[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Fintourist]

Awesome OH! Any chance I could quickly see your T114 save (and maybe also T110), I would love to check that because we need to decide in couple of hours where does the chop go at Nina (I would like to see how much we could benefit from earlier silk)? As another comment I think you are correct and we want CoL before possible Music push, which might be early enough or not. On the other hand current Azza-Mardoc crisis makes me think that after CoL this will become a pure military game until we have our domination victory (or we lose the game). Meaning: HA/Construction -> Machinery/Guilds.

Anyways, here is a preliminary report for the current turn:

Turn 97




That reload screwed us... Now our axe did not kill the barb axe and it advanced instead towards Nina.. Haven't checked the tech thread yet so maybe there is something about that weird Barry thing..

In better news, it seems Azza revenged Mardoc and took a city on his turn, then Mardoc took another city.. Most likely it's a city called "Dental Plan" that is changing hands.. I actually forgot to check the power graph, but all the action should not be visible until next turn anyways..




More to come latest tomorrow.. Leaning still towards monument in Nina currently...

[Old Harry]

Oh, I thought I'd attached it - this is most of the eot saves from t97-114. I like the first 5 or so turns, after that I just wanted to see where we ended up, so it got a bit sloppy.

Silk isn't actually hooked by t114 going Granary first, so the choice is setting our GA off using the music artist or the Great Person from Cornelius or going Monument (edit: or Barracks) first.

[Fintourist]

Thanks, those saves were a huge help and interesting!

Granary in Nina it is, screw silks! It looked like we can actually juggle fairly well with SAs and survive with sugar and spices even if we don't go for Music. You only settled one further city in the sandbox and I think I want more and the sim helps in determining where we could add couple of foodhammer builds. I'll try to organize the barracks chop soon for Nina though.. That building will end up being useful for us in every single city in this game I think.. I did one tile swap between B & D, otherwise went with your T97 micro

[Fintourist]

Turn 98 - start

Logged in quickly to check that our axe won against the barb axe

But I was even more happy about this...

[Fintourist]

Turn 98 - part 2







1. Whipped library in Flossie (works for food whip timings etc.)
2. Whipped granary in Kirby
3. Mardoc's WW is already over 50 (this means a bunch of dead units! As also visible in power graph..)
4. How do you feel about overflowing from galley into library at Hazelnut? The city will be mostly a hammer city, but it produces some commerce and it needs some culture in order to maintain the control of crabs tile in the long term. Cheater Hater probably isn't our no.1 target when it comes to early/mid game warfare.
5. Calendar comes in
6. Updated sandbox (~50 beakers behind the actual game, I will fix it next turn)
7. I'm doing some stuff differently compared to your run OH, but the big picture is similar. Is there something that works particularly well in your run that I should better be aware of? Just asking so that I don't miss any nice details..

[Old Harry]

4. I think building cheap MP or HR units is more use to us than that library. It's likely to be worth 1 or two beakers per turn at breakeven for a long while, so we'd only be building it for the culture (not necessarily a bad idea, but expensive at 90 hammers) whereas it could be 3 1/2 archers.
7. Good, even though I've been through these turns two or three times now its nowhere near perfect. We can definitely get more cities planted. In fact by t114 I felt like the worker force was too big and we were completing improvements that wouldn't get used for ages. I'll look again tonight at what the best bits were.

I think our big issue is deciding if we're using a golden age and Caste artists, Music (building culture) or buildings to pop the borders in our new cities. We want to be building Granaries, Forges and SAs in most of them, with either Barracks or Libraries depending on speciality (it'd be good to come up with a specialization list), then building Stables and Catapults and part-building HAs and Axes. Adding monuments to that seems a bit of a push, and building Barracks or Libraries before Granaries and Forges is just silly. I'd like a golden age around about t110 to revolt to Caste and OR (given a religion ) and start building things faster.

[Fintourist]

4. I think building cheap MP or HR units is more use to us than that library. It's likely to be worth 1 or two beakers per turn at breakeven for a long while, so we'd only be building it for the culture (not necessarily a bad idea, but expensive at 90 hammers) whereas it could be 3 1/2 archers.

I'm fine with building couple more units as well. I would imagine that Cheater Hater does not plan on attacking us (trade routes + busy with Whosit?), but a bit more military could keep him even more honest. We currently have 2 archers and 1 axe in the very east, should we add a spear?

7. Good, even though I've been through these turns two or three times now its nowhere near perfect. We can definitely get more cities planted. In fact by t114 I felt like the worker force was too big and we were completing improvements that wouldn't get used for ages. I'll look again tonight at what the best bits were.

Nice, I spent a good while sandboxing today. I think I'm satisfied with the incoming worker micro, but there are endless possibilities for optimizing tile allocations

Btw, regarding your last micro post: My feeling is that we might want to mine one of the grass hills in order to speed up all the infra. Apart from oxford that you mentioned bank/grocer/observatory also require a decent bunch of hammers during the mid game and our capital is pretty much the only city that we don't want to whip much at all. I'm not set on this though, just a gut feeling.

I think our big issue is deciding if we're using a golden age and Caste artists, Music (building culture) or buildings to pop the borders in our new cities. We want to be building Granaries, Forges and SAs in most of them, with either Barracks or Libraries depending on speciality (it'd be good to come up with a specialization list), then building Stables and Catapults and part-building HAs and Axes. Adding monuments to that seems a bit of a push, and building Barracks or Libraries before Granaries and Forges is just silly. I'd like a golden age around about t110 to revolt to Caste and OR (given a religion ) and start building things faster.

- To be honest I think everyone of our cities is a barracks candidate. Once we go to warpath I can see everyone of our cities whipping a HA/cat or two even if we are already at Guilds era. What I mean is that I don't have a huge problem with popping borders with them during this phase of the game, not that I want to get them everywhere immediately.
- I think Caste artist during GA are a nice solution for some of our cities, e.g. our island city, "Lucky" is lacking production for a good while and we want granary+lighthouse as our first builds there.
- No monuments anywhere, I promise! And always granary first!
- If I would need to vote now, I would say that we forget the music path and go CoL -> HBR+Construction -> Reli techs + CS -> MC/Feud/Machinery/Guilds
- In my last sandboxing session it seemed that we would lauch our GA at ~T112. We just need to be sure that we can reach Civil Service during the GA, because we totally want to switch into Bureaucracy during it.. I don't think it will be a problem, just reminding..

[Old Harry]

Btw, regarding your last micro post: My feeling is that we might want to mine one of the grass hills in order to speed up all the infra. Apart from oxford that you mentioned bank/grocer/observatory also require a decent bunch of hammers during the mid game and our capital is pretty much the only city that we don't want to whip much at all. I'm not set on this though, just a gut feeling.

If we don't work a plains hill mine and don't mine a grass hill Alfie makes 12 hammers => 24 with Bureau, OR (and religion) and Forge, so

Code:

Market = 150 hammers /12 = 12.5 turns
Forge = 120 hammers /12 = 10 turns
(assume OR + Forge + Bureau from now)
Grocer = 150 hammers /24 = 6.25 turns
Bank = 200 hammers (+100% FIN bonus)/36  = 5.5 turns
Observatory = 150 hammers /24 = 6.25 turns
University = 200 hammers /24 = 8.3 turns
Oxford = 400 hammers /(stone+OR+forge+Bureau = 30hpt) = 13.3 turns (by working the plains hill mine we get 40hpt = 10 turns)
= 62 turns of building infra

Depending on when we get Bureau, whether we use the plains hill mine and when we run our golden age it'll be a bit less, but that doesn't sound too bad to me. The cottage is worth 24-30 beakers/cash per turn in a fully developed bureaucap... What buildings have I missed?

- To be honest I think everyone of our cities is a barracks candidate. Once we go to warpath I can see everyone of our cities whipping a HA/cat or two even if we are already at Guilds era. What I mean is that I don't have a huge problem with popping borders with them during this phase of the game, not that I want to get them everywhere immediately.
- I think Caste artist during GA are a nice solution for some of our cities, e.g. our island city, "Lucky" is lacking production for a good while and we want granary+lighthouse as our first builds there.
- No monuments anywhere, I promise! And always granary first!

Agreed, Barracks everywhere eventually, but for culture in the next few cities we'll use GA Caste Artists.

- If I would need to vote now, I would say that we forget the music path and go CoL -> HBR+Construction -> Reli techs + CS -> MC/Feud/Machinery/Guilds
- In my last sandboxing session it seemed that we would lauch our GA at ~T112. We just need to be sure that we can reach Civil Service during the GA, because we totally want to switch into Bureaucracy during it.. I don't think it will be a problem, just reminding..

We had a chat about this last night and figured our Great Person is arriving some time between t110 and t112, by which point we could have Monarchy for a HR/Caste civic switch, then by the end we could easily have CS and Monotheism for a Burea/Slavery/OR switch. I'd be tempted to stick with Caste given that we're getting Guilds so soon, but with SA's and the amount of food we have slavery just makes sense.

We should be at or near the happy cap everywhere important by t110-112 so that seems like a good time to launch the GA. Does anyone have any opinions on how many cities should be running specialists during the GA? Just getting enough GP points together for the second GA not to be too far in the future is tempting, but we have five or six cities with more food than they know what to do with, so we could prime the third GA too...

Finally, I made a spreadsheet. It shows our cities and what infra we want them to have. Feel free to make notes or changes or just ignore - around this point in the game I find it hard to keep track of what we want each city to do, so this is mostly an aide-memoire.

[Fintourist]

Turn 99

What we also talked with OH yesterday was our bad luck with religion spreads... But here we go:




I think we would prefer to be Buddhist as conquering this continent and Mardoc's Buddhist holy city seems more likely than getting pindicator's Hindu holy city, but I'm still not complaining. Kirby does not need a border pop too bad, but it will be nice to have a bit more vision of the area and start putting culture on all those coastal tiles.

Inter-turn was really kind to us..




Obviously my screenshot failed, but we got an event We got +8 food in Nina thanks to our deers. Of course that's a fairly minor event, but hey, that +8 food speeds up Nina's growth curve by 2 turns. Nice, nice, nice...

Does the below screenshot also read nice, nice, nice?




Mardoc seems to be giving Azza rough time (WW = 60). So far only one city has changed hands though. Azza only has lonely spearmen in his both border cities, but I think we are not in a hurry to take those cities from him and I'm happy to keep our border peaceful and let him focus his troops to the west. I'm hoping that this wars becomes even more mutually destructive to both sides while we are still getting a lot out of this expansion phase. I think HBR will follow after CoL (EOT105 probably) and we'll put us closer to a position where we can swallow Azza with a quick attack if that awesome war continues. I guess the only downside of this war is that so far it has reduced Azza's unit costs, which has improved his tech rate..

Calendar came in, sugar will be connected next turn and in order to celebrate that we have 10 cities that will grow during the next inter-turn




You might notice that the micro has already changed a bit from yesterday evening.. Development develops..

We whipped some stuff:
- galley in Hazelnut
- archer in Jelly Bean
- lighthouse in Izzy
- library in Englbert

We currently have 3 scouts, I think we use one for fogbusting, one goes to scout Cheater Hater and I think one could go north to scout pindi/barry/cyneheard continent?

What buildings have I missed?

Probably no buildings, but maybe couple of knights? Nevermind, I'm sold on grass hill cottages

Finally, I made a spreadsheet. It shows our cities and what infra we want them to have. Feel free to make notes or changes or just ignore - around this point in the game I find it hard to keep track of what we want each city to do, so this is mostly an aide-memoire.

Cool, I'll have a look!

EDIT: I like the idea of NE in Kirby

Aaand updated sandbox
(note that Nina has now a 8/1 flood plains tile in order to catch up with the event and I'm running 20 % research so that we catch up the difference with the actual game).

[von Adlercreutz]

Since you're going next construction->HBR (right?), what will determine whether you want to attack with cats and HA or knights?