Mikehendi Pitboss 16 Thread

[Mikehendi]

Apologies for not updating in a few days. I was caught up in work, and then I wanted the latest crisis in this game to be resolved before posting. Long story short, more irritating barb troubles.



This was from Turn 89, I don't remember anything particularly important happening on this turn. We whipped a settler in Bourges for 3 pop, that was probably the main thing. Note that the damaged axe from the last barb fight moving into Le Havre to heal.



Here's where it starts to get silly again. Turn 90, another barb axe shows up. This was despite the fact that we had just killed two previous barb axes in this same region. In fact, I went back and looked at my pictures of this area. We moved our own axe off the hill and towards Le Havre on Turn 88; this barb axe literally spawned on the first possible turn, on the tile south or southwest of the crabs, and then moved onto this hill on Turn 90. We had this area defogged, moved our axes back to heal, and in the 2 turns interval before our units moved backed again to re-defog this area, another barb axe appeared. Oh, and the main reason our axes had to move back to heal is because they were both critically injured and nearly died in 99% odds fights. Sheesh.

For this reason, I had to move the axeman in Aix out of the city, causing a citizen to become unhappy. That actually cost us finishing Iron Working this turn, we came up 5 beakers short and we lost a 2/0/4 hamlet tile. I hoped that the barb axe would move either southeast or south here, allowing me to move our own axe into Le Havre. With two axes inside the city, it would be completely safe against attack. Anything other than moving southwest, onto our sole road connection into the city.



Here is Calais growing and developing nicely. It's in the process of finishing that long delayed library, and growing onto the last riverside grassland cottage. But back to the important stuff, the barb axeman problems.



Of course the barb axe moved onto the worst possible tile, to the southwest. I should have expected it, they always go after tile improvements, even a measly little road. Now our second axe was blocked from moving into the city, and we had a real tactical puzzle on our hands. In my Worldbuilder tests, the odds for the barb axe to defeat our defending axe inside Le Havre were about 10%. The barb axe would always take that battle if I did nothing, meaning that 90% of the time we would hold the city with no problems... but 10% of the time we would have the city razed, a complete disaster. Given our luck with barbs so far, I didn't feel very comfortable sitting on my hands and doing nothing. A one in ten outcome isn't common, but it's not unprecedented either.

I tested to see if the barb axe would attack our other axe if I moved it south into the forest, and unfortunately no, it wouldn't take the bait there. The odds were better for the barb to attack the city than to attack into the forest. So that was out as a plan. In the end, I decided to hold the axe on the plains tile and fortify there. This would set up a battle where we had 66% odds to win, much lower than defending in the city, but if we lost it wouldn't cost us a city. If we lost the battle, we could then hit the barb axe with the axe from Le Havre, and if that failed, hit it with the archer in Aix, and if that failed, hit it with the spear in Lourdes, which I could move down a tile to cover that spot. In other words, the same strat that we had fail us disastrously around Bourges earlier. I still felt like it had to be done though - we could not afford to take even the 10% chance of losing the city. Too risky.

Perhaps worst of all, my workers were now stuck on the other side of Le Havre and could not improve the wines tile. Our empire needed worker labor desperately, and 3 of them were stuck wasting their time building pointless roads. Argh!

EDIT: Oh, why didn't I move the axe in Le Havre onto the forested road tile on Turn 90, and prevent the barb from moving there? That axe still wasn't full health from the last barb fight, only at 3.5 health or something. Our odds to defend on that tile were only 50/50. Seriously, if the barb axe showed up even one turn later, we would have been in so much better shape here.



Other stuff going on included the completion of our first galley, heading off to explore the southern islands. We actually had a settler already queued up for this area, now we needed to find the best place to put a city down here. We should have gotten a galley out before the 90 turn mark, that was certainly too slow. The earlier barb crisis around this city was a major reason why we were slow, those stupid emergency whips were costly.

[Mikehendi]

Next turn arrives, and the barb axe chooses to pillage the road instead of attacking. Oh come on, that's just cruel. Barbs have a 50% chance to pillage improvements instead of attacking, I was hoping we'd avoid that here. No such luck, I guess at this point we should assume the worst possible outcome with anything involving barbs. That meant another wasted turn for the 3 workers over here - the wines should have been connected and roaded by now. Argh. The only good thing was another turn to stack up fortify bonus on my axes, that would improve the combat odds slightly.



Here's our only visible source of iron, amusingly just outside borders. An upcoming city is planned to go two north of the iron, where it can also grab the bananas and clams. A poor location for defensive purposes, but very strong economically. Expected ETA for this area is roughly Turn 105.



Great news down here in the south though. In typical RB mapmaker fashion, the offshore island has more fertile land and new resources not on the mainland. The plains hill looks like a dream location for a city. The settler has already been whipped for this location out of Rochelle, I think it gets here on Turn 98. Unless we find an even better location, which seems unlikely. Have to get here before Goreripper tries to settle the same spot!

As it turned out, we had 70% odds to win the axe vs. axe fight against the barbarian. Do I honestly have to tell you how that turned out?



Yep. At this point, I'll honestly take this result. At least we did enough damage to redline the barb axe, actually winning the battle was obviously way too much to ask. Just to recall, here's a quick summary of our experience with the barbs this game:

- Lost axe vs. axe at 66%
- Lost axe vs. axe at 89%
- Lost warrior vs. crippled axe at 90%
- Lost axe vs. axe at 70%
- Two axes won but were crippled (1.5 / 5.0 and 2 / 5 health) in 99% odds battles
- Another axe was crippled (1.5 health) in an axe vs. warrior 99% battle

Please, no barbs for the next Pitboss game? Pretty please? It's partly our fault for not rushing to chariots sooner, but I do think we've gotten pretty screwed here after putting ourselves in some good positions. At least we were able to clean up with our archer:



I was not confident that we were going to win this. We did win though without issue, thank goodness. Note the new threat though: Noblehelium's team has showed up with a chariot. Man, having another axe over here sure would be helpful right now...

I have to run for now. I'll update tonight with plans on how to deal with this new neighbor. They're only humans though, imagine if we were up against barb chariots.

[Mikehendi]

This post will focus on the Noblehelium / Gaspar team that just made contact with us. They offered Open Borders right at the start of the turn when I logged in, which I declined because I had no opportunity to see the map. My understanding from reading other Pitboss game is that you probably shouldn't accept deals without seeing things for yourself. I was going to offer Open Borders back to them after that, but they left the game before I had the chance.

This picture is where our units ended up in the Le Havre area. They moved the chariot onto the hill, which would normally grant vision into Le Havre, but the forest blocks their view. They actually do not know what's in there, which is probably why they didn't declare war and attack the city (defended only by an axe). It's also why they're so keen to get Open Borders, which would obviously appear to favor them and grant our team nothing in return. Well, I did go ahead and accept with them, for reasons I'll get to in a little bit. Mostly I'd like to be on good terms with this team and avoid any sign of conflict.

We're still shuffling units in the aftermath of the barbarian troubles. The archer had to kill the barb axe itself, that's why it's out of position. That archer can move back into Aix next turn. The spear is covering Aix to prevent unhappiness. I've dropped an archer into the build queue for Lourdes in case of an emergency whip, we can 1 pop whip that if needed and archer in a city on a hill is not threatened by a chariot. I'm somewhat more concerned about the workers, hopefully they can finish with the winery and get the heck out of that dangerous spot. Le Havre itself should be safe from attack; I'm moving the scout up from fogbusting duty to the south, and I dropped an archer into the city's build queue. If Noblehelium declares war, he can kill the axe in Le Havre, but there will still be a scout in the city so it won't fall, and then I can whip the archer and have it complete on the interturn. I really hope all of that is unnecessary though, and they choose to remain peaceful.



This is the western half of the civ. We founded Nimes for our 9th city last turn, kind of a filler spot but worth grabbing due to the 6 food pigs tile. Unfortunately all 4 forests are in the second ring, which is going to delay the granary at this location. I may end up chopping the forests at the out of culture penalty anyway, rather than wait for religion to spread here or for borders to expand. We'll have to see. For the moment, it can grow and work non-riverside cottages.

The capital finished its library and continues to grow, La Rochelle just 3 pop whipped the settler for the island city, etc.



Noblehelium offered Open Borders again a second time, and this time I went ahead and accepted. I'm hoping that this will be a way of building friendship between teams, and I also hope to get a chariot over to their territory ASAP and begin mapping out their stuff. We've finally got a couple of chariots under production, and they won't all be needed for local barb defense. I offered a trade of 1 gold for 1 gold after closing this screen as a sign of friendly relations, I hope they're on the same page. I would not do this with someone like Krill, he would never care about friendship and always declare war on someone the moment he saw any kind of advantage in it. Gaspar is the one playing most of the turns for this team, and I'm hoping he is more friendly. Maybe this was a mistake, time will tell.

Here's the main reason why I think their team won't be looking to pick a fight:



They are already in a fight with Gavagai. That's probably not news to the lurkers but it was news indeed for me. I assumed that we had another neighbor on this continent, because it was unlikely that there would be 3 teams on this island. Plus there's the weird artificial lake in the middle of our continent, and it would make the most sense to have 4 teams placed in the corners around that central lake. We appear to be in the southwest, Bantams in the northwest, Gavagai in the northeast, and Noble/Gaspar in the southeast. I'm actually glad that we have a stronger neighbor here, it will force Gavagai to be on his toes and not be able to devour up more territory with ease. The fact that these teams are at war is even better.

According to the diplo screen, Gavagai has declared war on Noble twice, and they've declared on him once. I also didn't see any war weariness from either team. So - real war or fake war to force peace via treaty? I hope it's the former, unfortunately we can't say for certain. Two things argue in favor of a real war though. One, the fact that Noble/Gaspar have been playing after Gavagai for some time now on the clock, and if it was a fake war for treaty purposes, wouldn't they immediately sign peace? There's no compelling reason to stay at war in that scenario. Secondly, there's this:



Gavagai has been emphasizing military for some time now. I also noticed before meeting the Noble/Gaspar team that two known teams had already researched Horseback Riding tech, due to the GNP bonus that gives you. I am pretty certain that the two teams with HBR tech are Gavagai and Hashoosh (who appears to be either in a war himself or ready to fight one). And why would Gavagai research Horseback Riding if he wasn't planning on going to war? I thought he might be planning to attack Bantams. Now I'm hoping that Gavagai and Noble/Gaspar have gotten into a skirmish over some kind of border location, which would obviously be great news for our team.

So I hope that I'm reading this situation correctly. I'd feel a lot better if I saw some war weariness numbers popping up, and power bar graphs going down. I am trying to position our team as a friendly neutral party while we continue to tech and develop. This is harder to do without talking! Maybe this all blows up in our face, but I find it hard to see Gaspar declaring war to capture and delete a worker, something that doesn't help them much, when they already have a much closer and unfriendly neighbor on their northern border. (Their teams have been in contact for ages now, look at those massive EP spendings against one another.) We shall see!



Finally the Demos for the current turn. We look great compared to everyone other than Sevenspirits in that Food stat. Their team had two recent triple whips, which means two more cities likely appearing shortly, their 10th and 11th cities. We have #10 on the way, just can't keep pace. We do get 5 city growths next turn, and as long as our neighbors stay friendly, and those stupid barbs stay away, I like our position overall.

[Mikehendi]

These last few turns have been focused on keeping all of our stuff (cities, workers, etc.) safe from that wandering Noblehelium chariot. On Turn 94, they moved the chariot from the grassland hill two north of Le Havre down to the location shown. I had to wait to play our turn until after they moved. That's the pattern we've been in for the last few turns, and it didn't feel like a good idea to tempt fate by putting three workers in a spot where they could be captured. This turn the workers finally were able to put a winery down and road the wines tile. That did not connect this resource to our trade network; I wasn't sure if it would pass through the oasis, should have checked it in Worldbuilder. We still needed a road on that forest tile northwest of the wines. This caused unhappiness in the capital as well. Stupid barbs!

Lourdes is still sitting there on the border, empty, with only an archer in the build queue. I would never do this normally, we're only getting away with this because Bantams is playing 2 minute turns and has shown no interest at all in attacking. Seriously, Lourdes is only 7 tiles away from the capital of someone playing CRE/EXP leader. It's criminal what we're getting away with due to Bantams' terrible play.



Here's our galley with settler and worker ready to head over to the island. The next ferry service will bring across a second worker and a missionary. That land over there is excellent, we want to control it ASAP. We're also in the process of swapping the archer and warrior defenders in Bourges/Carcasonne, putting the archer in the outside city that could be attacked by Noble's chariot to avoid temptation.



Here's the capital coming along nicely. The unhappiness is due to the wines not being connected, fortunately a whipping penalty will wear off the next turn. I dropped the copper for one turn because that would allow Calais to grow to size 10 the following turn. No more whipping here, we're simply growing upwards onto as many cottages as possible, in anticipation of upcoming Civil Service / Bureaucracy in about ~15 more turns.



These were the Demos, looking very sharp. We largely managed to close the Food gap with Sevenspirits team, although that's because they were doing a series of triple whips (likely for settlers) while we were growing. And of course we're cheating on Production, none of these cities aside from the capital are producing much in the way of hammers. Le Havre will be a production city, but it's not there yet. Most everything has emphasized Food and Commerce, which seems to be working well for the moment.

[Mikehendi]

I had to play this turn on my laptop while away from home for the day. I only have the one picture, showing where the Noblehelium chariot moved. We were the last ones to play, but again, that's because we had to wait for the Noble team to move first, and they were very slow to do that. I hate to hold up the game, even though this was only a few hours. We moved the workers onto the forest tile at the end of the turn.



This turn was super fast, everyone played in about six hours. Noblehelium moved the chariot down to Carcasonne, finally out of the way from Le Havre. Fortunately we have an archer in the city now, rather than tempting him with a warrior defender. No reason to test our "friendship" in that manner! Le Havre finally was reconnected to the trade network, next step will be to chop that forest tile for the Jewish missionary, cottage the riverside grassland underneath, and then chop the two forests at Le Havre for its granary once religion has been spread there for the OR bonus.

We have a major shortage of worker labor right now, I think we have 9 workers for 9 cities (about to be 10 cities). We will fix this by getting 4 workers out in the next couple of turns, but for now it's a definite crunch. I blame the barbarians.



Settler and worker landing on the plains hill spot for our first island city. What an amazing spot! We need to explore further to the south to see what else is down here. There's at least two happiness resources (silver and silks), and probably more than that to be found. This spot is also hugely valuable for trade route purposes. We're lucky that Goreripper didn't push for this spot, his capital is coastal and would have had an easier time reaching this area with a dedicated naval rush.



Speaking of trade routes, here's a quick summary of their value. We're getting 50 commerce per turn from them! That's 3 commerce trade routes with each of Goreripper's 10 cities and with Hashoosh's, um, 4 cities. That team is not having a strong game, to say the least. It's also worth pointing out that 2metraninja is the only team here to be in Hereditary Rule and Organized Religion civics, everyone else is running the default stuff along with Slavery. Both OR and HR have been highly useful for our team thus far, especially HR happiness. Hashoosh and Bantams have even both revolted into Judaism, so if we ever get a Great Prophet down the road, we'll be able to benefit from them spreading our religion around.

Noble / Gaspar's civics are a special case, we'll get to them in a second.



Demos for Turn 96. We've taken over the Food lead for ourselves, thanks to the recent whipping from Gavagai and Sevenspirits. We will lose this lead when we whip out more workers over the next few turns, but I have to say that I'm happy with our outlook there. I believe that we have the most population points in the game at the moment, and we're reaping massive benefits from trade routes + FIN trait. All of those slow-starting cities like Cannes and Carcasonne have come into their own now and are starting to pull their weight. GNP is right where we want it, it was 233 at 100% science on Aesthetics, a tech with no known tech bonus. We were close to 300 if we select Code of Laws, a tech with double prereqs that's widely known. Research is pushing next to Music tech, where I think we'll be strong favorites to land the Great Artist.

Regarding the Noble / Gaspar team: I saw in the event logger that a Great Engineer was born a couple of turns ago. That had to be their team, as they were the only ones with any access to Engineer points. They must have whipped a forge in their Oracle city, then ran an Engineer specialist. That was a smart plan; they had roughly 50/50 odds to get a Great Prophet or a Great Engineer. Either they would get a shrine for their religion or they would get their choice of a free wonder. They landed the Engineer, and they chose to turn it into the Pyramids on this turn, Turn 96. It was a good decision, this feels like a strong map for Representation with so much food available. We'll see how well they can leverage their Pyramids build. I'm hoping that several other teams were trying for Pyramids and were left with nothing.

The big wonders still to fall will be Great Lighthouse and Mausoleum. We are not going to get either one, we obviously do not have the production base. I think we will try for the Great Library, since it synergizes very well with our tech path (early Music tech) and it's much stronger for PHI teams than non-PHI teams. We'll see.

[Mikehendi]

A short update for the current turn (Turn 97). I'm moving our scout over to Noble / Gaspar territory, so that we can explore their territory just as they are exploring ours. As long as we're both revealing map information I think the Open Borders are a net plus for our team. Remember, we want that team to be focused on Gavagai, not focused on hostilities with our team. Anyway, the scout noticed that there's only a single barb warrior in this city. We need to make certain that we either capture or raze this barb city. Either outcome is fine, we just can't let Gaspar / Noble take this one. Our chariot is on the way to ensure one of those two outcomes.



This is the wider view from the end of the turn. The brown borders of the Gaspar team are just visible to the northeast of our scout, we'll move into their territory next turn and start poking around. I'm going to 3 pop whip a settler out of Aix soonish (despite our poor worker situation) to grab a city location NE-NE of the rice tile. That spot claims fish + wines, and would make for a solid border city, no overlap with the Noble /Gaspar location. We have to make sure we get there first - we can fill in more workers later, we can't do that with land. Not without going to war at least. We also want a city on the tile south of the gold soonish as well. I hate that spot, there's not enough food from the clams alone to work the gold, however all of the other spots I tried to dotmap are even worse for various reasons.



This is why I think we'll be OK relative to our eastern neighbor. They did not revolt into Representation, they revolted into Police State. That was unexpected! They are still at war with Gavagai, and remember, this team is EXP/IND, not SPI. They must be anticipating serious fighting if they were willing to use an Anarchy turn to go into Police State. Hopefully our scout will get over there and figure out what's going on.

Quick word about the weird scout build in Rochelle: I want a unit to go explore Bantams territory (and hopefully Gavagai after that, if he'll accept Open Borders). The unit type doesn't matter, we only need something with 2 moves to defog more territory. A scout is a perfect choice because it's cheap to build and is completely non-threatening to the other teams. We need more information about what's going on with our neighbors, and 15 hammers is a cheap price to pay for that. Rochelle will go back to more units and workers/settlers after this turn.



Lourdes is a strange city. It's about to come into its own though: the borders are popping in 3 turns, and a worker just finished cutting down the jungle on the bananas. (Worker labor was suboptimal here, there was only enough time to cottage two of the three grassland river tiles.) We'll double whip this worker next turn, overflow into library, and we'll get a plantation on the bananas as soon as the borders expand. That will also bring the peak tile in the second ring into range, granting us outstanding vision against any possible incoming Bantams attack. Fortunately he seems totally uninterested in doing much anything this game. The archer and spear in the build queue are sitting there in case of emergency whip need.

Again, I can't overstress how fortunate we are having Bantams as a neighbor. His negligent play is a massive reason for our success thus far, we're getting land we have no real business settling, and being able to garrison it with almost nothing in the way of military. I'd be feeling confident about the game if Sevenspirits team hadn't settled two cities this turn. They have 12 cities now; we're tied for second with 10 cities. They are pretty terrifying as a team....

[Lewwyn]

They are pretty terrifying as a team....

I hate to say I told you so, but, who am I kidding! I love it!

[Mikehendi]

Our first look at a Gaspar / Noble city with our scout. Bay of Pigs is apparently a former barb city that they recently captured, workers were just connecting the deer resource and chopping out one of the cheap EXP granaries. This provides a good view of the contested border region between our teams, with Le Havre to the west and the other barb city down to the south. We need to make sure we land the wines/fish resource pair in the middle.



Toulon just getting started. This should be an amazing city down the road; I'm considering making it the Moai spot if nothing better turns up. It will depend on what else we find while exploring the map, but remember there's no stone on the map in this game, and that makes building Moai significantly harder. One of those little 1 tile islands with zero production will take an eternity to build the thing, and a Turn 180 Moai is a waste. We'll see what we find in the island belt.

Aesthetics research finished at the end of turn, and we know from GNP scouting that we were the first to get it amongst the teams where we had contact. We're setting up for the run to Music next.



More scouting info from Noble / Gaspar territory. This is their second city, and the place where Buddhism popped up. I thought that I screenshotted this at the beginning of the turn, when there was a horse archer and a chariot inside this city as well. Apparently not though. That was very valuable information, learning that the Noble team had also researched Horseback Riding tech. It certainly looks like their team and Gavagai are getting ready for some serious fighting. God I hope so!

That left us with the question of what to do about the barb city. We had a chariot in range to attack it at 80% odds, against the single barb warrior defending, and with no Noble / Gaspar units in range this turn. As I saw it, there were three potential outcomes here:

1) Noble captures the barb city.
2) We capture the barb city.
3) We raze the barb city.

Option 1 was simply bad, we don't want their team getting another free city close to our borders. Scratch that one if at all possible. Option 2 was attractive on face value, but it also had real dangers. Could we really hold a captured barb city 4 tiles outside our borders, against a team that's running around with horse archers and skirmishers? Taking the barb city ourselves seemed very likely to draw us into conflict with Noble's team, which would be a disaster. At the very least, even if they left us alone because they were busy with Gavagai, it would likely sour relations down the road. I'm sure that they were planning on capturing that spot themselves, they'd probably be angry if we swept in and took it. (Furthermore, if that barb city grew to size 2, and we both had chariots sitting outside waiting to capture it, we could be in for all kinds of clock arguments and headaches. Best to avoid that situation.)

So I thought that the best option was to raze the barb city, and went ahead and did so:



No Noble / Gaspar units in range, so no controversy. Now we can both compete fairly over settling this region. Feel free to post that this was a brilliant decision or incredibly stupid metagaming in the lurker thread. Again, the big picture goal is to avoid being drawn into any kind of conflict with our neighbors while the map is still so wide open. Let them fight it out while we play the good neighbor role and keep teching / expanding. The barb city was almost guaranteed to pull us into conflict with our neighbor. Best to delete it from the map and remove the temptation, IMO.

Here is an overview of the region:




I've marked our hopeful city spots with white dots. The settler in Aix is going for the location to the northeast of Le Havre. I'd like to pull it back slightly to a less aggressive spot, but the spot a tile west is illegal, and the spot a tile south is even worse. I guess we could go a tile northwest, onto the wines, however that wastes a 3 food tile in the wines, and we then need a border expansion to get the fish, and we have no forests in the first ring to chop. So I think it has to be this location, and we'll need a sizable garrison here. I guess that contradicts the whole stuff I just wrote about avoiding conflict with Noble and Gaspar, whoops! Still, I think we need a city there.

This picture also demonstrates how terrible the Bantams landgrab has been. He's CRE/EXP and yet we've managed to get almost everything between us. We've been so very, very lucky in our northern neighbor.



I didn't understand this at all. No, I'm not paying 2 gold/turn for the right to swap corn resources. Hashoosh isn't even on my continent. If there was a hidden message here, I have no idea what it was. Trade denied.



Calais continuing to develop. We're up to seven cottages now, and still with plenty of room to grow higher. Health is not an issue, as we have wheat, cows, bananas, and fish all to be connected. That would get us to size 17, which we won't hit for a very long time. Happiness has been the stumbling block, although we're making progress there as well. Toulon will have silver connected in about 5 turns, and the planned wines spot will add another resource. Goreripper offered a wines for dyes trade, which appeared to be one-sided in his favor, but once we connect our own second wines it will be an even trade. Then we also have a gold resource to settle in the southeast, and there are silks on the southern island. So we're lagging a bit on luxuries, but fortunately we have Hereditary Rule civic and religion to help make up the difference. (Out of the 6 teams with whom we have contact, only 2metraninja and Bantams are in HR civic right now.)

We should get to Turn 100 today, I'll post some more big picture thoughts then.

[Mikehendi]

We spotted our first glimpse of the (real?) war between the Noble / Gaspar team and Gavagai. There's an axe and an archer camped out on top of this forested hill tile, protecting a Sentry chariot underneath them. And yes, these two teams remain at war, although neither one has any war weariness on the diplo screen. I'm still uncertain about what's going on between these teams. I think that their conflict is genuine, even though neither team seems to be losing units, since they both continue to spend all of their EP against each other, and they remain at war, and they both seem to be researching military techs. I hope more exploration will reveal what exactly they're doing.

I offered Gavagai Open Borders at the start of the turn, which he did accept. Now our two scouts can map out his territory too!



This is our other scout entering Bantams territory. We want this guy to find the two missing Bantams cities (I literally have no idea where they went; somewhere on the north coast?) and then head into Gavagai territory. The map information should help us make informed decisions, and we'll also try to track the militaries of these teams as we pass. The more we know about what's going on, the smarter we can play. One of my regrets from this game has been the inability to send out 1-2 galleys on deep exploration missions to make contacts, we simply haven't had a good opportunity to do so. Perhaps when we get caravels later, or when we're not desperately trying to push out more workers.

Turn 100 overview picture:




I will probably whip the settler in Aix for the contested city spot northeast of Le Havre this turn, that would have us planting the city on Turn 103. The Rochelle settler will be going north of Cannes at the bananas/clams/iron spot. I think it gets founded Turn 105, and that would get us to 12 cities. We still only have 10 workers at the moment, and we're pushing more of them out everywhere possible.



F1 city list for the curious. We have exactly 50 pop this turn before whipping anything. Population distribution looks just about right. We have excellent Food and Commerce, terrible Production across the board. That's by design of course, we are FIN/PHI after all.



Demos at 100% science. This is honestly better than I expected at the 100 turn mark, I thought we'd be further behind in foodhammers. We're holding our own pretty well, although we continue to cheat on the production side. That's slowly getting fixed, Le Havre is going to be our first production city, but we definitely lag there. Food is much better, where we temporarily hold the lead until the Sevenspirits cities grow and pass us. Gavagai has also done a huge amount of whipping recently, likely for some combination of UB altars and units. That's why we're first there, for now. GNP is 271 for widely-known Meditation tech, falls to about 255 for a tech that no one knows. Our break-even rate is right at 60%, very healthy for this stage of the game. Trade routes are having a massive effect there, we get more than 50 commerce / turn just from trade routes.

Of course you can't be good at everything, and our big weakness is military. We're playing farmer's gambit here and hoping no one will call us on it. (This was not helped by losing 20k worth of power to the barbs earlier!) That's why I've tried to cultivate good relations with our neighbors, and why we've got scouts heading into their territory to try and spy out any incoming attacks. I feel like we have to take our chances while the local diplo environment appears friendly. Bantams keeps playing 2 minute turns and shows little interest in doing much of anything. Gavagai and Noble are at war, staring daggers at each other across their mutual border. If we want a serious chance to win this game, we've got to continue to push expansion and tech. If we can get another ~30 turns of free buildup, we'll hit the Renaissance era and open up units that obsolete everything currently on the field. Keep those fingers crossed...

[Mikehendi]

Let's use this Turn 100 post to look at big picture issues. A few teams still have a good chance to win the game. Most teams do not. Ranking time!

Sevenspirits / Krill team
12 cities, ~50 population, 15 Ancient and 3 Classical techs (a lot of estimating here)
+ Have the most cities
+ Have the best players (probably)
+ Already killed one neighbor
- Poor economic traits (AGG/SPI)
- GNP a little weaker than other top teams (I think)
- Not very well liked by other teams, most likely to see OB bans and spiteful AP/UN votes against them

I think they are the favorites to win at this point, keeping in mind that we've never contacted them or seen any of their land. This is the most likely team to roll over the rest of their neighbors and reach an impregnable position. The only saving grace at this point are those weak traits, if they had taken Darius with the first pick I think this would be 100% over.

Gavagai
9 cities, ~38 population, 17 Ancient and 4 Classical techs (roughly)
+ Best non-banned leader allowed for this particular map setup (FIN/ORG)
+ Super duper cheap sacrificial altars everywhere
+ Very strong pop and GNP, only lower right now from heavy recent whipping
+ Has his own religion (Confucianism)
- Warring with neighbor currently (not sure how serious)
- Less experienced player compared to top RB talent

Gavagai has put himself into a strong position. I might even have picked this team over the Sevenspirits team if it wasn't for the war with Gaspar and the difference in player skill. Darius is disgusting on this map, he might actually be stronger than Willem for these particular settings.

Noblehelium / Gaspar
7 cities, ~34 population, 15 Ancient and 4 Classical techs
+ Built Oracle (Metal Casting) and Pyramids
+ Have their own religion (Buddhism)
+ Noblehelium has the reputation of being a strong player
- Warring with neighbor currently (not sure how serious)
- Focus on wonders led to mediocre expansion thus far
- Do not have FIN trait, have already gotten much of the benefit of EXP and IND traits

I've been underwhelmed by this team so far. Pyramids and cheap IND mints or not, they only have 7 cities on Turn 100, and that's simply not that good. I probably won't know what happened in their early game with Gavagai until after the game ends, something probably went down.

Goreripper
10 cities, ~35 population, 12 Ancient and 7 Classical techs (these techs are probably wrong)
+ Lots of cities and high GNP
+ Academy in capital and lots of resources connected
- Does not have FIN trait, has already gotten most of the benefit from CRE trait
- Uncertain player skill compared to top RB talent

Goreripper has played a genuinely good game from what I can see. He's got a lot of cities and a lot of different food/luxuries connected. The tough part is evaluating where he really stands, because his CRE trait and cheap libraries have inflated his score by quite a bit. I know he has a lot of land points, no idea how many though. Can he keep up in tech once the boost from his cheap, early libraries wears off? I didn't see a lot of cottages with my scouting boats and he doesn't have FIN trait. There's the potential for a midgame falloff here. But so far, yeah he's playing well.

Goreripper is the last team with any realistic chance to win the game. There's a huge dropoff to the rest of the teams. I would be shocked if any of the other teams were in contention later.

Wetbandit
7 cities, ~30 population, 13 Ancient and 2 Classical techs
+ Has FIN trait
+ More cities than most of the other non-competitive teams (7)
- Mediocre GNP from what I can see
- No wonders, religions, or anything special

I have almost nothing to say about wetbandit, who we still have no contact with. Doing better than the other bad teams.

Ad hoc
5 cities, ~25 population, 17 Ancient and 2 Classical techs (again probably not correct here)
+ Has FIN trait
+ Built Stonehenge
- Only has 5 cities, unless I've somehow missed some of them. This is a crippling blow.
- Mediocre GNP

Not much more to add here. We don't have contact with ad hoc, but he's a middle of the road civ who doesn't look to be a major factor. Perhaps he's already been at war or something, it wouldn't surprise me.

2metraninja
5 cities, ~30 population, 14 Ancient and 2 Classical techs
+ Has his own religion (Hinduism)
+ His cities all have a ton of population
- Only has 5 cities, which is terrible on Turn 100.
- No FIN trait, questionable economic traits (IND/ORG)
- Appears unaware of how Slavery civic works

Despite having a good amount of population and his own religion, 2metraninja is one of the weakest teams in the game. This guy simply does not whip, ever. He has whipped exactly 1 time for 1 pop in the last 25 turns. I am not making that up. (Gavagai whipped 6 times for 12 pop in the last two turns!) I guess he just sits there in his big cities and builds things by hand? It's not a winning strategy. His GNP is also among the weakest in the game.

Kuro
7 cities, ~20 population, 14 Ancient and 2 Classical techs
+ Has 7 cities, more than the other bottom feeders
+ Has a really weird in-game name (Aya Shameimaru)
- His cities are all tiny, they have about 20 pop between them
- GNP is among the worst in the game
- Playing Isabella (EXP/SPI) of China is all about the fast start. This was not a fast start. No FIN to help out economy.

We don't have contact with Kuro either. Based on what we can figure out from the Demos, he's doing better than he did in Pitboss 11. But not by a whole lot.

Bantams
4 cities, 17 population, 14 Ancient and 1 Classical techs
+ Uh, has a neat profile picture?
- Fewest cities in the game
- Lowest pop in the game
- Fewest techs researched in the game
- Has achieved all of this despite picking the fastest-starting leader in the game (CRE/EXP)

There's not much I can write here that hasn't already been written. Bantams has been a total train wreck thus far in his play. The only suspense is whether our team or Gavagai's team will be the one to devour him in the future. We absolutely hit the jackpot when we landed him for a neighbor. Bantams has unquestionably played one of the worst opening 100 turns in recent memory at RB. (If he reported at all, you guys would see how bad it is.)

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Then there's us:

Mikehendi
10 cities, 50 population, 16 Ancient and 6 Classical techs
+ Likely the best GNP in the game, has FIN trait
+ Solid city count and overall population
+ Strong upcoming midgame with PHI universities and French musketeers
+ Has Bantams as a neighbor
- Weak military and production
- Player skill could be questionable compared to top RB talent
- Highly vulnerable to barbarians

We're in good position, we'll definitely be one of the contenders moving forward. Outside of the weird barbarian combat luck, there's been little to complain about. We have been fortunate in how things have played out. Here's to us being first in score on Turn 200.