[Spoilers] Gavagai, Bacchus and Elizabeth Form a Romantic Trio

[Gavagai]

And by the way - of course, we have screwed up our start. Worker - settler - WB, BW-Agri-AH would be strictly better: second city about ten turns earlier with only a slight delay in capital development. Much less commerce, of course, but who cares. We would be even able to grab Polytheism later.

[Bacchus]

Is that four different readings of the word Hydra within half an hour and none of them referring to the actual beast?

It has been attempted with various degrees of success in different games.

Does any notable amount of that variance lie outside the 'entertaining failure' range of the success scale? I always wanted to see this succeed, takes a lot of heart and dedication.

[Krill]

And by the way - of course, we have screwed up our start. Worker - settler - WB, BW-Agri-AH would be strictly better: second city about ten turns earlier with only a slight delay in capital development. Much less commerce, of course, but who cares. We would be even able to grab Polytheism later.

How many forests would you have if you went worker>settler?

Does any notable amount of that variance lie outside the 'entertaining failure' range of the success scale? I always wanted to see this succeed, takes a lot of heart and dedication.

I did it to a certain extent in PB3.

[Bacchus]

And by the way - of course, we have screwed up our start. Worker - settler - WB, BW-Agri-AH would be strictly better: second city about ten turns earlier with only a slight delay in capital development. Much less commerce, of course, but who cares. We would be even able to grab Polytheism later.

Well, originally we didn't know how good the second city would be, but as I mentioned in gchat -- yeah, we should have probably switched to this as soon as we saw the wet corn, which was on T1 or 2.

[Gavagai]

How many forests would you have if you went worker>settler?

A worker would have chopped three forests: two would go into a settler and the third one would overflow into a workboat. Per our current plan we will have only one or two forests chopped before our second city (and I'm now leaning towards one chop and delaying whipping the settler to instantly get 30 hammers into a workboat). So, yes, in terms of forests our current plan has a slight advantage. But earlier second city worth it, I think. The thing is that this second city is very strong. Of course, we didn't expect to have such a spot nearby on T0. And after that we were a bit mentally locked into an earlier plan.

[Bacchus]

We also forgot that one of the reasons we wanted religion was so that we can grow to five without a garrison — when that need disappeared with the amendment of the plan, we also should have reassessed the tech path. Basically, we picked a tech and, to lesser extent, build plans that only worked under very specific circumstances (and even then only marginally), but forgot about that specificity when circumstances changed. Whichever MM plan we went with, Mysticism as first choice tech really should have been subject to re-assessment at least at the first three turns, and then the same for Meditation. Still, I think we just about have enough commerce to sail through this screw up handicap.

Will we be paying supply on the camping scout?

I did it to a certain extent in PB3.

Alas, and due to our own actions, our northern neighbours are far closer to your charioteering successes.

[TheHumanHydra]

Thanks, Krill. I'll have to try that sometime; sounds fun.

[Gavagai]

Will we be paying supply on the camping scout?

No.

[Gavagai]

I did this:



Next turn his worker will go to the city or to the forested hill and my scout will go to a cow tile. They should have a warrior out on T20 or even T19 by my estimates. So, we will delay their cow by 1-2 turns only. But much more important result of this intrusion is that I was able to scan their BFC for horses: none, as you see. We will need to try to get our scout back here around T30 and try to scan their second city.



Working a grassland forest per Bacchus' spreadsheet. Next turn switching to a hill again.



This is for Bacchus to analyze, I'm not in a proper shape now. No score increases this turn.

And also this happened:



...shit...

It is actually even worse than it looks. Contact happened on a previous turn and Kurumi has already put 4 EPs into us. So, we are his only target. I switched all EPs to Nakor, they look like a more immediate threat. It can be deceiving, of course - for all we know, Kurumi can be very close. At least, he is easier to defend - all we need is to block two squares between the sea and the lake.
Ended turn.

[Bacchus]

Yes, perfect neighbour choice.

Need spears.