Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Sullla]

Turn 145 - 700AD

Another quiet turn. We continue to make preparations for war, due now in 5 more turns.

We lost about a full day's worth of playtime yesterday back of Caledorn's latest hosting issues. The game was finally reloaded today, and it was possible to log into the game again. (It was Paused when I logged in; I unpaused it. With 35 hours on the clock, there was no reason to keep it Paused any longer.) This is what we saw before the reload:



The Germans double-moved a chariot across the turn timer window, moving 7 tiles into our territory. Their unit gained visibility on all of the white dot units, roughly half of our total attack force. Fortunately we had split up our main attack force last turn into three different chunks, this looked a lot less antagonistic. I asked everyone where to move in response, and we came up with this:



I moved the group of units southeast of the rice SE-SE to sit two tiles north of the capital, and the stack on that tile down into the capital itself. This will move them out of the sight range of the German chariot, and I'm hoping that their unit will be pulled down toward the capital to track their movement. We'll also move the stack two north of the capital down into the capital next turn. That should suggest to them that we're not moving these units towards their borders. (We can have all these units in the capital at the start of Turn 147 and still make it to the designated invasion tile on time.) My hope is that the German chariot heads off to the east after it sees our units moving south. Hopefully.

The other third of our main stack has moved to the tile south of Frozen Jungle. The hope is that this will remain out of sight of the German chariot. We'll see, it depends on where they choose to go with that unit. If we can buy even another 2-3 turns of surprise with the Germans, it will be worth it. They haven't been doing much of anything to increase their power rating, and time is rapidly running out for them to do that.

Two city management notes here. First, Brick By Brick is running Wealth this turn because it has 20 production overflow from the last build + chop, and we want to put that into a knight. We'll build a horse archer next turn, which will get auto-upgraded into a knight. (Plus, we need about one turn's worth of Wealth build somewhere to get Guilds next turn, and this lines up nicely.) We were trying to do the same thing at Horse Feathers, with the idea of building two catapults and stacking up production overflow to get a knight (from horse archer auto-upgrade) at the end of turn 146. However, someone changed the catapult build in this city to a war elephant at the end of last turn, which has now messed up that overflow chain. Please do not change builds or tile assignments when logging into the game. Now I'm going to have to build a war chariot this turn to stack up the necessary overflow into a knight, and we're going to end up with war chariot + elephant instead of two catapults. The cats would have been more useful.



Here is the actual German border region. They have founded two new cities in the last two turns, the visible one (on the spot where we were planning to put a city ourselves) and another unrevealed city in the west. I will try to get vision over there with a chariot before we invade. We are going to have to raze Wolfratshausen and the other German city so that we can refound our own city on the tile south of the spices. The new city will almost certainly autoraze when we capture it anyway. We hope to be able to capture Wipperfuerth intact and save ourselves a settler there.

On our own side of the border, I have been methodically clearing out the jungle on all tiles south of the peaks. See that horizontal row of tiles north of Ditchdigger / Frozen Jungle / Tree Huggers? That will all be de-jungled by the time the war starts, forcing any invasion of these cities to walk onto flat ground to attack. I have NOT cleared out the jungle on the horizontal row north of that, because those jungle tiles block all vision from the German culture. We're going to road the tile two north of Frozen Jungle, and that will be it. Everything else left as jungle for the moment to continue to block their vision.

Note finally that Frozen Jungle hit size 6 for the first time this turn and was drafted for another mace.



Here's the east. There's not too much going on over here this turn; we finished a forest chop at The Covenant which completed its library. Time to whip a forge there soonish. I'm quietly putting down a road here and there near the German border at Simple Life for movement purposes later on. We shouldn't need that, but you never know.



This is the south of our territory, starting to develop nicely. A forest chop finished the lighthouse at Catherine; the final plains forest will get chopped there next for a work boat and overflow into a theatre. Workers are in the process of roading down to that new city at the southeast deer/crabs pairing. We have two missionaries finishing next turn, one going to French Riviera (our only city at the moment without religion) and one going to the new city in the tundra. French Riviera is planned to grow another turn or two, then swap to settler and triple whip it for a location down in the polar islands to claim silver.



Here's a view of the polar region in the extreme south. Settler founds the deer/crab city next turn, and it will eventually be a pretty strong fishing village. Slow starter though. I would suggest we put our next city directly on the western silver, the one next to the two lake tiles. It's absolutely awful, but we are going to need the happiness from the silver when we hit war weariness from the German war. And strategically, that location actually does control the entrance to our southern territory by sea, making it not completely wasted. We'll plant for the crabs/marble over further to the east a little later. Great Lighthouse makes all of these locations fairly viable.



Quick picture of the religious situation. As I said, French Riviera is the only city without religion, and we've got two missionaries about to finish for this spot and the new crabs/deer spot. Any suggested names for the new city to be founded next turn?

Overview:

We have a huge amount of overflow from Feudalism tech, and that will allow us to research Guilds at the end of next turn (eot 146). We did get a major assist from Apolyton and CFC, who both finished Feudalism/Guilds right as we turned on 100% research into both techs. That meant another 6% bonus beakers into both techs, which is fairly noticeable when you're researching 3000 beakers (roughly 180 free beakers). Both CFC and Apolyton literally got Guilds this turn - as I said, the timing was outstanding for us.

UniversCiv also discovered Alphabet tech this turn, allowing us to see all of their technologies. They are up Alphabet on us, and are missing Polytheism, Aesthetics/Lit/Drama, Horseback Riding, Construction, Feudalism, Machinery, Philosophy, Nationalism, and Liberalism. Somewhat surprisingly, they do have Education tech, which they have beelined by ignoring everything on the Aesthetics line and pretty much every military tech. Based on their tech choices, they do not appear likely to declare war on anyone right now.



Demos look strong at the moment. CivFr is finally out of their Golden Age, which means that two teams are running a lot of production right now. I'm pretty happy with our GNP at 100% rate here; Apolyton is the team with that 900 number, from their Oxford/Academy capital combination. We continue to creep out to an ever-higher military lead, and the #2 team in Power is WPC. Good stuff.

We have bar graphs with CFC, CivFr, Germans, WPC, and Spanish. We probably will not be getting graphs on UniversCiv, Apolyton, or CivPlayers any time soon. I'm spending EP on UniversCiv at the moment as they are the only ones we have any kind of chance of getting the graphs with. We also have yet another passively aggressive message from CFC to deal with, so feel free to go have your say in the diplo thread.

There's basically nothing else to do on this turn, but let me know if I've missed something so that we can end turn.

[NobleHelium]

We really should scout out the western island further before planting on the silver. We can scout with the settler, even. It's very much possible that there will be seafood in range of the silver, towards the south.

[kjn]

Agree with NobleHelium. I think if we want to do a settler-on-silver it's the eastern island that makes the most sense.

That said, did you intend to use MostlyHarmless (still on the galley) to do some more scouting of the islands to our south?

[Sullla]

The galley is heading back down to the south and will scout out that island in the south. But I'll give you 10:1 odds that there's no seafood down there; the silvers were obviously hand-placed by the mapmaker, and every silver we've seen has been placed in a spot with no claimable food bonuses. This is not a natural map, and that's not a coincidence. If we want to grab a silver, and we do, we are going to have to pick a spot that doesn't have seafood.

[Qgqqqqq]

Agree with sulla.
Also not sure why you think eastern is better when it has one less lake.

[kjn]

Now, this is very strange. I logged in this morning just as I saw that CFC had done several whips, and the turn immediately rolled. CFC had continued their whipfest and ended their turn just as I had logged in, but we still hadn't finished our turn according to CivStats. And I was nowhere near the enter button...

So we have a catapult in Horse Feathers right now, and not enough overflow to finish a knight this turn.

CFC whipped at least one knight, and have also adopted Police State, Nationhood, Slavery, and OR. I guess the Spanish team is in for a spanking. That said, they must have hurt their economy something fierce with this.

Idea: Spanish Apolyton has dye connected. Ask them now for an ivory-for-dyes trade. They can connect the next one easily enough, and it can help them put up some resistance against the knights.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Weird, how does this early turn roll hurt us? We probably won't ask for a reload, but that sucks.

And this tells us that CFC really are gunning for us T175. They also have ~20 turns to digest their neighbour, but fortunately, there'll be less to gain. We really do want to guarantee an alliance with WPC so they won't threaten the long border with us, don't tie up our army at the far end of our empire, and won't give them a way to sneak the CotW army into our far end.

Edit: and I'm also pro-fucking CFC over with gifted ivory. Just make sure we won't lose out on the market happiness.

[fluffyflyingpig]

We should warn the Spanish. And give them ivory.

[kjn]

Happiness analysis if we trade ivory for dyes to the Spanish team:

-1: AO, GM
+/-0: MM, HF, TC, SL, CE, FR, FJ, LIS, Catherine
+1: FP, TH, ST, FF, ED, BbB, Starfall, Ditchdigger

So we gain a total of 6 net happiness with the trade. The loss of happiness in AO is the only real loss and can be countered by an MP unit - GM hasn't finished its market yet and is still not unhappy, so the +2 from the market will give room for growth. AO also has more whip and draft unhappiness that will soon disappear, and a forge finished soon (+2 happy).

It's our push for an early Globe Theatre that pays off here. We have 9 theatres compared to 2 markets.

[novice]

Just to point out the obvious, if we trade away our only ivory we can no longer build war elephants. I guess we're going to prioritize knights anyway though.