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

[Ichabod]

The college that lost was your college, Scooter?

[scooter]

The college that lost was your college, Scooter?

Actually no, I didn't go to UM, but I grew up as a big fan of their sports teams and had family that went there. College sports in the US are barely distinguishable from professional sports at this point.

[dazedroyalty]

Actually no, I didn't go to UM, but I grew up as a big fan of their sports teams and had family that went there. College sports in the US are barely distinguishable from professional sports at this point.

Way to put your finger on the heart of the problem!

[Ichabod]

The college that lost was your college, Scooter?

Actually no, I didn't go to UM, but I grew up as a big fan of their sports teams and had family that went there. College sports in the US are barely distinguishable from professional sports at this point.

Ah, ok. That explains a lot too. I was watching a bit of the game and I was amazed at the amount of people watching it. Even the fact that a lot of NCAA games were shown here is proof of how big things have become.

What's with all the games having a special name, though? It's always "Something" Bowl, right?

[NobleHelium]

That's football. At the end of the college football season teams may have the privilege to go to a "Something" Bowl which is a one-game playoff of sorts. Don't ask me for the arcane criteria that's part of selecting who goes to which bowl though...

[pindicator]

It needs to be scrapped for a playoff
The only things holding that back are an overactive sense of nostalgia, and a fear that the people making money off the bowl system won't make money in a playoff. More the latter than the former

[scooter]

Ah, ok. That explains a lot too. I was watching a bit of the game and I was amazed at the amount of people watching it. Even the fact that a lot of NCAA games were shown here is proof of how big things have become.

Yeah, college basketball and (American) football are pretty massive in the US. The opening round of the basketball tournament is not that far off from being an unofficial holiday . And college football is a cash cow - universities with football programs in major conferences often fund their entire athletic department (and then some) purely off football revenue - TV deals are massive. The whole system is a bit of an ethical mess actually.

On game notes - I did pop in and end turn, and I'll have a few things to post after I eat. Teaser: slowcheetah teched Paper so we can now see what techs he has.

[scooter]

Okay, let's get caught up on the foreign affairs. Bigwyn unsurprisingly declared on Azza, but it sure looks like they hit a speed bump:



GG spawn by Azza. Dutch game has one of the bigger letdowns we've seen in this game IMO (pun!). They've declared and then called it off several times now, and still the borders have yet to shift all game long. Serdoa lands Hagia Sophia which I imagine will be fairly useful for hacking down jungle I guess. Here's the other thing Serdoa is up to:



Also not surprising. This does not end well for Brick I don't think - Serdoa is sporting Knights, and Brick I don't imagine is particularly close to pikes. Really curious to see if Serdoa pushes further into Brick OR he nails one more city, sues for peace, then takes on Xenu who has much more attractive land. Not that Brick's isn't manageable for the style of game Serdoa needs to play, but there's a little more payoff to killing Xenu. If he does this, we need to at least pile on and pick off the island cities. Merohoc is not long for this world unfortunately:



Plako is NOT messing around, no surprise. Having such an obvious, easy target + MoM is probably going to put him in the driver's seat for this game. LeisurelyFeline is making me dislike him.



STILL spending max EPs on us, so we have no prayer of getting his charts anytime soon. Well, at least he's making his intentions crystal clear . Howeva, he teched paper so here's the chart:



I'll work backwards now to map this out. In diplomatic news, I did the following:



We have no use for that Clam anymore as we have several of our own. No idea if he needs the health, but we are NOT sending him 10gpt for marble, so I countered with this:



If he accepts (eh, maybe he will), we'll just cancel our wine for banana + wheat deal with Plako as we aren't really badly needing health anymore now that we have Harbors in our two big cities.

[scooter]

Slowcheetah has these techs that we don't have:

Paper, Guilds, Calendar, Feudalism, Horseback Riding


The only tech he doesn't have of ours is Monotheism. Anyways, this is concerning because he has now unlocked Astronomy, so there's a very good chance he's working on that now. The good news is that should still take him quite a long time. He can't bulb even a part of it without teching a few other things, and Astronomy is extremely expensive here on Krillmod. Still though, we're going to need to keep a close eye on things. However, we might just have sufficient time to take out Xenu's 3 nearby island cities and strangle him navally before Slowcheetah can get Astro, so perhaps we should take this brief moment to do that before preparing ourselves to fend off an Astro army.

[pindicator]

Doh, I thought I posted in here last night but I guess not.

I was wondering if we should just spend a turn raising gold to upgrade our triremes anyway. They'll be a lot more useful as caravels with +1 movement, and xenu won't be able to hide in the ocean tiles under his control. We're going to need to build maces and cats for going after xenu, though.

As for slowcheetah, if we think he's coming then we'll want a lot of caravels anyway. Two can be a sentry net in the east and then a stack of them to be where we think he most likely lands. (I'd wager Starbucks as a first stop.)