[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Fintourist]

Good comments/observations/questions! Here are my thoughts:

Nice report. Interesting - I wonder if Cynheard declared on Barry to get through?

I'll check this when I log in next time. At least they aren't in war at the moment.

If not then he must have come SE-S which means Barry's core is to the east and we have a chance that someone non-cre will compete with us for that fish (although at only three cities that must be "his" land). If we meta-speculate that there are three Civs on that continent then those two don't scare me a lot, I wonder if we could keep hold of a beach-head easily?

Azza has met Cyneheard (and quite early based on EP amounts) so my hypothesis is that Barry is NE/N of us and Cyneheard is somewhere NW of us. Planting a beach-head for furs sounds interesting, but at the moment we are still busy securing land on our own continent (and don't have Sailing yet) so we could re-evaluate this in ~15 turns.

Once we get to Currency then hammers will be pretty useful for bagging techs. After Currency I guess we want Sailing then CoL (although we want Sailing to arrive the turn we can net the whales which may be before Currency?) but thinking about conquest we could get Sailing->Construction or Sailing->HBR then get CoL to help assimilate our conquests.

I have pretty much convinced myself that Sailing should be our next tech. We can get it significantly before Currency and it provides us a reasonable boost:
1. In practice it will mean 4 extra cottages worked (A, B, C & D) thanks to higher happ cap from whales
2. Whales is a nice 3/1/4 tile on its own
3. Couple of our cities would like to start building a lighthouse
4. When we get our 9th city down I want to build a galley there pretty fast (I'm not 100 % sure if we would have time to get Currency first though)
Overall I think that these factors compensate pretty well for extra trade route and ability to build wealth earlier.

After Sailing+Currency we want:
Economic: Calendar + CoL
Military: HBR + Construction

What's the order for these 4 techs I'm not sure, it depends a lot on our preference towards aggression. One could make a case for Calendar instead of Currency also, but maybe Currency is the right bet especially if we manage to settle couple of island cities soon enough.

Btw, I think building wealth is not such a big thing for us in this game (compared to PB13) and we don't really need mines for that. That's because we are FIN this time and working 2/0/3 coast/lakes/hamlets beats grass mines. That said, I'm sure we still want to squeeze couple of turns off from some key techs by building wealth, but as said we don't need to build production capabilities for wealth purposes.

I vote that we attack whoever has least cities/most holy cities! Do we start spying on Barry now? If Azza has made a decent start and isn't going to be a good target then we're back to PB13-style naval action . I'd try and work up a C&D dossier for Barry, but the first 30 turns have disappeared from the civstats replacement, so you'll just have to get graphs if you want to know what he's up to .

Yeah, we are not getting city visibility on Azza as long as he is putting EPs on us. I'll start working slowly towards Barry, but will keep our research visibility on Azza. I want to know if heads e.g. for HBR.. Overall I agree that if Azza is strong enough naval attack might be the better option as it offers a possibility of clear surprise. However, galleys require a bunch of hammers and travel slowly so an immediate attack does not sound lucrative. We are developing fast now, so in ~15 turns we should be in position where we could start building real military if that's the path we choose.

Does Monument first beat Granary first for Gertie or are you looking at keeping both fish long-term? With Moai and a library in there we'll produce 6 cpt which means 17 turns to pop 40% borders at which point the eastern fish is ours, although a city settled NW of the northern fish could still steal it. Obviously I haven't tested anything, just throwing out ideas...

No worries, it's not really a monument first at the cost of early granary. Now, thanks to Math, we can just chop a monument into Gertie EOT72 and the city will get another chop into granary so that Gertie can whip it at appropriate moment at size 2. It wasn't possible to get 2 chops into city early enough to get granary benefits already when growing first time from size 1 to 2, so we aren't really sacrificing growth speed here (well of course we could have chopped immediate granary there, but our workers were busy with other tasks and I thought this was an OK approach)

Did any wonders fall? Oxy seems to be doing well...

No wonders after Stonehenge! 70 turns, 33 players, no Oracle sounds pretty weird, but that is all caused by the huge tech costs. Everyone have surely had enough production to build Oracle multiple times but e.g. from our perspective this scenario sounds terrible:
1. Spend commerce on Polytheism/Meditation
2. Spend commerce on Priesthood
3. Lose oracle
Going for those techs and Oracling Mathematics or MC just does not justify the risk of delaying all the key techs (Currency, Calendar etc.)
If we would have been one of the lucky civs who got 2 techs from huts it would be a lot easier to go for Oracle. I wonder if someone manages to get something exceptionally nice from that wonder..

The Great Lighthouse is also still available, if it has not fallen we can speculate about an opportunistic attempt on it once we get closer to Sailing.

No idea where Oxy has gotten his score. He is CRE/IMP so it possibly is just a fast start and land points? Btw, thanks to Math we are now 3rd in score as well. I would not still put too much value on it, but I guess it is still better to be 3rd than 3rd last. Based on score I would say that Jowy is doing very bad, but other than that you probably can't count anybody out yet.

[Fintourist]

Turn 71

Following the micro plan.. Whipped settler in our capital. We are working 7 cottages (1 of them hamlet..) at the moment. Need more!

No declarations so far from the people we have met, here is the overview:

[Ceiliazul]

- What's going on with the first-place GNP?
- I too think settling/eventually conquering that other continent is an interesting idea.

In a macro sense, what will it take for someone to win this game? As in, what priorities and how many kills?

Also, yes gnp is lurker civ with many EPs.

[Old Harry]

Azza has met Cyneheard (and quite early based on EP amounts) so my hypothesis is that Barry is NE/N of us and Cyneheard is somewhere NW of us. Planting a beach-head for furs sounds interesting, but at the moment we are still busy securing land on our own continent (and don't have Sailing yet) so we could re-evaluate this in ~15 turns.

Actually I was imagining that taking his three cities off him would count as a beach-head .

Once we get to Currency then hammers will be pretty useful for bagging techs. After Currency I guess we want Sailing then CoL (although we want Sailing to arrive the turn we can net the whales which may be before Currency?) but thinking about conquest we could get Sailing->Construction or Sailing->HBR then get CoL to help assimilate our conquests.

I have pretty much convinced myself that Sailing should be our next tech. We can get it significantly before Currency and it provides us a reasonable boost:
1. In practice it will mean 4 extra cottages worked (A, B, C & D) thanks to higher happ cap from whales
2. Whales is a nice 3/1/4 tile on its own
3. Couple of our cities would like to start building a lighthouse
4. When we get our 9th city down I want to build a galley there pretty fast (I'm not 100 % sure if we would have time to get Currency first though)
Overall I think that these factors compensate pretty well for extra trade route and ability to build wealth earlier.

I roughly played through a Currency-first sandbox and it will be t90 before we get it. It felt like we had a lot of hammers that I didn't want to spend on new cities, so yeah, Sailing for lighthouses, extra happy and IC trade route cities is fine by me.

After Sailing+Currency we want:
Economic: Calendar + CoL
Military: HBR + Construction

What's the order for these 4 techs I'm not sure, it depends a lot on our preference towards aggression. One could make a case for Calendar instead of Currency also, but maybe Currency is the right bet especially if we manage to settle couple of island cities soon enough.

Btw, I think building wealth is not such a big thing for us in this game (compared to PB13) and we don't really need mines for that. That's because we are FIN this time and working 2/0/3 coast/lakes/hamlets beats grass mines. That said, I'm sure we still want to squeeze couple of turns off from some key techs by building wealth, but as said we don't need to build production capabilities for wealth purposes.

I think the fact this map is constrained on tech not hammers argues more for wealth builds than PB13 did, the sooner we can be converting hammers into commerce the better. But we should be taking advantage of FIN coast and cottages as well.

Yeah, we are not getting city visibility on Azza as long as he is putting EPs on us. I'll start working slowly towards Barry, but will keep our research visibility on Azza. I want to know if heads e.g. for HBR.. Overall I agree that if Azza is strong enough naval attack might be the better option as it offers a possibility of clear surprise. However, galleys require a bunch of hammers and travel slowly so an immediate attack does not sound lucrative. We are developing fast now, so in ~15 turns we should be in position where we could start building real military if that's the path we choose.

Attacking CH would be easier as it's less far to ship in reinforcements. Barry would require two or three boats full of 1-movers along with pre-landed 2 movers, so not that appealing, but having the Hindu holy city is very appealing...

The Great Lighthouse is also still available, if it has not fallen we can speculate about an opportunistic attempt on it once we get closer to Sailing.

Worth it for fail gold if nothing else... Masonry is fairly cheap, but I don't like delaying Currency even further...

[Fintourist]

In a macro sense, what will it take for someone to win this game? As in, what priorities and how many kills?

A very good question, OH should probably answer this, because he will take care of winning as he probably takes over at some point after PB13 is over and I start working full-time 60+ hour weeks. I haven't thought about that too much yet as it would almost be too overconfident at this point when you are playing a 33 civ game. Anyways, rough ideas:

Cultural victory:
- I guess we would need to take control of at least this continent (there might be more land west of Mardoc though) in order to have even a remote chance of success. So 2 kills/land worth of 3 civs. Quite a bit of geopolitical luck also needed and probably also more suitable traits than our FIN/IMP.

Space:
- My rough guess would be that getting land equivalent of 6 civs share could give you a necessary teching/production power.. So two 3-player continents? Well, in the end that only depends on what your competitors get and it's difficult to say what's enough.. But it's probably safe to assume that some contenders manage to conquer at least land worth of 4-5 players before space race becomes an issue.

But if we happen to get into a winning position above considerations won't be that relevant, because we will go after Domination anyways. Then the correct answer for kills needed is just constantly: More!

[Fintourist]

Actually I was imagining that taking his three cities off him would count as a beach-head .

I roughly played through a Currency-first sandbox and it will be t90 before we get it. It felt like we had a lot of hammers that I didn't want to spend on new cities, so yeah, Sailing for lighthouses, extra happy and IC trade route cities is fine by me.

Any observations from your sandboxing? Based on my sandboxing I think we can get Sailing first and still be close to getting Currency eot90. Roughly..

I think the fact this map is constrained on tech not hammers argues more for wealth builds than PB13 did, the sooner we can be converting hammers into commerce the better. But we should be taking advantage of FIN coast and cottages as well.

Yes, that's true. I'm just saying that I don't see us using grass mines for wealth, just our normal hammers from resource tiles.

[Old Harry]

Any observations from your sandboxing? Based on my sandboxing I think we can get Sailing first and still be close to getting Currency eot90. Roughly..

I wasn't too tight on the micro, but I felt that we needed to settle the cottage-sharing city east of Alfie in the mid-80s because the capital was at its happy limit working all it's cottages and the workers had time to spare. I used the surplus hammers I got because I couldn't build lighthouses to build units, which isn't a bad use of them, but lighthouses would be better.

We have a lot of trees to chop on the CH coast, so if TGL is possible we could put it there. It'll only benefit three or four of our cities though, so I'm not that keen. We want Masonry when we settle for stone - but I hadn't got to settling the stone city by t89 so it can wait until after Currency. I'd like to get a lot of chops into a Pyramids build when we do hook stone for the 1.5x multiplier on the fail gold.

Thinking later on in the game we don't have a coastal capital so Free Market isn't going to be as lucrative as PB13, so lets start to plan for a State Property economy now. Our core cities can be commercial monsters, then we try to put workshops everywhere else...

Ceil - I guess that winning is going to be about taking land off your neighbors better than the other front runners do. I'm pleased that none of our neighbors so far are Krovice, Plako, Dtay, Scooter, TBS, Pindicator or even Boldly Going Nowhere. The trouble is I haven't yet run a successful aggressive land war in my three games here, and I think we're going to need to be taking ready-developed land from someone by turn 120 to keep up with those guys... On the positive side though tech costs are so high that if we attack someone who doesn't yet have Construction or Feudalism we *should* finish them off before they can research it.

[Fintourist]

I wasn't too tight on the micro, but I felt that we needed to settle the cottage-sharing city east of Alfie in the mid-80s because the capital was at its happy limit working all it's cottages and the workers had time to spare. I used the surplus hammers I got because I couldn't build lighthouses to build units, which isn't a bad use of them, but lighthouses would be better.

We have a lot of trees to chop on the CH coast, so if TGL is possible we could put it there. It'll only benefit three or four of our cities though, so I'm not that keen. We want Masonry when we settle for stone - but I hadn't got to settling the stone city by t89 so it can wait until after Currency.

Where did you put cities #9 and #10 or where would you like to have them? In my sims I settled the stone city on turn 81 as the 9th city and I think that's a solid move, because we will need it as the stepping stone for island cities. I'm slightly worried that Azza wants to steal this site from us, because he has Masonry selected as a tech, but I hope he is just planning to take his own stone site. In PBEM45 Azza settled a completely crazy city basically behind my lines so I guess everything is possible..

I think settling a filler-like 10th city east of capital could be reasonable. Ability to grow cottages for capital, no need for military and easiness of worker support sound arguments that could make up for the increasing maintenance costs. And also we still have a while before Calendar, which means that our capital can't make full use of its food tiles so this is also a reasonable time frame for the filler city to borrow those pigs and get to size 5 or something.

Or would you like to see us prioritizing some other city sites?
(N of Flossie to grab us more from the northern sea)
(East coast: flood plains + fish)
(East of stone city: deer + silk)
(something else down south?)

I'd like to get a lot of chops into a Pyramids build when we do hook stone for the 1.5x multiplier on the fail gold.

Sounds like a plan (unless we have some other important needs for hammers, e.g. military). How was it in this version of RBMod again: Can we get fail gold from multiple cities or was that changed somehow?

Thinking later on in the game we don't have a coastal capital so Free Market isn't going to be as lucrative as PB13, so lets start to plan for a State Property economy now. Our core cities can be commercial monsters, then we try to put workshops everywhere else...

Hmm, you are right although I think Free Market could be awesome here as well even though we are not getting harbor + customs house in our capital. That being said, I'm a fan of SP workshops too and if we are doing well in this game and want to grab more land getting several production cities going would be awesome. And yes, for now workshops aren't yet an option and commercial core does not sound too bad either.

[Fintourist]

Turn 72

Ok, these are potentially awesome news. Mardoc razed Azza's far-reaching western city. I don't dare to dream about a long conflict that leaves both players crippled just yet, but there is some potential... At the very least this is a setback for Azza and it seems probable that his military will be concentrated in the future to his western border..



I repeat, this might be a major geopolitical boost for us.. At the very least a small one..

......

Domestically we finished 2 monuments, one via chop, the other one was whipped. I hate building those things, but hey, now it's done and we will get couple of useful resources inside our borders.

Next turn we will meet Cheater Hater and I'll provide some domestic screenshots as well. Does anybody want to see anything in particular?

EDIT: Actually Mardoc may have kept the city, I checked the city list and did not think that it was the case, but I'm not 100 % sure. Our civstats replacement does not give quite enough information for me to be certain..

[Old Harry]

Good news that Azza and Mardoc are fighting! I hope Mardoc kept the city, as that could become Azza's focus, whereas if he burnt it then their borders are going to take a little longer to clash again...

On the sandbox here's how mine looked on t90. There was a period from t80-t87 when I felt like I was just wasting hammers everywhere. With wealth builds we're making an extra 24 gpt, allowing ~ 50% slider. I guess you could switch the order of 9 and 11 if we're worried Azza will be heading that way, and 10 could be moved to be 3S1W of the capital so that it can work crappy hill and plains cottages while the capital grows on grass cottages.


I think cities A-F are could be commerce focused, with G being a hybrid and then my 8, 10 and 11 will be hammer-focused (ten will just get to about size five working cottages until the cap can take them, then it can work its hills, 8 and 11 should produce naval units, but a barracks wouldn't be a bad build in either). Then we convert any conquests into workshop-powerhouses unless they are really obvious cottage cities.