[SPOILERS] The Wild Card

[The Black Sword]

Dtay's world map makes me even more annoyed at how badly I've played and how much land he's taken.


Reconsidering the idea of a few horse archers, long supply line and easy to fork cities. We still have no production though, and I doubt it'd be profitable for us either. That's Fintourist and Old Harry in the south west and I ran into suttree's borders in the south east.


Settler out next turn for the copper, one in 7 turns for the island, and a decision to be made for the one in 8. There's another nice undefendable city spot in the central mountains with an oasis, wet rice and plains cows.

At least our religions seem to be spreading well.

[Jowy]

The 2 fish island would have been fantastic, but it seems Commodore will get it.
Getting a city 1W of the lake in the south would be nice. Problem is ofc that it's on the border of another Civ and we don't want to lose yet another city.
Need to settle that area between us and Dtay. It's mostly shit so just pick your favorite locations :P

Now with full map it's 100% clear that the area we lost to Dtay was really meant for us.

We should build HA's since we went for HBR.

[The Black Sword]

Settled the copper spot:


I'm actually building a granary there. 4t left on our peace treaty I think. Dtay settled 2 more cities I think, I'll take a count when I next log in. That is pretty impressive, more than anyone else we've met anyway and he sent in those invasion forces. His GNP seems pretty good thanks to that academy and he's just about to get currency. Both of us are running nothing at the minute though:


Maybe that's how he's managing this.

In the south I offered suttree a map trade:


I'm afraid he'll have already traded with pindicator and won't accept though. 5 cities seems quite small compared, so it looks like he might have had some setbacks too. There's two good city spots toward him, the rice and the double flood plains.

Also, there appears to be some other fish on our island:

I'm hoping there will be some other later luxury resources too. Everybody seems to have 1 single early resource(our gold), multiple copies of another(our Ivory) and copies of 1 later resource. Well, everyone except us that is, the closest source I can see is the wine pretty much equidistant between our capital and dtays.

There's essentially one good spot in the north between us and dtay, the rest are fillers and then we need to decide to go on the warpath again or try to take the southern spots from suttree first. I'm afraid HBR might have been a mistake tbh, but we can at least build some for mobile defence. Toying with the idea of hitting New Xerxes with 3 chariots, ~3 horse archers and 2 axes on a galley. He'd only have one turn to whip as we come out of the fog. It will take a while to do though, the only city that is actually 'set up' atm is Sleeper, where I was going to try fit in the Colossus.

[The Black Sword]

Nice, perfect time for the spread, just before I start working the mines for the OR bonus. I really underestimated the rate this thing will spread passively, and the shrine doubles that, I guess the golden age idea should be put on a back burner.


He settled another one I think ... There's no way all these cities can be defended. The deal is just saying I still want peace I assume?

Noticed this though:


Suttree is losing cities. I definitely think we should take this area:


We could fit in a third filler city to the East, working the lighthouseable lake and 2 farms for food, growing onto Colossus coast tiles. The rice site is a great military pump.

Probably attacking dtay and trying to take this is mutually exclusive, though I'll see how quickly I can get out 3 HAs and still keep expanding. I think the North site toward dtay can be delayed, all the resources are in our culture, so no chance of him stealing them, we could send that settler for the rice instead. Any input here Jowy?

Some points on attacking dtay:
-he hasn't had research visibility on us, so he doesn't know we have HBR
-Besides New Xerxes, is there any city we could actually keep?
-He probably settled that GG in a Barracks city, could be getting out triple promoted melee units there
-Currently has the spear and axe in New Xerxes, I should do some simming about what we'd need to beat that.
-We've been slowly climbing up the demographics with these peaceful turns

Also thinking about tech path. We've a few turns of gold saving first anyway. Alphabet is actually like a mini-currency, open borders with the other continent should be possible, so that's 3g trade routes rather than 2g for our island. Otherwise its about time we got Maths.

[Jowy]

PB9 ended, I'm back
Catching up now.



There needs to be two tiles between each city. Settling New Tachyon 1S would have let us found another city on the ruins or on the island. I'm way late on this, but thought I'd clear it up for the future



Orange and pink plan for the south. I like orange better, but pink is safer (even more-so if we give up the dyes).



Old Harry took the south city from Suttree.
Check out the striped culture in the picture. Then I dug up this from CivStats:

10/17/13 4:53 am Old Harry Score increased to 165
10/17/13 4:52 am suttree Score decreased to 132

Suttree wasn't logged in at that time.

What this means is that our southern neighbor will be the stronger of the two warring partners, and we already know he has an army since he has taken a city (or "cities" if you are right about Suttree losing multiple cities already). It's risky to settle south but I'd say let's try it anyway. This means we can't fight with Dtay, but if he has any sense he will take this time to peacefully expand to all the land he has waiting for him. Of course he might be opportunistic if we do end up in a war in the south, but that's not too bad. He's researching Aesthetics right now and he did send trades that signal peace.

Let's make this clear: If we were to attack Dtay, it is just to fuck with him. It is not a move that benefits us, it's just revenge. Perhaps down the line we'll be in a position where we can attack him and actually gain something out of it, but right now it'd just be revenge for not accepting peace after he took The Turtle. Don't get me wrong, with enough HA's and him having so many cities, we could do damage to him, just we won't be capturing any cities for our own use. Nevertheless, having some Horse Archers as mobile defenders will still be quite handy. Not the tech I would have gone for first if we aren't gonna go piss off Dtay, but it should have it's uses.

Monarchy -> Feudalism should be our next move. Maths -> Construction is possible for HA+Cat stack that we could use for attacking out, whether on offense or defense. Longbows are better at sitting in a city, and also really good at making people think twice whether they want to attack us. Extra points for our border cities being on hills. Most of our cities are small but still at happy cap, so Hereditary Rule would be nice to have. Imo something like this: Monarchy -> Feudalism -> Maths -> Civil Service/Construction

We need contact with our southern neighbors (got Suttree now but not Old Harry) and we need their maps (either from them or someone else).



Would be nice to have these islands too. At least the one directly south of us. The other "belongs" to Nakor, but looking at the placement of cities on that continent, he has his hands full dealing with Scooter, so we might beat him to it and get away with it.

Two settlers ready soon. One should go for the cow+ivory spot, it has 6 forests to be chopped on the first ring. The second either on the island for IC trade routes, or south to secure those lands. We should have some units with us when we go south, so maybe settle the island first? Let's take the scouting chariot south so we have a better idea on what is happening over there and what kind of stacks are running around, then we can make the call.

[Jowy]

Alphabet allows Open Borders? Okay, we could take a detour for that first. I should play a new RB mod game to remind myself of the changes.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

The blue spot on the island 1E of the clams is a legal site to found a city. The two spaces minimum distance only applies to cities located on the same landmass.

[Jowy]

Thx for the correction. Let's settle that island one day.

[The Black Sword]

Lots to respond to.

The biggest point I suppose is the next city spot, I was thinking island+rice next. Island is pretty much set I think, we already have the galley, so it's a straight 7gpt better than any other spot. The Ivory would certainly be very useful but we need a border pop in that city and I'm just not sure where we can get the hammers for a missionary.

The best place I suppose would be Fortunato, which can whip 3->2 soon when the rice comes online and also has a second ring forest to chop. We probably need a WB here too though and we badly need some military units also, which I was thinking would come from here and New Tachyon.

I came up with a micro plan for Sleeper to complete the Colossus EOT 108. If we want to cancel that we'd have a lot more hammers to play with but we already have 21h invested in a forge and it feels like we're leaving it quite late already.

We can defend the rice spot with 2 archers plus floating chariots if we choose to settle it, Fortunato doesn't really need a unit sitting in it. That said, we probably have more time here than I thought with Old Harry taking over suttree's city(Nice catch!).

I agree with your points about dtay, it's sacrificing our game to hurt him and I'm not even sure we can do it that well. We could declare war again and offer another peace treaty after this one. I'd guess he'd be happy with that. Might allow us to ignore military a bit longer to get out what we need.

We should try to take the two main south cities very quickly though IMO. Old Harry doesn't have our graphs, he should be busy finishing suttree and settling both of their areas. I don't think he'd object much to us taking them. The chariot down there was going to meet Old Harry btw, so he can just pop south to do that instead.

[The Black Sword]

The other thing we should be aware, while we certainly need more happy medium term, it isn't that pressing short term. Sleeper and Jetboy are the only cities to benefit from it right now and Sleeper wouldn't really need it till T108 after the Colossus(triple whip forge and grow back).

Anyway tech:
Upon reflection, we should leave alphabet for someone on the other continent to tech. Assuming 2 island cities its 2g per city after currency, I imagine one of them will pick it up before long and we should focus our beakers on other stuff.

Monarchy -> Feudalism -> Maths -> Civil Service/Construction

What are you thinking about our Great Prophet? If golden age then I'd agree this is the best tech path. I was leaning back toward a shrine though, in which case I'm not sure. Another alternative it to build a library in the capital and run 2 scientists after the prophet for a 25t GP for another GA. The other techs to consider are Currency and Machinery(after Feudalism for a serfdom econ) IMO.

With the island city and the shrine/GA, our tech rate is going to improve a bit soon. Monarchy is quite expensive if you include a turn of revolt, going Maths and/or Currency first is rather dependent on how fast we're teching.