[SPOILERS] By the Rivers of Babylon, FIN has no effect (on krovice)

[Krill]

Oh yeah...you will like this

[novice]

Sweet wheat and fab land grab!

Is that a barb city 2S of the tundra deer, or is it just the grid lines creating that impression?

[Krill]

Grid lines.

It's not over until the fat lady sings though, and I've no idea where Sullla has disappeared to. Lots can still go wrong.

[Krill]

Final question novice. Do we run the espionage slider at 20% to get Ruffs graphs this turn? Costs us 26 gold for 25EP, which is basically all put on Ruff. Ruff has 40EXP on us, we have 20 on him, so he probably has our graphs already, and if he keeps on spending on us we wouldn't not get them for a while.

Personally, I think it's a reasonable use of the gold.

To put this into context though, Currency takes 4 turns at 140 base bpt and 3 turns at 180 base bpt. We make 126 now, but once we settle the next few cities we will easily be at the 140bpt point. We will probably have to save up about 400 gold though to research Currency, and max gold generation is about 40-45gpt at present, if I'm optimistic about the growth this turn and I emphasize commerce where ever possible. We have 153 gold saved, so Currency eot T106 is the realistic aim but it might slip a bit. After that we gain something like 45bpt just due to the extra trade routes so we need to get Currency ASAP.

[novice]

I think getting Ruff's graphs now is a good idea.

[Krill]

Report coming up. Main question is if Ruff has 2 chariots on those boats and lands them in the right spot. If he does he can raze Pass Mustard and we can't stop him, but I don't think he does.

[Krill]

T97 Continued




Ruff has a work boat near Plako, nothing we can do about it and he can't stop us working water tiles. If we whip a galley at WH we can go screw with it but that seems like a waste of a whip there.





Whosit is healing his scout, I don't want to annoy him as he just made peace with CH, but next turn he will see our worker as we are moving it onto hte plains hill to road. This may affect his strategy, but not sure how; I don't care much if he wants to settle for that plains cow or even to the west of the plains sheep, we intend to take those cities from him long term anyway and he potentially saves us a settler (and his dot mapping skills aren't awful). But if he tries to settle for that whale that is greedy as fuck and we have to go HBR after Currency and smack him around a bit.





Overview of South Island eot T97. If you want me to novice I can upgrade the warrior to a spear right now, and unless Ruff lands 3 chariots he isn't taking PM without getting lucky. It also pushes back Currency eta so costs a lot more than 80 gold in real terms.





If I wanted to be really greedy (and stupid) we could settle GE next turn and load up both bowman and threaten Ruffs copper city T99. That's stupid though, unless we land bowman have awful odds against melee units and suck even worse against everything else anyway. But 2 bowmen in GE is pretty solid IMO, and only 1 tile that can house a galley to attack the bowman/settler pair this turn on the tile 665 of that clam.





I don'y like this galley, but Plako has no galleys anywhere else we can see so I don't feel threatened...except I changed the bowman in WH to a spear...shit I need to go change that back to a bowman, we can't double whip next turn as still at size 3.





Before the change. I was going to build another galley here but I don't want to ignore Plako. If I have to double whip a galley I will do so and delay the settler, but I do have a few micro shenanigans in mind to rig potential Rep happy into WH to stack whip anger a little bit higher. Galley probably needed if Ruff tries to move naval units north of GE to blockade there, but Cf is better place to whip that IMO do to extra food surplus and ease of getting Rep happy into Cf than WH.





I couldn't think of what else to do here. We don't need a worker. Can't get 2 chops down quickly due to need to get stuff over to Ruff, and directing a worker to road to GE yet still have to prioritise chops into Mids. So going to chop the forest west of hte city, and then 1 pop whip the granary and regrow. Will then dare Whosit to snipe the worker on the rice or just farm the northern grassland. Don't care much which one is done now. Need 5 more settlers IMO, 3 for south island, 1 for Tarter Sauce and one for city south of TtL for plains cow and sheep. This is one of them, another is from WH, final three likely from DS (at size 10-ish), OT and Ec, or maybe FR.





Still on track. Get between 333 and 357 fail gold if lose Mids now, enough to just rush Currency eot T101 IMO.





Whip next turn if Ruff threatens the strait and overflow into a galley and whip that. Fall back blockade position is the western 1 tile strait directly south of KM, but that makes it harder to resupply JD, requiring us to settle Mind Grain and then road east. A lot could happen over those turns. KM is safe from boating though IMO.





Plako has too many archers to keep track of, and our front city with him is naked. Luckily he has no galleys in range, but we can whip the bowman next turn, or more preferably, we can just keep on swapping builds into a galley next and then a spearman whilst growing to size 5, and finally double whip one of them depending on need. We most likely will have to double whip the spear IMO, even if we then just move that to GE and keep the bowman in Cf, but to do that we need Ruff to not run the strait. I think the galley is more likely even if I would prefer to whip the spear.





Changed my mind on this, going to emphasize hammers to get the bowman out a bit sooner, and potentially whip something else at size 2. Elephant to border pop, then deer (2/2 tile). Ruff can attack before we get the 20% defence bonus but with 4 units in the city it's safe against most things except luck,one hell of a biased attack force, or 4 HA. And I'm not sure about the HA as we can have 2 spears in there next turn.





This might have been a stupid plant, but it's a gamble worth taking IMO as Ruff has no way of knowing we were about to plant it, thus he can't have planned to raze it on T98. Depending on if and what Ruff lands next turn, I want to run the warrior and bowman down to PM, or at least the warrior. I also want to chop a forest (might do the same at JD, dependent on Ruffs actions).





Inflation has started, and we are paying for unit supply again which should drop shortly when we settle GE, and move a bunch of units between JD and PM back into our borders (and tangentially, that's a nice bonus for CRE).

[novice]

Great work, Krill.

I would not upgrade the warrior this turn, I don't think PM is in imminent danger.

[novice]

One comment that's not really related to anything, except it concerns Ruff: he declared war on the lurker civ briefly. I can't think of any reason to do so except to move a unit through lurker territory. Could be a scouting boat or maybe the tundra explorer.

[Krill]

Lurker civ being down there would be interesting. You think we can kill them?