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

[Krill]

Absolutely to the supersub system and more stringent reliability reps. But I'd like to play a snake pick game at some point...

[novice]

Chronicling the wars of the world:

Turn 68:

By the way, I forgot to mention that according to pitboss portal, AT captured or razed one of Molach's cities last turn.

Turn 71:

Mardoc (the man of the many hut techs) just captured a size 2 city from Azza.

Turn 72:

Cheater Hater or Pindicator razed a size 3 city belonging to Barry Lyndon.

Turn 76:

Pindicator captured a size 3 city from Barry Lyndon.

Turn 79/80:

Molach is fighting back against AT - It seems he captured a size 2 city from him last turn.

Turn 80/81:

While Pindicator was logged in, Barry Lyndon lost 14 score points and Pindicator gained one.

Turn 83:

Demos also show that someone has been reduced to a single size 1 city, btw.

Turn 87:

Looks like wetbandit lost two cities to Qgqqqqq.

Turn 88:

Whosit declared on and took a CH city. [CH lost 7 score points.]

Dhal lost a size 1 city turn 88, while BGN, Ruff, and TBS were logged in.

Turn 88/89:

And cheater hater lost another 8 score points. Looks like Whosit is razing the cities?

Turn 96:

T96: Start of Ruff war

There are wars all over the place in this game. On T96, in addition to us killing Ruff's settler, furungy lost two score points to Dazedroyalty, and TBS razed 11 score points from Xenu, our latest contact.

Azza lost three score points to Mardoc.

Turn 97:

Whosit is healing his scout, I don't want to annoy him as he just made peace with CH

Turn 98:

Ruff offered peace. I rejected and will reoffer so he can accept it next turn, which gives us 1 turn longer before war could be redeclared. [Ruff logged in again and accepted peace t98]

Turn 99:

Looks like wetbandit settled a city this turn and BGN promptly razed it.

Pindicator reduced dtay's score by 1.

Tech thread info, T100:
Mardoc appears to still be in a turn split (with Azza?), and Jowy is in a turn split with HitAnyKey.

[Ceiliazul]

That must have taken a while Novice.

[novice]

That must have taken a while Novice.

Yeah, it did... Luckily i have experience perusing huge threads from the werewolf forums.

I edited the chronicles into the first post in this thread, for easy reference.

Some points of interest:
* Pindicator has devoured Barry Lyndon and is now having border tensions with dtay.
* wetbandit has lost cities to Qgqqqqq and lately a newfounded city to BGN
* Another contender, TBS, has been razing cities from Xenu. (And possibly Dhal)
* Mardoc got a hut-fueled start and has been taking over Azza.
* dazedroyalty is conquering furungy
* AT and Molach have exchanged blows

[Krill]

novice, are you taking the game back tomorrow? Or you need me to keep on playing and hand over to you on Monday? I can give the game back whenever you want.

T101

OK, this turn involves a little bit of MM, mainly because I'm trying to keep WH happy at size 5, and need to use the rep happy to do so. So long as the other cities that are the same size as WH are behind WH in the turn order, WH will keep the rep happy bonus. WH is fourth in turn order, and the three cities before it are going to be size 7 or higher during the next few turns so that doesn't matter so much.

Other than this, it's keeping and eye on Ruff, scouting to try to find trading partners for OB, and planning further expansion. novice, I think I've found a trading partner...but I have a plan to whip a galley/bowman pair out of WH to go scout north past Plako. That might also give us a bit of an idea of where Pindicator fits into the geopolitical situation. Ruff does not appear threatening, so I'm easing off the unit builds near him for the moment. I have worked out plans to settle Tarter Sauce, and a spare settler from FP for the south island or as a combat settler if Ruff surprises me.





This looks like Oxyphenbutazone. He is higher than us in score, but not in the top 2 of dtay and BGN. Greece, which does not suggest an Alphabet play though, so I am not expecting trade routes from him.





I'm going to move the bowman south next turn, then retreat him. I am not convinced of a city south east of PM, but there looks to be a good city site that overlaps the wheat, sheep, incense and a bunch of fresh water lakes. This is the area I think we can send the settler from FP.





Did you want a city 2N of the sheep? This would be the other location we could send the settler from FP, but we'll have to sacrifice tile improvements around RC and TtL to do that. To be entirely honest, I'm not sure if giving that land to Whosit isn't the better choice; I suspect we will be attacking Whosit at Overland park in the next 50 turns, with the aim of cutting this entire area off from other players so we can take it at our leisure afterwards.

Note Whosit has not moved his scout, so he is still keeping an eye on a settler off in the middle of no where. Must be better place to have that settler?





I dare Whosit to do something. I want that rice farmed so we can just ignore Whosit afterwards until we have a bowman/sspear stack available to defend workers as they road/mine the hills.





OK, this is the plan. Whip galley (T103), load current defender as passenger, go sail north (T104). Overflow new bowman for defender (eot T104), with rep happy lack of MP not an issue. Then regrow to size 5 (eot T105), build settler to 55/100 (eot T107), double whip (T108), settle TS (T110).

Now, this can be delayed slightly by regrowing to size 6 then double whipping, so basically we can settle TS on any turn from T110-12. We can get a worker from DS eot T109 after growing to size 10, and this worker can chop dye forest T113. We can unload the worker at Cf onto a forest at TS and chop a forest T113 as well. We can get a work boat out of Cf either via whip (bad idea), by chop (easy, T108), or by building it manually (after T108...). The chop is simply the best option, but we can store hammers in the work boat and then finish it with a chop. Work boat must be complete eot T108 to hook crabs on T110.

With a granary eot T113, the granary would only save 8/11, avoid growth would waste food. It works reasonably well, so settler either at size 5 or 5.5 is fine (5.5 means save full 11 granary food so whatever). Can then either chop a light house, improve horse, maybe hook dye or send both workers to improve KM. My preferred option is to throw everything at TS; chop 1 forest for a light house and improve horse to finish it at size 2 before moving onto KM.

All this means that after the settler eot T108/9 WJ can then regrow and, well, so something else. It will have stacked another 2 whips, so the whip anger would only run out T143. So until we get Calendar happy WH is pretty constrained on that front, as the Rep happy will have to move onto another city, can't keep the cities that small for that long.





Don't really care too much, but the rice farm means granary will save full 14 (7fpt) food growing to size 5. Need to whip settler at size 5 as at size 6 screws over WH. Plains cottage to RC next turn, work grass forest, build settler next turn. May need to get another worker from her after the settler by stacking whip unhappy, whipping at size 3, maybe at size 4. Looking at the game I feel we need another 4 workers.





Seriously, KM is getting shafted. It needs the light house though, so it can keep on growing even whilst building units and working those hills. It has 11 unique tiles but they can't be irrigated, don't want to cottage here right now, couldn't even if I wanted to. FIN coast is obvious answer. Can finish eot T107 if work plains hill forest. Think we should, unless need to work coast to keep Currency eta of T105.





See Ruff not scary, CH not much better military than us (considering pop advantage we have), dtay not screwing about with Pindicator, and Whosit would be terrifying if we didn't have bowmen.





City screens are easy but I'm lazy and most of them are boring.

[novice]

I'm driving home saturday night. If I can take over monday that would be ideal, but I can do it sooner if you want me to.

[Krill]

Monday is fine. I'm off Sunday, first day off in 10 days, so I might actually be saner on Monday.

[Krill]

So the T100 update is coming shortly. Are there any requests from lurkers for the report on that date?

A non-zero death toll? The axe snipe has awakened long-suppressed instincts in the lurker pool!

An excellent thread so far, I hope to see some long term strategy and maybe some win condition analysis. Who is still competing for.the crown?

Oh, and a plan to get off your rock* and meeting the contender would be nice. Krill cant make fun of Commodore's scouting after this isolationist showing! *yes I know you settled an island, but get your Leif on and spread some ancient love!

Who can win this game? We lack enough information to state categorically who will win. The game started with 33 real civs, and no one is dead yet. PB13 had half the number of civs and still isn't decided in the modern era, so I suspect that there will be at least 6 viable winners in this game by that point...or the map is so broken someone has too big a land lead and the game can be called around T200. I hope the former, expect the later.

I never expect to win any game played on RB. But due to our map position, if people do not declare on us and invade I have confidence that we could abuse our position at the bottom of the map and stupid land lead to win. (To Commodore: I say this in no uncertain terms. Stop fucking about when you make maps and use toroidal, anything over 8 players is a joke if it is not on a toroidal map).

The player who are in strong positions are dtay and BGN. BGN I know nothing about, but they have stupid score leads over everyeone else. Their stats are not that scary though. dtay is, what, 30-odd crop yield over us at #1 and that is an ever decreasing %age difference. dtay does have a good MFG though, and would have a decent ability to build an army yet lacks military techs. He can change this by teching HBR next and forcing us to follow ASAP, but we will be able to survive until Currency and then get HBR around T110, at which point whipping between both of us would lead to a stalemate, maybe a city or two lost, and neither could win. So with dtay's position, he has no reason to do something that doesn't help him. He needs to kill us efficiently and his only real chance of doing that is Knights.

He is up Myst>Meditation>Priesthood (Poly>Mono is irrelevant if we have no state religion, effective beaker cost is zero). He also has MC. So he has a beaker lead to knights, and a good one at that. However, if we feared that, we could prioritise MC, slave a forge in FR, run an Engineer and bulb Engineering, which is the bulb target if we have Machinery and IW. We'd still get there around the time he got to Guilds, cos Rep, Fin coast and not giving a damn about maintenance with intercontinental trade routes leads to a stupid tech rate once we grow cities.

So really, dtay, in what is perhaps the current best position in the game, is not a concern IMO. I don't fear an invasion from him. If anything, he is just someone we have to manipulate to give ourselves openings to keep on growing.

So to talk about win conditions, I'll start with dtay. He could theoretically win without killing us, but so long as we get Overland Park from Whosit, he probably will not have enough land on this continent to defend that huge front from us. So basically, he needs to take most of Whosit, then take all of CH, and then even more land beyond that, probably though conquest and so I feel he needs to win against Pindicator, and win convincingly to keep on snowballing. After all, look at his traits and civ, his long term advantages are a bit more health, and free CG1 on archery/ and gunpowder units, so good Oromo units. No problem.

BGN is a bit different, Pericles of Russia has a good chance to kill people with Cossacks (great UU) and the UB is half price. Not shabby. Not sure it's teh same level of late game output as FIN though, but it is not bad at all. All I know is he has a good score, so is doing something right, but he has a lot less land than us (everyone does, really). So again, watch him get in a war and get more land. Fail to do that, and not an issue.

Our win condition is actually just as straight forward.

We kill Whosit when dtay can't invade through DS and RC, ie he is dealing with Pindicator. This is not that easy done solo, so ideally done with CH also doing well, we only want Overland Park and southern land, which means CH has to deal with any potential border at Whosits capital and west of there. Means we don't have to spread ourselves too thin whilst we are focusing on growth. The other choice is to just try and snowball straight through CH, but unless we focus on a very specific knight rush strategy, GA revolt into PS to whip knights everywhere after building a slow mover stack, it's not that likely IMO. At all points we need to have enough units to hold at RC and DS; Engineering really does affect this, because the city locations were chosen specifically that a fast mover stack in FP can reach DS in a single turn, and yet can also 1 move Overland Park (and yes, this is one of the reasons I wanted that city location...dot maps ought to be thought out a long way into the future...).

So we basically just need a 2, maybe a 1 turn window to start the war and we could start rolling along the lebensraum route of game victory. We take out Whosit and try to roll through CH at some point afterwards, preferably after CH and Whosit have tired each other out. We have to focus on taking hte cities near dtay, and potentially razing them and replacing immediately, so he dtay does not have the opportunity to alpha-strike our stack. In the alternate universe where dtay attacks Whosit, we have to try and either alpha-strike his stack, or, if he is greedy and tries to take out CH as well, we cut his stack off from his core and then either destroy the stack and take over the then easy pickings of CH and Whosit's corpses...or we kill dtay immediately. Whatever we do, we build up production capacity pick a point in the tech tree and take the entire continent.

We have a second choice though, which is to kill Ruff. This one is much more reasonable than it first seems. He has no power. dtay doesn't know him, so would not see us declare war until he looked at the tracker, and we would then try to roll up to his neighbour...and maybe even kill them as well. In fact, this is something we ought to try and do anyway, using the slave production from south island plus naval units from elsewhere, because we are going to need more than just our continent to win this.

Ultimately, we have a straight forward series of issues to deal with. We are in a tech whole compared to dtay and others. Getting Currency will stop the current decline, plus minor known tech bonus will help us keep up, but working Fin coast, growing into Calendar increased happy cap, and then onto Rep scientists will give us a short term window to equalize then blow past our local opponents tech positions.

The best way to do this is to use the first GA fairly soon, after we grow our cities to a happy cap around 10-14. Revolt into Caste on T1 of the GA, and focus on popping at least 3 more GP, at least 1 GS for an Academy, maybe a GE for Engineering, and most of the GP points for the next GA. Probably try to get Bureaucracy for the end of the GA, unless we can get into it on T1 as well. Palace in Ec (plus the Academy, size 15 etc and all cottages fairly well grown...), then focus on reaching Guilds.

We need Calendar, we need Code of Laws. Beyond that? Myst through Fued is only relevant for wines until we want to get into either Serfdom or Vassalage...we want neither unless we plan to whip knights everywhere (too many stables to build), but Bureau too important. So that can wait until after we go for Civil Service. Construction and HBR are researched if we feel the need for safety, or we want to kill Ruff. MC is useful earlier because Caste workshops are main route to build knights (with PS? Definitely). Once reach Guilds they go berserk. We need to grow cities, so can focus on farms at first...which also suggests an early CS, actually. And then there is CoL, which is the easiest tech to time because don't need it until we start the GA, and if aim for CS at T1 we'd have beforehand anyway.

How all this would fit in around an attempt to assimilate Ruff in 10 turns or less I'm less sure, but I enjoy challenges.

[Krill]

T102

Much easier turn this. Nothing much to think about, just double checking the micro from last turn.




Met Oxy. No Alphabet, he has Currency. That's 6 people that have it, so 12% known tech bonus. NO OB means that the warrior has to move back onto the road network, then head north IMO.





It's hard to see in this screenshot, but those are Queegs borders next to Plako. I know the plan was to retreat the galley and bowman back to GE to get fort bonus but as Ruff is not scary, plough forward; in fact, I think I want to sail this pairing all the way east to meet people. Next turn, once I'm more certain of the happy situation in KM I'll likely just move the spear towards GE. I expect to just put hammers into a bowman before growth to 2, which should occur around the time Ruff can attack anyway.





Tundra forest chops take 4 turns, so chopping that forest at BW (please change the name, that one sucks). In 5 turns we will have complete vision of the coastal area and can choose the ideal city location for the incense city. Granary complete eot in PM, and best of all marble. We can settle the marble to grab the crab, and the deer, but we really ought to scout more to see if we are missing anything. But not with that bowman, that is back to cover PM and JD. I do feel that we can get 6 cities on the south island though, as there looks to be a large number of freshwater lakes that we can use as food, plus other coastal tiles. Those plus rep specialists? Tech will be rolling in. Eventually.





Contacts. Ruff has contact with Whosit and CH. Not sure how. Otherwise nothing expected, and obviously we miss contacts that the others have.





I'm considering the possibility that we need to get a small loan (20g) from Xenu. I might ask for one next turn, much more likely I don't, or I ask for it on T104.





Pity no OB.





Grow eot T102, T103, T105, T107...shit just realised, whale lands T109. So going to make a worker at size 9 on T106, built eot T107, which can then land a chop into TS on T111. Ugh, can't get the chops quickly enough if TS works a 4F tile from T110...OK, it works if we use the worker at GE to connect to the road network, then chop the forest on the plains hill at KM T112. So DS will stop growth at size 9, wait 2 turns, then grow to size 10 eot T109...or overflow into a library and triple whip it? Then regrow on coast whilst researching, as at that point we are likely about begin research into Calendar or HBR.





Should have posted this last turn. Grow to 6, build worker, triple whip T106 so WH keeps rep happy. This gives us three workers (including the one from DS) when I said we needed about 4 more workers. Once the Ec cottages are down, TtL needs a few farms down and those mines going up. Blah blah stop stating hte ovious etc.





Ugh, this is where I need to start thinking. As Oxy does not have Alphabet, the warrior is forced north, and then probably back west. A galley heading north with a slow mover on it isn't going to discover an awful lot using the slow mover, it's just a bit more info regarding the coastal lands. So I think I'm going to whip the galley this turn (I'll log in and do it), and overflow a scout. We send the galley north west, dump the scout on the first bit of land that seems like a continent, then send the galley towards the warrior, pick that warrior up and dump that warrior on a new land mass as well. And keep on exploring in 3 different directions.

Basically, micro doesn't change. Whip galley T102, scout T103, build bowmen T104-5, settler T106-7, whip settler T108, build bowmen T109 until complete. TS founded T110, TS granary eot T112, grow @2 eot T115 save 11 food in granary.





Grow size 6 (need commerce for beakers), build worker, whip 106, overflow 20 hammers into spear (need to complete due to hammer decay). We lose the third ring tile 77 of city centre eot T103 IIUC. No roads in place for immediate dumping of slow mover stack on our doorstep. And to lurkers: that's why we haven't chopped the forest.





Micro still works. Happiness will return when regrow to size 6 due to rep being based on happy sizes.





OK, let's see here. Every cottage overlapping OT is complete. Need 2 cottages completed to overlap with FR. 1 cottage needed at TtL, complete that one T105, and the final overlapping cottage at FP is no where near being started. I think all of those overlapping cottages can be completed by T111. So last cottage turns to a town eot T181. Other than that...just keep growing, right? Not planning on whipping Ec, but I do want to mine those hills. The only difficulty is worker micro, and honestly we shouldn't work the plains cottages at all if we can work grass cottages whilst growing, we just have to improve tiles at other cities and shift the pop around. So long as we are at max happy no concern giving away the wheat and deer and working the plains cottages though, and we need to get so much infrastructure here...so I think if possible work the hills before the plains cottages if other cities can ensure every cottage is worked.

Beyond that? novice, you're the micro master, you tell me what I'm doing wrong.





OK, I give CRE a lot of flak but it's decent here. Chopping the tundra forest for a workboat, grow to 2, drop another chop and whip the granary. Or more likely work the whale for a turn and then whip...





Note crop yield and Land ranking. GNP sucks but that's to be expected and not a long term concern with these traits and other values. MFG rank is also improving. As I said in the last post. I'm not conerned about dtay.





novice, I missed that someone got ToA. And that size 13 city seems good, but given rep we will have multiple size 10 cities shortly, so meh.





Land area compared to dtay. Even if he is at 2.99%, we have 1/3 more land than him, so...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxuCeHUxoBY

[Krill]

T102 update:

Whipped galley in WH.

Corrected micro in JD.