Power right now. Nobody too fearsome out there. When we actually do start building a military for real, I'm going to feel sorry for some of these other teams. Well, not too sorry.

Overview / tile micro:

I don't have too much to add here. We chopped a granary to completion for French Riviera, on a tile where we'll be chaining irrigation later anyway. The Covenant borrowed the cows from Simple Life to grow a turn earlier. Keep your fingers crossed for that Great Lighthouse build in Gourmet Menu, now only 2 turns away from completion. I will be mighty sad if we miss it now.



Demos in Golden Age mode remain pretty awesome. First or second in every single category other than trade routes, which is going to be the case pretty much always because we're bigger than everyone else.

We should be done now, but I will leave the turn unfinished for at least 12 hours to leave time for comments.

[Sullla]

Turn 125 - 250AD

Hopefully this post will show up in the right place; the clock on the forums seems to be acting up again and time-traveling some of the posts into weird places. Anyway...



There was a message from WPC when I logged into the game asking us to move our missionary into Great Plains and spread religion. Uh, sure guys, we were doing that anyway? Well, mission accomplished in any case. Great Plains has a granary, barracks, totem pole, and library - this means that it has more infrastructure than their capital for some reason. Odd. Looks to be a low-commerce city too, so I'm not sure why this city has a library when other, better cities do not. I probably shouldn't try to expend too much brainpower trying to understand WPC's city management decisions in this game. They haven't been quite Templars-level bad, but certainly not good either.

We got a free religion spread into WPC's Fields of Color as well this turn, meaning that our religion is pretty well established in WPC territory. Here's an overview of their territory that we can see:



There's the six cities that we can see, five of which are running Hinduism. Let's hope that WPC will spread our religion further to the rest of their cities. It's also visible here how badly we've squeezed both of these teams for territory; the entirety of the equatorial jungle region has fallen under our control. WPC and Germans both have their southern borders well north of where the other teams that started in the "northern" hemisphere have them. Their idiot conflict in the early game over the territory north of that central lake could not have gone much better for us.



Here's our scout in Apolyton territory; I took the picture to show how close we are getting to the big sea that we spotted on the other side of the worldwrap. I was originally going to keep pushing east for circumnavigation purposes, but now that that bonus is gone, I think we'll do better by moving north and trying to scout as much of Apolyton territory as possible. If they won't trade us their maps, then fine, we'll just map out their territory manually. At worst, they can ask us to leave. Until then, better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.



And here's a similar picture of the deep south. We thought before that our tundra south didn't connect to CFC's deep south, but now I'm not so certain. A few more turns of exploring should clear up whether or not those two fingers of land connect to one another. Sadly, we have not spotted any more resources down in our own territory. The barb axe appears to be leaving our own axeman in peace for the moment, and I'm content to walk past in safety if possible.



In our own territory, the biggest news was the founding of our newest city, the somewhat misnamed Frozen Jungle. I heard some calls for "Stagnation", but I couldn't in good conscience give a city such an inauspicious name. Workers are in the process of farming the rice (farmed next turn, irrigated the turn after that) and then roading over to Ditchdigger. We will probably add one more farm for +6 food, put down a couple of cottages, and mostly do whipping for production here for the moment. The true purpose of this city is to be a monster State Property workshop camp later on; every one of those jungle tiles can become a 2/3 tile later on, or even 2/4 if we adopt Caste System. There are 13 flatland grassland tiles here, meaning we can easily get roughly 40-50 base production before any modifiers. So while this and Ditchdigger are extreme longterm projects, they will be wonderful cities in about 50 turns.

Don't worry, we're not abandoning the northern rice; a city placed two west of that resource can be founded in the post-German era and will be very strong as well. But we'll never get control of that second rice tile until the Germans are gone, and Frozen Jungle has plenty of food to work with. There's no reason to push an aggressive city further north here right now.

Another city management point: I've queued up a lighthouse in Brick By Brick, due in 3 turns. This is a bit of a judgment call, but I want us to have some way to grow the city rapidly if needed later on. With the lighthouse, we don't have any way to push fast growth (by working a bunch of water tiles) in the wake of a whip or draft. This feels like the best time to get the lighthouse done as well: Golden Age, no strong military units to build, still waiting on forge and stables to become available. The only other option at the moment is a catapult, and the lighthouse is only slightly more expensive at 60 shields vs 50 shields. Feels like the right decision to me, let me know if all of you object.

Further to the south, Heroic Epic is now due in two turns, and this is due in one:



We are guaranteed at least a coinflip for this wonder now. I'm really hoping we land Great Lighthouse, and I think it will be pretty valuable. More so than the other teams think. We have 5 coastal cities at the moment, and our next city will be on the coast in the south by the furs for 6. We can then plant at least 2 more coastal cities in the deep south. Meanwhile, the German team has 5 coastal cities of their own. That's starting to add up to a lot of trade routes there! Furthermore, we're Expansive and will have the opportunity to build cheap harbors (effective cost 40 shields) which synergize very well with Great Lighthouse trade routes. We also will not be teching Corporation for close to 100 more turns. I am waiting to see if we land this wonder before moving forward with the simulation, as it would give us some more commerce to play around with and make the Liberalism race not quite so tight.



Here's the eastern part of our civ, not too much of great interest happening here either. Eastern Dealers is going to pop out its Great Scientist next turn, and that's about it.

Speaking of the Liberalism race, we are teching Philosophy to near-completion this turn, in the same way that we did Paper tech last turn. We previously had 1177 out of 1440 beakers, and we make 158 base / 228 modified beakers this turn. That gets us to 1405/1440 in total at the end of the turn, 97.6% overall. It's as close as well can get without going over, if not quite so nice as Paper tech. Next turn, we'll run 0% research and put the Scientist specialist beakers into Archery tech, then go four turns of 100% to close out the race. Just the Scientists alone nearly finish Archery, due to its extreme cheapness and discounted cost from other teams.

Overview / tile micro:

Note that Focal Point is building Wealth to help us in our Liberalism push. There's very little that it needs to work on there; it would only be pushing out catapults or whatever. We do need some extra gold to land our desired slingshot, and Focal Point + Brick By Brick are the best spots. Brick will be running some Wealth after it finishes its lighthouse. Eastern Dealers is also running 5 Scientists + gems tile in truth, but I'm not creating another image after doing the 6 Scientist graphic before.

I am nearly out of the default colors in Paint to use for our cities.



Demos still putting up the predictable Golden Age stampy stamp numbers. We are well over 300 Food without mass specialist usage. We're also finally about to overtake CivFr on the misleading "Population" number, which they've led for ages due to their size 16 capital. The GNP number is just funny, due to the double pre-requisite bonus and known tech bonus on Philosophy tech. At 100% research, our GNP goes to 845 for the turn. Yikes.

Apolyton ran a turn of 0% science last turn, which is a huge win for us. Any turn that they are not putting beakers into Education right now is a turn that puts us closer to Liberalism. They are rapidly running out of time to win that race; even if they lightbulb Education at the end of this turn, they'd only have 5 turns to get through the 2500 beaker cost of Liberalism itself. Looking more and more difficult for them all the time. We also have confirmation that teams are not gifting Apolyton gold to win a Liberalism race, which was always unlikely, but still, paranoia and all that.

I am trying to keep graphs with UniversCiv while also building EP towards CivFr. We'll have to run another turn or two of spending against Univers for the moment, as they had just enough points for us to lose their graphs this turn. CivFr is spending no points against us, thank goodness. We are actually ahead of them 10 to 6 in EP. They either didn't build courthouses or don't have Code of Laws. We actually think that CivFr researched Metal Casting this turn, so they probably do not have Code of Laws. They would obviously be in Bureaucracy if they had Civil Service (with their size 16 Academy + Great Library capital). In other words, CivFr isn't even in the picture for Liberalism, as predicted earlier. No one other than Apolyton has Paper or Philosophy techs, making them the only competitor.

Well that should be all for now. Hopefully we get this marble deal straightened out with the Germans, and then sign an NAP extension with CivPlayers. Let me know what you think.