[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Old Harry]

Surely the fact that you want to be growing your cities bigger to take advantage of the factory bonus is the thing that makes slaving less efficient? Anyway it probably doesn't apply to a SPI civ who can spend five turns whipping every now and then.

I guess that we should be running more wealth builds than we are at the moment. But I've got a feeling that Mack will exit his golden age in nationhood drafting infantry from his infinite number of cities, so we're pre-building cannons and cavalry... will maces queue-upgrade to rifles?

[Fintourist]

Surely the fact that you want to be growing your cities bigger to take advantage of the factory bonus is the thing that makes slaving less efficient?

Well, if you happen to have a, say, size 6 city with factory that you are constantly triple-whipping in a non-RBMod game you are taking a lot of advantage out of the factory too, which beats the natural production of that particular city... It's just so that in general factory won't belong to your first infra builds in a new city because it's expensive + you typically want to grow your cities --> you build factories at cities that already have a decent size and are not anymore lucrative to whip. I would say that "having-a-factory" correlates with "not-whipping-too-often-is-the-correct-approach", but there's no causality between those two

will maces queue-upgrade to rifles?

I would imagine, but maybe someone can confirm this?

[Hashoosh]

I think they turn into Grenadiers in the queue or not at all, since it's the rightmost picture in civstats, like with archers to xbows/lbows

[Hashoosh]

I think they turn into Grenadiers in the queue or not at all, since it's the rightmost picture in civlopedia, like with archers to xbows/lbows

[Old Harry]

Warning: Maths!
Forge + Factory + power = +100% hammers
So in BTS at size six a 3-pop whip gets you 180 hammers and costs 42 food every ten turns
42 food means you need a +4 surplus, which is one corn and two mines, then a farm then another mine, so say that gets you another 10 base hammers per turn that's +200 hammers, so your city is making 380 hammers every 10 turns.

Meanwhile at a larger size, making, say 20, 30 or 40 base HPT you get 40, 60 or 80HPT, which is 400, 600 or 800 hammers every ten turns.

With just a forge the 3-pop whip gets you 117 hammers + 100 = 217 every 10 turns while your 20/30/40 hammers get you 25/37/50 HPT or 250/370/500 hammers.

Perhaps it isn't the factories that necessarily make the difference, it's the overall hammers per turn being over 21.

[Old Harry]

I think they turn into Grenadiers in the queue or not at all, since it's the rightmost picture in civlopedia, like with archers to xbows/lbows

Thanks Hashoosh, I did a quick check and we need to be building Muskets or Longbows to upgrade to Rifles.

[Old Harry]

And for the triple post - can you take this turn Fintourist - things are starting to happen.

[TheHumanHydra]

Things? That sounds ominous.

[Fintourist]

Turn 210

I traded maps with Commodore and was greeted with this:




I sat there a while and thought... This comes across as a military alliance for the next 30 turns, which can very well be the time that mackoti needs to gather an army for crushing us. Meaning that we might be better off just by attacking him earlier etc.. However, that's prabably not really realistic either due to our Ichabod situation and dtay border so I accepted anyways...

(I later looked at mack's lightly defended border cities and if he does not improve his defenses we could hurt him by burning a few cities and even more if we could get our navy away from ichabod front. However, I would imagine that he improves his defenses a bit now as the enforced peace runs out and makes those cities look less attractive and it's questionable whether we could keep any of our gains anyways. It's just always the question: are we waiting for an opportunity elsewhere that benefits from the peace with mack or should we just "accept" that eventually he will attack us and have a more duel-like mentality..)

Dtay seems to be settling an "aggressive" border city:




There's a settler on that "sentry here" tile. Btw, any ideas how I could print screen so that what my mouse cursor shows is visible? We need to keep an eye on this area when our enforced peace is nearing to an end..

I checked techs of our opponents and moved the sentry units, nothing special was found.
Ichabod currently has at BoM:
6 Frigates
1 Privateer
3 Caravel
1 Galleon
2 Galleys
And on the way 1 Frigate + 1 Galleon
And no money for immediate upgrades

Our navy:


We are finishing 1 Frigate this turn and 2 more next turn. Overall the situation is under control, but not by a huge margin. The positive thing is that our Frigates are mostly C1 while most of Ichabod's ships should be unpromoted. Btw, our 21 cuirs and 24 knights are not visible in the above shot (I referred to them couple of posts ago and did not remember the exact amounts).

International events:




Poked Bear seems to be collapsing at a higher speed than I imagined. No idea what's there really happening because scooter's WW is really low compared to the amount of city razes/captures and no GG's are born. Only 9 cities left IIRC.

I could not find an event of Ichabod starting a GA and he is not SPI so maybe he spent a turn in anarchy? Works for us of course as Free Market and Representation are good civics but not "total revenge" civics.

Btw, now that the discussion about who throws and who does not throw his game for hurting the aggressor that ruined your game etc., is going on... Our situation with Ichabod is actually a fairly relevant example for this discussion. Another player might have decided that those guys ruined my game and just focused on causing us pain. Ichabod's response has been more like, ah damn, maybe those guys will be killed later and maybe then I take my cities back. Well, I don't know how Ichabod sees the situation, but it's clear that he could have been more aggressive during the last 15 turns. I guess, we still have to assume that he is just patient and eventually burns us..

I did not end the turn just yet because:
1. Maybe OH wants to take a look although things are of course more important!
2. Was there a some kind of plan going on where to relocate our troops? Move more to the island or back to core? I left the stack locations more or less as they are now and only transferred a missionary. (we have enforced peace with mack+dtay and ichabod should not be able to attack us so they are flexible enough..)
(3. I got some tactical/micro ideas that I could share in a chat, but they are not urgent at all. And I wonder if you had a grand plan for all the workers, because I really had to think before I managed to find anything even remotely useful to do for some of them )

Demos:



MFG should get better once we switch back to caste although the difference to GA-mack is depressing. So is the food margin, which shows that our 26 cities simply aren't enough. That situation won't really improve as scooter and plako are eating their neighbors while we are even more stuck as we were 60 turns ago (now we have played our attack-suttree and surprise-ichabod cards..). I wonder how mack feels about his position, he practically only borders us, scooter & plako, which is not the most appetizing offering for future invasions. I'm not saying that we would not burn eventually, but I'm sure he would rather be eating Bacchus.

And here is the power graph, we came couple of points short of dtay's graphs, let's hope we get them next turn:



We have a decent room for power improvement, because
a) We will draft a round of rifles soon
b) If we get attacked we should be able to upgrade our current cuirs/knights and cats pretty quickly.
That said, if mack shifts into full military mode things can become quickly difficult.

[TheHumanHydra]

Does dtay have an Artist? 'Cause that city plant looks threatening ...

What did you do with Mack's offer? It might be best to accept ... Wonder who he's going after ...