RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Peter of Byzantium

[sunrise089]

First: You should not buy this doubleland-bubble of Rego Afterall Jowy himself has a decent chance to settle the land (once Byzanz has fallen).

Second: Janissaries while good are far less dangerous than Cataphracts.

Third: If the meatshield is really crippled it is of no good use as any aggressor can easily march through it without hesitation.

Mind you all of the above are my stand on this and I'll only post it here and not on Jowy's thread.

Point 2 is correct, but points 1 and 3 I take issue with.

Re: settling all the land - If we die then Jowy is back into a settling race he may loose, or he may win and create new hostility with the Ottomans. After all, they've proven they don't like aggressive settlements

Re: usefulness of a meatshield - if nothing else we provide early warning. What's better for Jowy - to have his border city conquered, or to have his neighbors die, learn the timing and composition of the enemy stack, and have our units die (and take Ottoman units with us) rather than his?

[regoarrarr]

Why not whip an archer into the Oracle?
You spend 1t building the archer at 4/25.
Next turn, whip, and get to 38/25, gaining an archer and 13 overflow. You basically turn a whip into 1 archer + 5 hammers for the oracle, no whipping penalty whatsoever.
Similarly, double-whipping a barracks should give you 18 overflow.

Good, good - this is the kind of analysis we need to do.

One issue to consider is that we are currently at a double whipping penalty (it shows 24 turns), so we have 4 turns of +2 angry and then 10 more turns of +1 angry, assuming that we don't whip any more, which we should.

I guess what's the fastest we can get teh Oracle and say 2-3 more archers. That's your problem class - get to work!

[Jabah]

First you probably should not whip the Oracle but whip into the Oracle. (for efficiency)

Second, if you are afraid of angry citizen, just 'Oracle' Monarchy and get "Heredetary Rules", so each archer you whip will make sure no one is upset about buiding it.

Solution might be 1t archer, whip (to size2) into Oracle, then 1t archer whip (to size1) into Oracle (all with seafood + max hammer).

Once in HE, whip archers each time you reach size 2, repeat and watch Ottomans faces when you have 10 archers inside city. (you definitively won't win with that but they will have trouble cracking the city until they have archers killers units)

(possible try to get a barrack at some point)

[darrelljs]

Well you definitely don't want to whip The Oracle, due to the wonder penalty. Even overflow gets that penalty. Sometimes you whip in cities that can't work hammer tiles to build national wonders, but that's kind of a special case. Its especially bad since we don't have a Granary.

I'd grow and work the Wheat, then the other Grassland Forest. I don't think we want to whip again until the unhappiness wears off, so what I would do is go The Oracle -> Archer (partial) -> Barracks (whip when anger is gone) -> Archer. As soon as Sailing is in we need to get our half cost Granary in since it will be a dramatic increase to our production. We can probably skip the Lighthouse for now at least.

Darrell

[darrelljs]

Crosspost with Jabah . Are you sure if you whip into the Oracle you don't get the penalty? My understanding was you still did.

That's a good point about Monarchy, but I still favor Iron Working. It looks like we are going to need to settle a city to the north that grabs a metal. There is no Copper up that we can see.

Darrell

[regoarrarr]

As soon as Sailing is in we need to get our half cost Granary in since it will be a dramatic increase to our production. We can probably skip the Lighthouse for now at least.

Darrell

You mean research Pottery to get our Granary, right?

Sunrise and I were having an interesting discussion about whether to build a barracks, and it kind of boiled down if we're doing Operation Noah's Ark or not.

[Jabah]

Crosspost with Jabah . Are you sure if you whip into the Oracle you don't get the penalty? My understanding was you still did.

I am not sure, but if that is the case, then I must have played in a very sub-optimal way in all my recent (SP) game where I usually try to ahave a big overflow (from any option, whip, chop, natural..) into wonders.
Since the overflow is not 100% whip, I doubt they conserve the penalty, but as I wrote, I am not 100% sure

[regoarrarr]

Crosspost with Jabah . Are you sure if you whip into the Oracle you don't get the penalty? My understanding was you still did.

That's a good point about Monarchy, but I still favor Iron Working. It looks like we are going to need to settle a city to the north that grabs a metal. There is no Copper up that we can see.

Darrell

I'm fairly sure that Jabah is correct that you do not.

So you think IW over HBR? You might be right, as there are decent odds that we have an iron at one of those hills in the capital, given that we have no copper anywhere and horse not in the BFC.

It can only be on the hills 1W, 1SW and 1S-SW of Athens, as the other ones had hills on them. Best for us would be 1SW, not least because all of their units are sitting on our hill 1W

I'm pretty sure from my analysis yesterday that they don't have IW, though it's possible someone else does and told them where it was

[darrelljs]

I don't think we have a choice re: Noah. If we just sit around eventually we'll get killed without doing more than being annoying, no one is going to come to our aid. At least this way we have a shot at making some real noise.

We definitely need Pottery as the next self researched tech.

Darrell

[darrelljs]

Lots of crossposting going on . I doubt we have Iron in the capital, and even if we did it would be useless with all those Chariots going around. We need Iron across the sea.

CFC seems to agree with you guys on the wonder whip question.

Darrell