[SPOILERS] Serdoa, Ichabod and Ex-Girlfriends - co-starring NH,Bigger and Lewwyn

[NobleHelium]

Well the best building to build would be a monastery, two culture for two population. But we're definitely going to lose the peak for now because we can't grow fast enough to build it (finishing the granary first is still better).

Anyway I don't think it matters in terms of seeing our attack, because we can't attack out of the fog anyway.




I think we stage one group of knights where it says "Western Stage" and that group attacks the western city. The other group stages inside Nicole and either attacks his units or moves to the sugar 2N of the eastern city, where it can be covered by a vulture or something. The peak doesn't reveal either of those tiles. What we do lose is the ability to see where his units are, which is unfortunate but probably not a major issue given that we're attacking soon. Long-term it would be require us to increase defenses due to not being able to see.

[NobleHelium]

slowcheetah did the MoM Golden Age Caste/Pac GP thing. His galley is also visible now outside Julia. Unfortunately he's adopted Buddhism, powering up Gavagai's shrine. Music Artist is still available.

Nakor has Alphabet but no Currency. He also has Construction but lacks Mysticism, Calendar, Aesthetics, HBR, IW, and MC.

[Serdoa]

So basically he has not much tech and what he has is pretty worthless in his situation. And slow does the right play, what was expected. Lets hope he doesn't tech Music this turn already. To note, we are despite his GA still no. 1 in GNP.

Regarding the game: I changed several build-queues into Ziggurats. You are right that the maintenance costs are really high (12 gpt in some cities) and we can actually two-pop whip those Ziggurats and put the overflow into the HA-builds, making them 2-pop whippable when we get Knights. And the lost commerce from whipping should be get back easily by the Ziggurats savings. Let me know what you think about it Noble.

We should have 11 Knights on T143, the one with the longest route taking till T149 to arrive at the staging tile. Till then we should have another 7 ready I guess (not calculated through though, just a feeling), though that will cost us quite a bit of pop. Maybe we can get 20 in total by that point, but that will not be enough. I estimate that we want ~40. And that will take till T165 at least.

Still, we can most likely take his two front-cities right away on T149. Around T155 for the choke-city. At that point reinforcements should arrive and we probably can push further. It really depends on what he does though. If he whips himself down like crazy we probably can just outproduce him though.

[NobleHelium]

Okay, I'm good with the zig builds as you say.

Yeah, it doesn't look like we can produce enough knights immediately to take him out, but maybe that's not what we want? I definitely think we should attack as soon as we can reasonably take the front-line cities and go from there.

[NobleHelium]

Okay well I cancelled the zig buid at Katharina, because we're already planning to whip the forge into the knight there. Let's not get too unfocused here. And Heidi is about to finish its forge, so I swapped that back as well.

slowcheetah moved his galley south out of sight again.

I asked Merovech/WarriorKnight for OB, since our galley is up against their borders now. Not sure whether we should DOW if they decline. And wow, they spent 16 EP on us last turn. They'll get graphs on us at EOT. BaII also started spending on us again, something like 10/turn unless I've miscounted the turns.

When we tech Paper later we should try to buy Nakor's map. I assume he's desperate for any sort of help.

[Serdoa]

Okay well I cancelled the zig buid at Katharina, because we're already planning to whip the forge into the knight there. Let's not get too unfocused here. And Heidi is about to finish its forge, so I swapped that back as well.

Heidi was intentional as whipping the Ziggurat would finish the Forge with overflow. Though I concur we might not have enough pop left to whip again for a Knight so I'm fine with that change. Katharina as well, I remember we talked about that.

slowcheetah moved his galley south out of sight again.

Lets hope that's the wrong direction for him to get circumnav.

I asked Merovech/WarriorKnight for OB, since our galley is up against their borders now. Not sure whether we should DOW if they decline. And wow, they spent 16 EP on us last turn. They'll get graphs on us at EOT. BaII also started spending on us again, something like 10/turn unless I've miscounted the turns.

Yeah, I guess we reach the "Lets all dogpile Serdoa/Noble"-phase, which is - if it succeeds - quickly followed by the "Lets all dogpile slowcheetah"-phase

When we tech Paper later we should try to buy Nakor's map. I assume he's desperate for any sort of help.

Good idea.

[Serdoa]

Started doing the boring excel-table stuff for the Knights. But I'm not gonna finish it today. At all. But anyhow, what I know by now is that Iris alone can give us 4 Knights, 3 of which are ready and on the staging tile (F1) on EOT147 or with some galley-flipping instead we should be able to have all 4 next to his western border-city by EOT151.

I'm not sure on the other cities, if we double-pop whip them twice some of them might be able to get 2 Knights done in time. 4 pop lost in 10 cities (or 40 pop-points) is pretty huge though. *sigh* I want my PB8 capital and 2nd city back

[Krill]

*sigh* I want my PB8 capital and 2nd city back

Did you ever think you would say this?

[Serdoa]

Certainly not at the start of PB8 But tbh I think what I really want back is RB-Mod and the possibility to have more impact on the decision what a city is actually going to be. In BTS it is pretty much cottage-city as long as you don't have 6+ hills. Even now with still need to get at least Chemistry as well before workshops make sense (as Caste can't compete with Slavery for production if you take into account the lost commerce for not building cottages on the workshop-tiles - or at least that's what I think, I really would have to calculate it, maybe there is some breakeven-point).

[NobleHelium]

Well, we can make that western border city of BaII's into a production city. I do have a tendency to plant such that cities have very few hills, it often just works out that way for some reason.

Anyway one issue we have is that we only have one galley at home in the west right now and we'll need to transport knights from both Iris and at least one from Barbara, so I'm not sure what we should do there.

There's also this.




There are two ways to irrigate the rice at Nicole, through the F1 path or through the F2 path. (This assumes that we want to minimize the number of bare farms, which I tend to prefer doing.) Originally I was thinking the F2 path, but that path is only preferable if we raze BaII's eastern border city and replant it 1W, making room for a National Epic city next to the pig as marked. I consider the F2 path to be slightly preferable to the F1 path, because one farm will be in range of the NE city so we'll want to build it anyway. I think the key here is whether we think we'll raze his city or not. Or do you think we should just build some extra farms? Which do you prefer? We'll need to decide soon since that F1 jungle is being chopped.